“Presumably man, thanks to his greater physical strength, achieved dominance over women from the very start; man, who earns the money, who begets children, who may do what he wants…It is stupid enough of women to have borne it all in silence for such a long time, since the more centuries this arrangement lasts, the more deeply rooted it becomes. Luckily schooling, work and progress have opened women’s eyes. In many countries…modern women demand the right of complete independence!”
All along, we have sensed that Anne’s rage at her mother and at Mrs. Van Pels has involved their inability to be—or even to seem—as brave and sensible and competent as the men. Only late in the diary does Anne understand that there is an actual person behind the abstract symbol of female limitation and servitude that she has so despised. Her digression about the problems of, and the disrespect for, women ends by suggesting that those who have gone through childbirth are entitled to gratitude and sympathy on that score alone. Anne seems to have realized that her mother is not entirely to blame for the ways in which she had been conditioned to behave, and for her stunted ambitions and expectations.
Almost a year and a half after writing a particularly furious passage in which she describes forcing herself to remain calm and having to suppress the desire to slap her mother, Anne had second thoughts about including it in Het Achterhuis. In the meantime, she had undergone the change that John Berryman considered the turning point in her child-into-adult conversion, which immediately followed her vision of her friend Lies and her dead grandmother. “I was very unhappy again last evening. Granny and Lies came into my mind. Granny, oh darling Granny, how little we understood of what she suffered, or how sweet she was…And Lies, is she still alive? What is she doing? Oh, God, protect her and bring her back to us. Lies, I see in you all the time what my lot might have been.”
In an entry dated three days later, January 2, 1944, Anne remarks that she has been rereading her diary and is shocked by the “hothead” sections about her mother. She blames her bitterness on “moods” that prevented her from seeing a situation from another person’s point of view and from realizing that she might have hurt Mummy or made her unhappy. Her mother had responded in kind, and the result was “unpleasantness and misery rebounding all the time.”
In the aftermath of her vision of Lies, Anne vows to improve. She promises herself that she will stop making her mother cry. She herself has grown more mature, and her mother is no longer quite so anxious. But a few days later, Anne is unable to refrain from returning to the theme of how hard it is to respect her mother and how little she wishes to follow her example.
The winter of 1944 marked the start of an acutely introspective period during which Anne looked back and measured the person she had become against the girl she was: “If I think of my life in 1942, it all feels so unreal. It was quite a different Anne who enjoyed that heavenly existence from the Anne who has grown wise within these walls. Yes, it was a heavenly life. Boyfriends at every turn, about 20 friends and acquaintances of my own age, the darling of nearly all the teachers, spoiled from top to toe by Mummy and Daddy, lots of sweets, enough pocket money, what more could one want?…I look now at that Anne Frank as an amusing, jokey, but superficial girl who has nothing to do with the Anne of today.”
Had Anne survived, or had she been able to stay in contact with the wider world, she might have taken consolation from the discovery that many, if not most, teenage girls come into conflict with their mothers. Isolated in the attic, Anne could only examine her own history and her own conscience, and try to locate the wellspring of her sadness and her rage.
JUST as Anne finds a shorthand in which to express her complex relations with her parents by recording her response to their tastes in reading—Goethe versus the prayer book—so she introduces the Van Pelses by describing their arrival at the secret annex with Mrs. Van Pels’s pottie in a hatbox, and her husband carrying a folding tea table under his arm. The Van Pelses begin their new lives with a noisy quarrel of the sort that Otto and Edith would never have had, and would certainly never have allowed to be overheard. Coarse, selfish about trivial matters, unembarrassed to squabble over plates and sheets, yet ultimately sympathetic, the Van Pelses do one thing after another that arouses, in the reader, amusement and affection commingled with annoyance. They are characters.
Because the Van Pelses are so much more transparent than the Franks, we can more easily watch them weakening and falling apart. By the last summer in the attic, Mrs. Van Pels is talking about hanging, suicide, prison, a bullet in the head. “She quarrels, uses abusive language, cries, pities herself, laughs, and then starts a fresh quarrel again.”
