Authentic Events: the Diaries of and the Alleged Diaries of 1

Sonja Neef 23 Authentic Events: The Diaries of and the Alleged Diaries of 1 This article approaches the concepts of authenticity and copy by focusing on two autographs whose authenticity is at the core of a longstanding and culturally ur- gent debate: Anne Frank’s diaries and the alleged diaries of Adolf Hitler. Combin- ing these cases by discussing them in one and the same paper may, at first sight, seem odd, or even blasphemous. By taking a closer look at these diaries, however, I will concentrate on a rhetoric of authenticity that they share and that, at the same time, distinguishes them radically. The aim, then, is to arrive at a differentiated view of the concept of the authenticity of handwriting and of the cultural signifi- cance of the idea of the original. Both diaries were subject to a series of investigations into their authenticity. For Frank, several attempts were made to prove that the diaries were false and – along with this – that the Holocaust was a lie. For Hit- ler, in contrast, the aim was to prove that the diaries were authentic, and – along with this – to fill in the flatness of der Führer’s public persona with the private depth of an original, personal character. Both diaries had a serious impact on how we deal with the past and on how we locate this past in our present culture between memory and amnesia. Both for the diaries of Frank and for the alleged diaries of Hitler, the discourse of authenticity is to a large extent based on archival work. The primary scene for studying the authenticity or falseness of these manuscripts, then, is the archive, understood as a location where authenticity is generated by means of certification and custody.2 However, ‘exposing authenticity’ does not only mean exposing a 24 Sign Here! / Authentic Events document as true or false, one of the basic operations of the archive, but it can also refer to the act of exposing objects in a museum, literally understood as placing the object in a showcase, lighting it, and equipping it with an explanatory sign. The goal of this paper is to explore both ‘loci’ of authenticity: firstly, the archeı~on as an official hall that guarantees authenticity through the very architecture of an insti- tutionalized authority, and secondly, the mu-se-um – as a location where objects are displayed or ‘exposed’ in such a way that authorizes their function as authentic witnesses to the past, as semiophores in the sense of Krystzof Pomian (1990, 30): visible objects that gain their meaning by referring to the hidden, the invisible. The diary of Anne Frank was first published in 1947 by Anne’s father, Otto Frank, and was titled Het Achterhuis (The Secret Annex). Since then, it has been translat- ed and published in more than 60 languages, and has become one of the most widely read books in the world. However, from the 1950s on, the authenticity of the diary was repeatedly questioned by several ex-Nazis and neo-Nazis in a variety of pamphlets, brochures, and other publications that received extensive media coverage. Their accusations were all aimed in the same direction, claiming – to quote from a pamphlet distributed by Schönborn – the diary of Anne Frank to be a ‘forgery and the product of Jewish anti-German atrocity propaganda to support the lie of six million gassed Jews’ (quoted from Da Silva). Between 1960 and 1993, these allegations became the subject of five lawsuits in Germany, mostly filed by Otto Frank, sometimes with the Anne Frank House as co-plaintiff.3 In all these cases, the verdict that the accused were guilty of slander and publicly inciting racial hatred was grounded in evidence that the diary was authentic. Like the diary of Anne Frank, the alleged diaries of Adolf Hitler and the debate of their authenticity received extensive media coverage. Their discovery created a major stir in the media. On May 5, 1983, Germany’s best-selling weekly magazine Stern headlined the sensational find of secret diaries written by Adolf Hitler.4 The discovery of these documents was presented as an adventurous story about an he- roic pilot named Friedrich Gundlfinger who escaped Berlin at the moment of Rus- sian liberation in May 1945, carrying with him a safe containing secret documents of der Führer, among which were his personal notebooks. Almost forty years later, Gerd Heidemann, a Stern reporter, claimed that these diaries had shown up again. He explained that he had received the notebooks from an intermediary who had smuggled them into the country from East Germany by intervention of the Institut für Staatssicherheit (East German Secret Service) and some dubious generals in the Nationale Volksarmee (East German Army) (Heidemann in Stern, April 28, 1983). In fact, Hitler’s notebooks, along with other Nazi memorabilia, were manufactured by Heidemann’s mysterious intermediary – Konrad Kujau, alias Dr. Fischer, a forger and dealer in Nazi relics