UNLIKE THOSE BOOKS THAT WE LOVED AS CHILDREN and return to as adults with the bewilderment of someone visiting the site of a childhood home that has been torn down to make room for a superhighway, Anne Frank’s diary never makes us wonder: Who was that person who liked this book? Rather, like any classic—it may be one definition of a literary classic—it rewards rereading. Each reading (I am referring here to the “c” version of the diary, which Otto Frank assembled by combining Anne’s first draft and her revisions, the edition that schoolchildren read and that most of us first encountered) reveals aspects of the work that we may have missed before and allows us to view the book in the light of our own experience, of everything we have learned, remembered, and forgotten since the first time we read it.
Though most young readers might not know what to call it, or how to identify the source of the book’s appeal, the first thing that draws us into the diary is Anne Frank’s voice, that mysterious amalgam of talent, instinct, hard work, and countless small authorial decisions that make words seem to speak to us from the page. The assured, infectious energy of that voice makes us willing, even eager, to hear a little girl tell us what gifts she got for her thirteenth birthday and how her friends watched a Rin Tin Tin film at her party. We are patient, even charmed, as the child prattles on about who her best friend is now as opposed to which girl used to be her best friend, which boy she has a crush on, which boy she intends to marry.
One of the misconceptions about The Diary of a Young Girl is the notion that, from the beginning, Anne called her diary Kitty. In fact, in the early drafts, she framed some entries as letters to friends—some real, some imaginary—with whom she kept up a lively, if one-sided, correspondence. In one affecting note, Anne tells a friend that this will be the last letter she will be able to send. Other letters were addressed to characters in Cissy van Marxveldt’s Joop ter Heul novels, a popular series of books, of which Anne was extremely fond.
The series, writes Mirjam Pressler, “follows the fortunes of a ‘club’ of girls from school to marriage to motherhood. The subjects of the books are not very different from those of the girls’ books published elsewhere in the world at the same time—stories with an almost educational feel to them, preparing girls for their future roles as wives and mothers. In style, however, they are quite different—more colloquial and amusing; it is tempting to say more modern…We may safely assume that Cissy van Marxveldt had some influence on Anne’s own style.” In September 1942, during a period when Anne mentions reading the Joop ter Heul books, she addresses her diary letters (later cut or changed in her revisions) to Conny, Marianne, Phien, Emmy, Jettje, and Poppie—members of the “club.”
One of Van Marxveldt’s heroines was Kitty Francken, and it was Kitty on whom Anne decided when, during her last months in the attic, she began to revise her diary and focused on one imaginary listener. Though Anne had had a real friend by that name, Kathe “Kitty” Egyedi, it is generally agreed that Anne chose the name from among Van Marxveldt’s characters. Anne may have envisioned Het Achterhuis as a Joop ter Heul-style romance of the secret annex.
What matters is that this device—the diary letters to Kitty—gave Anne a way of addressing her readers intimately and directly, in the second person: you you you. Perhaps it helped her write more fluently by providing her with an imaginary audience. Many people have found themselves prevented from keeping a diary or journal by uncertainty and confusion about whom exactly the diarist is supposed to be writing to or for.
Reading Anne’s diary, we become the friend, the most intelligent, comprehending companion that anyone could hope to find. Chatty, humorous, familiar, Anne is writing to us, speaking from the heart to the ideal confidante, and we rise to the challenge and become that confidante. She turns us into the consummate listener, picking up the signals she hopes she is transmitting into the fresh air beyond the prison of the attic. If her diary is a message in a bottle, we are the ones who find it, glittering on the beach.
Within a few pages, the transparency of Anne’s prose style has convinced us that she is telling the truth as she describes the world around her and looks inward, as if her private self is a foreign country whose geography and customs she is struggling to understand so that she can live there. Among the motifs that run throughout the book is Anne’s urgent desire to find out who—what sort of person—she is.
The subject of Anne’s true nature absorbs her, and us, from the earliest passages to the diary’s final entry, in which she talks about her “dual personality,” the lighthearted, superficial side that lies in wait to ambush and push away her “better, deeper, and purer” self. Aware of how often she hides her good qualities because she is afraid of being misunderstood or mocked, she accuses herself of being uncharitable, supercilious, and peevish. “I twist my heart round again, so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside, and keep trying to find a way of becoming what I would so like to be, and what I could be, if…there weren’t any other people living in the world.” On the brink of a horror of which she was painfully aware, Anne Frank agonizes about not being nicer to her mother.
Reading her diary, we are reminded, often shockingly, of similar questions we may have asked ourselves as adolescents, of the enthralling mysteries that time has solved, or whose urgency age has erased. It’s nearly impossible to recall wondering who we were, who we really were, as well as our related preoccupations with the differences between our authentic selves and the outer shells that everyone mistook for the real thing. Trying to remember the psychological and spiritual contortions we put ourselves through, when we were young, is as difficult as trying to summon back our astonishment at how quickly our bodies were changing.
Perhaps more than any other book, Anne’s diary reminds us of what that bewilderment and yearning were like. Meanwhile, the diary entries become a sort of mirror in which teenagers, male and female, can see themselves—a capsule description of the alienation, the loneliness, and the torrents of free-floating grief that define adolescence in twentieth-century Western culture. Older readers will recognize familiar but forgotten echoes from their own pasts as Anne describes her inability to breach the wall that separates her from others. Younger readers may experience an almost eerie kinship with a girl who died so long ago but who is saying what no one has expressed quite so succinctly. Of course, she is writing about eight Jews forced by the Nazis to spend two years in an attic. But she is also describing what it is like to be young.
Among the fascinations of the diary is the chance it offers to watch Anne’s protagonist and narrator—herself—revealed in all her complexity, and to witness what John Berryman called the transformation of the child into the adult. Anne Frank was immensely observant, and unabashedly curious about everything from current events to the quirks of human nature to the problems of being a movie star to the sex life of a cat. She also had a highly developed sense of humor, which served her well during the worst moments in hiding. When Pfeffer arrives in the attic and brings news of the “gruesome and dreadful” fates of their Jewish friends and neighbors, Anne promises herself that “we shall still have our jokes and tease each other when these horrors have faded a bit in our minds; it won’t do us any good, or help those outside to go on being as gloomy as we are at the moment. And what would be the object of making our ‘Secret Annex’ into a ‘Secret Annex of Gloom’?”
The form of the diary—letters with breaks, like chapter breaks, allowing for gaps in time and changes of subject—lets Anne glide from meditation to action, from narration and reflection to dialogue and dramatized scene. Part of what keeps us reading with such rapt attention are the regular yet unpredictable shifts between opposites of tone and content—between domesticity and danger, between the private and the historic, between metaphysics and high comedy. One of the most intriguing of these oppositions is the tension between the extraordinary and the ordinary, the extreme and the normal, the young genius and the typical teen. In one entry, Anne can make the most trenchant or poetic observations; in the next, she complains that she is being picked on, singled out, criticized unfairly; the adults don’t understand her, they treat her like the child that she sounds like in these passages. Even as the dangers grew more pressing and her reflections more transcendent, she keeps insisting on how ordinary she is, and regardless of the evidence to the contrary, we believe her, and we don’t, because it’s true and it isn’t.
Her voice is so recognizable and so evocative that we might mistake it for any girl’s, until we read more closely and realize that its timbre, its tempo, and its choice of what to focus on is uniquely Anne’s. Anyone who has ever tried to write autobiographically will know how difficult it is to do so without seeming mannered, strained, and false. Only a natural writer could sound as if she is not writing so much as thinking on the page.
