But Otto Frank was merely an accessory to the transformation of the diary from one kind of witness to another kind: from the painfully revealing to the partially concealing. If Anne Frank has been made into what we nowadays call an “icon,” it is because of the Pulitzer Prize–winning play derived from the diary—a play that rapidly achieved worldwide popularity, and framed the legend even the newest generation has come to believe in. Adapted by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, a Hollywood husband-and-wife screenwriting team, the theatricalized version opened on Broadway in 1955, ten years after the ovens of Auschwitz had cooled; its portrayal of the “funny, hopeful, happy” Anne continues to reverberate, not only in how the diary is construed, but in how the Holocaust itself is understood. The play was a work born in controversy, and was destined to roil on and on in rancor and litigation. Its tangle of contending lawyers finally came to resemble nothing so much as the knotted imbroglio of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce, the unending court case of Bleak House. “This scarecrow of a suit,” as Dickens describes it, “has, in course of time, become so complicated, that no man alive knows what it means.… Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; old people have died out of it.” Many of the chief figures in the protracted conflict over the Hacketts’ play have by now died out of it, but the principal issues, far from fading away, have, after so many decades, intensified. And whatever the ramifications of these issues, whatever perspectives they illumine or defy, the central question stands fast: who owns Anne Frank?
The hero, or irritant (depending on which side of the controversy one favors), in the genesis of the diary’s dramatization was Meyer Levin, a Chicago-born novelist of the social realist school, author of such fairly successful works as The Old Bunch, Compulsion, and The Settlers. Levin began as a man of the left, though a strong anti-Stalinist: he was drawn to proletarian fiction (Citizens, about steel workers), and had gone to Spain in the thirties to report on the Civil War. In 1945, as a war correspondent attached to the Fourth Armored Division, he was among the first Americans to enter Buchenwald, Dachau, and Bergen-Belsen. What he saw there was ungraspable and unendurable. “As I groped in the first weeks, beginning to apprehend the monstrous shape of the story I would have to tell,” he wrote, “I knew already that I would never penetrate its heart of bile, for the magnitude of the horror seemed beyond human register.” The truest telling, he affirmed, would have to rise up out of the mouth of a victim.
His “obsession,” as he afterward called it—partly in mockery of the opposition his later views evoked—had its beginning in those repeated scenes of piled-up bodies as he investigated camp after camp. From then on he could be said to carry the mark of Abel. He dedicated himself to helping the survivors get to Mandate Palestine, a goal that Britain had made illegal. In 1946, he reported from Tel Aviv on the uprising against British rule, and during the next two years he wrote and produced a pair of films on the struggles of the survivors to reach Palestine. In 1950 he published In Search, an examination of the effects of the European cataclysm on his experience and sensibility as an American Jew; Thomas Mann acclaimed it as “a human document of high order, written by a witness of our fantastic epoch whose gaze remained both clear and steady.” Levin’s intensifying focus on the Jewish condition in the twentieth century grew more and more heated, and when his wife, the novelist Tereska Torres, handed him the French edition of the diary (it had previously appeared only in Dutch), he felt he had found what he had thirsted after: a voice crying up from the ground, an authentic witness to the German onslaught.
He acted instantly. He sent Otto Frank a copy of In Search and offered his services as, in effect, an unofficial agent to secure British and American publication, asserting his distance from any financial gain; his interest, he said, was purely “one of sympathy.” He saw in the diary the possibility of “a very touching play or film,” and asked Frank’s permission to explore the idea. Frank at first avoided reading Levin’s book, saturated as it was in passions and commitments so foreign to his own susceptibilities; but he was not unfamiliar with Levin’s preoccupations. He had seen and liked one of his films. He encouraged Levin to go ahead—though a dramatization, he observed, would perforce “be rather different from the real contents” of the diary. Hardly so, Levin protested: no compromise would be needed; all the diarist’s thoughts could be preserved.
