Orion Magazine - I'm going to show them that Anne Frank wasn't born yesterday! (2023)

"Ithey made aOn June 14, 1942, Anne Frank wrote in her diary: "Sketch of my dungeon. I hope that one day my wish will come true, but it must be a miracle, because it usually It's not going to happen . . . you can disappear underground and live there, it's too good to be true.

When Anne Frank wrote this beautiful meditation on imagination, how could she not have known - as real and dreamy as the best fairy tales - that her father was hatching a plan to kill him? Too good to be true, as fairy tales show.

The fictional Anne Frank created by the world, since her murder, is neither beautiful nor real. Can you still remember her by her real name now? Author Anne Frank. Jewish philosopher Anne Frank.
Just three weeks after Anna sketched her dungeon, the Franks braved the rain and took what they could to Het Achterhuis (Secret Annex). There, behind a bookcase, and through a door, are stairs leading not to the ground, but to a space where the family can "disappear and stay there" for a while. They need to be silent all day so that no one in this pectin warehouse building will know that Jewish families are hiding in the ceiling. Books will be their constant companions: Dickens, Greek and Roman mythology, the Bible. With the exception of a few classics (Faust), no German books were allowed, which meant that the 1925 edition of Grimm's fairy tales that Anne once shared with her sister had to remain in their real home.

Jacob and William Green did not enter the Chamber of Secrets.

Although Anne Frank was born in Germany, her family left the country when she was four because, she wrote, "We are Jewish."

Anne Frank's subterranean palace is not only poetic with castles in the air — an image coined by another of my favorite Jewish philosophers, Ernst Bloch — but also moral. Like Ernst Bloch, Anne Frank loved fantasy, which she knew was sacred to seriousness.

But how did Anne Frank, a girl killed by genocide, become a symbol of hope? What does it mean to us to make a girl murdered out of Jewish hatred a symbol of hope? What does this mean for our relationship with girls, Jewish hatred and hope?

At times, Anne Frank was very angry, which was not the opposite of hope.

In late September 1942, immediately after she went into hiding, Frank wrote:

Margot [Anne Frank's older sister]. . . Great, great, perfection itself, but I seem to have enough malice for the two of us together. . . . Mom and Dad told me I shouldn't talk so much. I should've been more private and not turned my nose up at anything, but I seemed doomed. .. nothing, I repeat, nothing, is not right for me, my appearance, my general personality, my mannerisms. ..I'm not going to take all these insults, I'm going to let them know that Anne Frank wasn't born yesterday! Then they will be surprised. ..I am amazed by them time and time again. . .madness. .. Am I really mean, arrogant, self-willed, pushy, stupid, lazy, etc. like everyone says I am? . . . if only you knew that I sometimes boil over so much sarcasm and ridicule. I don't know how long I can suppress my anger. I'm going to explode one day.

This image of the girl - all over the world - with the misstatements in her diary ("I still believe that people are really nice") returns again and again with her own philosophy to the question of kindness - her ellipse , to be more precise.

November 7, 1942:

I have to do well. . . Whom can I take comfort from but myself? I often feel weak and dissatisfied with myself due to my constant need for reassurance, my flaws are very large. I know this, and every day I try to improve over and over again.

Later this month:

I have often seen lines of kind, innocent people walking away with crying children. . . bullying and beatings. . . none were spared. .. how lucky we are here to be well looked after and undisturbed. . . . I feel awful sleeping in a warm bed. . .

January 30, 1943:

I am furious, but I must not show it. . . . If I talk, everyone thinks I'm showing off. When I'm silent, they think I'm ridiculous. Be rude if I answer, be cunning if I have a good idea. Lazy if I'm tired, selfish if I take an extra bite, stupid, cowardly, crafty, whatever. ..an unbearable baby..I can't eat sugar one day and spit venom the next. I'd rather go for the mean (not so golden). . .

As in the Grimm's fairy tale of two girls, one talking to the diamond and the other to the toad, Anne Frank looks at the conflict and asks how to resolve it. in. She wants to be good. He wants people to be good people. How else would he be saved?

