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Anne Frank as an Icon: Fictionalization of the Image in the Works of
Literature and Visual Arts
Alexandra Vladimirovna Strukova, Olga Olegovna Nesmelova, Olga Borisovna
Karasik
Kazan Federal University, Kremliovsckay str.,18, 420008, Kazan (Russia)
Abstract
The essay deals with the fictionalization of Anne Frank in the works of mass culture. The
authors show how this process began, and analyze the interpretations of Anne's diary and the facts
of her life on the screen and the stage, both in the Western world (mainly the works considered to
be classical in the twentieth century) and contemporary Russia. The majority of these works show
the girl as a Holocaust victim, presenting her with sentimentality and tragic elements, however light
and hopeful concerning the future. The true story of the inhabitants of the secret annex in
Amsterdam was transformed into a melodrama, and Anne herself – into the mass culture icon.
Today some authors try to turn back this process of fictionalization and return the true facts and
histories. But in Russia common people mainly are unaware of the tragedy of Anne Frank. The
diary, though published, is not known, but several theatre interpretations have already been
released, thus the process of creating the simulacrum out of real personality has already begun.
The authors of the article speculate on the positive and negative sides of learning about the
Holocaust events form the products of mass culture.
Keywords: Anne Frank, the Holocaust, mass culture, diary, fictionalization, image.
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Introduction
The name Anne Frank has become the main symbol and embodiment of the Holocaust. L.
Khabibullina in her article calls such personalities “subjects of culture” [Khabibullina, 2014].
The personal diary of this teenage girl is one of the most important documents showing life
and death of Jews in Europe during the Second World War, the main evidence of the Nazi's crimes
and the Holocaust as the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century.
We distinguish two levels of fictionalization of Anne Frank as a personality and the author
of the diary: the literary one, made by Anne herself; and the one that happened due to the
adaptations of the book to the screen and the stage, that turned the girl into the iconic figure of mass
culture.
1
Literary fictionalization began, when Anne started editing her notes for the future publication: she
changed the names of the inmates of the secret annex and added some descriptions addressed to the
reader, but the process was not completed. What she tried to do from the point of view of fiction
resemble W.S. Maugham's approach in The Moon and Sixpence: the main facts of Paul Gauguin’s
life are true there, but the author changes the name of the main character and his nationality, calling
him Charles Strickland, an Englishman. This method opens wider range of possibilities to the
writer, as formally he becomes free from facts and real life stories. At the same time he keeps to the
true life story quite thoroughly, using various artistic devices and sometimes giving evaluations.
Consequently, here we deal with a special non-fiction genre.
The process of turning the image of Anne Frank into a mass culture icon started in 1955
with the appearance of the play by F. Goodrich and A. Hackett and the Broadway performance
based on it. Then several films and TV-series were shot. Thus, the fictional image of Anne became
better known and more popular than her real personality.
2
The Pulitzer Prize winning play and its production on Broadway and on the other stages in
1959 was followed by the film directed by G. Stevens. It still remains the most successful and the
most famous screen version of the diary. The touching and tragic story is very well presented, and it
has a strong impact on the audience. But it is hard or even impossible to feel any documentary basis
without knowing that the story is not fictional. For a common modern spectator this film may seem
just one from the big amount of works about the Holocaust, such as R. Polanski’s The Pianist, P.
Verhoeven’s Black Book, S. Daldry’s The Reader, or even Q. Tarantino’s Inglourious Bastards. Of
course, these films are absolutely different and have different levels of fictionalization of historical
events and personal destinies, some of them are based on true stories and biographies, and we see
the process of transformation of facts into fiction. Some of them are purely postmodern fantasies, as
Tarantino’s work. The reason why we put The Diary of Anne Frank in this list is the effect it
produces on the audience. Anne, her parents and other inhabitants of the secret annex are presented
in the way typical for the fictional characters – well developed personages revealing the authors’
ideas shown within a well-developed plot with knotting, climax and denouement.
Movies and TV films dealing with Anne Frank's biography and her diary appear rather
regularly in different countries since the 50s. There even exists an anime adaptation of the diary
released in Japan in 1995. The 2009 British TV series was quite popular. But the first American
film remains classical and the most well-known.
