The Phenomenon of Anne Frank by David Barnouw

Author:David Barnouw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2018-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

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Anne’s Diary under Attack

WHEN THE DIARY OF ANNE Frank was not yet world famous, no one doubted its authenticity or Anne’s short existence. After the publication of Das Tagebuch in Germany in 1959, there certainly were questions about her too-mature language. The translator was usually blamed, and deservedly.

Two years after the 1955 premiere of the play in the United States, the first attack on the authenticity of Anne’s diary was launched. The Danish anti-Semitic literary critic Harald Nielsen published the article “Jewish Psyche—A Study about Anne Frank and Meyer Levin” in the Swedish National Socialist paper Fria Ord. He questioned the authenticity of the diary and stated that Meyer Levin was its actual author. During the next half century, that would be the most important argument of the deniers of the diary’s authenticity. Hadn’t a judge in New York ordered Otto Frank to pay Meyer Levin for his work? The fact that the lawsuit was about the play and Het Achterhuis had been published in 1947, well before Levin and Otto Frank had met, was disregarded. In various media, primarily those of the extreme right, the deniers constantly referred to each other as “proof” that the denial was true. Harald Nielsen, who had earlier written anti-Semitic articles, also pointed out that Anne and Peter were not Jewish names, in contrast to the name Meyer Levin.

Almost half a year later, a Norwegian magazine (Folge og Land), the mouthpiece of the former Viking SS division, took up the baton. Referring to the court case in New York, the article determined that the diary was most likely a forgery. A part of that article appeared in translation in Reichsruf Wochenzeitung für das nationale Deutschland, a weekly paper of the extreme right Deutsche Reichspartei, established in 1950.

These publications were read almost exclusively by their own rank and file, and no action was taken against them by Otto Frank or any of the publishers. That changed in 1958 with Lothar Stielau, an English teacher at the Oberschule zum Dom in Lübeck. Stielau, fifty years old at the time, had been a member of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) and the storm troopers (SA), a member of the Deutsche Reichspartei after the war, and district chairman of its Lübeck group.

Stielau had written a review of the performance of the play The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in the school’s alumni magazine on October 10, 1958. Halfway through his essay, he wrote: “The forged diaries of Eva Braun, of the Queen of England, and the hardly more authentic one of Anne Frank may have earned several millions for the profiteers from Germany’s defeat, but they have also raised our own hackles quite a bit.”

Until then, nothing had happened regarding the neo-Nazi activities in Norway, Sweden, and Austria, but this time legal action was initiated. The Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland had alerted Fischer publishing to the piece, and Fischer discussed it with Otto Frank. Stielau would get into trouble on two fronts because of his statements.

First, his employer, the

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