Anne Frank

by Francine Prose

  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 t
hroats…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.

  FIVE

  The Book, Part III

  INCLUDED IN THE CRITICAL EDITION ARE NUMEROUS PHOTOS documenting the childish printing of Anne’s first diary entries and the fluid cursive scrawled over the final pages. Forensic handwriting experts engaged by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation have charted the alterations in each upswing and loop as her handwriting developed from that of a child into that of an adolescent. But even more pronounced than the changes in penmanship are the differences in maturity and sensibility that separate the little girl who printed those awkward letters from the young author who covered the colored sheets with confident script.