The Diary of Anne Frank: A Play

Contemporary theatregoers and literature enthusiasts might be surprised to learn that a Daily News review of Goodrich and Hackett’s The Diary of Anne Frank, which opened on Broadway in 1955, referred to the work as “not in any important sense a Jewish play.” The treatment of Anne Frank’s diary and the subsequent construction of her in the popular imagination through performance has long been the chagrin of Holocaust and theatre scholars, not because the diary isn’t an incredible document by an extraordinary young woman—it is—but because, as a dramatization of perhaps the most famous document of the Holocaust in circulation, The Diary of Anne Frank largely avoids the Holocaust itself. Before Hackett and Goodrich were brought in to write the play, Jewish journalist Meyer Levin vied for the right to adapt it himself for stage and film. As a war correspondent, Levin had gone into multiple concentration camps, including Bergen-Belsen where Anne and Margot died, and interviewed those who had suffered there. He saw Anne’s diary as an authentic “voice from the mass grave” that could help Americans to relate and grasp the magnitude of the Holocaust. Levin began a lengthy correspondence with Otto Frank, hoping to help him publish an American translation and gain the right to adapt the diary into a play for American audiences. Otto agreed, and Levin acted as an agent to navigate the American publishing market. After the diary was published in the United States, Levin’s glowing book review in the New York Times essentially single-handedly propelled the book into bestseller status. However, Doubleday decided to bypass Levin and hand control of the theatrical adaptation to producers, who enlisted playwright Lillian Hellman’s assistance to choose a suitable writer. Levin still fought, writing a radio play and sending it to Otto Frank, but the producers rejected it. Levin believed it was turned down for being too focused on the Jewishness of the story. However, one of the stipulations of a resulting lawsuit was that Levin’s play couldn’t be published or performed, so no definitive version is available.

To adapt Anne’s story into a play, Hellman picked Frances Hackett and Albert Goodrich, a successful Hollywood husband-and-wife screenwriting team known primarily for their comedies and musicals. They also weren’t Jewish, and therefore were pushed by producers to write a play that was designed to have more universal appeal. For instance, the Hanukah celebration scene, initially written with the advice of a rabbi to include Hebrew prayers, had to be changed to avoid alienating Broadway audiences. It was to be a lighthearted coming-of-age tragicomedy, in which Jewishness and the Holocaust were simply dramatic circumstances to overcome. For instance, just before the Nazis arrive (in the form of offstage sounds), Goodrich and Hackett’s Anne tells Peter, “We’re not the only people that’ve had to suffer. There’ve always been people that’ve had to… sometimes one race… sometimes another” (95). Anne’s death, devoid of the details of the conditions in which she died, became a romanticized tragedy of ethnically ambiguous lost potential. The play was a huge success, praised by critics for its surprising humor and optimism. With the Cold War rising since World War II, Anne’s story was more useful on Broadway stages if she was generalized as a victim of fascism rather than a victim of the Nazis, who targeted her specifically for being Jewish. History scholar Peter Novick wrote that Anne Frank and her family “became the representations of the Holocaust that nearly everyone who writes on the subject loves to hate.” This is not because Anne doesn’t deserve the posthumous attention and praise, but in the postwar near-decade until Anne’s diary was published, Holocaust awareness in the United States was minimal. There was no Holocaust Museum, and Elie Wiesel would not publish his shocking memoir about surviving the camps at Auschwitz and Birkenau until 1960. Anne’s diary and her depiction on stage and film became synonymous with Holocaust victimhood in the American national imaginary.

For the 1997 revival, playwright Wendy Kesselman was only contracted at first to make minor revisions and update the text, but in the 40 years since the original production, there was not only a far wider array of publicly available research and evidence of the Holocaust, but there were also pages and passages of Anne’s diary that had been released for the first time in 1995. The first play, which took eight drafts before Otto Frank approved it, was based on the diary that Otto edited. He omitted passages about Anne’s faith, her changing body, and her conflict with her mother, shaping Anne’s representation into his vision of the daughter he remembered. Kesselman attempts to give the play back to Anne, reinserting some of the most striking removed entries, such as Anne’s feelings about her period and her revelation that she may have been attracted to girls. The new adaptation works to emphasize the presence of the Holocaust outside and reaffirm the characters’ Jewishness more clearly. At the end of the play, the Nazis are not just noise outside. They come onstage and audiences witness the horror of the arrest. Another major difference between the 1955 version and the 1997 revision is that the original is a memory play. It begins with Miep giving Otto the diary, and Otto relives his time in the Annex during the war by reading it. Therefore, it becomes Otto’s play as the rest of the action is only a memory. The 1997 version starts as Anne and her family arrive at the Annex for the first time. The play is Anne’s narrative until her voice is cut off and Otto must take over. Instead of focusing the final lines on Anne’s famous quote about the intrinsic goodness of people, Otto describes the inhumanity of her last days. The play was still criticized for upholding the bubbly, optimistic, relentlessly positive image of Anne that continues to run deep in America’s imagination, but Anne was optimistic. While writing, she was a child who suffered and experienced terror but largely believed she would survive. Even while hiding from the Nazis, Anne couldn’t have fully understood how it would feel to be utterly broken and hopeless, having watched her sister die horribly and to give up on living. Anne’s hope is poignant because she died, but it is also terrible in hindsight, knowing how deeply it was shattered.