The details of everyday life in the secret annex play an important role in this film. The
spectator feels the unique atmosphere of a typical canal house in Amsterdam, which seems small
from the outside, but has a hidden part. The interior is shown thoroughly: the moving bookcase
disguising the door to the back house; the attic where Anne and Peter used to go at night; the cat as
the favorite pet, – all these things make the picture true to life and add an adventure intrigue to the
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story. At the same time, they become a good background for the sentimental scenes producing
melodramatic effect and make the story move away from the real one. The spectator’s attention is
mainly attracted by the beginning of the love story of Anne and Peter. The movie is a melodrama
with the elements of a detective story or a thriller. The plot keeps the viewer in tension.
In 2000 the Russian Academic Youth Theatre in Moscow released The Diary of Anne Frank
based on the same play with one of the most prominent contemporary Russian actresses Chulpan
Khamatova as Anne. Critic A. Sokolianski in his review highly appreciates the performance. First
of all, he says that it is necessary to remind to the public who Anne Frank was. Then he says:
As far as I judge from the Russian translation, the play is too sentimental and too well-made. The
action is effectively constructed and the secondary characters are very well presented. <...> Here,
the play was staged by Alexei Borodin, chief director of the Academic Youth Theater
[Sokolianskiy, 2000 ].
Thus, the author gives a critical review to both the play, and its stage version, pointing out,
how far they are from the real story and drawing attention to the artistic devices used by the authors.
One more Russian stage version of the diary is 2011 monopera presented by Moscow
Chamber Opera Theatre named after Boris Pokrovsky. Its author is G. Frid. The opera genre is
unexpected for such a topic; it doesn't suppose deep and many-sided characters and needs dramatic
collisions and passions. The emotional aspect here is emphasized again: the spectator is expected to
experience sympathy to the destiny of the characters; however, the hope for future should prevail.
The creators make the visual accent on the figure of Anne: the color scheme of the whole opera is
black-and-white, and only the actress playing the girl appears in bright red dresses.
3
In the second half of the twentieth century two prominent American authors turned to the
image of Anne Frank. These are Philip Roth in his novel The Ghost Writer (1979) and Cynthia
Ozick in her essay Who Owns Anne Frank? (1997). The idea they reveal is the same: public opinion
and Mass Media have turned Anne into an idol devoid of human features and credibility. The
majority of people have forgotten or never realized the fact, that The Secret Annex is a work of
literature, unfinished but possessing undoubted aesthetic value. The talent of Anne is obvious: her
notes are full of interesting observations and humor, her language is vivid and lively and the
characters are well-defined.
Ozick criticizes plays and films, telling about the distortion of Anne Frank's image and her
notes. She condemns the way they were presented to the readers: ‘Yet any projection of Anne Frank
as a contemporary figure is an unholy speculation: it tampers with history, with reality, with deadly
truth‘ [Ozick, 2001 ]. The writer speaks a lot about Anne's tragic and non-heroic death in BergenBelsen a month before its liberation, attracting the reader's attention to the fact, that the cause of her
death was typhus fever carried by lice. Such naturalistic details are mentioned deliberately to lower
the pathos of the public image of Anne as a heroine, especially in the play and movies, where she is
full of life and hope.
...bowdlerized, distorted, transmuted, traduced, reduced; it has been infantilized, Americanized,
homogenized, sentimentalized; falsified, kitschified, and, in fact, blatantly and arrogantly denied.
Among the falsifiers and bowdlerizers have been dramatists and directors, translators and
litigators, Anne Frank's own father and even – or especially – the public, both readers and
theatergoers, all over the world. ... Almost every hand that has approached the diary with the wellmeaning intention of publicizing it has contributed to the subversion of history[Ozick, 2001].
