The Diary of Anne Frank: A Play

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1955

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Summary

Background

Act Summaries & Analyses

Act I

Act II

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Themes

Waiting and the Passage of Time

Anne Frank and the other seven inhabitants of the Secret Annex spend two and a half years in hiding, confined to a small inside space. The first notable effect of the play’s evocative soundscape is the bells of the nearby Westertoren, a large clock on the highest church spire in the city that chimes every 15 minutes. Anne is delighted at the sound, whereas her mother laments that she’ll never get used to it. For Anne, who is on the cusp of growing up and becoming a woman, the passage of time is something she eagerly awaits. For Mrs. Frank and the other adults, time is something to be lost. The frequent chiming is both a reminder of how slowly time is dragging and an accounting of each quarter-hour increment as it disappears. The Secret Annex is connected to the offices and above the warehouses of Otto Frank’s business, and the first rule is that for 10 hours a day on weekdays, they must be still and silent while the workers are present. That time is tedious, and they must find ways to waste it, breathing a sigh of relief when it ends. The paradox of time passing in the Annex arises from the dramatic irony through which the audience knows that this time is the last time that these families will be together. The boring time that they’re wishing away is inching seven of the eight closer to their inevitable deaths. Time runs together, and when Act II starts, a year has disappeared since the end of Act I.

Meanwhile, despite this dramatic irony, the arrival of D-Day in the second act creates an irrational sense of suspense. For an audience that is counting the time onstage against knowledge of the historical end date of the war, the play urges an illogical hope that they might survive this time and that the re-performance of events means that the outcome could change. Of course, any hopes are dashed, and the suspense serves to show just how close they were to running out the clock and surviving. The passage of time in the Annex is a sort of time out of time, as the inhabitants live outside all social structures except for the confines of the workday. Alongside this fabricated construction of time, there are markers of normalcy. Anne’s diary is a chronological document, and she notates the days as they pass. Miep brings new library books every Saturday. They celebrate holidays. Mrs. Frank gives Anne a “curfew” for her attic date with Peter. Additionally, the radio broadcasts interspersed throughout the text provide anchors that root the narrative within the flow of historical events. The Annex inhabitants are beholden to these manmade structures of time that dictate their circumstances and survival, all of which seem as if they’re in flux to the characters but are actually frozen in history.

However, there is also a force of natural time in the play, which occurs in cycles that supersedes manmade time. Although the Annex keeps the natural world largely hidden from its inhabitants, Anne can see a sliver of the chestnut tree outside and longs to see it bloom, hoping that they will be free when it happens. From the attic, Anne and Peter can see the moon, which continues to cycle regardless of the atrocities on earth. For both younger teens, their bodies feel the passage of natural time in contradiction to their stagnant environment. In particular, Anne begins to menstruate, an internal cycle that she calls a “sweet secret” (44) that marks time within her body. These natural cycles are affirmations of life amidst death and the expectation of living. The characters make promises to their future selves with the poignant assumption that they have futures. They aren’t life amidst death, but ghosts in Otto’s memory. The future time that would have redeemed their long hours of waiting is snatched away, insignificant within the magnitude of the years of life erased along with the six million Jews extinguished by the Nazis.

The World Outside the Annex

In the first lines of the play, through voiceover, Anne notes, “[Father] said it would be very hard for us to live cut off from the rest of the world” (8). The immediate world outside is Amsterdam, and the Secret Annex is attached to Mr. Frank’s office building and warehouse, which is in the middle of the city. The Annex represents Mr. Frank’s last narrowing sphere of influence, where although he has been forced to give up his business, he still has the respect and loyalty of some former employees who are willing to help him. As Anne explains, Hitler and the Nazis have been closing in on them for most of her life. The Franks left their home in Germany in 1933 when Anne was about four and Hitler was appointed chancellor. Six years later, Hitler invaded Poland and began seizing control of Europe, taking the Netherlands in 1940. By the time the Franks and the others went into hiding in 1942, Hitler and the Axis powers controlled most of Europe. In the play, the walls of the Annex are their last defense against being swallowed by the outside world, and the outside world has become enormous. Escape to Switzerland, the closest free country, meant a long, dangerous journey through Nazi-occupied territory. At the beginning of the play, Anne is the only character who isn’t afraid. She is young, and persecution has become normal. She even tries to go down to the office for a pen, surprised by her father’s terrified response. By the end of the first act, however, Anne is just as frightened as the others, especially when her father goes downstairs after the robbery. Anne describes, “I see the eight of us in the Annex as if we were a patch of blue sky surrounded by menacing black clouds. […] But the clouds are moving in on us” (42).

