Theater of Cruelty

by Ian Buruma

  In fact, if anyone was chiefly to blame for the “revisionism” of the 1950s play, it was the director Garson Kanin, another Jew swabbed by Levin with the self-hating, Stalinist brush. He insisted on taking out Peter van Daan’s line about having to suffer “Because we’re Jews! Because we’re Jews!” He told the Goodrich and Hackett to substitute the jaunty “Oh, Hanukah!” song for the more sober and dignified “Ma’oz Tzur.” And Kanin argued that Anne’s statement about Jews having had to suffer through the ages was an “embarrassing piece of special pleading. Right down the ages, people have suffered because of being English, French, German, Italian, Ethiopian, Mohammedan, Negro, and so on.” This is missing the mark so widely, you wonder whether he ever had it in his sight.

  Levin’s play has hardly ever been performed, since Otto owned the rights to the diary. This is a shame, for now we shall never know whether his version would indeed have been more effective in deepening public understanding of the Holocaust. I think the Broadway producers and Otto were right to assume that Goodrich and Hackett’s version would reach a wider audience, which is not to say it was the better play. But popular entertainment can sometimes deepen people’s understanding. Depth is a relative concept. Showbiz can be remarkably effective, for better or worse. The Goodrich and Hackett play stunned audiences in Germany, just as the American TV soap opera Holocaust would a generation later. People are moved precisely because they identify with the victims as characters—though not of course with their fate. Hollywood’s international appeal always has been its stress on character instead of milieu. Cultural and historical accuracy suffers. But making German audiences identify with Jewish victims is better, it seems to me, than teaching them lessons on how to be a good Jew. Such identification can result in sentimental self-pity, but it is more likely to give people at least some idea of the evil that was done.

  I am in any case not sure that Levin’s play was less of a distortion of the diary than Goodrich and Hackett’s version. I have only read a late, much revised version of Levin’s script. It is clumsy and hopelessly didactic. It isn’t easy to recreate the atmosphere of the secret annex in Amsterdam, where eight terrified people argued about all manner of things, including the Jewish Question, in a mixture of German, Dutch, and broken Dutch (mimicked by Anne in the diary). But I find the following dialogue between Otto and his wife, Edith, somewhat implausible:

  Mrs. Frank: We haven’t taught our children, Otto. We ourselves know so little, and they know less. Perhaps God wants to wipe out our people because we have failed him.

  Mr. Frank: We taught our children to believe in God. In our day that is already something. We never believed the forms were so important, Edith.

  Mrs. Frank: We haven’t loved our God, Otto. And since being here, it is strange, but I feel more and more His love for us.

  This is what Levin wanted his characters to say. And Mrs. Frank, in a liberal way, was more religious than her husband. But it sounds more like an interior dialogue in Levin’s own head. He “got” religion late in life. When Otto visited New York, Levin took him to his synagogue, hoping that Otto would share in his discovery of Judaism. Then there is Mr. van Daan, a solid German businessman, who alternates in Levin’s version between sounding like a friendly rabbi and a character in a Yiddish soap opera. When his son, Peter, asks him why only religion should help us to tell right from wrong, he preaches: “That is the way it came to us. The Jewish way. Everybody in the world, Peter, has the right to be what they are, and we have the right to be Jews.” Again, this sounds like Levin being pious more than the van Daan we know from the diary.

  If Goodrich and Hackett’s sin was to take the Jewishness out of the Franks and van Daans, Levin’s sin is to put too much of it in. These were people, after all, who celebrated Saint Nicholas (which has no religious significance in Holland) with greater gusto than Hanukah. Otto actually wanted to give Anne a copy of the New Testament on Hanukah, for her education. Mr. van Daan’s pork sausages were the highlight on the annex menu. Levin was right to insist on the uniqueness of the Holocaust, but making the characters appear more Jewish than they did in real life was the wrong way to make the point. For one of the horrors of Nazi anti-Semitism was that it didn’t matter how Jewish or un-Jewish you were, appeared, or wanted to be, they would get you anyway. And here, I think, we have arrived at the center of Levin’s antagonism. Levin resented Otto, and his kind, for not being willing, in Levin’s eyes, to be good enough Jews. He condemned Otto for his assimilationism. The ferocity of Levin’s battles with Otto, which are still being fought by his defenders, has less to do with the diary itself than with class and “identity” politics.

