In honor of the 60th anniversary of the day Anne Frank started her diary, I posted her original entry yesterday in my Live Journal:
“Ik zal hoop ik alles aan jou kunnen toevertrouwen, zoals ik het nog aan niemand gekund heb, en ik
hoop dat je een grote steun voor me zult zijn.”
… which means, “I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support to me.”
What amazed me was that two of my LJ friends (who know German) recognized the passage right off the bat, and it got me thinking that many of us have probably read her diary several times and can quote bits of it word for word. I’m a bit of an Anne Frank addict myself - I collect books about her, and even won a hundred bucks in a book collection competition that the MSU library sponsored back in April.
Who among us grown-ups is still a fan, and how many times did you read the diary? (For bonus points, who else fell in love with Peter Van Pels?)
You know, it’s funny, but I’ve read Anne Frank many many times, and it’s always seemed like it was an American story. Seeing the German just gave me kind of a shock; she’s our hero, not yours!
I felt disappointed at seeing Ann Frank’s house in Amsterdam.
I felt the tension and fear in the book and imagined some horrible and tiny alcove which they crawlled into at short notice to hide from the searching Germans. But…
They had a whole house behind the bookcase!! Bedrooms, bathroom, kitchen etc… It ruined my whole perception of their hardship. It looked too easy to live in there.
But I guess its easy to be flippant after the fact.
Well, Aro, I guess the fact that they couldn’t leave the premises for a year and a half (before being discovered and deported), and the fact that the windows where whited out completely add a little to the situation.
Eonwe: Anne Frank should be everybody’s hero.
And yes, she wrote her diary in Dutch (although she did speak and write German too, being of German descent).
If you’re ever in Amsterdam, don’t skip the Anne Frank Huis. It’ll give you a dose of perspective, at the very least.
I couldn’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve read her diary. I find it incredibly moving on so many different levels. I’ve been re-reading it at least once a year for the last 30 years or so, and marvel at what their family went through in their efforts to survive. And I mourn at the loss of the great writer she may have become, as well as the great human being she already was.
I’m not an expert or a long-time fan. At the moment, I’m just reading it for the first time, aged 29, but I’m finding it amazingly good. Insightful, honest, funny, and very moving. It’s hard to believe she was so young.
For a mildly disrespectful laugh, you could check out http://annfrank.diaryland.com/ for a silly entry in a modern teenager online journal style. Sadly the writer never continued it.
It does seem to have an important place in American culture and culture everywhere (which is why I finally decided to read it). The pilot of My So-Called Life had a particularly brilliant take on it, with the central character Angela identifying with Anne Frank and longing for her life to be as meaningful and free from trivia and distractions. Tasteless quote:
Teacher: "So how would you describe Anne Frank? "
Angela: “Lucky.”
Teacher: “Is that supposed to be funny, Angela? How on earth could you make a statement like that? Hmm? Anne Frank perished in a concentration camp. Anne Frank is a tragic figure. How could Anne Frank be lucky?”
Angela: “I don’t know. Because she was trapped in an attic for three years with this guy she really liked?”
Not quite on topic - picking up from crazy4chaucer’s comment about the “great writer she may have become”: take a look at Garrison Keillor’s introduction to The Best American Short Stories 1998. His comments on Anne Frank in his conclusion were stunning, and really made me think about that…she really would have been an amazing fiction writer.
It sounds odd, but the idea never really sunk into me until the moment I read that intro.
I realise that, and that my feelings about it are made from a privileged position of comfort and hindsight. All I can do is be honest to myself about how it affected me, and it did seem so different than how I had imagined it reading the diary.
I guess what I was just saying is that in the US we read many many many works of literature in translation. When I see or hear it in its original language, it just is a sort of little reminder that, “wait a minute, this author has a very different cultural experience and history than me.”
I am aware that Anne Frank is not American, but I imagine that sometimes it’s easy to forget that from a cultural standpoint her outlook on things were pretty different from early 21st century outlooks (while there are some things that are also universal).
I know what you’re talking about, Aro, I was also surprised by the size of the living quarters. My first reaction was “wow, this is sort of large.” But it did make it meaningful in a different way – she couldn’t leave, and in addition to Peter, she was living with several adults that were mostly strangers to her at the outset. The thing that struck me the most was how much of a <i>home</i> the families created.
Obviously, she was an amazing writer, and would have continued to write later in life, and most likely professionally. However, one thing about her diary that has always struck me as very powerful is that she was one of <i>so many</i> young people who were being hunted and destroyed simply for being Jewish, and that all of these people might have had such a personal story that is at the same time unique, and universal. The beauty of Anne’s diary is that we have a record of one voice from this terrible time in history, and the tragedy is that there are so few.