Such a position, though being sensible in a way, especially concerning the popularization
and fictionalization of Anne's image, seems to us rather brusque. The writer goes too far blaming
Otto Frank, as his life is also the tragic story of the Holocaust survivor. Even for Ozick who could
be the witness of the Holocaust in her early childhood (she is a year older than Anne Frank, but was
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born in the US, and thus avoided the danger of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust) it is hard to
understand the feelings of the man who survived in Auschwitz, lost his family and discovered the
whole depth of his daughter’s personality and her talent from her diary only after her death. The fact
that he omitted some parts of the diary is also quite understandable: these are mainly the parts
where Anne tells about her bad attitude towards her mother and the details of her coming of age –
menstruation and other physiological aspects of young girl’s life. For Otto his Anne remained a
human, a living being and a child, but not the object of worship and sympathy. This may be proved
in Anne Frank’s House in Amsterdam. All the parts of the museum – the interior of the rooms
without furniture, the diary and the videos presented there, appeal to the visitor with the goal of
showing Anne as a real person, a teenage girl, not a cult figure and object of worship.
Ozick’s idea is close to this. As a writer and literary critic her goal is to restore historical
truth and memory and to return the human features and real identity to the image of the girl.
Turning into an icon led to the fading of the real personality. The human is substituted by
simulacrum. That is why Ozick speaks about the simplification of the image that leads to the
distortion of historical facts. She points out some unpleasant factors coming into contemporary
everyday life, which connection with the image of Anne Frank looks weird and cynical, especially
when they commercialize the tragedy:
The mood of consolation lingers on, as Otto Frank meant it to – and not only in Germany, where,
even after fifty years, the issue is touchiest. Sanctified and absolving, shorn of darkness, Anne
Frank remains in all countries a revered and comforting figure in the contemporary mind. In
Japan, because both the diary and play mention first menstruation, 'Anne Frank’ is a code word
among teenagers for getting one's period. In Argentina in the seventies, church publications began
to link her with Roman Catholic martyrdom [Ozick, 2001].
What makes the message of Ozick’s essay is the fact that mostly was missed by those who
deal with Anne’s personality and her diary, including film and theatre directors: the girl’s dream
was to become a writer. It is obvious that her style and manner of writing and the ways of
constructing the narration prove her talent and the ability to create fiction. That is why Ozick rejects
that the diary is a Holocaust document, and calls it a piece of literature.
4
A different aspect of fictionalization of Anne Frank is presented by Philip Roth in his novel
The Ghost Writer. The whole story is narrated by Roth’s fictional alter ego – the young and
promising author Nathan Zuckerman; and he is the main character of the novel. The plot is
developed around his visit to the famous Jewish American writer Emanuel Isidore Lonoff (a
fictional character) whom Nathan saw as his favorite author, literary teacher and idol figure.
Nathan’s wish to find an example of the real writer leads to the play of his imagination. In
Lonoff’s house he meets Amy Ballette, the writer’s student, and as it turns out later, his lover. The
young man’s fantasy prompts him the idea, that Amy is Anne Frank, who survived in the death
camp, and now anonymously lives in the United States. So, the author’s imagination presents an
alternative history, and the novel as whole may be considered as postmodernist and one of those we
speculated on in our article about the Holocaust in the works of modern American writers
[Holocaust…, 2014].
The fact of fictionalization here is emphasized by the structure of the novel – the narrator is
telling about his youth, and his fantasy is presented as the story within the story, so we may say,
that Roth didn’t have the aim to persuade the reader that real Anne Frank could have survived. It is
just the supposition on the one hand, and the play of the young writer’s mind on the other.
Obviously, Anne Frank turned into Amy Ballette becomes a different personality, whose story is
purely fictional for the reader. Roth directly makes Anne Frank the hero of his novel, but he uses
real facts, making real events develop into a fictional way. In Nathan’s mind everything is rather
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logical: someone thought Anne was dead, though she wasn’t, or, maybe, she was confused with her
sister Margot and said to be dead. She survived and was sent to America with the other Jewish
children, where she decided to change her name and biography. When she knows that her father has
published her diary, she first wants to contact him to let him know she is alive, but when she
realizes the effect her diary makes on people all over the world, she decides not to appear. ‘They
wept for me, said Amy, they pitied me; they prayed for me; they begged my forgiveness. I was the
incarnation of the millions of unlived years robbed from the murdered Jews. It was too late to be
alive now. I was a saint’ [Roth, 1995]. Amy realizes that she has become an idol for the whole
world, and her rising from the dead would destroy the light and sacred image of the martyr created
in the minds of common people.