  Melnick sets the tone of his book by stating in the preface that Stalinist propaganda was only one reason for cutting out Anne’s “Jewish avowal” in the play. There were other “equally egregious reasons for this decision, both commercial and assimilationist.” Having established that Stalinism and assimilationism are equally egregious, Melnick quotes Levin’s view that assimilationists suffer from “psychic cancers, ugly secret growths that our people have so long buried in their souls.”

  The Jews most associated with assimilationism, not just in the US, are of course, the prosperous German Jews. Ill feeling against them is deep and goes back a long way. German Jews tended to disassociate themselves from the poor, religious immigrants and refugees from the east. The Ostjuden were regarded as riffraff who gave respectable Jews a bad name. Later on, too many assimilated Jews, lucky enough to be in Britain or the US, looked the other way when Hitler went about annihilating their less fortunate brethren. Walter Lippmann’s refusal to write even one column forthrightly denouncing the persecution of Jews is a well-known and indeed shameful example. So a degree of resentment is understandable. But when resentment about German-Jewish snootiness slips into paranoia, as it does in some of the recent comments on the case, including Melnick’s, reasonable argument is cut short.

  It has become fashionable to assert one’s minority status, especially in the US. And this can be a positive thing. Diversity is good. Jews who wish to live according to the customs and religious beliefs of their ancestors contribute to it. But this is no reason to feel such contempt for those who choose not to do so. Wanting to be assimilated does not necessarily imply self-hatred. The person who had felt ashamed of his parents’ Jewishness was Levin, not Otto Frank. The fact that people such as the Franks were not able to live out their lives as ordinary Germans was not their fault, but Hitler’s. To think that they were punished by God for not being good Jews is to say that God is a Nazi. If Mrs. Frank really said such a thing, she was deluded. If Levin invented it, he was being grotesque.

  Of the three theatrical versions of Anne Frank’s diary, Kesselman’s rewrite of Goodrich and Hackett’s play strikes the fewest false notes. It provides a sharper historical perspective. And Anne’s famous lines of redemption—“In spite of everything …”—are given a dark twist of irony, for they are spoken moments before the Nazis arrive to claim their victims. Critics have praised the current production for its tough-mindedness: “A Darker Anne Frank,” as one headline put it. This is right. But before condemning the “Fifties Zeitgeist” too smugly for its sentimentalism, we should reflect on our own variety. In an interview with Charlie Rose, Linda Lavin, who plays Mrs. van Daan, describes how people come back “into our dressing rooms, sobbing at the end of the evening—sobbing. And I’m holding friends—strangers, people who’ve come to say—what—to show us what they have just been through. We know what they’ve been through because we’ve presented it and they’re afraid for us.”

  What they went through was a theatrical performance. Reviewing the play in Time magazine, Richard Zoglin called Anne Frank’s diary a “communal rite of grief.” That was indeed the mood of the audience with whom I “shared” the experience of watching the play in December. The more I see people expressing their “identities” in communal rites of grief, the more I am inclined to admire Otto Frank’s dignity, and his perh
aps naive, but nonetheless admirable, wish to put his own grief to a more universal purpose.

  1 The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition, edited by David Barnouw and Gerrold van der Stroom (Doubleday, 1989), p. 587.

  2 Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, The Diary of Anne Frank, adapted by Wendy Kesselman, directed by James Lapine, at the Music Box Theater, New York City, 1997.

  3 Graver, An Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the Diary (University of California Press, 1997); Melnick, The Stolen Legacy of Anne Frank: Meyer Levin, Lillian Hellman, and the Staging of the Diary (Yale University Press, 1997).

  4 “Who Owns Anne Frank?,” The New Yorker, October 6, 1997, p. 82.

  5 Quoted in Ernst Schnabel, Anne Frank: A Portrait in Courage (Harcourt Brace, 1958), p. 136.

  6 The Stolen Legacy of Anne Frank, p. 177.

  7 The Stolen Legacy of Anne Frank, p. 178.

  8 Quoted in Frances and Albert, an unpublished manuscript book about Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, by David Goodrich.

