A critique of Holocaust Universalization in honour of Anne Frank
After decades of exposure to the Nazi murder of European Jewry, through education in schools and universities, the production of countless Holocaust histories and memoirs, the wide distribution of Holocaust related films, plays, and television programs, and, the construction of Holocaust memorials and museums, including a prominent federal institution in Washington, we are now facing pressure to include all people who suffered under Hitler into what we know as the Holocaust—the deliberate, systematic, state-sponsored annihilation of Jewish Europe.
How do we explain the apparent paradox of
a culture that appears to be suffering from “Jewish Holocaust fatigue,”and yet
knows very little about the history of this specific event and the pivotal role
played by antisemitism in its conception and execution? To answer the question,
we must begin to examine the phenomenon of Holocaust education and its
universalizing methods, and try to assess what exactly people have learned about
the Holocaust and antisemitism over the last several decades.
Part of the answer can be found
in the material used to teach the subject. One of the central texts used by
teachers, parents, and professors to educate students about the Holocaust is
The Diary of Anne Frank. The book has been celebrated for decades but
also criticized for its universalization, and not so subtle elision, of the
Jewish experience under Nazism. The Diary was first published in Dutch
as Het Achterhuis [The House Behind] in 1947, translated into French
and German in 1950, and into English in 1952, with a play staged on Broadway
only three years later.1
Instead of discussing the long and
detailed controversies over the book and its theatrical applications, I will
examine several trenchant critiques of the text that deserve our renewed
attention. In 1960, Bruno Bettelheim wrote a psychosocial critique of the
Broadway play (1955) and Hollywood film (1959) for Harper’s Magazine,
in which he focused his attention not so much on Anne’s text but upon our use of
it and our reaction to it. For Bettelheim, the larger culture’s “universal and
uncritical response” to The Diary reflected “our wish to forget the gas
chambers,” and instead take comfort in the false belief that Jews could retreat
“into an extremely private, gentle, sensitive world” despite being surrounded
“by a maelstrom apt to engulf one at any moment.”2 Even more
offensive was our fetishized treatment of her statement, “In spite of
everything, I still believe that people are good at heart,” to which the story
is often reduced, when in fact Anne had written those optimistic words well
before the attic had been sold out by a Dutch informant for about a dollar per
person, the inhabitants deported to camps, her mother killed, and she and her
sister Margot suffered abject death by typhus in Bergen Belsen in April 1945.
This “lesson” about the goodness
of people, given the actual history of Anne Frank and her family, is patently
false, and Bettelheim believed that it created an equally false sense of
optimism, misleading readers to imagine Anne surviving the war. In fact, recent
pedagogical studies of The Diary have demonstrated this exact problem.
Students have been shown to characterize Anne’s diary as more “hopeful than
sad,” as a story of survival, and even a love story. They appear to manifest a
deep-seated resistance to the truth of her death in Bergen Belsen, which was
described as “ruining” the story for one student in a classroom
study.3
Bettelheim also argued that the platitude
about human goodness “releases us effectively of the need to cope with the
problems Auschwitz presents.”4 Writing in 1960, he did not mention
antisemitism specifically, nor did he characterize the specific “problems”
Auschwitz presents, but today we know that without antisemitism there would not
have been a Birkenau, and yet The Diary allows its readers to disregard
this reality entirely. Here, then, is a perfect example of the way students, and
the larger culture, are exposed to the Holocaust and yet learn nothing in
particular about the problem of antisemitism.