who found his business partners in collectors ob- sessed with the Third Reich. He had also faked, for example, handwritten manuscripts of Mein Kampf and paintings ‘by Hitler’. Almost a quarter of the more than Sonja Neef 25 700 artworks represented in Billy Price’s Adolf Hitler: The Unknown Artist (1983) were actually forgeries by Kujau.5 Both the diaries of Anne Frank and the alleged diaries of Adolf Hitler have been investigated by a battery of internationally acknowledged handwriting ex- perts. In what follows, I will not provide a complete overview of the jumble of cer- tifications and reports. Rather, I will ask how authenticity and falseness are con- ceived of in these assessments by analyzing some snapshots, each showing a frag- mented episode from a long and arduous quest for truth. These snapshots are tak- en at the two locations central to this article: first, the archive, and later in this article, the museum. The archival investigation of a document’s authenticity can roughly be divided into three types of approaches. First, from an historical point of view, a text-criti- cal analysis questions the text’s content for grammatical, logical, and historical consistency and places it in a context. Second, the material authenticity of a document is investigated on the grounds of chemical tests. And third, handwriting ex- perts analyze the visual performance of the actual writing. Initially, it was the first procedure – the historical approach – that, for Hitler’s notebooks, led to a certification of authenticity.6 Since Kujau had collected and read an extensive personal library about Hitler, historians specialized in the histo- ry of the Third Reich could not immediately expose the manuscripts as forgeries. Only upon a second viewing did a team of archivists from the German Bundes- archiv locate Kujau’s sources: Max Domarus’ well-known publication of Hitler’s speeches and proclamations, Gerd Rühle’s Das Dritte Reich, as well as the Nazi daily Der Völkische Beobachter. They identified a series of identical mistakes con- cerning dates, names of institutions, and historical facts made both by Kujau and one of his sources (Henke, 310-314). The initial certification of authenticity was also based on the immense amount of autographical material, which included a collection of 62 volumes of diaries, ac- companied by a massive archive of 300 watercolor paintings, drafts for speeches and letters – all ‘by Der Führer’, and, last but not least, his World War I uniform and helmet (Hamilton, 1). Hugh Trevor-Roper evaluated the find in the London Times as follows: ‘whereas signatures, single documents, or even groups of documents can be skillfully forged, a whole coherent archive covering 35 years is far less easily manufactured… The archive coheres as a whole and the diaries are an integral part of it’.7 But there were also skeptical voices, among which the famous historian David Irving and the German Bundeskriminalamt. Their critique introduced a second phase in which the Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung (German Criminal Court Laboratory), by chemical analyses, identified synthetic fibers in the binding as well as paper-bleaching agents in the paper of some volumes, neither of which were used before 1945.8 Whereas the historical investigation of the al- 26 Sign Here! / Authentic Events 1. Extract from Hardy’s summary of the report of the Gerechtelijk Laboratorium in Rijkswijk/ Netherlands (150-151) showing ‘micro-characteristics’ studied as visual ‘points of identification’ in the handwriting of Anne Frank. The examples on the left are from reference material, those on the right from the first diary. Sonja Neef 27 28 Sign Here! / Authentic Events leged Hitler diaries had initially failed, this chemical investigation provided positive evidence that the diaries were fake. To achieve positive evidence of a document’s falseness, historical and technical investigations are undoubtedly effective. To prove the authenticity of an authentic manuscript, however, the evidential value of these methods is limited, since they can only demonstrate a manuscript’s falseness. This is what happened in the assessments of the diaries of Anne Frank in which no anachronisms could be found – neither historical nor chemical.9 To achieve positive evidence of authenticity, the Gerechtelijk Laboratorium (Dutch Forensic Laboratory) investigated the specifi- cities of the handwriting and categorized them in an extensive list of so-called ‘micro-characteristics’ (microkenmerken) of both the writing movement and the writing pressure.10 These micro-characteristics were studied as visual ‘points of identification’ (identificatiepunten) appearing in the extensions of a character (Illustra- tion 1). If they follow a systematic scheme they can be compared with certified reference materials, in this case, with Anne Frank’s letters and school albums.

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