Roses from the Earth: The Biography of Anne Frank Viking By Carol Ann Lee 297pp, £16.99 in UK
Anne Frank: The Biography By Melissa Muller Bllomsbury 330pp, £16.99 in UK
The Story of Anne Frank by Mirjam Pressler Macmillan's Children's Books 192pp, £9.99 in UK
IN July 1942, Otto Frank, a German Jewish refugee living in occupied Holland, took his wife, Edith, and daughters Anne and Margot into hiding, to escape imminent capture by the Nazis. His younger daughter, Anne, faithfully kept a record of their time in the secret annexe, chronicling in intricate detail their hidden existence. The diary, published after her death, became a world best-seller and has notched up sales of over 25 million since it was first published in 1947. We've had the play, the film and, somewhere, I dare say, there's the T-shirt. Along the way, Anne Frank, the consummate heroic victim of the Holocaust, and representative of all the talent and potential snuffed out by the murder of six million Jews, has become a 20th century icon. Anne, the precocious teenager who never lived to grow up, smiles out eagerly from the familiar photograph that has graced millions of copies of the diary. Forever captured in that trusting optimistic pose, intelligent eyes gazing directly at the camera, she spares us the gruesome reality of her death in Belsen.
Needless to say, the cult of Anne has generated its fair share of controversy. The most sinister development has been the neo-Nazi campaign to discredit the authenticity of the diary. To quash these calumnies, Anne's father, Otto, took legal action to prove conclusively that it was not a fake. In 1996, Buddy Elias, Anne's favourite cousin and last living relative, approved the publication of an unexpurgated version. Otto Frank had edited and censored some of the entries, particularly those where Anne was critical of or in rebellious conflict with her mother. Buddy Elias said he wanted to halt the canonisation. The new edition, he averred, showed the true Anne: "It's really her. It shows her in a true light, not as a saint but as a girl like every other girl". The new entries showed a waspish, catty side to Anne, and also demonstrated her no-nonsense attitude to sexuality.
Now we have two biographies, plus a version of her life for younger people. All claim to offer fresh insights and to reveal the "real" Anne Frank. Roses From The Earth by Carol Ann Lee is touted as the only biography to be written with the full co-operation of Anne's surviving family. Melissa Muller's Anne Frank: The Biography opts for a more sensationalist approach, claiming to draw on "documents long kept secret" and promises tantalisingly to shed light on who betrayed the Franks. The battle for Anne Frank the Commodity starts here.
With the diary continuing to sell in vast quantities, a little more than marketing rivalry is at stake here. Both books furnish a wealth of fascinating detail about Anne's life before, during and after the secret annexe. We find out about her mercurial moods, her precocity, vanity, liveliness, her passion for Hollywood stars and crushes on boys. Carol Ann Lee's more scholarly, thoughtful book offers more in the way of historical context, and asserts that Anne's sexual curiosity started much earlier than her teens.
Muller doesn't overly burden herself with history, and her tendency to impute motives and actions to Anne, Otto and the rest of the people in the annexe is too speculative for my liking. Her's is a less reverential approach, the story told in a slightly pseudo-transatlantic twang - though to be fair, her book is a translation and may suffer the curse of the translator. The oppressive life of the annexe is recounted in all its detail, confirming the uncanny accuracy of Anne's depiction. Both Lee and Muller recreate the tensions, the see-saw shifts in mood, the elations and the disappointments of that cloistered existence. Both women emphasise the enormous changes in Anne's character during confinement. Muller opts for therapy-like analysis, verging on psychobabble. Lee doesn't indulge in such speculation - but threatens to overwhelm us with meticulous detail. Where Lee steals a march on Mller is in her mercilessly detailed chronicle of Anne's final months in Bergen-Belsen. In the past, a discreet veil has been drawn over Anne's death; the words "Anne's diary ended here," and a bland note about her death in a concentration camp protecting generations from the full horror of her fate.
Lee has tracked down four women who were in Bergen-Belsen with Anne and Margot. Through their eyes, we become privy to the girls' deterioration, their attempts at bravery and cheerfulness. It makes for harrowing reading. Muller does not have these testimonies, which leaves her book lacking in crucial detail. In Roses From the Earth, Janny Brilleslijper recalls Anne's last days, covered in lice and scabies, and ravaged by the typhus that would kill her: "Anne was sick. . . but she stayed on her feet till Margot died; only then did she give in to her illness". Some days later, when Janny and a friend went to check Anne and Margot's bunk, they found it empty. "We knew what that meant. . . We looked for them and found them. Four of us laid the thin bodies on a blanket and carried them to the great open grave. We could do no more."
Both Muller and Lee are aware of Otto Frank's complex role as devoted custodian of his daughter's legacy, with Muller slightly more critical. Anne's diary has been transformed into a beacon of hope, with its oft-quoted line "in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good" becoming a kind of mantra for the triumph-over-tragedy school of Holocaust thinking. Otto Frank wanted to promote tolerance and to ensure his wife and daughters had not died in vain. It was of paramount importance to him to maintain the image of the Franks as a happy family. And as he was the sole survivor of the little band in the annexe, who can blame him? But the sanitised version of Anne, of her life and more importantly, of her death, does nobody any favours.
I welcome the unsentimental and candid approach of Mirjam Pressler's The Story of Anne Frank, which will furnish future generations of children with a clearer picture of Anne's historical significance, and uncompromisingly describes her fate within the context of a genocide against Jews. Indeed, all these books go a long way to demystifying the legend of Anne Frank. While it is clear that Anne was perceptive and talented, we have no way of knowing how that talent would have developed. She has been turned into a kind of Everyman for the Holocaust but, despite the wealth of new information now available, she remains eerily elusive, overshadowed by her legend. Lee's book is a sincere attempt to do justice to Anne, while Muller's biography, though enlightening, suffers slightly from its presentation as a journalistic scoop. But as for revealing the real Anne Frank? That's just not possible.
Katrina Goldstone is a researcher in Jewish history and culture.
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