The house on Prinsengracht, in Amsterdam, where the Frank family was hidden in a secret annex and where they (together with their fellow refugees, the van Pels family and Fritz Pfeffer, and two of their protectors, Johannes Kleiman and Victor Kugler) were arrested in 1944 was emptied of its furnishings by German forces. When, in the late nineteen-fifties, Otto Frank—Anne’s father, and the only member of the family to survive the concentration camps—sought to preserve the house and to open it to the public, he insisted that it be maintained in the empty state in which the Germans had left it. His vision is akin to Claude Lanzmann’s essential inspiration, in making “Shoah,” to evoke (or, to use Lanzmann’s term, to incarnate) historical events through his own images of the sites of death camps and through the interviews that he conducted. The objective is an aspect of imagination that owes nothing to fantasy; it is, in effect, the imagination of the unbearably real, the creation of experiences that conjure virtual images of history in the first person.
The role of interviews in the Anne Frank House is filled by informative quotes from Anne Frank’s diaries, as well as from Otto Frank and others, and display cases showing artifacts and a miniature replica (made under his guidance) of how the rooms were appointed. (A mirror at the top of the steep steps to the attic shows the view through the roof window from which Anne and the teen-aged Peter van Pels gazed at treetops and the sky.) But the most extraordinary and agonizing elements of historical testimony that the house contains are literally documentary: the wallpaper in the room shared by Otto, Edith, and Margot Frank retains the father’s dated horizontal pencil marks tracing his daughters’ growth. And the room that Anne shared with Pfeffer is decorated with carefully-cut newspaper clippings—ones she had cut out before going into hiding—that she pasted to the wallpaper. Most of them had to do with movies—and primarily with Hollywood movies (which, of course, had become unavailable under the German occupation).
Some of the clippings appear to have been torn off the wall; most of the ones that remain there show movie actors, grouped in various ways:
Rudy Vallee and Sonja Henie
Sonja Henie, alone
Deanna Durbin, Robert Stack, and a third uncaptioned actor (Lewis Howard), from “First Love” (a version of Cinderella)
Deanna Durbin, alone
Sally Eilers and a child in “They Made Her a Spy”
Greta Garbo as Ninotchka
Simone Simon, wearing Chanel
Ray Milland
Norma Shearer
Ginger Rogers
The German actor Heinz Rühmann, and other images, including a self-portrait by Leonardo da Vinci, a portrait by Rembrandt, and a postcard showing four chimpanzees eating a meal at a table.
The United States represented, of course, a land of freedom and deliverance for Europe’s Jews. At the end of the exhibit, in the latter-day entrance building, a separate exhibit documents the Franks’ attempts to leave Amsterdam ahead of the German invasion; Otto Frank wrote in 1941—in a phrase printed on the wall—that he knew that there would be no safe place for the family except for the United States. (Despite his efforts in advance of the German invasion, Otto was unable to obtain a visa.)
Hollywood represented something else. It was a pop culture that wasn’t trivialized as “folk” but that was world-historically worthy to stand alongside the classics with which Anne Frank’s education was so richly imbued. It was an artistic realm that took the dreams of teen-aged girls very seriously, and the Cinderella story—the plot of “First Love” and, in effect, of Lubitsch’s “Ninotchka”—has much in common with Anne Frank’s dreams: those of romantic awakening, of the flourishing and transformation of a common girl with uncommon merits, of her entrance onto the grand world stage where, in her heart, she feels herself able to compete. And it was a culture created largely by American Jews (in Neal Gabler’s enduring phrase, an empire of their own), which largely reflected their liberal ideals. The very internationalism of Frank’s Hollywood heroes (Garbo was Swedish, Henie Norwegian, Milland English) suggests her sense of the relative paradise of tolerance that Hollywood represented and perhaps even helped to foster.
And, for the most part (a story for a later post), Hollywood still functions the same way.
P.S. F. Scott Fitzgerald, who knew a thing or two about the dreams of teen-aged girls (albeit only of ones from a milieu akin to his own), spent time in Hollywood and wrote about its significance for the Jews who worked there. He was aware of the horrors that were about to befall the Jews of Europe; he was pessimistic about the coming war with Germany and wondered whether American Jews didn’t have dark days awaiting them, too; and he saw the dominion of Hollywood—and the sudden wealth and pleasure it afforded—as a sort of compensation in advance. But his view of the matter was all too cynical and was tinged by his own frustrations in getting movies he worked on to reflect his own perspective.
Photograph: Universal History Archive/Getty Images.