  8

  OCCUPIED PARIS: THE SWEET AND THE CRUEL

  HÉLÈNE BERR, TWENTY-ONE, student of English literature at the Sorbonne:

  This is the first day I feel I’m really on holiday. The weather is glorious, yesterday’s storm has brought fresher air. The birds are twittering, it’s a morning as in Paul Valéry. It’s also the first day I’m going to wear the yellow star. Those are the two sides of how life is now: youth, beauty, and freshness, all contained in this limpid morning; barbarity and evil, represented by this yellow star.1

  Philippe Jullian, twenty-three, artist and aspiring man of letters:

  Read The Poor Folk, and felt like a character out of Dostoevsky, just as I felt extremely Proustian three years ago. I always see myself through the colored windows of my admiration. I’m afraid of having no more great works to immerse myself in. After Balzac, Proust, Dostoevsky and the English, what is left for me?…

  How ugly they are, those poor Jews, who wear, stuck to their clothes, that mean yellow star.2

  Same date, June 8, 1942; same place, Paris; two different journals. Although both were solidly bourgeois, Berr’s background was grander than Jullian’s. She was Parisian; he came from provincial Bordeaux. Her father, Raymond Berr, was a famous scientist who ran a major chemical company. His was an impoverished war veteran named Simounet, of whom Philippe felt so ashamed that he took the name of his maternal grandfather, Camille Jullian, a noted historian of the Gauls. Philippe was a socially ambitious homosexual whose diary proudly dwells on dinners in the company of Jean Cocteau and his circle.3 Hélène’s idea of a perfect evening was listening to a Beethoven trio or discussing the poetry of Keats with her friends from the Sorbonne. But the main difference between them was one imposed by the German occupiers: she was Jewish, and he was not.

  This was not an identity that Hélène had sought. Quite to the contrary, the Berrs were secular, assimilated, and felt more French than Jewish. In a journal entry on December 31, 1943, she notes:

  When I write the word Jew, I am not saying exactly what I mean, because for me that distinction does not exist: I do not feel different from other people, I will never think of myself as a member of a separate human group, and perhaps that is why I suffer so much, because I don’t understand it at all.

  The suffering that she refers to, the daily humiliations, the terror of deportation, torture, and probable death, the experience of seeing her father dragged off to a concentration camp (for just having pinned, not sewn, the yellow star onto his suit), mothers being torn from their children, relatives and friends disappearing without a trace, none of this figures in Jullian’s diaries. Not that he has any sympathy for the Nazis. But his attention is elsewhere. Thus he writes, in December 1943:

  Monday, in Paris, return of [my friends] Clerisse and Grédy, beautifully dressed. Lunch at Madame Grédy, perfectly “natural.” … I go and find the Rilke poems with my prints, which, taken as a whole, disappoint me. However, their fine presentation makes me cry with joy.

  From Jullian’s journals the reader might get the impression that life in wartime Paris was almost normal. Germans are barely mentioned. Food was short, to be sure, but something could always be rustled up at dinner parties attended by a young aesthete with the right connections.

  Of course, Jullian was not exactly representative of the French population. But the impression that life went on, and that the horrors that afflicted the Berrs, and many others, could be safely ignored by those who were not marked with yellow stars, is not totally false. Paris, unlike other European capitals under Nazi occupation, was meant to look normal. Nominally, it was under French (Vichy) rule, and German policy was to encourage cultural life there as long as it was not unfriendly to the German cause. Francophile administrators, such as the German “ambassador,” Otto Abetz, were sent to Paris expressly to cultivate French writers and artists.

  Herbert von Karajan conducted the German State Opera in Paris.