Anne’s response to Mrs. Van Pels is quite different from the helpers’ memories of her real-life model, whom Miep Gies called, “a very uncomplicated person, anxious and cheerful at the same time.” Miep came to see Mrs. Van Pels as not only realistic but prescient. “If anyone had a premonition of how badly it would all end, she was the one.” Anne seems not to have known that, for Miep’s birthday in February 1944, Auguste van Pels—who, in the diary, we see greedily holding on to every possession—gave Miep an antique diamond-and-onyx ring as a “way to express the inexpressible.”
Mr. Van Pels grows more fractious as his cigarette supply dwindles. He is careless in ways that endanger the Jews and their helpers. Yet another crisis, marked by yet another fight, erupts when the Van Pelses’ money runs out and they must sell Mrs. Van Pels’s fur coat. It is a tribute to the vividness of Anne’s writing that readers can recall the drama surrounding the loss of the coat decades after reading the diary. All over Europe, families were deciding what to sell or keep or barter as they struggled to survive. But of all those painful conversations, the one we hear about in detail is the one that Anne describes in a few lines. The argument erupts over a rabbit-skin coat that Mrs. Van Pels has worn for seventeen years, and for which her husband has received the impressive sum of 325 florins. Having hoped to save the money in order to purchase new clothes after the war, Mrs. Van Pels is enraged by her husband’s insistence that the money is deperately needed by the household.
“The yells and screams, stamping and abuse—you can’t possibly imagine it! It was frightening. My family stood at the bottom of the stairs, holding their breath, ready if necessary to drag them apart!”
How humiliating for the Van Pelses to have such a squalid fight with another family listening, and not just any family but the perfect Franks. In many ways, the Van Pelses are the more well drawn and rounded of the two couples in the secret annex, since—unlike the angelic Pim and (in Anne’s view) the unfeeling Mummy—the Van Pelses are alternately and sometimes simultaneously maddening and touching.
The gunfire that frightens Anne terrifies her neighbor: “Mrs. Van Daan, the fatalist, was nearly crying, and said in a very timid little voice, “Oh, it is so unpleasant! Oh, they are shooting so hard,” by which she really means “I’m so frightened.” There’s something affecting about her husband’s hypochondria, the “tremendous fuss” he makes about a little cold, rubbing himself with eucalyptus and gargling with chamomile tea. Anne’s dual portrait captures so much that, even as enforced intimacy enrages her, we can see the Van Pelses’ charm and vulnerability shining through.
One thing seems inarguable: Anne was able to make the Van Pelses so real and present to us that we grieve at the thought of the hand injury that made Hermann lose his will to survive at Auschwitz, just as we can hardly bear to wonder if Auguste regretted the loss of her beloved fur coat during that freezing march from Bergen-Belsen to her death.
IF the characterization of the Van Pelses is a marvel of literary portraiture, the image of their son, Peter, is another matter. If Peter strikes us as an interesting character, a closer reading reveals that this is largely because he is lit by the refracted glow of Anne’s interest. When her fascination wanes and disappears, as it does in Anne’s revisions—which we’ll look at in the next chapter—we are left with only what we actually see him do and sa
y. He accompanies Otto to investigate the break-in, does the heavy lifting of the sacks of beans, and wishes he weren’t Jewish. Young readers may develop a crush on Peter, but it is Anne’s crush. Her attraction transforms Peter into a romantic figure. But without that intensity—which, again, is Anne’s—Peter is a touching but rather ordinary boy. Moody, mercurial, restless, not especially perceptive, he is a scrim on which the isolated girl can project her loneliness and longing.
Anne’s early opinion of Peter is so harsh that one pleasure of reading the book is watching that antipathy reverse itself. In the “a” version of the diary, Anne reports getting a chocolate bar from Peter for her thirteenth birthday, before the families went into hiding. But the fact that they are acquaintances is hard to extract from her account of the Van Pelses’ arrival in the attic; Anne calls Peter “a rather soft, shy, gawky youth; can’t expect much from his company.” The authors of the play must have thought it simplified matters to have the young couple meet for the first time in the annex, which is the impression that most readers and audience members come away with.
