Category: Anne Frank

Looking very much forward to giving this talk on 31 March (6 pm, online) at the Jeudis de l’Institut Historique Allemand in Paris.

These days every new story about Anne Frank becomes world news. Most recently the much hyped cold case investigation, seeking (and stumbling) to uncover who betrayed the hiding place of Anne and her family to the Nazis in 1944, even caused a veritable scandal. Over the past 75 years, since the publication in 1947 of her diaries detailing life in hiding between July 1942 and August 1944 in the back annex to one of the canal houses on the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam, Anne’s image, her writing and the famous Anne Frank House have become iconic. They play major roles in the Dutch, German, American, indeed global memory culture concerning the Holocaust and the Second World War.

This lecture looks at Anne as writer and reader. It explores how in her encounter with the world of literature, especially with the innovative work of Dutch female novelists, Anne created in her diaries a life of writing and reading that helped her to survive. Reading and writing empowered Anne to address the fundamental issues of life as a teenager in hiding, searching for her inner self, embracing her Jewishness, finding her own way between the German culture of her parents and the cultural riches of Amsterdam life.

Top Hats, Low Standards. It is the telling title of the collection of essays published in 1969 by Jaap Meijer (1912-1993), an outstanding historian of Jewish life and thought, a fierce Dutch public intellectual and a deeply troubled soul. Meijer’s collection is about Jewish life in the Netherlands during the 1930s. Each essay is a blast. Meijer hated the paternalistic patriarchs and parnassim of the pre-war period; in Meijer’s view they had stifled Jewish life. Meijer’s own quest for both intellectual and spiritual revival was a rich and curious blend of socialism and Zionism.

Meijer came from the most northern rural part of the province of Groningen. His parents struggled to make ends meet. As a young boy Jaap was sent to Amsterdam to the school that trained boys to become a rabbi. He then took up the study of history at the University of Amsterdam. After German troops invaded the Netherlands in 1940 and the Nazi regime started the persecution of Jews in the Netherlands, Jaap and his wife Lies led a ‘quiet’ life of defiance. Their son, Ischa, was born. Jaap, against all odds, managed to finish and defend his PhD, a study of the famous and controversial poet Isaac da Costa. The public PhD-defence in October 1941 was an act of defiance; the speech of Jaap’s supervisor, the great Dutch historian Jan Romein was a subtle act of resistance. The title of Jaap’s doctoral thesis suggests it is about Da Costa’s conversion to Christianity. Actually it is a historical and deeply personal study of the poet’s quest for the meaning of spiritual and intellectual life—as a Jew, as a poet, as a human being. Jaap’s PhD was even published — and in a twist of historical cynicism a copy made its way to the library of the university of Göttingen, by 1941 a rather sad stronghold of Nazism. I have it here, on my desk; probably I’m the first reader of this copy.

To make money and to protect his family Jaap Meijer taught history at the Jewish Lyceum in Amsterdam, which was set up, more or less overnight, in the summer of 1941, when the Nazis ordained that Jewish children were no longer allowed to attend regular Dutch schools but had to go to Jewish schools. One of Jaap’s pupils was Anne Frank, who was in the first class. The first notebook of Anne’s famous diaries tells us about her class and about her school year — in a way that was deeply inspired by one of Anne’s favourite novels, The High School Days of Joop ter Heul, written by Cissy van Marxveldt in sparkling Dutch, refreshingly different from the heavy style and idiom that marked so much of serious (male) Dutch literature…

Jaap Meijer also knew Anne’s family. Jaap was interested in both German and Jewish culture. After the war he wrote movingly about ‘the Jewish drama’ of those who, like the Frank family, as German Jewish refugees, living in Amsterdam, had tried to keep up some of the good parts of German culture, preserving their books, as Meijer wrote, on their ‘tragic, well-built, voluminous bookshelves’. Like the Frank family, Jaap and his family were eventually arrested by the Germans. Like Anne and her sister Margot, Jaap and his family ended up in the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen, just north of the town of Celle, here in Niedersachsen. Anne and Margot perished in the mud and cold. Jaap and his family survived in the Vorzugslager, as it was called with deafening cynicism. The story of their struggle for survival in Bergen-Belsen is told in a monumental chapter of Jaap’s biography, written by the Dutch historian Evelien Gans and published in 2008. The chapter is indeed a monument, an attempt to capture every minute and day of life in Bergen-Belsen for us, readers. Written with verve, elegance and passion Evelien Gans’ study warns us, her readers, not to forget.

