http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/arts/design/museum-of-tolerance-inaugurates-an-anne-frank-exhibition.html?_r=0&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1381831630-2TP5n1L5mwaGt8H403LQDQ
Museum of Tolerance Inaugurates an Anne Frank Exhibition
A new exhibit at Los Angeles’s Museum of Tolerance restores Anne Frank’s diary to its horrific historical context—and then distills that context into fantasy and platitudes.
LOS ANGELES — What lessons do we learn from Anne Frank? Since her diary is the chronicle of an education, we learn what she learns: the lessons of daily life and early adolescence, acquired during a horrific time. We watch a meticulously observant girl, age 13, evolve into a self-consciously observant young woman, age 15. We watch — as one of Philip Roth’s characters pungently remarked — a fetus growing a face.
What we don’t learn from the diary is what happened after the last entry, on Aug. 1, 1944. We don’t learn how this self-described “chatterbox,” whose most-quoted pronouncement is “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart,” must have come to doubt that sentiment; nor do we learn that by that winter, she was a typhus-ridden, starving, naked, weeping, walking corpse in Bergen-Belsen, where the Germans had shipped her from Auschwitz along with other condemned souls in the waning months of the war.
One achievement of a permanent exhibition opening on Monday at the Museum of Tolerance here is that we do learn those things; history is not treated as the diary’s footnote but as its context. The exhibition is a $4 million, 9,000-square-foot examination of Anne’s life and times, offering films, touch-screens, reproductions and artifacts; it is perhaps the most extensive exploration of Anne Frank in any museum outside Amsterdam. It required arrangements with both the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and the Anne Frank Foundation in Basel, which holds the copyright to the diary and most of the images here. (The museum is charging a supplementary fee of up to $15.50 for admission to the exhibition.)
Bizarrely, though, for all its strengths, the installation nearly undermines its own achievement at the end. Understanding that also requires some history.
Otto Frank, Anne’s father and the sole survivor of the “secret annex” where Anne, her parents and sister, and four others hid from the Nazis in Amsterdam, published an edited version of Anne’s diary in 1947. Since then, partly because the diary only vaguely reports on history, the temptation has been to make history almost irrelevant. The diary’s subject is often turned into a generalized idea of injustice.
Sometimes the effort to lift the diary out of the particulars of its past has just meant a shift in emphasis. Mr. Frank wanted it treated as a universal tale. (“Do not make a Jewish play out of it!” he instructed the writer Meyer Levin in 1952, when Levin was trying to bring it to the stage.) And sometimes the diary is so wrenched from history that it can hardly be recognized; the Anne Frank House has long used Anne’s history and hiding place to champion causes including opposition to the Vietnam War or “the ugly face of nationalism” in the Balkan conflict.