Creating this fantasy Nathan believes that Amy-Anne sacrifices herself for the sake of public
opinion, mass culture, because Anne Frank has already become a part of it, and her biography has
made her diary a world-wide bestseller and the most popular Holocaust book. Therefore, she feels
responsibility before people and doesn't want to disappoint them.
On Sunday she read about all the new books being published in America: novels said to be
'notable' and 'significant,' none of which could possibly be more notable and more significant than
her posthumously published diary; insipid best-sellers from which real people learned about fake
people who could not exist and wouldn't matter if they did [Roth, 1995].
Thus, it is shown here that the reality surpasses fiction.
In Nathan's imagination the only thing from her past that Amy-Anne doesn't reject when
having her new life is her desire to become a writer. Even being Amy Ballett Anne wants to fulfill
her lifelong dream: she goes to university and takes Lonoff's course of creative writing. The reader
understands that the girl is more talented than her professor, and she becomes an embodiment of
double sacrifice – for the sake of public image, and for the sake of literature and art at the same
time.
In this context Roth couldn't avoid mentioning the stage versions of Anne Frank's diary. He
mentions them with the strongest irony he can have: Nathan's father doesn't like his son's stories,
thinks they are anti-Semitic, and he recommends his son to watch the Broadway production of The
Diary. Mr. Zuckerman believes that this will help his naughty son to understand the real sufferings
of the Jewish people and show him what the real Jewish work of art should be. The old man takes
smooth and sentimental image of Anne as genuine. The irony of this episode is that here Roth
shows how Anne Frank becomes a simulacrum as they know her only from Broadway shows and
films.
As Ozick does, Roth tries to restore the historical truth and return human features to Anne
Frank, but he uses artistic means for it.
Conclusion
Anne Frank's image is one of the most typical examples of turning a real historical figure
into the icon of mass culture. In the Western culture, the image of the girl was fictionalized, and
sometimes it is hard to distinguish the human features in it. It happened due to the numerous
cinema, TV and theatre adaptations, each of those added sentimentality to the heroine. Nowadays
the same process is observed in Russian culture, as “In Russia theater has always played an
important social role. It has been a means of emancipation of the internal energy of the masses, a
mouthpiece of ideological dictatorship, a voice of forbidden truth, and, eventually, a school for
democracy, teaching people to think and speak freely” [Prokhorova, Shamina, 2014].
The current social and political situation shows, that such works of mass culture contribute
greatly to the education and up-bringing of mass audiences. They are comprehensible for people
and often become the only sources of knowledge about historical events and personalities. Thus,
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turning Anne Frank into the icon of mass culture is not negative in this context, it plays important
educational role.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The work is performed according to the Russian Government Program of Competitive Growth
of Kazan Federal University.
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REFERENCES
Khabibullina L.F., Cultural identity of a person in the polycultural space terms: its social
aspect, Life Science Journal 2014;11(11s), pp.248.
Sokolianskiy, Alexander “Два года перед концлагерем” [Two years Before Concentration
Camp]. Web. 14 Oct. 2000, [electronic resource] URL:www.smotr.ru/rez/ramt_daf/daf01.htm, Date
views: 12.12.2014.
Ozick S., Quarrel & Quandary: Essays, Vintage, 2001, pp. 75, 77-78, 99.
Holocaust in Works of Modern American Writers: Post-modernist Look, Journal of
Language and Literature, Vol.5, No.3, 2014, pp. 9.
Roth Ph., The Ghost writer, 1st Vintage International edition, 1995, pp.150.
Roth Ph., The Ghost writer, 1st Vintage International edition, 1995, pp.147-148.
Prokhorova T., Shamina V., School for democracy: Interactive theater in soviet and PostSoviet Russia//Comparative Drama, 2014, Volume 48, Issue 1-2, pp. 59-73. pp. 72.
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