That warning steeps much of Jaap Meijer’s post-war publications, as poet and historian. All publications are deeply personal. Some are written in anger; some are moving struggles to keep our memory alive. One of Jaap’s first post-war publications was the deeply personal review of the diaries of his pupil, Anne Frank, in 1947. It was part of a ‘campaign’ to publish and publicise the diaries. First, on 3 April 1946, Jaap’s old supervisor, Jan Romein published his reflections on Anne’s manuscript (given to him by Anne’s father, the sole survivor of the Frank family) on the front page of Het Parool, a newspaper set up by the Dutch resistance at the beginning of the war. The piece, The Voice of a Child, helped to get the diaries published. On 25 June, 1947, the publishing house Contact published the first edition of Anne’s diaries, with a preface written by Jan Romein’s wife, the historian and literary critic, Annie Romein-Verschoor. Sales were helped by a series of positive reviews. Jaap Meijer wrote, as far as I can tell, the very first review. Jaap hailed the diaries as ‘the unique electrifying autobiography of a young girl, so pure’ that it must take the reader’s breath away. Jaap wrote his review with ‘melancholic sadness’. He drew the first portrait in print of Anne, a sketch of ‘a true Jewish child: Anne Frank’, a slender and ‘delicate girl’, with big, striking and dallying eyes, ‘talkative’ and ‘full of spirit’. Commemorating Anne’s death in Bergen-Belsen, Meijer regarded it as ‘senseless and deeply hurtful’ to ask what Anne’s future might have been. Her story was that of ‘murdered youth’, the title of the review.

At the end of October 1942 Otto Frank, so his daughter reported in the revised version of her diaries, took ‘Goethe’s and Schiller’s dramas out of the large bookcase.’  Her father’s idea was, as Anne put it, ‘to read ^somethingfrom themout loud to me every evening. We’ve already started on Don Carlos.’ So just about four months after taking his family into hiding in the annex to his office on the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam, Otto Frank decided that it was time to read out one of the major plays of Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), written between 1784 and 1787, to his youngest daughter. For Anne this was part of her German lessons. For her father it was much more. Schiller was one of the great figures of the ideals of Bildung; the family of Otto Frank’s mother, Alice Stern, exemplified the early German Jewish embrace of these ideals.

The family’s most celebrated luminary was Moritz Stern (1807-1894), who, in 1827, decided to move to one of Germany’s great Enlightenment universities, Göttingen, to study mathematics with one of the finest scholars of the period, Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855). Eventually, in Göttingen in 1859, Moritz Stern became the first full Professor (Ordinarius) at a German university who had publicly maintained his adherence to Judaism – he did not, like many others, convert to Christianity.

Stern was widely praised as an excellent teacher of mathematics. Above all, as his son Alfred Stern (1846-1936) insisted in his Family History, published in 1906, Moritz Stern stood in the great tradition of Enlightenment scholarship, having broad interests in ‘oriental studies’, the comparative study of languages, history, especially Jewish history, astronomy and philosophy. Religion was problematic. During the 1840s, Moritz Stern was the most prominent member of a group of Frankfurt Jews, named the Reform Friends, that pleaded for a radical reform of the religious practices of the Judaic faith. Stern’s own beliefs were deeply influenced by his reading of the works of Baruch de Spinoza (1632-1677), one of Amsterdam’s great free thinkers. As his son reported, Moritz Stern regarded Spinoza as his ‘guiding star’. As a Spinozist, Stern was wary of all faith and religious dogma. But, in the words of his son, ‘piety’s pure sense of duty’ drove him to fight for ‘the interests of the Jews’, both in the realm of the political and the ethical. Politically Moritz Stern believed in the democratic republic and in equal civil rights for all. With the long wait for his chair in Göttingen and the appointment in 1859 as first Jew to a full professorship, he had, as son Alfred Stern represented his view, ‘broken down the wall’. Eighteen years later Moritz Stern had the great honour to give the memorial speech of Gauss’s centenary on 30 April 1877.

