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 almos
t 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:
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