Lawrence Langer makes an
important observation about the book in this regard. Instead of providing any
actual information about the Holocaust or antisemitism, Langer argues, The
Diary “enacts in its very text a designed avoidance of the very experience
it is reputed to grant us some exposure to [and] thus her work helps us to
transcend what we have not yet encountered, nonetheless leaving behind a film of
conviction that we have.”5
In a devastating critique by
Cynthia Ozick, The Diary is described as “bowdlerized, distorted,
transmuted, traduced, reduced . . . infantilized, Americanized, homogenized,
sentimentalized, falsified, kitschified, and, in fact, blatantly and arrogantly
denied.”6 Like Bettelheim and Langer, Ozick denies the value of this
text as a Holocaust document. To make her point, she proceeds to reconstruct the
actual fate of the Frank girls, based upon the testimony of Belsen survivors,
including Anne’s schoolmate Hannah Goslar: “[Margot] fell dead to the ground
from the wooden slab on which she lay, eaten by lice, and Anne, heartbroken and
skeletal, naked under a bit of rag, died a day or two
later.”7
Equally important to Ozick’s
graphic truth-telling is her revelation of the very real dejudaization of the
book, revealed by the publication in 1995 of additional diary material removed
by Anne Frank’s father Otto, subsequent publishers, and translators.8
Comparing editions now reveals that Otto Frank removed Anne’s numerous
references to Judaism, including those describing Yom Kippur. Additionally, the
Zionism of Anne’s sister Margot as well as the Hebrew the family sung at
Hanukkah were deleted from the Hackett Broadway script approved by Frank.
Additions that distort Anne’s story were invented by producer Lillian Hellman,
who inserted lines like “we’re not the only people that’ve had to suffer . . .
There’ve always been people that’ve had to . . . sometimes one race . . .
sometimes another.”9
Even worse, Otto Frank allowed
the translator of the German edition, Anneliese Schütz, to either remove or
revise Anne’s passages about Germans. For example, in her list of house rules,
Anne writes, “‘Use of Language: It is necessary to speak softly at all
times. Only the language of civilized people may be spoken, thus no German.’ The
German translation reads: “Alle Kultursprachen . . . aber leise!’—‘all
civilized languages . . . but softly!’”10 Schütz justified her
methods of distortion and exculpation as necessary because a book “for sale in
Germany . . . cannot abuse the Germans.”11
Ozick tells us that a German drama
critic admitted that the theatrical version of The Diary allowed
Germans to see “our own fate—the tragedy of human existence per
se.”12 And so, as Alvin Rosenfeld observes, “Anne Frank has become a
ready-to-hand formula for easy forgiveness,”13 and of all things,
Ozick argues, a “vehicle of German communal
identification.”14
One is reminded of Theodor Adorno’s
discussion of a German woman who left the play in 1959 saying, “Yes, but really,
at least that girl ought to have been allowed to live.”15
The fact that Adorno characterizes this remark as a “first step toward insight,”
for which he appears to be grateful, illustrates the pervasive antisemitism in
postwar German society and the ongoing complicity of Germans in these crimes as
late as 14 years after the war.
It would not be until 1991 that Germans
would have the opportunity to discover the original content of Anne’s
diary.
Cynthia Ozick describes Otto
Frank in what are thought to be stereotypically German Jewish terms: secular,
assimilated, and bourgeois, but also accommodating, even deferential in relation
to gentiles and especially toward Germans. She interprets his primary role in
distorting The Diary of Anne Frank as the result of his “social need to
please his environment and not to offend it.”16 It has always been,
and remains today, safer for Jews to avoid confronting gentiles about their
antisemitism, and this reality, Ozick argues, is what led him to “speak of
goodness rather than destruction,” and to allow The Diary to be
“accommodated to expressions like ‘man’s inhumanity to man,’ diluting and
befogging specific historical events and their
motives.”17
Furthermore, the memorial he chose
to honour his daughter was the Anne Frank Foundation18 and
International Youth Center, both located in Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. Ozick
argues that this memorial, dedicated to the humanistic goal of bringing young
people across the globe into contact with one another, “nevertheless washed away
into do-gooder abstraction the explicit urge to rage that had devoured his
daughter.”19
Here, she is referring to Anne’s
diary entry from 3 May 1944: “There’s a destructive urge in people, the urge to
rage, murder, and kill.”20 Obviously, our choice to ignore these
words and fetishize their very opposite, and then to present our choice as the
epitome of Anne Frank and her experience, says more about the problematic needs
of post-Holocaust Western culture than anything else. One can see how truly
deceitful this cultural fetish is when the lines immediately following Anne’s
comments about human goodness read: “I simply can’t build up my hopes on a
foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually
being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will
destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of
millions.”21
Our misuse of her words is actually
perverse, as suggested by Griselda Pollock, in that we make the victim herself
provide bystanders (and even perpetrators) “with comfort in our distress at
encountering her suffering.”22
The primary approach of Holocaust
education has been to universalize (and, in some cases, to Christianize) the
experience of Jewish suffering in an attempt to make the subject matter
accessible and meaningful to non-Jews. This was perceived as necessary after the
war due to the antisemitic nature of postwar Western culture. There was a
general hope that non-Jews would somehow imbibe that antisemitism was wrong from
reading these stories and eventually from a curriculum that focused on the
general evils of discrimination and racism and that promoted a doctrine of
universal human rights.