“I have one outstanding trait in my character, which must strike anyone who knows me for any length of time, and that is my self-knowledge. I can watch myself and my actions, just like an outsider.” Anne’s self-scrutiny occasionally leads her to write about herself in the third person, as if she is describing an out-of-body experience during which she is watching herself interact with the others or simply lie in bed. “Then a certain person lies awake for about a quarter of an hour, listening to the sounds of the night. Firstly, to whether there might be a burglar downstairs, then to the various beds, above, next door, and in my room, from which one is usually able to make out how the various members of the household are sleeping, or how they pass the night in wakefulness.”
What makes these moments of detachment all the more affecting is that they are often associated with the desire to escape the semiconstant state of terror in which she and her family exist. Among the diary’s most lyrical passages is one in which Anne, who has just been startled by a loud ring at the door, envisions the fragile perch on which she and the others are huddled:
I see the eight of us within our “Secret Annex” as if we were a little piece of blue heaven, surrounded by black, black rain clouds. The round, clearly defined spot where we stand is still safe, but the clouds gather more closely about us and the circle which separates us from the approaching dangers closes more and more tightly. Now we are so surrounded by danger and darkness that we bump against each other, as we search desperately for a means of escape. We all look down below, where people are fighting each other, we look above, where it is quiet and beautiful, and meanwhile we are cut off by the great dark mass.
Even as she gropes her way through that great dark mass, Anne is remarkably restrained in calibrating the amount of fear she will admit into the diary. The air raids, the break-ins, and the brutality reported by the helpers and glimpsed from the window appear at regular intervals, so that the reader can never fully relax. Anne’s open-hearted compassion is so powerful and contagious that she makes us feel, as she does, for the elderly, crippled Jewish woman whom Miep has seen sitting on a doorstep, where the Gestapo ordered her to wait while they found a car to take her away.
Until late 1943, when Anne’s fear and anxiety spike, she tends to underplay the gravity of her situation and often ends a disturbing section with a consolatory joke. She appears to be reassuring Kitty, and, at the same time, herself. Her optimism, such as it is, seems like the pure product of youth and inspires a tenderness that few readers feel on reading the war diaries kept by, among others, Mikhail Sebastian, Viktor Klemperer, and Etty Hillesum. Written wholly or partly while their authors were in the world—the final section of Hillesum’s book is composed of letters from Westerbork—these brilliant eyewitness accounts involve numerous locations and large casts of characters, few of whom are as memorable as the Franks, the Van Daans, and Dussel. More comprehensive than Anne’s, offering views of their times that tend more toward the panorama than the keyhole, these journals were written by complicated adults, and each book, for different reasons, is as easy to admire but harder to love than the one by the no less complicated child.
WHAT I could be, if…there weren’t any other people living in the world. No one would have, or could have, planned it so that Anne Frank ended her book this way—no more than it could have been arranged that she received her diary as a birthday gift and almost instantly began to write in it, so that the book begins not in the dark confines of the attic, where the constrictions and deprivations are already making themselves felt, but rather in the bright light that in those years passed for normality. In the daylight we can see what kind of person Anne was—who she was before, and might have become without, the incarceration in the attic.
The first entry in Anne’s diary (again, in the version her father edited) nearly lifts itself off the page, powered by the joy that a life-loving, theatrical girl feels at the dawn of her thirteenth birthday. She’s practically bursting out of herself, awake at six in the morning to see her presents. But she must stay in bed until seven, when she is allowed to get up and unwrap her gifts: roses, a plant, some peonies, books, a puzzle, a brooch, money, sweets.
She lists her new books—Tales and Legends of the Netherlands, Daisy’s Mountain Holiday—and another she intends to buy with her birthday money, The Myths of Greece and Rome. We can tell what kind of girl she is: a reader, a fan of legends and adventure stories, of fantasy and the imagination. Of course, the gift she mentions first is the “nicest” of all, the diary that will later be given the name that history remembers: Kitty.
Our trust in Anne as a narrator will prove increasingly important as she describes daily life in a deceptively gentle circle of hell that, without her as our Virgil, we could hardly imagine. In the early diary entries, intimations of dread and peril (conveyed by the catalog of quotidian things that Jews are forbidden) alternate with equally quotidian activities—Ping-Pong games, flirtations, classroom dramas—that Anne is still able to enjoy. Our image of her as an “incurable chatterbox” whom her exasperated teacher assigns to write a composition called “‘Quack, quack, quack,’ says Mrs. Natterbeak” will inform our sense of her character and increase our sympathy for her neighbors in the attic, who must bear up under the strain (which Anne would be the last to notice) of her irrepressible conversation. Often, in these first diary entries, the descriptions of simple pleasures and of the punitive, shaming Nazi regulations appear within a single paragraph, such as this chilling variation on the theme of a parent worried by a child’s lateness:
“Harry visited us yesterday to meet my parents. I had bought ice cream cake, sweets, tea, and fancy biscuits, quite a spread, but neither Harry nor I felt like sitting stiffly side by side indefinitely, so we went for a walk, and it was already ten past eight when he brought me home. Daddy was very cross, and thought it was very wrong of me because it is dangerous for Jews to be out after eight o’clock, and I had to promise to be in by ten to eight in future.”
On occasion the contradictions of trying to live normally under abnormal circumstances are compressed into a sentence: “We ping-pongers are very partial to ice cream, especially in summer, when one gets warm at the game, so we usually finish up with a visit to the nearest ice-cream shop, Delphi or Oasis, where Jews are allowed.”
ANOTHER factor that contributes to the diary’s power to move us and to make us remember so much of what Anne tells Kitty is Anne’s eye for detail, for the gesture or line of dialogue that forms and refines her portraits of her family and neighbors so they become three-dimensional characters in a work of art.
In “The Development of Anne Frank,” John Berryman offers an example of Anne’s dispassionate observation, a passage in which she refers to her father by his nickname, Pim: “She was vivacious but intensely serious, devoted but playful…imaginative yet practical, passionate but ironic and cold-eyed. Most of the qualities that I am naming need no illustration for a reader of the Diary; perhaps ‘cold-eyed’ may have an exemplar: ‘Pim, who was sitting on a chair in a beam of sunlight that shone through a window, kept being pushed from one side to the other. In addition, I think his rheumatism was bothering him, because he sat rather hunched up with a miserable look on his face…He looked exactly like some shriveled up old man from an old people’s home.” So much for an image of the man—her adored father—whom she loves best in the world. She was self-absorbed but un-self-pitying, charitable but sarcastic, industrious but dreamy, brave but sensitive.”
Anne’s diary abounds in illuminating details—of setting, of action and repose, of food and clothing, of mood, of conversation and response. In case we have trouble visualizing the architecture of her hiding place, Anne maps it out for us and helps us understand where each room—each public space that will also serve as private quarters for working and sleeping—is located in relation to the others.
In an entry dated August 4, 1943, Anne begins an hour-by-hour account of what, after a little more than a year, has come to constitute an ordinary day in an existence that is “so different from ordinary times and ordinary people’s lives.” Every aspect of the daily routine in the annex is made use of for what it reveals about the quirks and personalities of the people forced to follow the intricate steps of the harrowingly restrictive choreography.
Anne starts her timetable at nine in the evening, when the cacophony of preparations for the night reaches a crescendo in the thunderous sounds of Mrs. Van Pels’s bed being moved to the window, “in order to give Her Majesty in the pink bed jacket fresh air to tickle her dainty nostrils!”
Washing up in the bathroom, Anne notices a tiny flea floating in the water. When gunfire erupts in the darkness outside, she wakes, “so busy dreaming that I’m thinking about French irregular verbs” until she realizes what she is hearing and creeps, for comfort, to her father’s bed.
