Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

How Anne Frank Became an Industry

Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree

I learned recently of a brand new app, “Anne’s Amsterdam,” which provides all sorts of digital details, both personal and geographical, about Anne Frank and her city. I can’t say I’m surprised.

In the years since the publication of her diary, Anne Frank’s life and times — and above all, her house, which has been made into a museum — have lent themselves to a staggering array of iterations, prompting Ian Buruma famously to observe that “about the only thing we haven’t seen so far is Anne Frank on Ice.”

Likening her to a “Jewish Saint Ursula, a Dutch Joan of Arc, a female Christ,” Buruma, some thought, went a bit too far. But if the response of some of Anne Frank’s acolytes and devotees to the news that the chestnut tree to which Miss Frank had referred in her diary was to be cut down is any indication, he may not have gone far enough. A hue and cry of enormous proportions ensued, with some insisting that fragments of the tree be preserved and venerated much as if they were bits of the cross itself.

In true post-modern fashion, these mediations of Anne Frank have also given rise to a veritable cottage industry of interpretations and, well, mediations all their own, of which Francine Prose’s book, “Anne Frank: The Book,The Life,The Afterlife” and Nathan Englander’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” are but the latest expressions.

Come October, Indiana University Press will publish “Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, and Memory,” a volume of essays edited by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jeffrey Shandler, which explores the impact of Anne Frank on adolescence, museology and toys, among many other things. Based on a symposium at NYU, which I had the good fortune to attend some years back and at which I spoke on the relationship between domesticity and the Anne Frank House, this book is sure to set more tongues wagging than any app.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.