Over the next months, Anne emphasizes how boring, lazy, and hypersensitive Peter is; the hypochondria he shares with his father is less winning in a young person. The first dramatized scene in which he appears involves a fight over a book that his father doesn’t want him reading. Peter gets credit for standing up to Mr. Van Pels, but loses it for the peevish and pouting quality of his resistance. Peter, we learn, has trouble with English, and has a comical fondness for using foreign words he doesn’t understand.
By late September, Anne is telling the Van Pelses that Peter often strokes her cheek, and she wishes he wouldn’t. Appalled by their response—could she grow to “like” Peter? He “certainly liked me very much”—Anne tells his parents that she thinks Peter is “rather awkward.” But slowly a camaraderie develops; Peter and Anne both enjoy dressing up in the clothes of the opposite-sex parent. For his birthday, in November, Peter gets a razor, a Monopoly game, and a cigarette lighter—in contrast to the Franks, who get, and give one another, books. In fact, Anne tells us, Peter “seldom reads.”
Peter at last moves to center stage as the hero of an adventure involving the transport of masses of beans. Four months later, we see him bitten by one of the large rats swarming the attic, and not long after, he is the one who goes downstairs with Otto after they hear a noise.
Not until January 1944 do we realize—before Anne does—what is starting to happen between the two teenagers: “It gave me a queer feeling each time I looked into his deep blue eyes, and he sat there with that mysterious laugh playing round his lips…and with my whole heart I almost beseeched him: oh, tell me, what is going on inside you, oh, can’t you look beyond this ridiculous chatter?” By the next month, Anne and Peter are having the intimate conversations that will fuel Anne’s longing for someone to love, as well as her conviction that this someone is Peter.
But even as Anne finds these exchanges endlessly fascinating, the reader may feel that Peter’s contributions to these talks are less riveting than hers. Peter expresses his desire to go to the Dutch East Indies and live on a plantation, as well as his hope that he may be able to pass for Christian after the war. When he reveals his inferiority complex and claims he feels he is less intelligent than the Franks, an impartial observer might agree. And yet, early in March, Anne records wanting to do something about Peter’s loneliness and sense of being unloved, and in a postscript to the March 6 entry, she admits that she has begun to live from one of their meetings to the next.
They talk, in the abstract, about kissing; they discover how much they have in common, how much they have changed during their time in the attic, how their ideas about each other have evolved. They discuss the fact that neither of them can confide in their parents, that frustration drives Anne to cry herself to sleep at night while Peter retreats to his loft and swears. They consider how different they were when they first arrived in the annex, and how they can barely recognize themselves as the same people they were in 1942. They marvel at the astonishing fact that they could have disliked each other at first, that Peter thought Anne chattered too much, while she was annoyed that he didn’t bother flirting with her. When Peter refers to his tendency to isolate himself from the others, Anne tells him that his silence is, in a way, like her chatter. As unlikely as it may seem, she too loves peace and quiet. They admit how glad they are to be together, to have each other. And Anne tells Peter that she would love to be able to help him.
“‘You always do help me,’” he said. ‘How?’ I asked, very surprised. ‘By your cheerfulness.’ That was certainly the loveliest thing he said. It was wonderful, he must have grown to love me as a friend, and that is enough for the time being…
“If he looks at me with those eyes that laugh and wink, then it’s just as if a little light goes on inside me.”
Such outpourings will be familiar (perhaps all too familiar) to anyone who has ever fallen in love. But they are utterly new to Anne, and, again, it is a tribute to her ability to write honestly and persuasively and to find the right tone for what she is telling Kitty (and us) that she can make it seem new. Anne longs for a kiss, they don’t kiss, they kiss. How easy it would be for another writer to make this sound banal.
On May 19, Anne writes, “After my laborious conquest, I’ve got the situation a bit more in hand now, but I don’t think my love has cooled off.” On June 14, she tells Kitty, “Peter is good and he’s a darling, but still there’s no denying that there’s a lot about him that disappoints me.” Three weeks later, Peter jokes about the possibility of becoming a criminal or a gambler, and Anne fears that Peter is becoming too dependent on her. “Poor boy, he’s never known what it feels like to make other people happy, and I can’t teach him that either…it hurts me every time I see how deserted, how scornful, and how poor he really is.”
