Anne Frank's Family

by Mirjam Pressler

  In other words, Otto didn’t want it to be a “Jewish” play—he felt that it should be “universal,” not directed only to a Jewish audience. Still, the conditions in the Secret Annex were obviously and unambiguously based on the fact that they were Jews who had gone into hiding. If Meyer Levin’s version, according to the general consensus, was “too Jewish,” the Hacketts’ version was perhaps too non-Jewish, too light and cheerful. The director, Garson Kanin, backed the team of writers and said that he had never seen the diary as a sad book; as he said in one interview, he didn’t want to depress the public. He felt that the specifically Jewish aspect should be suppressed “to allow for a better identification with the theme and the characters.” So he changed Anne’s line “We’re not the only Jews who have to suffer. Right through the ages there have been Jews who have had to suffer” to: “We are not the only people who have to suffer. There have been people who had to suffer for centuries, now this race, now that one.”

  Otto, the father, was to be played by Joseph Schildkraut, an actor born in Vienna who had started out as a child star and over time had become a well-respected character actor. Edith, the mother, would be played by Gusti Huber, also from Vienna, who had married an American in 1946 and followed him back to the States. This casting gave rise to fierce debate, from the beginning, since it was rumored that Gusti Huber had had close ties to National Socialism during the war—too close. That she of all people was to play Edith Frank unleashed a storm of criticism, especially in Jewish circles. But Garson Kanin insisted on her despite all the attacks. The young actress Susan Strasberg was to play Anne.

  To make the action of the play more dramatic, the Hacketts, at the director’s request, added a scene in their revised draft where Mr. van Daan (who was called van Pels in the diary and thus in the play) stole some bread. As Buddy related later, that didn’t seem right to Otto himself, since obviously no such theft had taken place. Anyone who only saw the play without having read the book would think that Anne had described this scene, he said, and he repeatedly expressed his regret that Dussel (Pfeffer) as well as van Daan (van Pels) were being presented as not very sympathetic characters. In his opinion, the play showed them in a false light. He nevertheless let himself be talked into agreeing every time, when Bloomgarden and Kanin argued that it was crucial for the play.

  The premiere of The Diary of Anne Frank took place on October 5, 1955, in New York’s Cort Theatre. The play was an overwhelming success. Only two days later, Buddy wrote to Herbstgasse from Dayton, Ohio:

  I have just read the absolutely glowing articles about the play and am stunned, but happy. I almost cried my eyes out. The whole situation has been on my mind for months, much more than I realized. If there are critics in New York papers writing things like that, then it must really be [in English:] “top quality.” If only I could see it. Of course I know that for me it would be anything but a pleasure to watch! Congratulations to Otto, to Fritzi, and especially to dear Anne, who has created such an indelible monument to humanity. Like so many other great individuals, she had to die so that the world could profit from her genius.

  Since I assume you will get all the N.Y. articles from the Hacketts, I want to keep for myself the newspapers I bought. But I’ll send you the article in Billboard that will be out next week. Billboard and Variety are the newspapers of the theater world.

  Ottel, what about translating the play into German. Maybe it can be performed in Switzerland, Austria, or Germany. I would be terribly happy to try to translate it and I think I could do it too.

  This suggestion from Buddy most likely arrived too late; in any case, it was never mentioned again. The Hacketts’ play was translated into German by Robert Schnorr.

  In Basel they were obviously also following the news of the play’s unexpected success. Anne’s diary became one of the main topics of conversation in the house on Herbstgasse, where at that point, in 1955, eight people were living (now that Herbert, after many failed attempts, had succeeded in getting a residence permit for Basel): Leni and Erich, Grandma Ida, Otto and Fritzi, Stephan, Herbert, and Imperia the housekeeper. The success of the diary that their “little Anne” had written astonished them. They almost couldn’t believe the good reviews that were appearing everywhere and the worldwide interest in Anne’s book that resulted. They listened, amazed and moved, as Otto read them letters that people from the far corners of the world had written to Anne’s father after reading the diary. Otto, who, as he himself put it, “was built right near the water” when it came to anything having to do with Anne’s diary, was often moved to tears, especially by letters from young people, and when he read sentences like “Anne Frank changed my life.” Sometimes, he would say, a little depressed: “Everyone only talks about Anne, but I had two children. No one talks about Margot.” Since there was little else to say, he would then add, as though to console himself, the sentence that he always said when Margot came up: “Margot was an angel.”