As much as the characters fear the outside, they are also desperate for it. They jump with excitement at the sound of the buzzer, hungrily smelling the air that comes in with Miep and treasuring her stories and gifts. Anne stares longingly at a sliver of tree and the sight of the moon from the attic. After only two months, they eagerly await Mr. Dussel’s arrival as an ambassador from outside, but the news he brings of heightened persecution only renews their fears, particularly Anne’s when she learns that her best friend has been taken and might be dead. In a rational world, their intense fear of stepping foot outside would seem almost phobic and exaggerated, as if the fresh air itself might be toxic, but within the irrational world ruled by Nazis, they very likely would be killed or arrested if spotted. Mrs. Frank’s threat to put Mr. van Daan out of the Annex is met with horror as if she had suggested they kill him on the spot. They take great care to avoid leaking any part of themselves into the outside, keeping the windows covered and being as silent as possible while workers are downstairs. They burn their trash rather than leave evidence of their lives out with the garbage. However, they can’t control everything. Mr. Dussel’s information about Anne’s friend gives her nightmares that make her scream. When the burglars are downstairs, Peter knocks over a chair, and the burglars seem to realize that someone is there. Near the end of the play, lights illuminate the smoke rising from their chimney, suggesting that perhaps this is the detail that gives them away and foreshadowing the thick smoke from the ovens at Auschwitz and other camps.

Much of the intrusion from the world comes in the form of sounds. Some are real sounds that signify immediate threats. For instance, the Nazi police siren stops everyone in their tracks, even in the middle of an argument. The sounds of bombing outside inspire terror and frantic prayers. News bulletins keep them apprised of Hitler’s victories across Europe until the tides finally turn in the second act. Other sounds tread the line between distortion and reality, such as the sudden, overpoweringly loud recording of Hitler rousing crowds at a rally, and the sound of the train that meshes with Anne’s nightmare. They listen obsessively for sounds from outside because their lives are at stake, so it makes sense that the border might break down between real and hallucinatory. They listen closely for the sounds of the workers leaving before going about their lives. At the end of the first act, they listen breathlessly to the burglars downstairs, and an entire outside scene takes place through sound as a dog barks and the thieves rattle the bookcase in front of the annex door. Mrs. Frank’s auditory vigilance is what leads her to catch Mr. van Daan stealing food after hearing what she thinks is one of the rats that come from the outside to eat their meager supplies. Notably, when the Nazi police do show up, they do it silently. After two and a half years on edge, the Annex dwellers are caught off guard. Once their stealthy entrance is noticed, the silence breaks with their harsh German shouting, and the sound of outside threats is suddenly present and embodied. The prolonged arrest scene is a chaotic mixing of terrified screams from the actors onstage, tossed furniture, Mrs. Frank’s music box, the sound effect of sirens outside into a cacophony that crescendos with the deafening sound of a train.