The “real contents” had already been altered by Frank himself, and understandably, given the propriety of his own background and of the times. The diary contained, here and there, intimate adolescent musings—talk of how contraceptives work, and explicit anatomical description: “In the upper part, between the outer labia, there’s a fold of skin that, on second thought, looks like a kind of blister. That’s the clitoris. Then come the inner labia.…” All this Frank edited out. He also omitted passages recording his daughter’s angry resistance to her mother’s nervous fussiness (“the most rotten person in the world”). Undoubtedly he better understood Edith Frank’s protective tremors, and was unwilling to perpetuate a negative portrait. Beyond this, he deleted numerous expressions of religious faith, a direct reference to Yom Kippur, terrified reports of Germans seizing Jews in Amsterdam. It was prudence, prudishness, and perhaps his own diffidently acculturated temperament that had stimulated many of these tamperings. In 1991, eleven years after Frank’s death, a “definitive edition” of the diary restored everything he had expurgated. But the image of Anne Frank as merry innocent and steadfast idealist—an image the play vividly promoted—was by then ineradicable.
A subsequent bowdlerization, in 1950, was still more programmatic, and crossed over even more seriously into the area of Levin’s concern for uncompromised faithfulness. The German edition’s translator, Anneliese Schütz, in order to mask or soft-pedal German culpability, went about methodically blurring every hostile reference to Germans and German. Anne’s parodic list of house rules, for instance, includes “Use of language: It is necessary to speak softly at all times. Only the language of civilized people may be spoken, thus no German.” The German translation reads: “Alle Kultursprachen … aber leise!”—“all civilized languages … but softly!” “Heroism in war or when confronting Germans” is dissolved into “heroism in war and in the struggle against oppression.” (“A book intended after all for sale in Germany,” Schütz explained, “cannot abuse the Germans.”) The diarist’s honest cry, in the midst of a vast persecution, that “there is no greater hostility in the world than exists between Germans and Jews,” became, in Schütz’s version, “there is no greater hostility in the world than between these Germans and Jews!” Frank agreed to the latter change because, he said, it was what his daughter had really meant: she “by no means measured all Germans by the same yardstick. For, as she knew so well, even in those days we had many good friends among the Germans.” But this guarded accommodationist view is Otto Frank’s own; it is nowhere in the diary. Even more striking than Frank’s readiness to accede to these misrepresentations is the fact that for forty-one years (until a more accurate translation appeared) no reader of the diary in German had ever known an intact text.
In contemplating a dramatization and pledging no compromise—he would do it, he told Frank, “tenderly and with the utmost fidelity”—Levin was clear about what he meant by fidelity. In his eyes the diary was conscious testimony to Jewish faith and suffering; and it was this, and this nearly alone, that defined for him its psychological, historical, and metaphysical genuineness, and its significance for the world. With these convictions foremost, Levin went in search of a theatrical producer. At the same time he was unflagging in pressing for publication; but the work was meanwhile slowly gaining independent notice. Janet Flanner, in her “Letter from Paris” in The New Yorker of November 11, 1950, noted the French publication of a book by “a precocious, talented little Frankfurt Jewess”—apparently oblivious to the unpleasant echoes, post-Hitler, of “Jewess.” Sixteen English-language publishers on both sides of th
e Atlantic had already rejected the diary when Levin succeeded in placing it with Valentine Mitchell, a London firm. His negotiations with a Boston house were still incomplete when Doubleday came forward to secure publication rights directly from Frank. Relations between Levin and Frank were, as usual, warm; Frank repeatedly thanked Levin for his efforts to further the fortunes of the diary, and Levin continued under the impression that Frank would support him as the playwright of choice.