At lunchtime, when the warehouse workers leave and the annex residents can briefly relax, Mrs. Van Pels pulls out the vacuum cleaner and tends her “beautiful, and only, carpet,” while Otto retreats to a corner to escape into the novels of his beloved Dickens. Finally, the workday ends, the helpers come upstairs, a radio broadcast silences even the loquacious Mrs. Van Pels. After a nap, it’s time to gather for dinner, a scene that Anne documents at length.
Two weeks later, in a “Continuation of the ‘Secret Annex’ daily timetable,” Anne returns to the subject of her father’s love for Dickens, and this time, uses this detail to convey something seemingly trivial—but in fact revealing—about her parents’ marriage.
Otto keeps trying to interest his wife in what he has been reading, but she insists that she doesn’t have time. As if there were anything but time in the secret annex! When he makes another attempt, she suddenly remembers something she needs to tell one of her daughters—and a potentially companionable moment between a husband and wife has ended in a standoff.
Anne’s revealing focus on the minutiae of daily life reminds the reader of how cautious the attic residents had to be about trivial things, and of how the need for such vigilance must have sharpened Anne’s eye. “Although it is fairly warm, we have to light our fires every other day in order to burn vegetable peelings and refuse. We can’t put anything in the garbage pails, because we must always think of the warehouse boy. How easily one could be betrayed by being a little careless!”
Days earler, Anne had trained her attentive gaze on the decline in the standard of living—their “manners,” she calls them—in the annex. The oilcloth they have been using continually on the communal table has grown dirty. The Van Pelses have been sleeping all winter on the same flannelette sheet. Otto’s trousers are frayed, and his tie is worn. Edith’s corset has split and can no longer be repaired, and Margot is wearing a brassiere two sizes too small.
The following January, Anne entrusts Kitty with this inspired and withering complaint about how tired she has grown of the grown-ups’ conversation—a seemingly lighthearted account that captures the stultifying tedium of social life in a place whose residents can no longer find anything new to say: “If the conversation at mealtimes isn’t over politics or a delicious meal, then Mummy or Mrs. v.P. trot out one of the old stories of their youth, which we’ve heard so many times before, or Pf. twaddles on about his wife’s extensive wardrobe, beautiful race horses, leaking rowboats, boys who can swim at the age of 4, muscular pains and nervous patients. What it all boils down to is this, that if one of the eight of us opens his mouth, the other seven can finish the story for him! We all know the point of every joke from the start, and the storyteller is alone in laughing at his witticisms. The various milkmen, grocers and butchers of the two ex-housewives have already grown beards in our eyes, so often have they been praised to the skies or pulled to pieces; it is impossible for anything in the conversation here to be fresh or new.”
Anne defines the people around her by noting their different solutions to a problem, or their diverse answers to a single question. Early in the diary, the arrangements for bathing—an activity that every attic resident approaches differently—provide a series of clues to their personalities, and to the extent to which they have adjusted to their new lives. Peter, Anne tells us, chooses to bathe in the kitchen even though it has a glass door and he is so modest that, before each bath, he goes around to each of the annex residents and warns them not to walk past the kitchen for half an hour. Mr. Van Pels cherishes his privacy enough to carry hot water all the way upstairs. Uncertain about how best to carry out this delicate and newly demanding activity, Mrs. Van Pels has avoided bathing at all until she figures out the most convenient and comfortable place. Otto washes up in his private office, Edith behind a fire guard in the kitchen, while Margot and Anne retreat to the front office. Peter has suggested that Anne use the large bathroom in the office, where she can turn on the light, lock the door, and be alone. “I tried my beautiful bathroom on Sunday for the first time and although it sounds mad, I think it is the best place of all.”
At dinner, during her “daily timetable” of life in the attic, Anne goes around the table, differentiating her characters by telling us what and how each person eats. Mr. Van Pels generously helps himself first, meanwhile offering his “irrevocable” opinion on every subject. His wife picks over the food, taking the tiniest potatoes, the daintiest morsels, smiling coquettishly and assuming everyone is interested in what she has to say. Their son eats a great deal and hardly speaks. Margot is also silent, though she “eats like a little mouse.” Mummy: “good appetite, very talkative.” Otto makes sure that everyone is served before he is, and that the children have the choicest portions. Pfeffer (“helps himself, never looks up, eats and doesn’t talk”) provokes, from Anne, a diatribe that progresses from the “enormous helpings” he takes to his habit of hogging the bathroom when others need to use it.
A year into their stay in the annex, the residents play a game. If they were free, what would they do first? Like any author who has learned that an effective way to create a character is to indicate that person’s hopes and fears, Anne reports each person’s fantasies of liberation. Margot and Mr. Van Pels dream of a hot bath, at least a half hour long. Mrs. Frank longs for real coffee. Mrs. Van Pels wants ice-cream cakes. Peter longs to go to town and to the movies. Anne wants a home, the ability to move around freely, and to have some help with her work, by which she means school; this last is a somewhat odd and perhaps even thoughtless wish, since we know that Otto has been supervising the girls’ lessons and, in theory, giving them all the help they need
When Otto’s turn comes, he says he would choose to visit Mr. Vossen, Anne’s pseudonym for Bep’s father, Mr. Voskuijl. A month before, the residents had learned that Johannes Voskuijl, who had built the bookcase that camouflaged the entrance to the annex, had been diagnosed with stomach cancer and was not expected to recover. He must have been very much on everyone’s mind. We also know that on the afternoon Margot received her call-up notice, Otto was visiting the Jewish hospital for the indigent elderly. Comforting the poor and old was something Otto did; it was among the reasons he was so admired. But when, in the game, he makes that choice, the reader can imagine how, at moments, it might have been a trial for his wife and daughters to live with this pillar of moral perfection. Couldn’t he have picked the hot bath and then the hospital visit?
The final survey of this sort occurs in March 1944, when Anne polls her neighbors for their responses to their depressingly deficient diet. By now, we know her characters so well that we can almost predict their replies. Mrs. Van Pels complains bitterly about the difficulty of cooking with limited ingredients, and about the ingratitude she receives in return for all her hard work. Her husband claims he can stand the bad food as long as he has enough cigarettes. Edith replies that food is not so important to her, but she would love a slice of rye bread, and, incidentally, she thinks that Mrs. Van Pels should put a stop to her husband’s smoking. Otto says that he not only needs nothing, but that part of his ration should be saved for Elli. And Pfeffer’s maddening bluster trails off in ellipses….
IF we try to understand why we come to know these people so well, one explanation can be found in the patient accretion of actions and gestures with which Anne informs our vision of them. You can track each character through the book, watching their portraits emerge like photos coming up in a tray of developing fluid. It often seems as if Anne is conscious of who she has been including or ignoring, of who has temporarily captured or lost her attention. Almost as soon as we become aware that one of the attic residents has fallen silent, or has briefly gone unnoticed, that character is brought in, center stage, to reassert the oppressive reality of his or her constant presence.
Unsurprisingly, given Anne’s age, her parents are the object of almost as much intense scrutiny as she devotes to exploring the mystery of her essential self. She consistently uses one parent to define the other: Daddy is kind and patient, Mummy short-tempered and sarcastic; Daddy is transparent and sensitive, Mummy opaque and obtuse.
A diary kept by Edith Frank or Auguste van Pels might have painted a slightly different picture of Otto Frank, but Anne’s perspective is the only one we have. In her view, Otto-Pim”—is invariably dignified and fair, defending his daughters when they are being maligned, yet perfectly impartial when he must mediate a dispute. He is the educator, the peacemaker, the leader to whom the others bring their dissatisfactions, fears, and complaints. In a passage that Otto cut, we see him unclogging the communal toilet. When there is a burglary, Otto and Peter are the ones who go downstairs to investigate. “We must behave like soldiers,” he tells the frightened Mrs. Van Pels.
