Witnessing the Disaster: Essays on Representation and the Holocaust

6. Promiscuous Reading: The Problem of Identification and Anne Frank's Diary

A few years ago when I was teaching Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, one student in my class related the following: “My roommate went to Poland this last month and stayed with her boyfriend’s family. While discussing their plans, she said she wanted to visit a concentration camp. This topic then diverged into a discussion of Anne Frank. Their family, native to Poland, had never heard of Anne Frank and said she was a creation of America and their involvement in the war. The Diary there is not the popular reading requirement it is here.” This disbelief, of a piece with more vociferous voices of Holocaust deniers, curdles in contrast to so many readers who not only know of Frank’s life and her violent death but also feel as if they actually know her. Cara Wilson, who auditioned unsuccessfully for the role of Anne Frank in the 1956 Twentieth-Century Fox film adaptation, wrote to Otto Frank that his daughter’s diary “spoke to me and my dilemmas, my anxieties, my secret passions. She felt the way I did . . . I identified so strongly with this eloquent girl of my own age, that I now think I sort of became her in my own mind.”1 141 6 Promiscuous Reading The Problem of Identification and Anne Frank’s Diary susan david bernstein Wilson’s assertion, representative of countless others, brings to the forefront the limits and liabilities of reading and teaching the Holocaust through identification. American multicultural and identity studies have repeatedly brought this dynamic into sharp relief as students study, teachers teach, and scholars write across boundaries of gender, sexuality, class, race, ethnicity, religion, and nation and across historical divisions. I am interested in exploring Frank’s diary as well as its various adaptations and appropriations as a way to gain purchase on a persistent pedagogical motif, especially in Holocaust studies, that courts reading through cross-identification.2 What kind of witnessing does reading through identification promote ? Put differently, is it possible to convert a historically distant bystander into an engaged witness by focusing on identification? How does identification correlate with sympathy, empathy, and understanding ? In what follows, I will explore different facets of identificatory reading primarily but not exclusively around Anne Frank. By “reading” I mean studying as a way to understand that which challenges comprehension , like the Shoah and other large-scale programs of human atrocity . Nevertheless, the question of what I call promiscuous identification, or reading without vigilance to the process of negotiating simulated realities of text-based rather than experience-based knowledge, applies more generally to the enterprise of analyzing textuality of any sort. I offer another vignette from the classroom, this time in the context of a course on the Victorian novel. After an energetic discussion during which some students explained their vehement dislike for a particular character depicted as the perpetrator of various crimes, I posed a question : “How do you read an account of a crime in a novel or a crime story on television differently than a news report of an actual crime or current event of human violence?” Several students replied that in fictional versions , the event seems more real because there is access to the thoughts and feelings of the characters, something that supposedly objective newspaper reporting elides. While I had expected someone to recognize a discursive distinction between a story largely based on actual occurrences in the world and a story primarily about invented people and events, I too realized that the slippage between invention and fact is a complicated matter. But this conversation brought to the forefront the power of imaginative discourse as a tool to promote identifications, whether sympathetic, antagonistic, or some other affective engagement. No doubt reading printed texts, whether labeled fiction or otherwise, 142 bernstein has been shaped by contemporary media of immersion, including film, television, and most recently the Internet.3 In a sense, reel knowledge has displaced real knowledge, a kind of “unreality-effect” or the “derealization of ordinary life” as a consequence of the hyperstimulation of visually saturated media. The inversion of this “unreality-effect”—but clearly an offshoot of its pervasiveness in our culture—is what I would call the realization of extraordinary lives, as young people in particular are encouraged by teachers and writers to assume the roles of Holocaust sufferers and...