BIOGRAPHY: Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife,By Francine Prose, Atlantic, 322pp. £16.99
HAD 15-YEAR-OLD Anne Frank not been robbed of her future, she would be 81 now. Her name might have remained unknown but she would have had a chance of life. But this is true of all the other young people who died in the Holocaust.
Anne’s fate moves us because we know something of her life through he r own words, from her 13th birthday, on June 14th, 1942, when she was given her first diary as a present, to the last entry two years and two months later. They trace her life from relative, though precarious, freedom in Amsterdam, to a clandestine existence in the annexe of her father’s business.
As physical conditions worsen and external threats increase, nerves fray among the eight Jewish fugitives in the annexe and for this lonely, intelligent, talkative young woman, the diary (which she named “Kitty”) provided solace. For obvious reasons, the final portion of her life – the betrayal and arrest of the annexe’s inhabitants, her transfer from Westerbork detention centre to Auschwitz and her eventual death of typhus in Bergen-Belsen, a few weeks before its liberation – are not chronicled.
Her diary – vivid and honest in its descriptions, reflective, funny in places and quite catty at times – has been traduced, bowdlerised and sentimentalised by the “Anne Frank” industry, though to be fair, there has been valuable analysis too. Books, plays, feature films and documentaries, cartoons, songs, puppet-shows and websites are dedicated to her; there are two Anne Frank foundations, one with its museum on the site of the Opteka warehouse and attic where she and her family hid, employing over 100 people. So one might ask, why yet another book on her?
Francine Prose, an accomplished novelist, teaches writing at Bard College, and her 2006 book, Reading Like a Writer, analyses the craft of fine writing. Rereading Anne Frank's diary in the summer of 2005, she decided to examine it from a literary perspective, as a "consciously crafted work of literature". This approach is based on the fact that, responding to a call from the Dutch Minister of Education in exile to establish an archive to document the war, Anne revised her diaries, extensively rewriting them under the title Het Achterhuis (the house behind). The fact that the result is more a memoir in the form of diary entries suggests to Prose that it should be viewed as a work of literature. One might argue that many diaries are revised before publication – this does not necessarily qualify them for consideration as works of literature or even as suggested here, a literary masterpiece. Her study is divided into four parts: 'The Life', 'The Book', 'The Afterlife' and 'Anne Frank in the Schools'.
Prose’s book is more interesting when it addresses the history of the diaries after Anne’s death. Liberated from Auschwitz in June 1945, her father, Otto, returned to Amsterdam, sole survivor of the eight inhabitants of the Opteka annexe. He undertook the task of editing and publishing his daughter’s diaries – the latter proved difficult as few publishers in the aftermath of the war, could imagine that anyone would wish to be reminded of their sufferings or those of a dead Jewish girl. German publishers insisted that criticisms of Germans be omitted or softened. Eventually published, success, especially in the United States, brought another kind of betrayal. As Prose recounts:
"On stage and screen, the adorable was emphasised at the expense of the human, the particular was replaced by the so-called universal, and universal was interpreted to mean American – or, in any case, not Jewish, since Jewish was understood to signify a smaller audience, more limited earnings, and more disturbingly, subject matter that might alienate a non-Jewish audience.''
But it gets worse. Holocaust deniers have denounced the diaries as a fraud.The very slight and touching references by Anne to her own sexuality have unleashed loathsome website porn about her. Perhaps, however, faced with the ultimate obscenity of the Holocaust, a sense of outrage has to be put in perspective.
Even those on Frank's side have not always served her well. The final section of Prose's book discusses the teaching of the diaries in American schools. She cites a 1996 survey, which found that 50 per cent of American high school students had read The Diary of Anne Frankas a classroom assignment. However, given the results of another survey in 2008, reporting that 75 per cent of American teenagers were unable to identify Hitler, one wonders what they can make of it. Well meaning but unimaginative teachers ask idiotic multiple-choice questions, such as "Anne's one golden rule was to laugh about everything and a) not to bother about the others; b) not to take anything too seriously; c) keep your troubles to yourself". In their anxiety to shelter their teen readers, teachers reduce the diaries of this intelligent young woman to the level of teenage soap with death and the Holocaust as optional extras.
Prose's account is useful in its examination of the fate of the diaries but for a real encounter with Anne Frank the best approach remains to read the diaries. After that, one might turn to memoirs by those who knew her, such as Miep Gies's Anne Frank Remembered.Other contemporary diaries and memoirs include Etty Hillesum's An Interrupted Life;Victor Klemperer's I Shall Bear Witness;Jorge Semprun's fictionalised The Cattle Truck,or Primo Levi's If This is a Man.
Carla King is a Lecturer in Modern History at St Patricks College, Drumcondra, in Dublin