Urging Anne to be nicer to her mother, Otto appears to take no satisfaction in being the more popular—indeed, the adored—parent. Anne worships her father, and in our own more jaded and suspicious era, her diary serves as a useful reminder of how an adolescent daughter can feel passionately about her father without their relationship bordering on the incestuous or improper. This too may be one reason the diary has remained popular among young readers—its honesty about emotions that teenagers have learned to keep private.
Before Anne’s romance with Peter takes its course and she tires of him, there is a dramatic incident that begins when her father asks her not to spend evenings alone with Peter in his room. Otto, we may feel, is right to worry. His daughter is a precocious adolescent, Peter is several years older. A pregnancy would be disastrous. Enraged by what she interprets as her father’s lack of faith in her, Anne decides what she wants to tell him. She writes a note saying that she has reached a stage at which she can live entirely on her own. Her father can no longer talk her out of going upstairs. Either he forbids her to be alone with Peter, or else he trusts her completely—and leaves her in peace. Then she slips the letter into Otto’s pocket.
Otto replies that he has received many letters in his life, but this is the most unpleasant. The remainder of his response, which Anne reports in direct dialogue, is such a model of forbearance and understanding, so thoroughly infused with a guilt-inducing sense of injury (how could Anne mistreat the loving parents who have done nothing but help and defend her?) that she caves in from remorse, just as she was meant to. “This is certainly the worst thing I have ever done in my life…to accuse Pim, who has done and still does do everything for me—no, that was too low for words…And the way Daddy has forgiven me makes me feel more than ever ashamed of myself.”
Less than a week later, the tension has dissipated, and we see the attic residents celebrating Otto’s birthday, for which he receives, among other gifts, a book on nature and a biography of Linnaeus. Anne makes it clear that her love of literature is part of what she shares with her father, who suggests that she and Margot list all the books they read in hiding. In Anne’s daily schedule, time was allotted for reading, and on Saturdays, the Dutch helpers brought more books, which the attic residents eagerly anticipated. In addition to books about history and geography, biographies, a five-volume history of art, a children’s Bible, compendiums of mythology, and what we would now call “young-adult novels,” Anne mentions works by Oscar Wilde, Thackeray, the Brothers Grimm, and Alphonse Daudet.
Anne conveys her mother’s character, as she does her father’s, primarily through dialogue and action supplemented by commentary. One of Anne’s earliest mentions of Edith occurs in an entry dated October 29, 1942, as Anne describes literary gifts from both parents. Otto has given her the plays of Goethe and Schiller, from which he plans to read to her every evening, starting with Don Carlos. “Following Daddy’s good example”—note the pointed irony of that phrase, which underlines the passage’s significance—“Mummy has pressed her prayer book into my hand. For decency’s sake I read some of the prayers in German; they are certainly beautiful but they don’t convey much to me. Why does she force me to be pious, just to oblige her?”
Regardless of the degree to which Otto’s editing modulated Anne’s criticisms, her estrangement from her mother is a constant theme, and is reflected in the novel on which she was at work in early 1944, Cady’s Life, a portion of which appears in Tales from the Secret Annex. The book begins when Cady, who has been hit by a car, complains to a friendly nurse about her mother’s tactlessness. Anne uses the license of fiction to be even harsher about a troubled mother-daughter relationship than she is in the diary.
“She talks so unfeelingly about the most sensitive subjects,” complains Cady. “She understands nothing of what’s going on inside me, and yet she’s always saying she’s so interested in adolescents…. She may be a woman, but she’s not a real mother!” In response, the wise Nurse Ank (much like the “nice Anne” who Anne claims to keep hidden) replies, “Perhaps she’s different because she’s been through a lot and now prefers to avoid anything that might be painful.”
A late diary entry (which Otto omitted from the edited version) includes an outline for the ending of Cady’s Life. This summary follows the well-known passage in which Anne mentions her desire to become a journalist and her plans to publish Het Achterhuis. In the narrative Anne sketches, Cady marries a “well-to-do farmer” though she remains infatuated with her former sweetheart, Hans, whom she initially broke up with because he sympathized with the Nazis. The entry concludes, “It isn’t sentimental nonsense for it’s modeled on the story of Daddy’s life”—a line that has been taken to mean that Anne knew, or at least believed, that the love of Otto’s life was a woman he had known before Edith, and that his marriage to Edith had had more to do with her convenience than with passion.
When Anne tries to find the source of her antipathy to her mother, she dredges up a memory of Edith forbidding her to come along on a shopping expedition with Margot. Anne also refers to the maddening maternal sermons that remind her of how different she and her mother are. But unlike Mrs. Van Pels, whose irritating habits and character traits are documented by the many annoying things she says and does, “Mama Frank, champion of youth” behaves quite admirably at almost every juncture. We observe Edith defending her daughters from Pfeffer and the Van Pelses, keeping the peace, making sure that her children eat well, and so forth.
Part of what makes the diary feel so authentic is that, despite all her resolutions to improve her character, Anne makes only the most pro forma teenage effort to be fair and impartial about her mother. Edith gets no credit when she insists (over Otto’s objections) that a candle be lit to comfort Anne, who has been frightened by the rattle of machine-gun fire. “When he complained, her answer was firm: “After all, Anne’s not exactly a veteran soldier,’ and that was the end of it.” Nor is Edith pitied when Anne’s coldness makes her cry. Anne blames her mother for the distance between them, a gap that has been widened by Edith’s thoughtless comments and tactless jokes, presumably at her daughter’s expense. “Just as I shrink at her hard words, so did her heart when she realized that the love between us was gone. She cried half the night and hardly slept at all.”
Miep Gies observed that Edith Frank often seemed depressed and withdrawn; when Miep left the annex, Edith would follow her downstairs and just stand there, waiting. Eventually, Miep realized that Edith wanted to talk to her in private. Unlike the others, who enjoyed discussing what they planned to do when the war ended, Edith was afraid that the war would never end.
In the diary, Edith can do nothing to mollify Anne, whose contempt for her mother has as much to do with who her mother is as with anything she does. Anne is appalled by the thought of growing up with the limited horizons, ambitions, and expectations of the women around her, and laments her own inability to respect her mother or to see her as a role model. Anne writes that she hopes to spend a year in Paris or London, studying languages and art history—an ambition she compares, with barely veiled contempt, to Margot’s desire to go to Palestine and become a midwife.
In an essay entitled “Reading Anne Frank as a Woman,” a feminist interpretation of Anne as “a woman who was censored by male editors,” Berteke Waaldijk, a professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Utrecht, points out a long and almost entirely overlooked passage that Otto Frank excised from the final section of the diary. Perhaps Otto assumed that a lengthy disquisition on women’s rights might distract the reader heading into the final pages in which Anne is unknowingly hurtling toward her doom. At a point during which Anne was simultaneously writing new material and rapidly revising, she devoted a remarkable amount of space to the question of why women are treated as inferior to men:
“Presumably man, thanks to his greater physical strength, achieved dominance over women from the very start; man, who earns the money, who begets children, who may do what he wants…It is stupid enough of women to have borne it all in silence for such a long time, since the more centuries this arrangement lasts, the more deeply rooted it becomes. Luckily schooling, work and progress have opened women’s eyes. In many countries…modern women demand the right of complete independence!”
All along, we have sensed that Anne’s rage at her mother and at Mrs. Van Pels has involved their inability to be—or even to seem—as brave and sensible and competent as the men. Only late in the diary does Anne understand that there is an actual person behind the abstract symbol of female limitation and servitude that she has so despised. Her digression about the problems of, and the disrespect for, women ends by suggesting that those who have gone through childbirth are entitled to gratitude and sympathy on that score alone. Anne seems to have realized that her mother is not entirely to blame for the ways in which she had been conditioned to behave, and for her stunted ambitions and expectations.