Anne Frank began to sleep with her hands over her ears to block out the relentless sound of machine gunfire throughout the night. He is hungry. He heard that "children came home from school" "to find their parents gone. Women returned from shopping looking for their . . . families gone." He wrote, "Every night, hundreds of planes fly over cities where the earth was flattened by their bombs, hundreds, if not thousands of people are dying every hour in Russia and Africa . . . the end is yet to come.” She added that she was lucky — she and her family ​​In a safe and quiet place. Essentially, they have the privilege to hide and wait, he said. They were waiting for the war to end, but—as the Austrian psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim brutally pointed out—they were only waiting to be discovered and taken away.

By this time, however, Anne Frank was well aware that Jews and others were being sent to "dirty slaughterhouses" like "cockroaches." She noticed her depression. She started taking valerian pills—sometimes, according to her diary, as many as "ten valerian pills," but nothing stopped the fear. or hunger. Her diary presents a hallucination—in short, she is immensely grateful and fortunate, spouting beautiful things. Next, she describes herself as a mean person, that the world is horrible and that life is a meaningless void. She is very good. She is mean. life is Beautiful. Life is scary. The secret annex is home. The Chamber of Secrets is a prison. She's a horrible person who thinks she's a prison. He is not in a concentration camp. She is still alive. he will die. They will all die. Everyone dies. But everyone will go to heaven. Today we ate bread. We ate rotten cabbage. We went to the bathroom in the jar.

At night, the family listened to the news—they heard all the atrocities—and the atrocities continued and no one seemed to be able to stop them.

Bruno Bettelheim has made a brutal indictment of the Frank family in his little-known but controversial essay "The Missed Lesson of Anne Frank", since it was discovered in his anthology , which I have read many times. When I read it for the first time, I was so angry that I threw the book against the wall. The second time I read it, I was really angry again, but I didn't throw the book away. I have more self-restraint. Only after reading it the third time can it be absorbed.

Bettelheim argued that "gentle Anne" was murdered in a concentration camp by her parents themselves. He gets mad at Franks, saying that Franks could easily save "little Anna" if he sent her to live under a false identity with a non-Jewish Dutch family instead of going "underground" together, which is too dangerous. Tellheim describes with disgust the Franks' dream of returning to their old homeland after the war, and uses it as an example of the Franks' denial of the real evil that surrounds them. This supposed act of denial involves "little Anna" and her sweet diary. Instead of saving her life, the Franks, she claimed, retreated into "a deeply private world" and "passively hid". He suggested they should get "a gun or two", saying it would be easy for them "if they wanted to", and then they could "take down" the SS, which would end up in the annex. Yes, he conceded, they probably would have died anyway, but at least they'd be "selling their lives at a high price, not dying".

It strikes me as odd and sad that Bettelheim can't imagine how deep their desire to be together and go home for his 1977 National Book Award-winning study,uses of charm, speculates deeply and generously about the mechanics behind the homecoming of vulnerable fictional characters like Hansel and Gretel, who you may recall return to the father who abandoned them during the famine at the end of their richly traveled story. Save yourself and your wife. Many of the stories are about exile, displacement, longing for home. Oddly enough, Bettelheim makes no connection to his favorite form in his essay on the Frank family. Reading, Bettelheim also sees Anne's Diary as a way to get back into a child's inner world, rather than as an urgent work of literature--for someone professionally devoted to exploring the intellectual psyche of a child's childish mind. Also very strange.

