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4. Hauntings of Anne Frank: Sitings in Germany
- Indiana University Press
- Chapter
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137 In stark contrast to the extensive attention paid to Anne Frank’s life since the first publications of her diary, especially the years she spent in hiding in Amsterdam, the story of her death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, which took place at some time in March 1945, was long neglected. There is an inherent disparity between her life and her death as encountered in the diary. For readers who come to the diary already knowing her fate, the text foreshadows her eventual capture and death witheveryturnofthepage—andyet,theseeventsareextrinsictothediary itself, as its final entry is dated several days before Anne’s arrest. The unknowing reader learns about Anne’s final months in an epilogue that appears at the end of published versions of the diary. The diary reveals to the public in great detail the story of Anne’s life in hiding, as well as this singular young woman’s private thoughts, in her own voice. But Anne’s death at Bergen-Belsen, even as it is a widely known fact, was for many years enveloped in silence and obscurity. Until 1999, no memorial had beenerectedtocommemorateherimprisonmentanddeathatthecamp, where the location of her remains is unmarked. Nevertheless, the site of Anne’s death is key to understanding the impact of her life and work in the Federal Republic of Germany throughout the postwar years, where her remembrance exemplifies Germany’s postwar grappling with the crimes of National Socialism.1 Little is known of how Anne and Margot Frank spent their final monthsatBergen-Belsen.Theyweresentthereasslavelaborers,partofa groupofthreethousandyoung JewishwomenfromAuschwitz-Birkenau, in early 1945. Sightings of the sisters appear in the memoirs of friends 4 Hauntings of Anne Frank: Sitings in Germany Henri Lustiger Thaler and Wilfried Wiedemann 138 Henri Lustiger Thaler and Wilfried Wiedemann and acquaintances from Amsterdam who had also been interned at the camp.2 They offer fragmented and episodic accounts of the sisters’ last days,asthousandsofinmatesweredyingofhungerandtyphus.Trapped in an evil, unforgiving environment beyond her control or expression, Anne appears as a shadowy presence in these accounts, in stark contrast to the pages of her diary, which brim with her inner life and self-understanding .Likethemorethanfiftythousandprisonerswholosttheirlives in Bergen-Belsen, her remains repose somewhere in one of many mass graves. Moving from Anne’s life to her death thus entails a shift from the singular to the anonymous. Whereas her life in hiding in Amsterdam, so richly documented in her widely read writing, is commemorated in a museum on the very site where she and seven other Jews lived in secret, her death brings one to the abyss, in a field of mass graves. And it is there that Anne Frank became a spectral figure, who has returned repeatedly to haunt Germany’s problematic memory of the Holocaust. Anne Frank’s afterlife in Germany is inexorably linked to both the emergence of postwar democratic culture and the acceptance of responsibility for the Holocaust. Indeed, Anne became a subject of public attention in West Germany—following the publication of the diary in German translation in 1950 and the popular reception of its dramatization , first performed there in 1956—well before the Holocaust was conceptualizedasaseparatehistoricalentityandestablishedasasubject of institutional commemoration. At a time when many Germans had suppressedremembranceofthepersecutionofEuropeanJewsunderNational Socialism—and, moreover, often claimed to be its first victims— their attention to Anne Frank as a victim of Nazism was quite singular. Within a cultural context of silence on the genocide of European Jewry, Anne Frank’s powerful symbolic presence enabled some Germans, especially youth, to address the crimes of their elders. In these intergenerational encounters, young Germans struggled to develop approaches to remembering the Holocaust in the early postwar years, doing so in tandem with their commitment to the advancement and protection of democratic culture in their country. By the early 1960s, the symbolic value of Anne’s life and work had become a fixture of West Germany’s official reckoning with the crimes of Nazism.In1963, State AttorneyGeneralFritzBauer,who led the pros- [18.212.242.203] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 13:57 GMT) Hauntings of Anne Frank 139 ecution of the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials, invoked her memory in a lecture entitled “Living Past”: Anne’s destiny brings into question the meaning of the sacrifice for which she became a symbol. She represents those who were persecuted, the unlucky ones wherever they lived or live, whatever their suffering was or is, wherever they died or die, because the state carries out unjust acts or tolerates them. It is about the relationship of people and...