Almost a year and a half after writing a particularly furious passage in which she describes forcing herself to remain calm and having to suppress the desire to slap her mother, Anne had second thoughts about including it in Het Achterhuis. In the meantime, she had undergone the change that John Berryman considered the turning point in her child-into-adult conversion, which immediately followed her vision of her friend Lies and her dead grandmother. “I was very unhappy again last evening. Granny and Lies came into my mind. Granny, oh darling Granny, how little we understood of what she suffered, or how sweet she was…And Lies, is she still alive? What is she doing? Oh, God, protect her and bring her back to us. Lies, I see in you all the time what my lot might have been.”
In an entry dated three days later, January 2, 1944, Anne remarks that she has been rereading her diary and is shocked by the “hothead” sections about her mother. She blames her bitterness on “moods” that prevented her from seeing a situation from another person’s point of view and from realizing that she might have hurt Mummy or made her unhappy. Her mother had responded in kind, and the result was “unpleasantness and misery rebounding all the time.”
In the aftermath of her vision of Lies, Anne vows to improve. She promises herself that she will stop making her mother cry. She herself has grown more mature, and her mother is no longer quite so anxious. But a few days later, Anne is unable to refrain from returning to the theme of how hard it is to respect her mother and how little she wishes to follow her example.
The winter of 1944 marked the start of an acutely introspective period during which Anne looked back and measured the person she had become against the girl she was: “If I think of my life in 1942, it all feels so unreal. It was quite a different Anne who enjoyed that heavenly existence from the Anne who has grown wise within these walls. Yes, it was a heavenly life. Boyfriends at every turn, about 20 friends and acquaintances of my own age, the darling of nearly all the teachers, spoiled from top to toe by Mummy and Daddy, lots of sweets, enough pocket money, what more could one want?…I look now at that Anne Frank as an amusing, jokey, but superficial girl who has nothing to do with the Anne of today.”
Had Anne survived, or had she been able to stay in contact with the wider world, she might have taken consolation from the discovery that many, if not most, teenage girls come into conflict with their mothers. Isolated in the attic, Anne could only examine her own history and her own conscience, and try to locate the wellspring of her sadness and her rage.
JUST as Anne finds a shorthand in which to express her complex relations with her parents by recording her response to their tastes in reading—Goethe versus the prayer book—so she introduces the Van Pelses by describing their arrival at the secret annex with Mrs. Van Pels’s pottie in a hatbox, and her husband carrying a folding tea table under his arm. The Van Pelses begin their new lives with a noisy quarrel of the sort that Otto and Edith would never have had, and would certainly never have allowed to be overheard. Coarse, selfish about trivial matters, unembarrassed to squabble over plates and sheets, yet ultimately sympathetic, the Van Pelses do one thing after another that arouses, in the reader, amusement and affection commingled with annoyance. They are characters.
Because the Van Pelses are so much more transparent than the Franks, we can more easily watch them weakening and falling apart. By the last summer in the attic, Mrs. Van Pels is talking about hanging, suicide, prison, a bullet in the head. “She quarrels, uses abusive language, cries, pities herself, laughs, and then starts a fresh quarrel again.”
Anne’s response to Mrs. Van Pels is quite different from the helpers’ memories of her real-life model, whom Miep Gies called, “a very uncomplicated person, anxious and cheerful at the same time.” Miep came to see Mrs. Van Pels as not only realistic but prescient. “If anyone had a premonition of how badly it would all end, she was the one.” Anne seems not to have known that, for Miep’s birthday in February 1944, Auguste van Pels—who, in the diary, we see greedily holding on to every possession—gave Miep an antique diamond-and-onyx ring as a “way to express the inexpressible.”
Mr. Van Pels grows more fractious as his cigarette supply dwindles. He is careless in ways that endanger the Jews and their helpers. Yet another crisis, marked by yet another fight, erupts when the Van Pelses’ money runs out and they must sell Mrs. Van Pels’s fur coat. It is a tribute to the vividness of Anne’s writing that readers can recall the drama surrounding the loss of the coat decades after reading the diary. All over Europe, families were deciding what to sell or keep or barter as they struggled to survive. But of all those painful conversations, the one we hear about in detail is the one that Anne describes in a few lines. The argument erupts over a rabbit-skin coat that Mrs. Van Pels has worn for seventeen years, and for which her husband has received the impressive sum of 325 florins. Having hoped to save the money in order to purchase new clothes after the war, Mrs. Van Pels is enraged by her husband’s insistence that the money is deperately needed by the household.
“The yells and screams, stamping and abuse—you can’t possibly imagine it! It was frightening. My family stood at the bottom of the stairs, holding their breath, ready if necessary to drag them apart!”
How humiliating for the Van Pelses to have such a squalid fight with another family listening, and not just any family but the perfect Franks. In many ways, the Van Pelses are the more well drawn and rounded of the two couples in the secret annex, since—unlike the angelic Pim and (in Anne’s view) the unfeeling Mummy—the Van Pelses are alternately and sometimes simultaneously maddening and touching.
The gunfire that frightens Anne terrifies her neighbor: “Mrs. Van Daan, the fatalist, was nearly crying, and said in a very timid little voice, “Oh, it is so unpleasant! Oh, they are shooting so hard,” by which she really means “I’m so frightened.” There’s something affecting about her husband’s hypochondria, the “tremendous fuss” he makes about a little cold, rubbing himself with eucalyptus and gargling with chamomile tea. Anne’s dual portrait captures so much that, even as enforced intimacy enrages her, we can see the Van Pelses’ charm and vulnerability shining through.
One thing seems inarguable: Anne was able to make the Van Pelses so real and present to us that we grieve at the thought of the hand injury that made Hermann lose his will to survive at Auschwitz, just as we can hardly bear to wonder if Auguste regretted the loss of her beloved fur coat during that freezing march from Bergen-Belsen to her death.
IF the characterization of the Van Pelses is a marvel of literary portraiture, the image of their son, Peter, is another matter. If Peter strikes us as an interesting character, a closer reading reveals that this is largely because he is lit by the refracted glow of Anne’s interest. When her fascination wanes and disappears, as it does in Anne’s revisions—which we’ll look at in the next chapter—we are left with only what we actually see him do and say. He accompanies Otto to investigate the break-in, does the heavy lifting of the sacks of beans, and wishes he weren’t Jewish. Young readers may develop a crush on Peter, but it is Anne’s crush. Her attraction transforms Peter into a romantic figure. But without that intensity—which, again, is Anne’s—Peter is a touching but rather ordinary boy. Moody, mercurial, restless, not especially perceptive, he is a scrim on which the isolated girl can project her loneliness and longing.
Anne’s early opinion of Peter is so harsh that one pleasure of reading the book is watching that antipathy reverse itself. In the “a” version of the diary, Anne reports getting a chocolate bar from Peter for her thirteenth birthday, before the families went into hiding. But the fact that they are acquaintances is hard to extract from her account of the Van Pelses’ arrival in the attic; Anne calls Peter “a rather soft, shy, gawky youth; can’t expect much from his company.” The authors of the play must have thought it simplified matters to have the young couple meet for the first time in the annex, which is the impression that most readers and audience members come away with.
Over the next months, Anne emphasizes how boring, lazy, and hypersensitive Peter is; the hypochondria he shares with his father is less winning in a young person. The first dramatized scene in which he appears involves a fight over a book that his father doesn’t want him reading. Peter gets credit for standing up to Mr. Van Pels, but loses it for the peevish and pouting quality of his resistance. Peter, we learn, has trouble with English, and has a comical fondness for using foreign words he doesn’t understand.
