A Dutch production of a new take on Anne Frank will open amid criticism this week for erasing the Frank family’s Jewish identity and failing to mention the Nazis who killed Anne and her sister in a concentration camp.
Frank is famous for The Diary of a Young Girl, the journal she kept while being hidden in an attic in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam during the Second World War. The diary has been made into a movie and countless stage adaptations, all of which focused on the soulful girl seeking a normal life amid Hitler’s atrocities.
But the new take on Anne’s story, called Behind the House, is set in modern times and refers to the Nazis-like characters as “the enemy,” without calling them by name. The play also includes a fictionalised assault on Anne Frank’s sister Margot by Fritz Pfeffer, a real-life character who hid with Anne Frank and her family during the Nazi occupation.
Pfeffer was never accused of assault, but the event was added to the storyline for extra action, director Ilja Pfeijffer said.
“The diary itself contains no drama,” Pfeijffer told the Dutch publication Volkskrantabout, elucidating his reasons for adding the assault. “What actually happens in the secret annex, seen through the eyes of a 13-year-old, is a bit lean for a theatre show.”
“They want Anne Frank to lose her Jewish character and lose the context of the Second World War,” Esther Voet, Editor-in-Chief of the Dutch Jewish Weekly, told Newsweek.
“Right now, Jews in the Netherlands are under a lot of pressure, and there is developing antisemitism. So everyone wants to do something with [Anne Frank’s] universal message of tolerance, but they also want to de-Jew her.”
Director Pfeijffer has been criticized in the past for making controversial statements about Jews. Most recently, he wrote a column criticizing a prominent Jewish playwright and calling him a “militant Jew.” He is known among poetry and literary critics for “stirring up new controversies or deliberately making enemies” in his column.