By that time Alfred Stern was on his way to become a successful historian. Born and raised in Göttingen, Alfred’s battles differed from those of his father. As a historian Alfred Stern developed a wide range of interests, moving well beyond the confines of the national focus that came to dominate the German writing of history, especially after the establishment of the Kaiserreich in 1871, when the Prussian king Wilhelm was proclaimed emperor. When in 1879 the Berlin historian and parliamentarian Heinrich von Treitschke (1834-1896) unleashed the ‘Berlin Antisemitism Debate’ with, at its heart, his declaration that ‘the Jews are our misfortune’, and sought to frame a strongly nationalist narrative in his multi-volume German History, Alfred Stern responded with his massive, ten volume History of Europe, published over a period of 30 years, between 1894 and 1924. The difference couldn’t be bigger. Stern’s narrative was far from national. He presented Europe as a ‘community’ of many cultures and peoples, for Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans and of course also for Jews. Alfred Stern strongly disapproved of the course the Kaiserreich was taking; he did so, as he put it in 1882, ‘as German, as lover of freedom and as Jew.’

Not all members of the Stern family were academic luminaries. Alice Stern’s grandfather, Emanuel Stern (1799-1841) had taken, as Alfred Stern put it, ‘highly adventurous roads’, ending up as a musician and soldier in Brazil and then running away from the harshness and misery of the slave plantations. Barely, just barely Emanuel made it back to Germany, to his brother Moritz in Göttingen. For Alice herself, the household of Clara and Alfred Stern was, as she put it in a long letter to her children in 1935, looking back on her life, where she learnt what Bildung meant. Another family friend, the physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955), fondly remembered the Stern household as ‘a seat of harmony’. Between 1912 and 1914 Einstein regularly visited the family to make music with Stern’s daughters, especially with Emma, a pianist, and Antonia, a fellow violinist, who enchanted Einstein. As he put it in 1952, the Stern household incorporated ‘on a small scale, the ideal of human community.’

When, in October 1942, Otto Frank started to read Schiller’s Don Carlos to his daughter, Anne was deep into reading a Dutch novel, Eva’s Youth, which tells the story of Eva, a daring and creative young girl. Anne was an intense and voracious reader. She engaged with some of the great Dutch bestsellers of the 1920s and 1930s, but also with the more distinctly literary work of Carry van Bruggen, the daughter of a rabbi (in a small Dutch village) who became one of Holland’s most innovative and feminist writers. As Anne read and wrote in order to find her own way, her ‘inner self’, she favoured reading novels about female teenagers and young women who were on a similar trajectory.

In many ways Anne’s search for her ‘inner self’ in her diaries goes beyond the German ideals of Bildung which her father cherished so deeply. For father and daughter Schiller’s Don Carlos may still have been a fertile meeting ground. After all the play tells the story of the Dutch Revolt and its fight against tyranny through the eyes of the son, Don Carlos, of the tyrant, Philip II, the King of Spain. The trials and tribulations of Don Carlos are set in the context of a struggle for freedom and independence—not only at the political level, which is why the Nazis forbade the play, but also at a more personal level. For Anne Frank, living in hiding, both aspects of the play may have resonated, aligning itself with her favourite novels. Nico van Suchtelen’s Eva’s Youth, Ina Boudier-Bakker’s The Knock at the Door and, earlier, Cissy van Marxveldt’s Joop-ter-Heul books were amongst the Dutch novels that accompanied Anne in her attempt to constitute, not so much a Humboldtian ‘self’, but her true ‘inner self’ and her ‘complete independence’ as a young woman. Reading Schiller together was an attempt to build bridges between the German cultural legacy of the father, Otto Frank, and the new Amsterdam ideals of his daughter, Anne.