By late September, Anne is telling the Van Pelses that Peter often strokes her cheek, and she wishes he wouldn’t. Appalled by their response—could she grow to “like” Peter? He “certainly liked me very much”—Anne tells his parents that she thinks Peter is “rather awkward.” But slowly a camaraderie develops; Peter and Anne both enjoy dressing up in the clothes of the opposite-sex parent. For his birthday, in November, Peter gets a razor, a Monopoly game, and a cigarette lighter—in contrast to the Franks, who get, and give one another, books. In fact, Anne tells us, Peter “seldom reads.”
Peter at last moves to center stage as the hero of an adventure involving the transport of masses of beans. Four months later, we see him bitten by one of the large rats swarming the attic, and not long after, he is the one who goes downstairs with Otto after they hear a noise.
Not until January 1944 do we realize—before Anne does—what is starting to happen between the two teenagers: “It gave me a queer feeling each time I looked into his deep blue eyes, and he sat there with that mysterious laugh playing round his lips…and with my whole heart I almost beseeched him: oh, tell me, what is going on inside you, oh, can’t you look beyond this ridiculous chatter?” By the next month, Anne and Peter are having the intimate conversations that will fuel Anne’s longing for someone to love, as well as her conviction that this someone is Peter.
But even as Anne finds these exchanges endlessly fascinating, the reader may feel that Peter’s contributions to these talks are less riveting than hers. Peter expresses his desire to go to the Dutch East Indies and live on a plantation, as well as his hope that he may be able to pass for Christian after the war. When he reveals his inferiority complex and claims he feels he is less intelligent than the Franks, an impartial observer might agree. And yet, early in March, Anne records wanting to do something about Peter’s loneliness and sense of being unloved, and in a postscript to the March 6 entry, she admits that she has begun to live from one of their meetings to the next.
They talk, in the abstract, about kissing; they discover how much they have in common, how much they have changed during their time in the attic, how their ideas about each other have evolved. They discuss the fact that neither of them can confide in their parents, that frustration drives Anne to cry herself to sleep at night while Peter retreats to his loft and swears. They consider how different they were when they first arrived in the annex, and how they can barely recognize themselves as the same people they were in 1942. They marvel at the astonishing fact that they could have disliked each other at first, that Peter thought Anne chattered too much, while she was annoyed that he didn’t bother flirting with her. When Peter refers to his tendency to isolate himself from the others, Anne tells him that his silence is, in a way, like her chatter. As unlikely as it may seem, she too loves peace and quiet. They admit how glad they are to be together, to have each other. And Anne tells Peter that she would love to be able to help him.
“‘You always do help me,’” he said. ‘How?’ I asked, very surprised. ‘By your cheerfulness.’ That was certainly the loveliest thing he said. It was wonderful, he must have grown to love me as a friend, and that is enough for the time being…
“If he looks at me with those eyes that laugh and wink, then it’s just as if a little light goes on inside me.”
Such outpourings will be familiar (perhaps all too familiar) to anyone who has ever fallen in love. But they are utterly new to Anne, and, again, it is a tribute to her ability to write honestly and persuasively and to find the right tone for what she is telling Kitty (and us) that she can make it seem new. Anne longs for a kiss, they don’t kiss, they kiss. How easy it would be for another writer to make this sound banal.
On May 19, Anne writes, “After my laborious conquest, I’ve got the situation a bit more in hand now, but I don’t think my love has cooled off.” On June 14, she tells Kitty, “Peter is good and he’s a darling, but still there’s no denying that there’s a lot about him that disappoints me.” Three weeks later, Peter jokes about the possibility of becoming a criminal or a gambler, and Anne fears that Peter is becoming too dependent on her. “Poor boy, he’s never known what it feels like to make other people happy, and I can’t teach him that either…it hurts me every time I see how deserted, how scornful, and how poor he really is.”
By the fifteenth of July, Anne’s enchantment with Peter has reached a low ebb: “Now he clings to me, and for the time being, I don’t see any way of shaking him off and putting him on his own feet. When I realized that he could not be a friend for my understanding, I thought I would at least try to lift him up out of his narrowmindedness and make him do something with his youth.” That is the final mention of Peter in Anne’s book.
In the theatrical and film versions of the diary, Anne and Peter are in the garret, staring rapturously at the heavens when the Gestapo come to arrest them. But that was not what happened. Anne was with her mother and sister. Otto was upstairs with Peter, helping him with the English lessons that, we know from Anne, gave him so much trouble.
TWO relatively minor characters, the dentist Pfeffer and Margot Frank, are among the most nuanced and well drawn. With every minutely monitored tic, Fritz Pfeffer becomes the remarkable literary creation that is Albert Dussel. Of the eight people in the annex, his characterization is probably least like his counterpart in life; by all accounts, Pfeffer was extremely attractive to the ladies. But his charms were lost on Anne.
The dentist arrives late and brings bad news. Nazis have been going door-to-door, hunting down Jews. Friends have been rounded up and deported, loaded trucks rumble past, and columns of bullied prisoners trudge through the streets. These sobering truths, mixed with gratitude for having been spared the fate of her fellow Jews, temper the reluctance Anne otherwise might have felt on learning that Pfeffer—who is her father’s age, but whom, unlike Otto, she refers to as old—is going to share her little room.
In her excellent biography of Anne Frank, Melissa Müller writes, “Otto and Edith’s decision to put Pfeffer in the same room with Anne instead of with the sixteen-year-old Peter van Pels corroborates Anne’s complaint that she was in fact regarded as a child. Not only Otto but Edith Frank as well disregarded her growing need for privacy and obviously ignored their adolescent daughter’s sense of modesty, which was of course becoming all the more acute as she matured sexually.”
Perhaps Anne’s characterization of Pfeffer might have been a bit more sympathetic had she not spent night after wakeful night listening to a middle-aged man sleep. By contrast, Miep Gies very much liked her dentist, as did many of his loyal patients.
His Christian fiancée, Charlotte Kaletta, was devoted to Pffefer, who was nineteen years her senior and who had a son from an earlier marriage that had ended in divorce. The couple had lived in Germany until Hitler’s racial laws forced them to flee in the futile hope that they could be married in Holland. In the diary, “Lotje” is referred to as Dussel’s wife, and in a section cut from the “a” version, Anne mentions getting a roll of candy drops for her thirteenth birthday from “Mrs. Pfeffer.” When her fiancé went into hiding, Charlotte kept up their correspondence, love letters that Miep delivered without revealing where he was.
After the war, Charlotte’s friendship with Otto Frank ended, possibly because she was upset by Anne’s portrayal of Pfeffer in the diary and later by his characterization in the play. It’s easy to see that the woman who loved Fritz Pfeffer so much that she waited for his return even after it had become clear that he had died in Neuengamme might object to the reader catching a near final glimpse of Pfeffer after a quarrel with the Franks over the “sharing out of the butter. Dussel’s capitulation. Mrs. Van Daan and the latter very thick, flirtations, kisses and friendly little laughs. Dussel is beginning to get longings for women.”
Anne’s patience wears especially thin on Sundays, when Pfeffer performs the exercises she describes in appalled detail: “When he has ended with a couple of violent arm-waving exercises to loosen his muscles, His Lordship begins his toilet.” Though everyone behaves as if no decent person should think twice about a grown man sharing a room with a pubescent girl, sexual discomfort suffuses Anne’s view of Pfeffer. She’s repulsed when she comes down with the flu and he plays doctor, laying his greasy head on her naked chest. “Not only did his hair tickle unbearably, but I was embarrassed in spite of the fact that he once, thirty years ago, studied medicine and has the title of Doctor. Why should the fellow come and lie on my heart? He’s not my lover, after all! For that matter, he wouldn’t hear whether it’s healthy or unhealthy inside me anyway, his ears need syringing first as he’s becoming alarmingly hard of hearing.”