Good and Evil in Human Nature

On July 15, 1944, Anne wrote, “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are really good at heart” (65). This became the most famous and oft-quoted line from Anne Frank’s diary, written a couple of weeks before she and the others were caught and arrested on August 4th. As a tagline, it sold the diary as an inspirational story by avoiding the truth, which was that Anne wrote that statement of optimism before she experienced the waking nightmare of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. In the 1955 version of the play, this is the penultimate line, communicated through Anne’s voiceover. Otto closes the diary and says, “She puts me to shame” (98). There is silence and the play ends. Within this framing, Otto is understandably unable to forgive as a grieving father, but Anne is not. The posthumous re-contextualizing of the quote puts the words back into Anne’s mouth as a counterfeit offering of absolution delivered to American audiences, which is far more palatable than grappling with reconciling the horrifying newsreel footage of emaciated concentration camp victims with the exuberant little girl they’ve just gotten to know. In the 1997 adaptation, Kesselman shifts the placement of the quote. As the Nazis creep in downstairs and the teens happily eat strawberries, Anne’s voiceover plays, punctuated by the Nazi breaking in and barking in German. The play ends with Otto’s voiceover recounting details of each person’s fate, much of which would not have been known in 1955, as gathering information from eyewitness testimonies was a process that took decades. Instead of ending with Anne’s tacit forgiveness, Otto quotes one of the last known things Anne said: “I don’t have anyone anymore” (67). Emaciated, naked, flushed with typhus, and crawling with lice, Anne had watched Margot die and died a few days later.

It’s impossible to know if Anne would have stood by her most famous words in the end, but in the play as well as the diary, Anne grapples with her own identity and sense of goodness. In comparison to Margot, who is repeatedly recognized as the good sister, Anne is always found lacking. She resents her mother and feels cruel for it, but with no friends to work through these issues with, Anne believes, “I’ll have to become a good person on my own, without anyone to advise me” (27). Upon learning from Mr. Dussel that her best friend has been arrested with her family, Anne is tormented by guilt. She exclaims, “I feel wicked sleeping in a warm bed when my friends are at the mercy of the cruelest monsters ever to walk the earth” (32). Anne is conflicted by what she sees as a split in her nature between good and bad, telling her father that she wants to be a good person but feeling as if she would have to disown a part of herself. Of course, Anne is still a child, even as she matures, and her worries about being a good or bad person are a normal part of finding herself, but within history and the world of the play, Anne is exposed to abnormally stark examples of the best and worst of human nature. Before hiding, Anne endured the harsh and senseless persecution of Jews, and she has seen how Hitler and his henchmen have used propaganda to denounce Jews as evil. Throughout the play, Anne comes to fully understand that the Nazis want to kill her and everyone she loves, although she doesn’t quite grasp the cruelty with which they will carry it out until she experiences it.

Philosopher Hannah Arendt, while reporting on the 1961 trial of Nazi Adolph Eichmann, one of the major orchestrators of the Holocaust, was stunned by what she called “the banality of evil.” He was a “terrifyingly normal” man who committed unthinkable atrocities. Moreover, statistically, the majority of the 8.5 million Nazis (by the end of the war) were also unremarkable rather than uniquely twisted individuals. Within this framework and the framework of the play, evil is both a choice and an act of weakness. Conversely, goodness is also banal, and heroes arise from normal people as a choice and an act of strength. Miep and Mr. Kraler are ordinary people who choose to selflessly risk their own safety for the sake of others. For the Annex dwellers, living in close quarters with seven other people in an increasingly desperate situation exposes, above all, the imperfections of humanity and the complexity of good and evil. The circumstances that bring them into hiding are entirely out of their control, necessitated by an instinct for self-preservation amid a fully manmade war that left them with the non-choice of hiding or death. Goodness is a matter of selflessness. Mr. Frank immediately agrees to take Mr. Dussel in because he sees saving a man’s life as unquestionably worth the sacrifices. The van Daans are less enthusiastic, even though Mr. Frank made the same sacrifice for their sake. Anne learns from her father and gives out Hanukah gifts that require her own sacrifices. As resources become thinner and they all get hungrier, weakness sets in. Stealing food becomes an act of evil, a choice born out of weakness, self-preservation, and the prioritizing of some human lives over others. Mr. van Daan is wretchedly ashamed by his weakness, but Mrs. Frank also chooses evil by deciding to sacrifice the van Daans out of weakness and fear for her own family. Ultimately, within the Annex, there are no evil people. There are only people who are driven by a need to survive that sometimes brings out the worst. Anne, like the others, doesn’t need to be a perfect victim, full of angelic forgiveness, because the tragedy of the Holocaust is the deliberately cruel murder of six million complex humans.