Astonishingly insane, Bettelheim's forgotten essay is still very, very important in trying to reverse America's horrific use and abuse of the charming Anne Frank, to exalt her as a beacon of innocent goodness, which was happening at the time Very dramatic article, when a drama about her life becomes very popular. He points out the details of the show ending with Anne Frank's character declaring the belief that "everyone is good." Bettelheim fails to point out that her diary doesn’t say “all” men, but “people are good people”—but it needs to be said here. However, Bettelheim was rightly outraged. Outraged that the public does not take seriously psychoanalysis's very important contribution to conflict resolution - the inner conflict between the life instinct and the death instinct, which we may also call, for the sake of this meditation, good and evil, must be resolved if we are to be alone or To exist peacefully together, they must be resolved without suppressing one side in favor of the other. Thank you, Sigmund Freud, Jewish mystic!
Anne Frank wrote her essay on people and goodness during adolescence, a time of life fraught with danger and suffering because of this tumultuous conflict of necessity. She contemplates her inner plight more clearly than most teens—let alone those who hide, tormented by airstrikes and death threats. He knows meanness inside and out. Bettelheim links her journals to childhood friendliness, a relentless exploration of the inner conflicts and conflicts between self and the world during the most unstable period of a girl's life. Quicksilver Anne, as she sometimes calls herself, provides the reader with a perfect analysis of this amateur drama called Adolescent Emotions:

If I'm quiet and serious, everyone thinks it's a new comedy, and then I have to make it a joke to get away with it. In the end, I twisted my mind again, making the evil outside and the good inside. ..Anna, who is pure in heart, guides me, but she is just a cute little goat unshackled on the outside.

At the end of the diary, he wrote down the struggle of youth nostalgicly:

In a time when all ideals are being pushed down and destroyed, people are showing their worst and don't know whether to believe the truth or not, it is more difficult for us young people to stand our ground and stand our ground. . . It's a wonder I haven't given up on all my ideals because they seem so absurd and impossible. However, I kept them because despite this, I still believe that people have good hearts. I simply cannot base my hopes on chaos, misfortune, and death. I saw the world gradually turning into a desert. I hear the coming thunder that will destroy us too. I can feel the pain of millions, however, if I look up to the sky, I think everything will be alright, this cruelty will end, and peace and tranquility will return again.

This is the "good" that Anne Frank believed in: love. Yes, he thinks people are nice. He also believed that humans were evil. He sees both in her.

As a young Jewish girl growing up in New England, I was told that my great-grandmother was a Russian princess who eloped with the gardener's son - which is why our family came to America.

This is a fairy tale, and like all fairy tales, there is a dark truth hidden at its seams. Although my great-grandmother immigrated to the US safely, her father, and her entire family who remained in Latvia, along with all the other Jews in their town, were murdered by their neighbors after being forced to dig a pit for the first time would be their own of mass graves.

Years later she learned of their tragic fate from a Jewish news pamphlet she was flipping through—a twist in her story as unlikely, even odd, as a sketch of an underground castle.

But throughout my childhood and career as a writer, anthology writer, and scholar of fairy tales, I carried the story of her narrow escape—and the inescapable darkness that followed.

My first published short story was a fairy tale. It appeared in a newsletter that my best friend Diana Selig wrote and edited with me and was mimeographed in my dad's office in Dorchester. Once upon a time in Russia, Jacob and Rose tells the story of a gardener named Jacob who falls in love with a princess named Rose. One day, he put a plane ticket to America under her pillow, and they met there and lived happily ever after.

I truly believe that this story is based on a true family story, I am sure I heard it from my grandmother and it will definitely bring me a huge amount of fame. Many, many years—until I was in my forties, I actually believed I was of Eastern European descent, the great-granddaughter of a woman named Rose who emigrated to America by climbing down a sewer or a ladder or a rose trellis.
Of course, decades later, I was shocked when I learned the real story.

I know terrible things happened to the Jews during the war. As children, we saw footage of concentration camps in our temples, documenting in vivid detail the deaths of millions of Jews, intellectuals, artists, LGBT people, other minorities, and people with disabilities of all kinds.

As children, we also heard shadows of a story about my great-grandmother, how she died of a stroke in the kitchen after receiving news that her family had died “during the war.”

We're not told how they died, but there are hints: "Be good, or the Germans will take you," my grandmother would say while washing the dishes after Seder.

