The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [52]
After Anne Frank’s death in Bergen-Belsen, the diary was given to her father by a family friend. Hoping for publication, Anne had already revised her diary, with one version containing real names and the other pseudonyms. Otto Frank restored the names of family members to the edited account, cut some sections that were critical of Anne’s mother or revealing about the daughter’s adolescent sexual feelings, and the diary was then published in Germany and France in 1950, in the United Kingdom two years later, and—under the title Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl—in the United States in 1952. A play based on the diary won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955, and a 1959 film, The Diary of Anne Frank, was both a critical and a commercial success. The diary began to be regularly taught in schools and colleges, even as some scholars began to criticize the softening and romanticizing of Anne’s character in these popular adaptations. Humanitarians and writers like Eleanor Roosevelt, Nelson Mandela, and Václav Havel (himself a playwright) commended it for its example and inspiration.
But the transformation of Anne Frank’s Diary into a ubiquitous work of art was not a seamless development. In a front-page panegyric in The New York Times Book Review in 1952, on the occasion of the diary’s first publication in the U.S., Meyer Levin called Anne a “born writer” and the book a “classic” that “becomes the voice of six million vanished Jewish souls.”38 The diary immediately skyrocketed from its five-thousand-copy first printing into a nationwide best seller. But Levin never told the Times that he had a personal and financial interest in the book: he had asked Otto Frank if he could write a play based on the diary. When his version was rejected in favor of the one written by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett (who had worked on the screenplay of It’s a Wonderful Life), Levin criticized the choice as a way of removing Jews and Jewishness from the Anne Frank story in the service of making it a “universal” tale of heroism and the human spirit, and he sued Otto Frank, accusing him and others of depriving Levin of his opportunity for fame and fortune. Levin’s suit failed, and his own reputation suffered, yet some of his incidental observations about the mythologizing of Anne Frank have been sustained.
The play and the film showcased Anne’s observation “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart,” making this uplifting sentiment the last line of the play, although it was written before she was arrested and taken to the camps. The diary actually goes on to discuss “the suffering of millions” for several pages. The result, as many critics have noted, was the production of individual pathos and heroism rather than the story of a terrible, unthinkable event. In Germany at the end of the 1950s, Theodor Adorno reported “the story of a woman who, upset after seeing a dramatization of The Diary of Anne Frank, said: ‘Yes, but that girl at least should have been allowed to live.’ ”39 Allowing that it was “good as a first step toward understanding,” Adorno added, “the individual case, which should stand for, and raise awareness about, the terrifying totality, by its very individuation became an alibi for the totality the woman forgot.”
Hannah Arendt commented in 1962 that the romanticization of Anne Frank was a form of “cheap sentimentality at the expense of great catastrophe,” and the historian Lawrence Langer observed, on the occasion of the publication of a “definitive” critical edition of the diary in 1986, that the young author’s “journey via Westerbork and Auschwitz