  Cocteau’s plays were performed all through the war. Jean-Paul Sartre published his books, as did Simone de Beauvoir, and German officers were among those who came to see Sartre’s plays. Albert Camus was patronized by the German chief of literary propaganda, Gerhard Heller. Film studios thrived under German supervision. And Sartre and Camus wrote for the resistance too. Things were even easier for French collaborators. For them, as Robert Paxton observes in Collaboration and Resistance, “life in occupied Paris was sweet.”4

  A tiny number of people resisted the Germans from the beginning. Some were religious, others were dedicated followers of Charles de Gaulle or committed leftists, and some just couldn’t bear to remain passive.5 The art historian Agnès Humbert was not religious, but she fit the other categories. She started the first resistance group in France with colleagues from the Musée de l’Homme, including the poet Jean Cassou. Her gripping wartime memoir, a kind of reconstructed journal written just after the war, was first published in English in 2008.6

  Recalling a conversation with Cassou in August 1940, she writes:

  Suddenly I blurt out why I have come to see him, telling him that I feel I will go mad, literally, if I don’t do something, if I don’t react somehow. Cassou confides that he feels the same, that he shares my fears. The only remedy is for us to act together, to form a group of ten like-minded comrades, no more.… I don’t harbour many illusions about the practical effects of our actions, but simply keeping our sanity will be success of a kind.

  Humbert was arrested, along with most of the group, in 1941, and barely survived prison and slave labor in Germany. She was immensely brave and driven by a strong sense of left-wing idealism. At a time when there was no prospect at all of a German defeat, her actions would have seemed quixotic to most people in France, who tried to carry on as best they could. Since the Germans made this easier in Paris (as long as you weren’t Jewish) than in Warsaw, say, or Minsk, passivity was perhaps not the most honorable option, but at least it was a perfectly understandable one.

  When General de Gaulle returned as a French hero in 1944 and told his compatriots that there was only one “eternal France,” and that all French patriots had stood up to the Nazi invaders, this myth was gratefully received. The more complicated reality was slow to emerge. It took an American historian, Robert Paxton, to start the flood of literature on Vichy France. But even though the murkier picture of collaboration and compromise, as well as heroic resistance, is now generally accepted in France, a confrontation with the superficial normality of wartime Paris can still come as a shock.

  The French photographer André Zucca was not a Nazi. But he felt no particular hostility toward Germany either. And as the historian Jean-Pierre Azéma remarks in his preface to the riveting book of Zucca’s photographs, Les Parisiens sous l’Occupation,7 he “was not a shining example of philosemitism.” Zucca simply wanted to continue his pre-war life, publishing pictures in the best magazines. And the one with the glossiest pictures, in fine German Agfacolor, happened to be
Signal, the German propaganda magazine. When a cache of these pictures was exhibited at the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris last year, the press reacted with dismay. How could this “celebration of the victor,” “underlining the sweetness of life in an occupied country,” take place “without any explanation”?

  Perhaps there should have been more explanation, but the pictures are only tendentious in what they do not show. You don’t see people being rounded up. There is only one blurred image of an old woman walking along the rue de Rivoli wearing a yellow star. There are no photographs of endless queues in front of half-empty food stores. There are no pictures of Drancy, where Jews were held in appalling conditions before being transported east in cattle trains. But what Zucca’s pictures do show, always in fine Agfacolor weather, is still revealing. They are disturbing to the modern viewer precisely because of their peculiar air of normality, the sense of life going on while atrocities were happening, as it were, around the corner.

  We see nice old ladies doing their knitting in the gardens of the Palais-Royal. We see a café on the Champs-Élysées packed with well-dressed Parisians enjoying their aperitifs. We see young people bathing in the Seine. We see fashionable ladies in elaborate hats at the races in Longchamp (this, in August 1943, when mass deportations were in full swing). The streets, to be sure, are weirdly empty of cars, and there are German men and women in uniform popping up here and there, drinking coffee, entering the Métro, playing in brass bands, paying their respects to the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe. Still, the overall impression is one of a people engaged in what the French call se débrouiller, coping as best they can.

  For some French men and women—perhaps more than we would like to know—the occupation was actually a source of new opportunities. That life was sweet for the “collabos” is clear. But a remarkable new book on the sexual aspects of foreign ocupation, 1940–1945 Années érotiques, the second in a two-volume set by Patrick Buisson, shows that the presence of large numbers of German soldiers meant liberation of a kind for large numbers of French women: young women rebelling against the authoritarian strictures of bourgeois life, middle-aged spinsters yearning for romance, widows, women alone, women in bad marriages, and so on.8 Buisson does not ask us to admire these tens of thousands of women engaging in “horizontal collaboration,” but to comprehend the complexity of their motives.