By the fifteenth of July, Anne’s enchantment with Peter has reached a low ebb: “Now he clings to me, and for the time being, I don’t see any way of shaking him off and putting him on his own feet. When I realized that he could not be a friend for my understanding, I thought I would at least try to lift him up out of his narrowmindedness and make him do something with his youth.” That is the final mention of Peter in Anne’s book.
In the theatrical and film versions of the diary, Anne and Peter are in the garret, staring rapturously at the heavens when the Gestapo come to arrest them. But that was not what happened. Anne was with her mother and sister. Otto was upstairs with Peter, helping him with the English lessons that, we know from Anne, gave him so much trouble.
TWO relatively minor characters, the dentist Pfeffer and Margot Frank, are among the most nuanced and well drawn. With every minutely monitored tic, Fritz Pfeffer becomes the remarkable literary creation that is Albert Dussel. Of the eight people in the annex, his characterization is probably least like his counterpart in life; by all accounts, Pfeffer was extremely attractive to the ladies. But his charms were lost on Anne.
The dentist arrives late and brings bad news. Nazis have been going door-to-door, hunting down Jews. Friends have been rounded up and deported, loaded trucks rumble past, and columns of bullied prisoners trudge through the streets. These sobering truths, mixed with gratitude for having been spared the fate of her fellow Jews, temper the reluctance Anne otherwise might have felt on learning that Pfeffer—who is her father’s age, but whom, unlike Otto, she refers to as old—is going to share her little room.
In her excellent biography of Anne Frank, Melissa Müller writes, “Otto and Edith’s decision to put Pfeffer in the same room with Anne instead of with the sixteen-year-old Peter van Pels corroborates Anne’s complaint that she was in fact regarded as a child. Not only Otto but Edith Frank as well disregarded her growing need for privacy and obviously ignored their adolescent daughter’s sense of modesty, which was of course becoming all the more acute as she matured sexually.”
Perhaps Anne’s characterization of Pfeffer might have been a bi
t more sympathetic had she not spent night after wakeful night listening to a middle-aged man sleep. By contrast, Miep Gies very much liked her dentist, as did many of his loyal patients.
His Christian fiancée, Charlotte Kaletta, was devoted to Pffefer, who was nineteen years her senior and who had a son from an earlier marriage that had ended in divorce. The couple had lived in Germany until Hitler’s racial laws forced them to flee in the futile hope that they could be married in Holland. In the diary, “Lotje” is referred to as Dussel’s wife, and in a section cut from the “a” version, Anne mentions getting a roll of candy drops for her thirteenth birthday from “Mrs. Pfeffer.” When her fiancé went into hiding, Charlotte kept up their correspondence, love letters that Miep delivered without revealing where he was.
After the war, Charlotte’s friendship with Otto Frank ended, possibly because she was upset by Anne’s portrayal of Pfeffer in the diary and later by his characterization in the play. It’s easy to see that the woman who loved Fritz Pfeffer so much that she waited for his return even after it had become clear that he had died in Neuengamme might object to the reader catching a near final glimpse of Pfeffer after a quarrel with the Franks over the “sharing out of the butter. Dussel’s capitulation. Mrs. Van Daan and the latter very thick, flirtations, kisses and friendly little laughs. Dussel is beginning to get longings for women.”
Anne’s patience wears especially thin on Sundays, when Pfeffer performs the exercises she describes in appalled detail: “When he has ended with a couple of violent arm-waving exercises to loosen his muscles, His Lordship begins his toilet.” Though everyone behaves as if no decent person should think twice about a grown man sharing a room with a pubescent girl, sexual discomfort suffuses Anne’s view of Pfeffer. She’s repulsed when she comes down with the flu and he plays doctor, laying his greasy head on her naked chest. “Not only did his hair tickle unbearably, but I was embarrassed in spite of the fact that he once, thirty years ago, studied medicine and has the title of Doctor. Why should the fellow come and lie on my heart? He’s not my lover, after all! For that matter, he wouldn’t hear whether it’s healthy or unhealthy inside me anyway, his ears need syringing first as he’s becoming alarmingly hard of hearing.”
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