I’ve always been amazed by the story of Anne Frank. I think I read it for the first time when I was 11 or 12.
Has anyone else read Melissa Mueller’s bio of Anne Frank? It’s a fascinating book. Ever since I read it, I’ve been meaning to purchase the unedited version of Anne Frank’s diary. Apparently, the book that’s usually sold is a compilation of Anne’s own edits, as well as edits her father made to the diary before publication.
There was an excellent television production of it based on the Mueller book (Lili Taylor as Miep Gies). Additionally, they ran interviews with the real Miep Gies, as well as one of Anne’s childhood friends (Jackie?).
I may be wrong, but didn’t the family climb up into the top of the attic above the living quarters during certain periods when they thought the danger of being heard was high?
I’ve probably read it at least a hundred times. My parents taught us about the Holoucast and gave me that book to read. I was young - just old enough to read it and was mortified, fascinated, every emotion possible. I’m only 29, so to me WWII is long ago history (well, it was when I was a kid. Now I understand just how recent it was).
I’ve also read the unedited (or re-edited) complete version of the diary - which had a lot more of Anne’s feelings and descriptions of what went on with Peter, which was something I hadn’t really though of.
I’ve seen a few movies made about the story as well. She was my childhood hero, hands down.
Yes. Remember Peter van Pelt’s room? The one with the bicycle on the wall.
It had a steep flight of stairs leading to the attic. IIRC, that’s where the occupants of the Achterhuis fled to when they heard the Gestapo coming up the stairs. All in vain, of course.
The occupants of the secret annex were transported on the very last train ever to leave the transition camp of Westerbork, at the Dutch/German border.
Holland was liberated 9 months after the secret annex was found by the Nazis.
Anne died approximately 2 months before the allied forces reached Bergen-Belsen.
I only read it once-- it really affected me; I was young and really understood her and fell in love with Peter with her, too, of course. Of coruse I also had a crush on the young man who joins the NSDAP in The Sound of Music. . .
I went to the Anne Frank huis and was a bit dissapointed. . . at what? I’m not sure. Maybe the mass-experience of it-- the long lines outside the Westerkerk and large plate glass windows in the exhibition salon, etc. This was years ago.
I think it’s easy to forget what happened in Europe, especially with Amsterdam, which is so engaged in Today and so alive. But now each time I pass by I’m sort of moved the the lines, which never get any shorter there, for years and years. And now the Homomonument in proximity is a nice addition, lest we forget the others.
I think there is a group of older people who volunteer to give WWII themed tours in the first-person of what used to be the Jewish quarter-- very personal, from what I hear. I’d like to do that sometime.
I also hap-hazardly noticed a plaque last summer on a small street-- off the Kalverstraat?-- that documented the site of a killing of a few gay college fellows after the clubs closed one night in the '80’s, perhaps. One of those sudden halts in one’s day, to unexpectedly come upon such a thing.
One of the most disturbing experiences I’ve had was visiting Matthausen (the KZ in Austria) with my younger host-sister’s 10th grade class-- a bunch of kids who were tired of hearing about WWII and jaded and couldn’t understand why they were supposed to shoulder this collective burden. I was sort of traumatized by the experience (I’m not sure if the more um, more tourist-marketed Auschwitz would have the same effect as listening to a local 85 year old man describe his experience as I watched the other kids calmly ignore him and discuss their Peters with one another-- life goes on). No matter how many times you are told WHAT exactly happened somewhere there is nothing that can compare to actually experiencing THINGS in the world. You can be told how small the bunks were that they shared, but when you see the bunks you realize what that MEANS, experientially. You see the rocks they were supposed to carry up THIS hill.
Whoops. That got involved. I guess this is meant as an American response to Coldfire’s Liberation Day thread, inspired by too many vodka tonics and too much thinking time on a Friday evening-- although we have our isolationist periods and Hague Invasion bills, some of us do remember what happened.
I was really young when I was first read the Diary of Anne Frank. I think 2nd grade. At that time I think part of me understood it to be real but a greater part of me just thought it was a story. I didn’t get it. Anne Frank dies? She’s the main character! She can’t die! You don’t do that to your main character. What a lousy story.
I think what you saw was this plaque, in the Voetboogsteeg - running parallel to the Kalverstraat around the Spui area.
Joes Kloppenburg tried to stop a few drunken idiots from kicking a homeless man. He paid for it with his life. His last words were “Kappen nou!” (“knock it off!”), which became the name of a foundation against senseless violence.