If a single front-page review in the New York Times Book Review can rocket a book to instant sanctity, that is what Meyer Levin, in the spring of 1952, achieved for Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. It was an assignment he had avidly gone after. But Barbara Zimmerman (afterward Barbara Epstein, a founder of The New York Review of Books), the diary’s young editor at Doubleday, had earlier recognized its potential as “a minor classic,” and had enlisted Eleanor Roosevelt to supply an introduction. (According to Levin, it was ghostwritten by Zimmerman.) Levin now joined Zimmerman and Doubleday in the project of choosing a producer. Doubleday was to take over as Frank’s official agent, with the stipulation that Levin would have an active hand in the adaptation. “I think I can honestly say,” Levin wrote Frank, “that I am as well qualified as any other writer for this particular task.” In a cable to Doubleday, Frank appeared to agree: “DESIRE LEVIN AS WRITER OR COLLABORATOR IN ANY TREATMENT TO GUARANTEE IDEA OF BOOK.” The catch, it would develop, lurked in a perilous contingency: whose idea? Levin’s? Frank’s? The producer’s? The director’s? In any case, Doubleday was already sufficiently doubtful about Levin’s ambiguous role: what if an interested producer decided on another playwright?
What happened next—an avalanche of furies and recriminations lasting years—has become the subject of a pair of arresting discussions of the Frank-Levin affair. And if “affair” suggests an event on the scale of the Dreyfus case, that is how Levin saw it: as an unjust stripping of his rightful position, with implications far beyond his personal predicament. An Obsession with Anne Frank, by Lawrence Graver, brought out by the University of California Press in 1995, is the first study to fashion a coherent narrative out of the welter of claims, counterclaims, letters, cables, petitions, polemics, and rumbling confusions that accompany any examination of the diary’s journey to the stage. The Stolen Legacy of Anne Frank, by Ralph Melnick, published in 1997 by Yale University Press, is denser in detail and in sources than its predecessor, and more insistent in tone. Both are accomplished works of scholarship that converge on the facts and diverge in their conclusions. Graver is reticent with his sympathies; Melnick is Levin’s undisguised advocate. Graver finds no villains. Melnick finds Lillian Hellman.
Always delicately respectful of Frank’s dignity and rights—and mindful always of the older man’s earlier travail—Levin had promised that he would step aside if a more prominent playwright, someone “world famous,” should appear. Stubbornly and confidently, he went on toiling over his own version. As a novelist, he was under suspicion of being unable to write drama. (In after years, when he had grown deeply bitter, he listed, in retaliation, “Sartre, Gorky, Galsworthy, Steinbeck, Wilder!”) Though there are many extant drafts of Levin’s play, no definitive script is available; both publication and performance were proscribed by Frank’s attorneys. A script staged without authorization by the Israel Soldiers’ Theater in 1966 sometimes passes from hand to hand, and reads well: moving, theatrical, actable, professional. This later work was not, however, the script submitted in 1952 to Cheryl Crawford, one of a number of Broadway producers who rushed in with bids in the wake of the diary’s acclaim. Crawford, an eminent co-founder of the Actors Studio, was initially encouraging to Levin, offering him first consideration and, if his script was not entirely satisfactory, the aid of a more experienced collaborator. Then—virtually overnight—she rejected his draft outright. Levin was bewildered and infuriated, and from then on became an intractable and indefatigable warrior on behalf of his play—and on behalf, he contended, of the diary’s true meaning. In his Times review he had summed it up stirringly as the voice of “six million vanished Jewish souls.”
Doubleday, meanwhile, sensing complications ahead, had withdrawn as Frank’s theatrical agent, finding Levin’s presence—injected by Frank—too intrusive, too maverick, too independent and entrepreneurial: fixed, they believed, only on his own interest, which was to stick to his insistence on the superiority of his work over all potential contenders. Frank, too, had begun—kindly, politely, and with tireless assurances of his gratitude to Levin—to move closer to Doubleday’s cooler views, especially as urged by Barbara Zimmerman. She was twenty-four years old, the age Anne would have been, very intelligent and attentive. Adoring letters flowed back and forth between them, Frank addressing her as “little Barbara” and “dearest little one.” On one occasion he gave her an antique gold pin. About Levin, Zimmerman finally concluded that he was “impossible to deal with in any terms, officially, legally, morally, personally”—a “compulsive neurotic … destroying both himself and Anne’s play.” (There was, of course, no such entity as “Anne’s play.”)