  Naturally, they all read the letters that Buddy sent to Herbst gasse; he knew he didn’t need to write to individuals in particular. His greeting, “Dear everyone,” was meant literally. In the numerous letters that he wrote in the following weeks and months, the main topic was the play. As early as October 10, 1955, five days after the premiere in New York, he wrote to them from Illinois, full of excitement:

  Hurrah, it’s what I’ve been waiting for! I will send you the reviews that are out from Time, Newsweek, New Yorker, and Billboard. So far I have the New York Times, Telegraph, Daily Mirror, Daily News, and American Journal. Do you have all of those?

  My colleagues all think that the play will run for years. Walter Winchell, the most famous radio commentator in America, whom the whole country listens to every Sunday, said today: [Buddy’s English:] “Best Drama on Broadway is ‘Anne Frank’s Diary,’ a play which will stay in your hearts forever! A new star is Born: Susan Strasberg!” I am thrilled about the success.

  Another five days later he was already sending his next letter to “Everyone and especially to Ottel”:

  I’ve enclosed some clippings that you might not have already. Especially the magnificent article in Life … I don’t want to be indiscreet, but I’m burning to know if Ottel will also get his share of the truly major financial success of the play and the movie. If I had been at the premiere I would probably have gotten to meet Marilyn Monroe, and I certainly wouldn’t have objected to that! I can hardly wait to go to New York.

  The play’s success really did exceed all expectations, although even then there was the occasional criticism that the Hacketts’ play was too light—the word “kitsch” even turned up here and there.

  Buddy Elias’s letter from Dayton, Ohio, October 10, 1955 (photo credit 13.1)

  Buddy Elias’s letter from Dayton, Ohio, October 10, 1955 (photo credit 13.2)

  Buddy had mixed feelings about attending the play: on the one hand, he was greatly looking forward to it; on the other hand, he realized that it would be “anything but a pleasure” for him. He could completely understand, he wrote to Basel, that Otto did not want to see the play, although he could imagine nothing better than meeting up with Otto and Fritzi in New York. And when he came home, hopefully that summer, he would be very happy to read some of the letters that Otto had received.

  By the end of 1955, the time had come, and Buddy saw the play. He wrote on December 26: “That unforgettable evening at the Cort Theatre is still on my mind and I will be turning it over in my head for a long time. Of course I’ll tell you everything about it in this letter.”

  This was when he started to tell people who he was, how he was connected with the Anne Frank whose name everyone had now heard, and slowly the news got around. Today, Buddy says: “I was happy about the success, and I was proud to be Anne Frank’s cousin, I have to admit it … Yes, well, the truth is I was a little conceited about it.” In interviews that he gave for Holiday on Ice, he would answer whenever asked about it: “Yes, I am the cousin.” The play’s success was so unexp
ected and so overwhelming that it couldn’t help but affect everyone who had had anything to do with Anne.

