Ian Buruma, writing in the New York Review of Books, called the “Jewish Joan of Arc,” but simply a book. Pained at first by the unpleasant side effects of commercialization, Otto learned to steel himself to the discomfort of having his daughter talked about as if she were a fictional character. As always, he was determined to support his family, which would soon include his second wife, Elfriede “Fritzi” Markovits Geiringer, whom he married in November 1953.
When it became clear to Otto that the diary was becoming not merely a commodity but a lucrative one, he decidedto channel some of the profits it generated into the human-rights causes that would become, to him, as much of a religion as the Reform Judaism he practiced after the war. As soon as Otto saw what the diary could accomplish, he became quite single-minded—practical, focused, and at least partly immune to second thoughts or distractions.
I T MUST have been an obvious choice to put Anne’s face on the cover, and Otto Frank sent his publishers a photograph of his photogenic daughter. Before the war, he had been a passionate amateur photographer. With his Leica camera, one of the first to be sold commercially, he documented births, birthdays, family holidays, and vacations, marking each stage of his daughters’ development with dozens of formal portraits and snapshots of the girls brushing their teeth, combing their hair, playing with friends, sunbathing, building sand castles. Scores of photos survived the war, striking visual images that would contribute to Anne Frank’s celebrity.
For the American edition, Otto selected a picture taken in 1939. In the photo, among the most sedate of Anne’s portraits, her beautiful face conveys a wistful intelligence and a piercing sweetness. It was the picture that Anne had pasted in her diary, with a note remarking that such a portrait might improve her chances of getting into Hollywood. In real life, she added, she often looked quite different. She was probably correct, if we assume that the majority of her photos—in which she is shown laughing or smiling impishly, more animated and funny faced than conventionally pretty and composed—provide a more accurate likeness. But she preferred to be seen as a serious, lovely girl, and in choosing the picture that she herself picked, Otto may have felt that he was again fulfilling her wishes. In later versions of the diary, the current paperback edition, and other books about Anne, more cheerfulimages have been used.
In a review in the New Statesman in May 1952, Antonia White responded, as so many have, to the photo: “What she has left behind is a book of extraordinary human and historical interest, as living as the mischievous, intelligent face in the photograph which confronts the middle-aged reader with the same shrewd pertness that must so often have been turned on her parents and the Van Daans.”
It’s impossible to overestimate the power that Anne Frank’s image has had. She is instantly identifiable, whether we see her face on a book or projected (to coincide with a visit of the Anne Frank traveling exhibit) on a tower in Great Britain where Jews were tortured during the Middle Ages. It is an understatement to say that she is the single most commonly recognized and easily recognizable victim of the Nazi campaign against the Jews, or of any genocide before or since. The passions that she has invoked cannot be separated from the fact that we know what she looked like.
Anne’s author photo was a publisher’s dream. At Doubleday, Donald B. Elder wrote to thank Otto for the “very charming” picture. Pleased by the portrait, Barbara Zimmerman must have felt her hope for the book take another quantum leap when she managed to secure a brief introductory essay from Eleanor Roosevelt.
Over fifty years later, this preface still introduces the book, even though Americans have since learned and forgotten that many Jews—including Otto Frank’s
When it became clear to Otto that the diary was becoming not merely a commodity but a lucrative one, he decidedto channel some of the profits it generated into the human-rights causes that would become, to him, as much of a religion as the Reform Judaism he practiced after the war. As soon as Otto saw what the diary could accomplish, he became quite single-minded—practical, focused, and at least partly immune to second thoughts or distractions.
I T MUST have been an obvious choice to put Anne’s face on the cover, and Otto Frank sent his publishers a photograph of his photogenic daughter. Before the war, he had been a passionate amateur photographer. With his Leica camera, one of the first to be sold commercially, he documented births, birthdays, family holidays, and vacations, marking each stage of his daughters’ development with dozens of formal portraits and snapshots of the girls brushing their teeth, combing their hair, playing with friends, sunbathing, building sand castles. Scores of photos survived the war, striking visual images that would contribute to Anne Frank’s celebrity.
For the American edition, Otto selected a picture taken in 1939. In the photo, among the most sedate of Anne’s portraits, her beautiful face conveys a wistful intelligence and a piercing sweetness. It was the picture that Anne had pasted in her diary, with a note remarking that such a portrait might improve her chances of getting into Hollywood. In real life, she added, she often looked quite different. She was probably correct, if we assume that the majority of her photos—in which she is shown laughing or smiling impishly, more animated and funny faced than conventionally pretty and composed—provide a more accurate likeness. But she preferred to be seen as a serious, lovely girl, and in choosing the picture that she herself picked, Otto may have felt that he was again fulfilling her wishes. In later versions of the diary, the current paperback edition, and other books about Anne, more cheerfulimages have been used.
In a review in the New Statesman in May 1952, Antonia White responded, as so many have, to the photo: “What she has left behind is a book of extraordinary human and historical interest, as living as the mischievous, intelligent face in the photograph which confronts the middle-aged reader with the same shrewd pertness that must so often have been turned on her parents and the Van Daans.”
It’s impossible to overestimate the power that Anne Frank’s image has had. She is instantly identifiable, whether we see her face on a book or projected (to coincide with a visit of the Anne Frank traveling exhibit) on a tower in Great Britain where Jews were tortured during the Middle Ages. It is an understatement to say that she is the single most commonly recognized and easily recognizable victim of the Nazi campaign against the Jews, or of any genocide before or since. The passions that she has invoked cannot be separated from the fact that we know what she looked like.
Anne’s author photo was a publisher’s dream. At Doubleday, Donald B. Elder wrote to thank Otto for the “very charming” picture. Pleased by the portrait, Barbara Zimmerman must have felt her hope for the book take another quantum leap when she managed to secure a brief introductory essay from Eleanor Roosevelt.
Over fifty years later, this preface still introduces the book, even though Americans have since learned and forgotten that many Jews—including Otto Frank’s
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