In July 1943, open warfare breaks out between the roommates when Pfeffer rejects Anne’s “reasonable request” to use the little table in their room so she can work there, twice a week, from four until five thirty. He mocks her whole idea of work (mythology! knitting!). She asks Otto for advice, and she and the dentist attempt a détente. Pfeffer responds by berating Anne for her selfishness and her stubborn insistence on getting what she wants. Only when Otto intercedes do they agree: Anne can work in their shared room, two afternoons each week, but only until five. “Dussel looked down his nose very much, didn’t speak to me for two days and still had to go and sit at the table from five till half past—frightfully childish.”
Regardless of whether he needs it or not, Pfeffer insists on having all his allotted time at the contested table. Rarely in literature have we seen a more pointed illustration of human smallness, and of the inability to compromise with grace.
Anne is not the only person whom Pfeffer is driving mad. One evening, as the annex residents violate the unofficial prohibition against Teutonic culture and listen to a radio broadcast of “Immortal Music of the German Masters,” the dentist fiddles with the dials until Peter explodes and Pfeffer replies, in his “most hoity-toity manner,” that he is working to get the sound perfectly right. Yet Anne lets us see another side of Pfeffer when she records each resident’s wish for what freedom will bring: “Dussel thinks of nothing but seeing Lotje, his wife.”
In the diary, Pfeffer is given quite a lot to say, not nearly so much as Mrs. Van Pels, but far more than the good-girl Margot, who only rarely appears onstage, and who Anne interprets for us, interceding and telling us what her sister is like. Much of what we learn about Margot is the result of projection on Anne’s part, as she repeatedly tries to intuit her sister’s responses to life in the attic.
After her romance with Peter begins, Anne worries that her sister may also have feelings for the annex’s only viable young male. Anne says, “I think it’s so rotten that you should be the odd one out,” to which her sister replies, “somewhat bitterly,” that being the odd one out is something she’s gotten used to. What does that mean? Anne doesn’t ask, and either Margot doesn’t say or Anne doesn’t tell us.
Anne’s first direct analysis of her sister comes at a moment when her sister has been held up (yet again, according to Anne) as a model human being. “I don’t want to be in the least like Margot. She is much too soft and passive for my liking, and allows everyone to talk her around, and gives in about everything. I want to be a stronger character!”
More than a year afterward, Margot’s “mouse-like” eating habits come up for scrutiny along with those of the others gathered around the table. “The only things that go down are vegetables and fruit. ‘Spoiled’ is the Van Daans’ judgment; ‘not enough fresh air and games’ our opinion.”
Later in the diary, Anne wisely allows Margot to speak for herself and reveal a facet of her character quite unlike the near saintliness with which she is often credited. Anne includes a letter in which Margot continues a discussion that she and Anne have been having about the possibility that Margot is jealous of Anne’s involvement with Peter. Anne introduces the letter as “evidence of Margot’s goodness,” as if she were unaware of the barely veiled insult to Anne’s intelligence that Margot can’t help slipping into her explanation of why she could never feel close to Peter:
“I would want to have the feeling that he understood me through and through without my having to say much. But for that reason it would have to be someone whom I felt was my superior intellectually, and that is not the case with Peter. But I can imagine it being so with you and Peter.”
“Not quite happy” with her sister’s letter, Anne’s answer includes a sentence that seems designed to elicit a flicker of sexual jealousy regardless of Margot’s claim to feel none. “At present there is no question of such confidence as you have in mind between Peter and myself, but in the twilight beside an open window you can say more to each other than in brilliant sunshine.”
In all the talk about Anne’s symbolic and historical import, her spiritual development, her friction with her mother, her discovery of first love, little mention is made of how much her diary tells us about what it is like to have a sibling.
IN an entry dated November 7, 1942, Anne describes the sort of family fight that has erupted in every household in which there is more than one child. Margot leaves her book around, Anne picks it up, Margot demands the book back, Anne wants it, her parents take Margot’s side. This ensuing scene, which may be the closest we come to fully believing Anne’s claim to ordinariness, is so familiar that we hardly notice how rarely it’s done, or done well, in literature.
“Just because I wanted to look a little further on, Margot got more and more angry. Then Mummy joined in: “Give the book to Margot, she was reading it,’ she said. Daddy came into the room. He didn’t even know what it was all about, but saw the injured look on Margot’s face and promptly dropped on me: ‘I’d like to see what you’d say if Margot ever started looking at one of your books!’ I gave way at once, laid the book down, and left the room—offended, as they thought. It so happened that I was neither offended nor cross, just miserable.”
Anne can render a moment in which everyone is talking simultaneously, acting or reacting, an example of barely contained chaos that poses a challenge for even the practiced writer. Conversely, there are tableaux that show us the characters in nearly static poses that communicate who they are, individually and collectively, and the levels of tension, resignation, or acceptance at which they have arrived.
Among such diary entries is one that John Berryman especially admired. Otto Frank is concerned about a business meeting taking place in the office downstairs. It’s suggested that he listen in, with his ear to the floor. He does so, along with Margot, all morning and into the afternoon, until, half paralyzed—the man is in his midfifties—Otto gets up. Anne takes his place, but the drone of voices puts her to sleep and she wakes up having forgotten every word she’s overheard.
Writes Berryman, “I have seldom, even in modern literature, read a more painful scene. It takes Anne Frank, a concise writer, thirteen sentences to describe.”
Some of the most dramatic incidents are the real and false alarms, the actual break-ins as well as the frights occasioned by noises the workers and helpers make, little thinking the sounds might be mistaken for the arrival of the secret police. Dated April 11, 1944, the longest entry in the published version of the diary concerns a break-in. A peaceful domestic scene (a Monopoly game, a visit with Peter, an argument with Pfeffer over a cushion) is interrupted: someone is breaking in downstairs. The men surprise the thieves in the act of knocking a hole in the wall. Pretending to be the police, they scare the intruders away and cover the hole with a plank, but someone kicks it in from outside. A passing couple shines a flashlight into the opening, lighting up the warehouse. Silence, then more noise downstairs. Then silence again. The residents are left in the dark and cold; fear plays havoc with their stomachs, so that everyone has to use the lavatory. In the fetid atmosphere, the Jews wait until the helpers return and tell them how serious the danger has been. Police had come to investigate the burglary, but left without suspecting that Jews were upstairs.
Obviously, the diary entry was written after the crisis had ended. Yet by this point, Anne’s narrative ability is so highly developed that she can re-create the terror into which she and the others were plunged as if she were still experiencing it, and without the mediating effect of knowing that the incident had a (relatively) happy ending.
There are comical interludes, such as the breaking of the sack of beans Peter is carrying upstairs. At first Peter is frightened, but then begins to laugh when he sees Anne standing at the bottom of the stairs, “like a little island in the middle of a sea of beans. I was entirely surrounded up to my ankles in beans.” Anne and Peter attempt to gather the beans, which elude them, rolling into the corners and the holes in the floor. “Now, every time anyone goes downstairs they bend down once or twice, in order to be able to present Mrs. Van Daan with a handful of beans.” In Anne Frank Remembered, Miep Gies recalls Otto Frank, returning to the office for the first time after the war, bending to pick up a bean.
