Cris Toala Olivares/Anne Frank House
Visitors at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, where the Frank family hid in a secret annex during World War II.
By SCOTT SAYARE
Published: June 16, 2013
AMSTERDAM — In a letter to her grandmother in 1940, composed before she went into hiding here, 11-year-old Annelies Frank recorded a detail that surely seemed of little consequence at the time.
A sortable calendar of noteworthy cultural events in the New York region, selected by Times critics.
Cris Toala Olivares/Anne Frank House
On view at the Anne Frank House museum, her first diary.
“Daddy is very busy in his office,” wrote the young correspondent, in a script already elegant. “He is moving to the Prinsengracht, and I’ll go and fetch him from the tram as often as possible.”
It was there, in the annex above her father’s office on the Prinsengracht, or Prince’s Canal, that her family would hide for more than two years from the Nazi occupiers, beginning in 1942. And it is there, in the museum that now occupies the building, the Anne Frank House, that visitors can view that letter to her grandmother.
But custody of that note, along with 10,000 other similar archival documents and photographs, is at the center of a bitter legal fight between the House and the Anne Frank Fonds, the other foundation most closely involved in the telling of Anne’s story. The Anne Frank Fonds, founded in 1963 to manage the copyrights to the Anne Frank diary, lent most of the disputed archives to the House in 2007 and has sued for their immediate return. House officials said they believed the loans would become permanent. A verdict is expected in the coming weeks.
The organizations have sparred for years over similar legal questions — ownership of archives, issues of copyright and trademark — in disputes that have seeded longstanding mistrust. The current lawsuit, however, has exposed a basic philosophical rift between the groups, a divergence in their visions of Anne and of what her legacy ought to be.
In addition to its lawsuit, the Fonds has accused the House of transforming Anne into a sort of child saint without context, an appealing icon of hope but one whose Jewish identity and place among the millions killed in the Holocaust are too little emphasized. Officials at the House, which maintains a network of exhibitions and centers across the world, insist their portrayal of Anne is strictly in keeping with the wishes of her father, Otto Frank, who survived Auschwitz and made it his life’s work to spread the message of tolerance he believed his daughter carried.
“Both organizations want to own Anne Frank,” said Melissa Müller, an Austrian biographer of Anne. “Both want to impose a way for the world to see Anne Frank.” Anne succumbed to typhus at age 15 at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.
Ronald Leopold, the House’s executive director, said Mr. Frank wished his daughter to be a “symbol of the future” and not of the past. To that end the House, which draws more than one million visitors annually, seeks to spread a “universal message” of tolerance, Mr. Leopold said, but that message is anchored in the “very specific” history of the narrow building at 263 Prinsengracht.
The spare, four-story museum guides visitors up steep wooden staircases to the back rooms where, behind a bookcase and through a trapdoor, the Frank family hid with four other Jews. In a narrow, dimly lighted room, images of Ray Milland and a red-lipped Greta Garbo, clipped from magazines by Anne, can still be seen pasted to the wall. In the next room pencil markings on the beige wallpaper track her height.
The annex has been kept empty of furnishings, as Mr. Frank found it after the war, Mr. Leopold said. Mr. Frank insisted it be maintained this way, to evoke loss, Mr. Leopold added, and the museum strives to present Anne’s story “in an emotional way.”
Pages from the original diary are displayed, and passages from the text are featured prominently throughout the museum and in the House’s official documents, along with images of Anne.
There are few images of the Holocaust, though, or of concentration camps or Nazi propaganda, a choice the Fonds has criticized.
The museum is “missing context,” said Yves Kugelmann, a Fonds board member and spokesman. Anne’s smiling face is “overpresent,” Mr. Kugelmann said, and the House has become a “pilgrimage place” where the girl is used “for everything and nothing.”
“They have a, let’s say, wrong perception of the truth and history,” he said, in an echo ofdecades of debate over Anne’s portrayal in popular culture.
Though her father may have sought to spread a message of tolerance, Mr. Kugelmann said, he did not wish to see his daughter memorialized in a museum. The House, Mr. Kugelmann said, was initially conceived as a meeting place for young people from around the world.
In comments to a Dutch newspaper last month, he compared the House’s refusal to return the archives to the seizure by “the Germans and their accomplices” of the Frank family’s possessions.
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