From The Times:
“The full story of Otto
Frank’s bid to publish Anne’s writings”
(Anne Frank and her father, Otto,
going to the wedding of their friends Miep and Jan Gies in Amsterdam, July 1941)
Rarely does the suspect of a
77-year-old murder case become the lead story in every news bulletin and
newspaper around the world. However, the announcement in January that a team
led by a retired FBI investigator had discovered the man who betrayed Anne
Frank and her family to the Nazis led to a sensational run of headlines, until
a quick rebuttal by historians, and outraged protests by the suspect’s
granddaughter, led to an equally swift climbdown and the withdrawal of the book
that accompanied the investigation from some markets. Over time, speculation
about who betrayed Anne has reached the same fever pitch as conspiracy theories
about who killed President Kennedy, but as I researched my own book, The Diary
That Changed the World, I was astonished to discover the complicated history of
a book that spurred court cases, lifelong feuds and murder threats, and drew in
public figures as well known as Eleanor Roosevelt and Nelson Mandela, and as
notorious as the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il.
Anne has been portrayed as the
ultimate victim of the Holocaust, an icon for adolescents around the war and a
political pawn used by both sides in the Cold War, and has even been heralded
by some US teachers as a bizarre sort of diet and fitness guru.
When Otto Frank unwrapped Anne’s
diary with trembling hands and began to read the first pages in Amsterdam in
late 1945, he could hardly have imagined that he would take his daughter’s
teenage thoughts and experiences and mould them into one of the most
influential and widely read books of the 20th century, The Diary of Anne Frank.
Nor that he was opening himself, and her work, to scrutiny and controversy that
would last for decades. Seventy-five years after the first publication of the
book I set out to discover why we still care so much about Anne, and how her
remarkable father obsessively overcame every hurdle to ensure her lasting fame.
Otto must have felt he was handling a miracle when his friend and employee Miep
Gies handed him the pages of the diary she had salvaged from the floor of the
annexe on the day that the family were betrayed and taken away by the Gestapo.
What was amazing, however, was what Otto did next.
Almost immediately, he was seized
by an unshakeable conviction that Anne’s diary was worthy of publication and had
a message about our shared humanity that would change the world. In the
beginning, few agreed with him. As he walked the streets of Amsterdam, carrying
the diary in his briefcase, Otto would encounter old friends and tell them
about his discovery. Not many believed that there would be interest in the
musings of a teenager. After corralling the help of a group of influential
left-wing Dutch writers and publishers, Otto arranged the first publication of
The Diary of Anne Frank in the Netherlands in 1947. A UK and German edition
followed, but it was not until the American edition of the book was published
in 1952 that the phenomenon of Anne Frank took off.
The Diary of Anne Frank has sold
more than 31 million copies, been translated into 70 languages and been the
subject of countless documentaries, feature films and television series. Nelson
Mandela said it was one of the books he shared with his fellow inmates on
Robben Island. He opened the Anne Frank Exhibition in Johannesburg in 1994. Her
story is still potent: an animated film, Where Is Anne Frank, by the Israeli
director Ari Folman debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in 2021. In Amsterdam
more than one million people visit the Anne Frank House every year, and
millions more around the world have seen the touring exhibition. To those who
weary of her singular fame, it sometimes seems as if everyone who met Anne has
written about their acquaintance, however fleeting. Far from slipping into
history, more than seven decades after the first publication of the diary
interest in Anne remains as strong, and as controversial, as ever. The
cold-case review in January, and subsequent book by the Canadian author
Rosemary Sullivan, is one among many that seeks to answer the whodunnit aspect
of the story. In reality, many people knew that the Jewish families were hiding
in the attic at 263 Prinsengracht, and any of them could have betrayed the
Franks.