Occasionally, horror is commingled with comedy, again in ways that deepen our understanding of Anne’s “characters” and their interrelations. One night, Anne hears a sound so loud she fears that an incendiary bomb has fallen nearby. The Franks go upstairs to find the Van Pelses watching a red glow outside the window. Mrs. Van Pels is convinced that the warehouse has caught fire. The residents return to their beds—only to be awakened by more shooting:
“Mrs. Van Daan sat bolt upright at once and then went downstairs to Mr. Dussel’s room, seeking there the rest which she could not find with her spouse. Dussel received her with the words, “Come into my bed, my child!” which sent us off into uncontrollable laughter. The gunfire troubled us no longer, our fear was banished.”
There are also memorable moments of reassuring domesticity. We watch, through Anne’s eyes, the disorderly burlesque that results when Mr. Van Pels throws himself into a hands-on demonstration of his professional sausage-making expertise:
“The room was in a glorious mess. Mr. Van Daan was wearing one of his wife’s aprons swathed round his substantial person (he looked fatter than he is!) and was busy with the meat. Hands smothered in blood, red face, and the soiled apron, made him look like a butcher. Mrs. Van Daan was trying to do everything at once, learning Dutch from a book, stirring the soup, watching the meat being done, sighing and complaining about her injured rib. That’s what happens to elderly ladies (!) who do such idiotic exercises to reduce their large behinds.”
Even more illuminating is the “potato-peeling scene,” an episode Anne meant to stand alone as a short story, which she included in the office register in which she wrote the pieces published as Tales from the Secret Annex. Otto integrated some of these sketches into the diary, dating this one August 18, 1943. Anne focuses on those instants when character is revealed through the way a person deals with an object or objects—here, a peeler and a few potatoes.
As the chores are divided up—the setting out of the potatoes, the newspaper, and the pan of water—the temperature of the community is taken and its health diagnosed by Anne’s observation that everyone keeps the best knife for himself. That Pfeffer is doing a terrible job doesn’t prevent him from telling everyone else how to do it, nor from blustering in German when Anne ignores his advice.
Scowling, Otto concentrates as if his life, as if everyone’s life, depends on his not producing even one “imperfectly scraped potato.” Mrs. Van Pels tries to flirt with Pfeffer, then gets frustrated and bored, and starts picking on her husband. He’s getting his suit dirty, making a mess. Doesn’t he want to sit down? He makes compliant noises, but he’s tuning her out. So she raises the ante, turning to a more fraught subject, the progress of the invasion. The English aren’t flying as many bombing raids as they used to. Her husband blames the weather, but she replies that the weather’s been fine. Then she adds that she’s noticed that, unlike her husband, Mr. Frank always answers his wife when she speaks.
It’s no longer about potatoes. The real subject is the Allied invasion. The Germans might still win. Also at issue is the Van Pelses’ marriage: how long it can survive in the attic and whether they will survive at all. The British do nothing, says Mrs. Van Pels, and her husband yells at her to be quiet, slipping into German. Enough.
Mrs. Frank tries not to laugh. Anne looks straight ahead. They know it’s only theater. When the Van Pelses are seriously fighting, they’re quiet and careful with each other.
Anne’s ability to dramatize becomes even more important when she begins to write about her romance with Peter. In January 1944, she records a conversation with Margot and Peter that continues when she is alone with him—a talk about the gender of Boche, the cat. Anne thinks that the cat is pregnant but is soon persuaded that it has gotten fat from a diet of stolen bones. In Anne’s first draft, Peter insists that he’s seen the cat having intercourse. There follows a fairly clinical description of animal castration, and a touchingly muddled attempt to determine the terminology for male and female genitalia.
The second, shortened and changed version has Peter telling Anne that, while playing with the cat, he noticed that “he’s quite a tom.” In both drafts, Anne prides herself on being able to have such a relaxed and grown-up talk with Peter about such a risqué subject; it proves what close, trusting friends they have become. But she may have had second thoughts about how future readers of Het Achterhuis might react. Peter’s account of watching the cat have sex, and the mechanics of castration, are omitted from Anne’s revision. She did, however, keep the observation that the impromptu biology lesson has left her feeling “a little funny,” and that she finds herself replaying the scene in her mind:
“I wasn’t quite my usual self for the rest of the day though, in spite of everything. When I thought over our talk, it still seemed rather odd. But at least I’m wiser about one thing, that there really are young people—and of the opposite sex too—who can discuss these things naturally without making fun of them.”
The ease of the conversation about feline physiology is typical of Anne’s approach to the subject of sex. Her openness has resulted in the book’s being banned from schools and libraries, but in fact it’s part of what young readers find refreshing, informative, and comforting. Her tracking of the highs and lows of her erotic preoccupation are still among the most accurate accounts of what it feels like to be a confused, romance-obsessed teen.
Late in the diary, Anne describes mining the Bible for its bewildering sexual information, reflecting on the scene in which the elders spy on Susanna in her bath, and wondering what exactly is meant by the guilt of Sodom and Gomorrah.
When I was growing up in the 1950s, the subject of sex was so much more veiled than it is today that I remember reading the Old Testament (Lot and his daughters! Boaz and Ruth!) for its tantalizing if vague allusions to sex. A friend confessed that when she read Anne Frank’s diary as a preadolescent, she thought it was all about sex. Now that the air we breathe is so heavily saturated with eros that a child can learn the facts of life from an afternoon of talk shows and soap operas, it seems unlikely that the diary could teach kids something new about sex, except in so far as any kind of nonhysterical honesty about the topic is always new.
One striking aspect of the diary is how much life it packs into its pages. Sex is part of it, as is death, love, family, age, youth, hope, God, the spiritual and the domestic, the mystery of innocence and the mystery of evil.
In addition to all that, the diary is about Hitler’s war against the Jews, about Holland during World War II, and about the Allied invasion of Europe as seen from inside an occupied country. It’s easy to overlook the amount of history folded into these entries: “Saturday March 27, 1943. Rauter, one of the German big shots, has made a speech. ‘All Jews must be out of the German-occupied countries before July 1. Between April 1 and May 1 the province of Utrecht must be cleaned out (as if the Jews were cockroaches). Between May 1 and June 1 the provinces of North and South Holland.’ These wretched people are sent to filthy slaughterhouses like a herd of sick, neglected cattle.”
As the hidden Jews followed the progress of the Allied invasion, Anne registers the statistics of each military maneuver that could be reported over the contraband radio. On D-day, she writes that 11,000 planes have been flying back and forth, bringing troops behind enemy lines, while 4,000 boats are ferrying soldiers and supplies between Cherbourg and Le Havre. The possibility that the Allies may be victorious in 1944, she writes, is a reason for fresh hope and, after everything they have endured, an inspiration to remain brave and calm. “Oh, Kitty, the best part of the invasion is that I have the feeling that friends are approaching. We have been oppressed by those terrible Germans for so long, they have had their knives so at our throats…now it doesn’t concern the Jews any more; no, it concerns Holland and all occupied Europe.”
Sadly, the war still very much concerned the hidden Jews. Yet during the last months in hiding, Anne and the others began to let themselves imagine they might prevail. They lost by the narrowest of margins—lost in Amsterdam, in Westerbork, in Auschwitz, and then again in Bergen-Belsen—as the luck that had kept them safe for two years turned against them.
Anne’s diary is a symphonic composition of major and minor themes, of notes and chords struck at sufficiently regular and frequent intervals so that they never leave the reader’s consciousness for very long. It’s possible to trace each thread as it weaves through the diary, periodically reappearing to heighten and sharpen our understanding of a character or situation.
How amazing, a casual reader might say, how thoroughly unlikely that such a penetrating, dramatic, and structurally ambitious work should have evolved, on its own, from the natural and spontaneous jottings that a young girl added, every day or every few days, to her diary. Such a reader would have been right, or partly right, to wonder about that naturalness and that offhand improvisatory spirit.