But how could I not be good enough and not. . . did he get

That's another understanding of the word, totally, forgive me, but hardly anyone understands Anne Frank. Representing the humble heroine of the story, a Jewish woman who is not an angel at all - making it known that Anne Frank was a warrior princess.

Is it much easier for the world to mourn the good Jews? Or does her innocence (in darker, less pleasant moods) make it easier for people to reject her - in other words, continue to hate her?

Unfortunately, the Dutch language has a specific verb for systematically looting Jewish homes: pulsen. It may be the only language in the world that has words for it. For the little things, let's be grateful. The term comes from the name of the moving company hired by the Dutch police to empty Jewish houses after being sent to their deaths during the Nazi occupation: Abraham Puls & Sons. When the house "throbbed", all valuable possessions such as furniture and carpets were moved to Germany. Ephemeral things—underwear, family photos, books—will be left on the street. "Sometimes, neighbors managed to salvage some of them, while the rest were sold at unbelievable prices to second-hand dealers and bookstores. The books found new shelves after the war," noted one oral historian.

I was a teenager when Anne Frank's Grimm's Fairy Tales were discovered in 1977. Apparently the company that evicted Frank's house found the book useless and left it there.

Of Anne Frank's diary, one reviewer for The Guardian wrote, "It is astonishing that this diary, also about the early stages of the genocide, ended up winning the award for the world's most famous primer How unusual it is that, like fairy tales, stories about gender-based violence, murder, abandonment, hunger, misogyny, racism, and queer realities are misunderstood as avenues for lessons in kindness. readdiary of a girlis to read the work of a demanding, self-critical artist - a Jewish intellectual girl who aspires to contribute to Dutch literature and history.

He lived in a dire situation with dire endings. With an eye toward publication, her rewritten diary is a vital work on family life, girlhood, becoming themes, and wartime fears. It's a family myth, a fairy tale. Had Anne Frank lived, I have no doubt that she would have continued her active investigation of our eternal ambivalence—and would have continued to advocate for the good in her constructions as her ego ideals developed.

In the preface to his 1955 German translationdiary of a girl, the theologian Albrecht Goes described the book as one of the most perceptive I have ever seen:

It's a conversation between "me" and another "me," between a very sensitive person with thin skin and another person who seems to be overgrown with thorns. It is a dialogue between "I" and the world around me, a dialogue carried out with great precision. Nobody misses the aggressive tone that dominates the dialogue, nor does anyone miss the second note that doesn't dominate but is the real tone of the whole: the ability to truly love. . . . We must demonstrate that the dialogue between "I" and the world presented in these pages is carried out by an almost uncommon instinct to achieve the stated goal.

About Anne Frank, I think you've heard that she thinks people are nice.

But Anne Frank wasn't born yesterday! Didn't I already tell you? Not being born yesterday means more than being bad. It brings that "knowing more than one keeps us going" feeling. It also has eternal value. I worry that Anne Frank's legacy is fading because the sweet version of Anne Frank - the girl who thought people were good - wasn't allowed to grow up with us. He was not born yesterday. Anna is eternal. He knows a lot.

Her words about people and kindness come, if they know, at the end of a self-condemnation of a long, self-punishing exploration of her own mistakes, as she sees them. These words are her wish to be fulfilled, "Pure Anna", not perfect purity, but her own ideal, through war, through
Puberty - her goodness intact. And get others to do the same. to end the conflict.

It’s important to know that when she wrote these words—in a state of starvation, amidst machine gunfire, she had to silently put her excrement in a jar in front of others, it took a few Pages apologized to her. Her own personal atrocities, hearing about people, children, dying in concentration camps every day - when she finally said that despite everything that happened, she thought people were fine, she was terrified, she So ashamed, she was sedated, she was in a desperate situation, and a lot, knowing full well that she was dying.
Anne Frank, when you're good, you're very, very good.

This includes when you write, "I'm going to show them that Anne Frank wasn't born yesterday!"

Now is the kind of hostility that could save the world. This is fairy tale logic.

The author would like to thank Kate Garrick and Ana Knudsen for their insight into this article.