But what had caused Crawford to change her mind so precipitately? She had sent Levin’s script for further consideration to Lillian Hellman, and to the producers Robert Whitehead and Kermit Bloomgarden. All were theater luminaries; all spurned Levin’s work. Frank’s confidence in Levin, already much diminished, failed altogether. Advised by Doubleday, he put his trust in the Broadway professionals, while Levin fought on alone. Famous names—Maxwell Anderson, John Van Druten, Carson McCullers—came and went. Crawford herself ultimately pulled out, fearing a lawsuit by Levin. In the end—in a plethora of complications, legal and emotional, and with the vigilant Levin still agitating loudly and publicly for the primacy of his work—Kermit Bloomgarden surfaced as producer and Garson Kanin as director. Hellman had recommended Bloomgarden; she had also recommended Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett. The Hacketts had a long record of Hollywood hits, from Father of the Bride to It’s A Wonderful Life, and they had successfully scripted a series of lighthearted musicals. Levin was appalled—had his sacred vision been pushed aside not for the awaited world-famous dramatist, but for a pair of frivolous screen drudges, mere “hired hands”?
The hired hands were earnest and reverent. They began at once to read up on European history, Judaism and Jewish practice; they consulted a rabbi. They corresponded eagerly with Frank, looking to satisfy his expectations. They traveled to Amsterdam and visited 263 Prinsengracht, the house on the canal where the Franks, the Van Daans, and Dussel had been hidden. They met Johannes Kleiman, who, together with Harry Kraler and Miep Gies, had taken over the management of Frank’s business in order to conceal and protect him and his family in the house behind. Reacting to the Hacketts’ lifelong remoteness from Jewish subject matter, Levin took out an ad in the New York Post attacking Bloomgarden and asking that his play be given a hearing. “My work,” he wrote, “has been with the Jewish story. I tried to dramatize the Diary as Anne would have, in her own words.… I feel my work has earned the right to be judged by you, the public.” “Ridiculous and laughable,” said Bloomgarden. Appealing to the critic Brooks Atkinson, Levin complained—extravagantly, outrageously—that his play was being “killed by the same arbitrary disregard that brought an end to Anne and six million others.” Frank stopped answering Levin’s letters; many he returned unopened.
The Hacketts, too, in their earliest drafts, were devotedly “with the Jewish story.” Grateful to Hellman for getting them the job, and crushed by Bloomgarden’s acute dislike of their efforts so far, they flew to Martha’s Vineyard weekend after weekend to receive advice from Hellman. “She was amazing,” Goodrich crowed, happy to comply. Hellman’s suggestions—and those of Bloomgarden and Kanin—were consistently in a direction opposite to Levin’s. Wherever the diary touched on Anne’s consciousness of Jewish fate or faith, they quietly erased the reference or changed its emphasis. Whatever was specific they made generic. The sexual tenderness betw
een Anne and the young Peter van Daan was moved to the forefront. Comedy overwhelmed darkness. Anne became an all-American girl, an echo of the perky character in Junior Miss, a popular play of the previous decade. The Zionist aspirations of Margot, Anne’s sister, disappeared. The one liturgical note, a Hanukkah ceremony, was absurdly defined by local contemporary habits (“eight days of presents”); a jolly jingle replaced the traditional “Rock of Ages,” with its somber allusions to historic travail. (Kanin had insisted on something “spirited and gay,” so as not to give “the wrong feeling entirely.” “Hebrew,” he added, “would simply alienate the audience.”)
Astonishingly, the Nazified notion of “race” leaped out in a line attributed to Hellman and nowhere present in the diary. “We’re not the only people that’ve had to suffer,” says the Hacketts’ Anne. “There’ve always been people that’ve had to … sometimes one race … sometimes another.” This pallid speech, yawning with vagueness, was conspicuously opposed to the pivotal reflection it was designed to betray:
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