  Buddy’s next letter, of January 4, 1956, shows how much the play really was on his mind:

  Some more things about the play. Not much can be changed in the directing or the staging at this point, but what absolutely needs to be changed, in my insignificant opinion, is the following: After van Daan steals the bread, Edith has a practically hysteric fit of rage and orders the van Daans to leave the Annex immediately. However humanly understandable this outburst is, the scene has an embarrassing and repellent effect on the audience and makes Edith look like a monster, when we all, and the audience too, have only seen her good side. The outburst is improbable and feels wrong. It’s also much too long. It’s what bothered me the most in the whole production. Van Daan’s theft is not connected with Judaism. In general the whole issue of Judaism is treated wonderfully throughout until then. He makes up for the theft with serious, heartfelt regret. Still, he is shown throughout the whole play as a rather unpleasant person. It makes sense that Mrs. van Daan wears a gold lamé dress, she is a woman who pays a lot of attention to her appearance and even in tragic surroundings doesn’t want to let herself go, which the scene with the fur coat highlights. The gold is appropriate in my opinion. That Anne makes herself look pretty when she visits Peter is maybe a little exaggerated but it’s sweet and I would take out only the part where she pads her bra. The audience’s laughter absolutely does not bother me. It’s not the laughter a comedian gets, it’s a liberating laughter like a child’s when you give her a doll after she’s been through something painful. The laughter doesn’t take away from the audience being moved, attentive, and sympathetic, not even for a second. Susan is a little too wild in the first act.

  This letter makes it very clear that Buddy, despite his skating career, remained in his heart of hearts an actor. In the following months and years he wrote about all sorts of things and experiences, obviously—for instance, he was worried about Stephan and advised him to take better care of himself, or he sent money for the house—but Anne’s diary and the play occupied him wherever he went. He was sucked ever deeper into the whirlpool that emanated from Anne’s diary and continues to be to this day.

  An additional reason for his immersion in what his cousin had written might well have been that he often felt isolated and lonely. He always suffered from homesickness and loneliness, says his wife, Gerti, having to live so far away from his family and so rarely seeing his loved ones. It’s true that Buddy met a lot of people, but the friendships and relationships always remained on a superficial level. It could hardly have been otherwise given his unsettled life, always on the move. No matter where he was, he took every opportunity to meet relatives, even distant relatives. For example, when he was in Los Angeles, he saw Dora and Emma, two of the daughters of Alfred and Klärchen, Alice’s favorite cousin. These childless old women, already over eighty, lived together in an apartment filled with old furniture and pictures, two of which hang in the Herbstgasse house today.

  At Otto’s request, Buddy also visited many people with whom his uncle had corresponded, whether readers of Anne’s diary or actors such as Joseph Schildkraut. He visited the Hacketts, too, the authors of the play. In a letter from June: “I hope you got the card that we sent you from the Hacketts’. It was a very nice visit. The Diary was obviously the main topic of conversation. Mrs. Hackett also told me: “I fell in love with your father, your mother, and your brother. She showed me a newspaper clipping from a Hamburg paper that said Dorit Fischer (from Basel) would play Anne there.”

  In April, Buddy wrote: “I’m glad that Anne’s play won the Tony Award. It more than deserves it. I only hope that the productions in Europe go as well as here. It will be hard to find another Susan Strasberg.”

  Mexico was the last stop on this tour, and Buddy wrote from Mexico City on May 16, after The Diary of Anne Frank had won the 1956 Pulitzer Prize for Drama:

  Most of all, congratulations Otto on the Pulitzer Prize! It is really tremendous, everything that’s happening, and wonderful. I wrote to the Hacketts … Mexico City is fantastic. An ultramodern city. Spanish and American combined. It’s a relief to be back in a sophisticated city with real atmosphere and not to have to see yet another endlessly identical, boring, uninteresting Amer. city for once … The premiere went very well but there were lots of obstacles. Since Mexico City is 8,200 feet above sea level and the air is so thin, lots of us had terrible problems breathing. Some of us fainted, Ted Roman as strong as he is had to come off the ice even today because of pains in his side and shortness of breath, and Steve and I could only barely drag ourselves to the oxygen machine after our number.

  The play’s success was unstoppable, and in late August 1956 the European premiere took place in Göteborg, Sweden. Then, starting in October, The Diary of Anne Frank was performed in Germany too, first in West Berlin, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Karls ruhe, and Konstanz, then in other cities as well, and of course in Vienna and Zurich too. Productions in many other European countries soon followed.