How The Diary of Anne Frank
related to the bigger context of the Holocaust has been every bit as incendiary
as the question of who betrayed the family. From the first reading, people
opposed the publication of the diary. In Amsterdam the influential Rabbi
Hammelburg called Otto “sentimental and weak” and said all “thinking Jews in
the Netherlands” should oppose the “commercial hullabaloo” of the diary and the
Anne Frank House. And in 1997 Cynthia Ozick of The New Yorker said: ‘The diary
has been bowdlerised, distorted, transmuted, reduced; it has been infantilised,
Americanised, sentimentalised, falsified, kitschified, and, in fact, blatantly
denied.” The claim that Otto had sentimentalised the diary, at the expense of
the family’s true Jewish heritage, would be at the centre of a bitter 1950s
court battle, then a lifelong feud, with Meyer Levin, an American writer who
first championed the diary, but then fought Otto for a share of the proceeds
from the highly successful play of the same name. At one point Levin threatened
to shoot Otto, called him a tax dodger, compared him to a Nazi and enlisted
Eleanor Roosevelt to speak out on his behalf. Otto himself said that he had
never been so disappointed in a man in all of his life as he was in Meyer
Levin.
At the same time, Otto was also
forced to defend the diary’s authenticity in Germany, where Holocaust deniers
brought a series of claims against him alleging that the diary was a fake that
Otto had written himself. The Diary of Anne Frank was now at the heart of the
battle over Holocaust denial, and controversy would rage for decades,
exacerbated by the revelation in the 1980s that Otto had personally withheld
five pages from publication. An unexpurgated publication of the diary in the
1990s prompted another round of soul-searching over Otto’s editing of the
original script.
(Otto’s stepdaughter Eva Schloss)
Otto’s desire to share his
daughter’s story embroiled him in years of legal battles, driving him to a
nervous breakdown and eventually into leaving Amsterdam and seeking a new life
in Switzerland. The popularity of the diary had turned Otto into a father
figure for the world, and he spent his days overseeing every aspect of the
publication and legacy of the diary from his home in Basel, and answering
thousands of letters asking for his opinion, support and understanding. He had
found happiness and love again with his second wife, Fritzi, who was also a
Holocaust survivor, her daughter Eva, and Eva’s three children.
Yet Otto remained a remarkable,
complex and haunted man. After his family had been killed by the Nazis, he was
gripped by his belief in Anne’s diary, but that dedication overrode all else,
and friends noted that in later life he rarely mentioned his other daughter,
Margot. In his stepdaughter Eva Schloss’s book, After Auschwitz, her daughters
remember the happy family holidays they took with Otto and their grandmother,
and how he told them stories and taught them to ride a bike and ice-skate — but
also that visiting the house in Basel could make them feel uncomfortable. Eva’s
daughter Sylvia said: “For weeks beforehand I dreaded the thought of having to
stay in that flat. It was like a museum and I even called Basel a ‘ghost
town’.” Otto often used Anne as an example when he spoke to the children,
saying, “Anne would not have done that,” Eva said. “Occasionally he would even
call one of the girls ‘Anne’.” Arguably Otto’s mission to spread awareness of
Anne’s diary was, if anything, too successful. His work resulted in an
unstoppable momentum and appetite for her story that turned the image of his
daughter into a sometimes remote icon and exploited figure. Over the decades
Anne’s name has been given to things as diverse as a rose, a refugee village in
Germany and a Japanese tampon (in Japan the phrase “Anne’s day” is a euphemism
for menstruation, after the candour with which she wrote about her first
period).
Today, almost 80 years after
Anne’s death, the battle to define what she means to the world is still
intense, with the future of a multimillion-pound industry at stake as competing
foundations, cultural critics and former friends and relatives clash over the
legacy of Anne Frank — and who should control it. In 2004 the North Korean
dictator Kim Jong-il struck an agreement with the Anne Frank Foundation to
publish the diary in the hermit kingdom. It is taught to all schoolchildren
there today but they are encouraged to identify Anne’s struggle against the
fascists with North Korea’s conflict with the West. Are Anne’s words still
meaningful to a young generation three times removed from the Holocaust of the
1940s? The director of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, Ronald Leopold,
insists that in a world where so many young people are struggling to find and
express their identities, Anne has never been more relevant. “In April 1944
Anne wrote, ‘If only I could be myself I would be satisfied.’ She didn’t say, ‘I
want to be a woman, I want to be Jewish, I want to be Dutch, or German,’ ”
Leopold says. Anne shared a longing for the freedom to discover who she was,
and in today’s culture wars that still connects with young people around the
world. The Diary that Changed the World — the Remarkable Story of Otto Frank
and the Diary of Anne Frank by Karen Bartlett is published on April 28 by
Biteback
^ This was interesting. ^
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