Today, Holocaust education forms the
basis for a new type of civic education. Increasingly, young people are learning
about war and genocide in a comparative framework and the new civic values of
peaceful reconciliation and human rights. In countries like Canada and the
United States this curriculum presents an opportunity to celebrate ourselves in
the form of the American Constitution, the Canadian Charter of
Rights and Freedoms, and our Allied role in liberating Europe from Hitler.
This is precisely the conclusion presented in the permanent exhibit of the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and it is the basis for the
conception of the new Canadian Museum for Human
Rights.
There is no doubt that Holocaust
education has had a positive influence on Western society. It has helped to
create our contemporary concern with fighting racism and promoting human rights
and has helped generate our current interest in the historical and contemporary
problems of genocide and war crimes. The problem, however, is
that Holocaust education has not produced a corresponding concern about, or
awareness of, antisemitism. Rather, what we have produced in
contemporary Western culture is a general conviction, to use Langer’s term, that
we have learned the “lessons of the Holocaust” when in fact few people outside
the academic field know anything in particular about the Nazi Final
Solution, its systematic destruction of Jewish Europe, and the nature and
history of the antisemitism responsible for this catastrophe, which continues to
evolve and is now in fact a global phenomenon.
Given this problematic reality,
one wonders if Cynthia Ozick is correct when she suggests at the end of her
critique of The Diary of Anne Frank that it may have been better for
Anne’s diary to have been lost, and thereby “saved from a world that made of
it all things, some of them true, while floating lightly over the heavier
truth of named and inhabited evil.”23
Notes
1 As of 2001, the book had been translated into fifty-five
languages and sold over twenty million copies.
2 Bruno Bettelheim,
“The Ignored Lesson of Anne Frank,” Harper’s Magazine (November 1960),
45-50: 45.
3 See Karen Spector
and Stephanie Jones, “Constructing Anne Frank: Critical Literacy and the
Holocaust in Eighth-Grade English,” Journal of Adolescent & Adult
Literacy 51:1 (September 2007): 36-48.
4 Bettelheim,
47.
5 Lawrence Langer,
“Anne Frank Revisited,” in Using and Abusing the Holocaust
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 16-29: 20-21.
6 Cynthia Ozick,
“Who Owns Anne Frank,” in Quarrel & Quandary(New York: Vintage,
2000), 74-102: 77.
7 Ibid., 79.
8 This is in
addition to Otto Frank’s removal of material that embarrassed the family,
including Anne’s discussion of the Frank marriage, and material that would have
been outside the bounds of decency in the 1950s, such as her discussion of
contraceptives, female genitalia, and lesbianism.
9 Ozick,
95.
10 Ibid., 90.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid., 98.
13 Alvin Rosenfeld,
“Popularization and Memory: The Case of Anne Frank,” in Lessons and
Legacies: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World, edited by Peter
Hayes (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 243-278: 271.
14 Ozick,
98-99.
15 Theodor Adorno,
“What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?” in Bitburg in Moral and
Political Perspective, edited by Geoffrey Hartman (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1986), 114-129: 127.
16 Ozick,
85.
17 Ibid., 86.
18 Today the Anne
Frank Foundation fights discrimination against minorities in Europe, with a
specific focus on protecting the rights of Turks and immigrants.
19 Ozick,
86.
20 Ibid., 85.
21 Martha Ravits,
“To Work in the World: Anne Frank and American Literary History,” Women’s
Studies (1997), 1-30: 16.
22 Griselda Pollock,
“Stilled Life: Traumatic Knowing, Political Violence, and the Dying of Anne
Frank,” Mortality 12 (May 2007), 124-141: 139.
23 Ozick,
102.
A larger version of this essay
was presented at Yale University in 2009.