  Especially in Germany, the play was an overwhelming success. Sometimes the audience sat in deathly silence for many minutes after the play ended, before leaving the theater without a sound; sometimes the applause went on longer than anyone had ever seen at a play. The Diary of Anne Frank helped to break the silence that still blanketed the Nazi era. Young people in particular poured into the theaters in great numbers; the play had long runs in sold-out theaters everywhere. One reason for its success might have been that there were no monstrous, horrifying acts portrayed onstage; another was presumably sentences like “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart”—so forgiving and non-accusatory—which even perpetrators and collaborators could identify with, although Anne had clearly not meant them that way. In fact, there were only a few critical voices in Germany, as in America. Hannah Arendt, the philosopher, who grew up in Königsberg and had been living in exile since 1933, called the universal admiration for Anne Frank a form of “cheap sentimentality at the expense of great catastrophe.” It was of course completely reasonable to analyze a mass phenomenon critically and ask whether the public reaction was the sign of genuine sympathy or simply the idealization of a girl who made it easy to avoid asking deeper questions of guilt, responsibility, and individual bad conscience. But so soon after the war it could hardly be expected that such questions would be discussed by the general public. In any case, Hannah Arendt was an exception to the general enthusiasm.

  Everyone living in the house on Herbstgasse went to see the play performed in Konstanz, except for Otto, who never saw The Diary of Anne Frank. Leni and Erich talked with Anja Römer, who played Anne, and invited her to visit them in Basel. She met Otto there and became a frequent guest of the family.

  Buddy wrote in October 1956: “I don’t know if you realize how much all this stirs my emotions and occupies my mind. The public’s reaction in Germany must really be unbelievable. It almost scares me and I would really like to know what the majority of the people there really think … In any case the name Anne Frank will live forever, and if humanity will take her message to heart, as we all hope, then Ottel will really have achieved what he wanted.”

  In a later letter, he wrote: “These overwhelming reviews from Germany. I read them last night and am still flabbergasted. What is there to say?! Little Anne has really made world history. I’ll take these clippings with me to New York and show them to Schildkraut … I have so many questions I would love to talk to Otto for a few hours … The movie plans don’t seem to be very secret after all … This all must be terribly agitating for our good Ottel.”

  In Germany there would soon be schools and youth centers named after Anne Frank. Buddy would write in June 1956: “It’s wonderful, that news about the Anne Frank School, and I would love to hear about the celebrations in Frankfurt from Herbert, since he was there at the opening.”

  Buddy also wrote that in his opin
ion everyone in the family, except for Otto, should see the play, even if it obviously would be painful. They should do it for Anne’s sake. Ultimately, it was her work there onstage.

  His letter of December 3, 1956, was about another New York production:

  We had a wonderful but difficult evening last Thursday. Steve, Dolores Pallet, and I went to the theater. Five of the actors were new, and the girl playing Anne is magnificent. Better than Susan. Susan was technically brilliant but little Dina Doronne is so natural, and acts with so much heart, that she reaches the audience better, in my opinion. The new Peter is better too. It was a wonderful production and for the first time in my life I saw Steve cry … I couldn’t control myself either of course … After the performance we went backstage. The whole ensemble was there and they were expecting me. They had intentionally not told little Dina that I was in the theater, and when I came backstage, hugged her, and was introduced as Anne’s cousin, she burst into tears. Then, when I said how magnificent I thought she was, she ran sobbing from the stage … We had to go into Schildkraut’s dressing room, where a press photographer took pictures of us that would come out the next day. They turned out brilliantly and I’ll bring them with me … After the performance we went out to eat with Schildkraut, his wife, Dina, and some of Sch’s friends. Little Dina is so enchanting that I fell in love with her right away. So natural and sweet. Totally charming.