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The Dramatization of the Diary of Anne Frank and Its Influence on American Cultural Perceptions

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The Dramatization of the Diary of Anne Frank and Its Influence on American Cultural Perceptions GOOD AT HEART: THE DRAMATIZATION OF THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK AND ITS INFLUENCE ON AMERICAN CULTURAL PERCEPTIONS A thesis submitted to Kent State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts by Whitney Lewis Stalnaker May, 2016 © Copyright All rights reserved Except for previously published materials Thesis written by Whitney Lewis Stalnaker B.S., Glenville State College, 2011 M.A., Kent State University, 2016 Approved by Dr. Richard Steigmann-Gall , Advisor Dr. Kenneth Bindas , Chair, Department of History Dr. James Blank , Dean, College of Arts and Sciences TABLE OF CONTENTS TABLE OF CONTENTS ............................................................................................................... iii PREFACE ........................................................................................................................................v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................................................................................. ix INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................................................................1 Historiography ...............................................................................................................5 Methodology ..................................................................................................................9 Why This Play? ............................................................................................................12 CHAPTERS ONE MARKETING ANNE FRANK: THE CREATION OF AN AMERICANIZED ICON ............................................................................................14 Meyer Levin and the Rejected Script...........................................................................15 Creating Anne Frank ....................................................................................................16 Representation of Judaism ...........................................................................................20 Effects on the Supporting Characters ..........................................................................27 The Public Response ....................................................................................................35 TWO 1990S AMERICA: CHALLENGES TO ANNE FRANK’S IMAGE AND THE PUBLIC RESISTANCE ............................................................................42 Updating the Historiography........................................................................................43 The Holocaust in 1990s America .................................................................................48 Changes to the Script ...................................................................................................51 The Public Response ....................................................................................................67 iii THREE ANNE FRANK IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: DEEPENING THE IDEOLOGICAL DIVIDE ...................................................................................82 The Struggle for Ownership.........................................................................................84 An Expanding Historiography .....................................................................................86 Reimagining Anne Frank .............................................................................................88 Case Studies .................................................................................................................92 The Public Response ....................................................................................................99 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................116 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................................121 iv PREFACE Like millions across the globe, my introduction to the Holocaust via The Diary of Anne Frank at the age of sixteen was a formative experience. However, unlike most readers, who closed the book with a sense of inspiration or spiritual triumph, my experience left me with a nagging sense of incompleteness. Certainly, Anne had documented her own thoughts and experiences thoroughly, and with impressive journalistic prowess, but what of the others in hiding with her? Though their presence is significant in Anne’s writing, I felt as though I was looking at them through an extremely blurry lens, as they were only mentioned in terms of their relationships with the diarist and not independently. It was the supporting characters who intrigued me the most, and I wanted – even needed – to know more about them. So, I embarked upon the exhaustive process of uncovering more, researching as thoroughly as an eleventh-grader possibly could, and the information I found was fascinating: Anne’s sister, Margot, had also kept a diary while they were in hiding, presumed to have been lost after their arrest. Friedrich “Fritz” Pfeffer, family friend and Anne’s roommate in hiding, had a son from a previous marriage who he had sent to safety in England when the Nazi threat consumed Germany. Auguste van Pels, the matriarch of the family who shared the hiding place with the Franks and Pfeffer, had secretly given a valuable antique ring to Miep Gies during their time in hiding as a token of gratitude for her help in their concealment. Anne’s mother, Edith, had come of age in 1920s Germany, where she dressed in flapper-style dresses and collected jazz records. The wealth of information overwhelmed me, yet in spite of these obviously intriguing v bits of information, it seemed that little attention was truly being paid to these individuals, outside of their interactions with Anne. No books exist, aside from a single biography of Otto Frank, dedicated to an empirical examination of these individuals’ lives. Their lives, experiences, and untimely ends – just as rich and complex as those of Anne herself – were essentially obscured. My frustration was only compounded when my local theatre company decided to produce The Diary of Anne Frank, the theatrical adaptation of Anne’s story, written by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett and later adapted by Wendy Kesselman. Though a comparison of the original script and its updated adaptation quickly revealed that Kesselman’s script (the one that we chose to produce) was exponentially more faithful to the historical story than its predecessor, the depiction of the supporting characters in particular struck me. Aside from Anne, it was as though they had all been written as caricatures, the humanity that made their stories so poignant entirely erased from their onstage portrayals. Portraying Edith Frank, I was thrilled to discover the monologue in which she unburdens her fears to Miep Gies, yet found myself relegated to oversimplified reactions in many other scenes, usually chiding or fussing over Anne. The climactic scene in which Edith discovers that Hermann van Pels (or Herman van Daan, onstage) has been stealing bread from the dwindling food supply certainly allowed for some character development on my part, but I was shocked at the inaccurate and blatantly slanderous scene in which it occurred: at no point was it indicated that Hermann van Pels stole anything, let alone from his fellow hiders. I have since portrayed Edith three separate times, and the scene has proven an increasing point of contention for me the more that I have performed it. vi As I continued to discover the depths of the dichotomy between history and the stage, so did my castmates (likely assisted by the fact that I was none too quiet about it), and we took it upon ourselves to conduct the research necessary to better represent our characters. The results of our research took the form of many post-rehearsal discussions in which we vented our annoyance with the scant information available about our characters’ lives and attempted to “fill in the blanks” of their stories. Ultimately, these conversations left me with questions that would eventually become the basis of my thesis research. Namely, why was there such a dichotomy between the historical story and its interpretation on the stage? How is it that these people had become relegated to oversimplified caricatures of their already limited portrayals in Anne’s diary, especially when Otto Frank himself oversaw the first script’s creation? Why is it that, now over seventy years after Anne’s death, nobody has called for a dramatization that does justice to all of the people involved in her story? As it would turn out, the answers to these questions are neither direct nor easily explainable, but may only be understood through a thorough examination of the culture in which the play was written, as well as the demands of the public that has consumed it for so many decades. Through many hours of exhaustive research, fueled by countless cups of coffee, I set out to tackle the questions about the “supporting cast” of Anne’s diary that have plagued me for nearly a decade, but the story that emerged from my research transcended their onstage portrayal and soon became a complex narrative of American peculiarities, artistic interpretation, marketability, and cultural iconography. Though I remain frustrated at the inadequate attention these historical figures have received, I have now conquered my sizable confusion about how vii this particular theatrical script came to be
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