The Diary of Anne Frank by Albert Hackett

First published: 1956

First produced: 1955, at the Cort Theater, New York City

Type of plot: Coming of age; history

Time of work: July, 1942-November, 1945

Locale: Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Principal Characters:

• Mr. Frank, a middle-aged businessman
• Mrs. Frank, his wife
• Anne Frank, their thirteen-year-old daughter
• Margot Frank, their sixteen-year-old daughter
• Miep, a Dutch woman of twenty-two, employed by Mr. Frank
• Mr. Van Daan, a business associate of Mr. Frank
• Mrs. Van Daan, his wife
• Peter Van Daan, their sixteen-year-old son
• Mr. Kraler, a Dutch employee of Mr. Frank
• Mr. Dussel, a middle-aged dentist

The Play

In the first scene of the play, Mr. Frank returns alone to Amsterdam; he has been liberated from the concentration camp at Auschwitz. Revisiting the rooms where he last lived with his family, he discovers the diary kept by his daughter Anne. In memory, he returns to their last days together.

All the action of the play unfolds in a secret annex, located on the top floor of a warehouse and office building in Amsterdam, during and immediately after World War II. The Franks are a Jewish family forced to hide from the Nazis, who have occupied Holland. Though originally German, the family fled their native land with the advent of Adolf Hitler and established a profitable business and comfortable domestic life in Amsterdam. Now the Nazis have again disrupted their existence, first by the passage of anti-Semitic laws in Holland and now by the rounding up of Jews for deportation to work and death camps. In their secret annex, located above the offices where Mr. Frank conducted his business, the family has been joined by the three Van Daans. Mr. Van Daan was Mr. Frank’s partner in the spice trade. Later the two families agree to accept Mr. Dussel, a bachelor dentist whom they did not know earlier but whose life is now also threatened.

In the cramped quarters and with the constant fear of betrayal, it is not surprising that tempers flare. Originally, the Franks expected only a few weeks of captivity before liberation by the Allies. However, these weeks stretch into more than eighteen months. The Van Daans constantly fight, and Mr. Van Daan is caught stealing more than his share of their limited food supply. The spirited Anne is obliged to share her small room with the stuffy Mr. Dussel. She experiences the perplexities of puberty, while conflicts with her mother and rivalry with her sister seem intensified in these dire circumstances. There are, however, two consolations. The first is Peter Van Daan, a sensitive youth who has smuggled his beloved cat into the annex and who is attuned to Anne’s emotions. The second comfort is Anne’s ever-present diary, to which she faithfully confides her daily experiences, her fears, and her hopes for the future.

The inhabitants of the annex attempt to establish some routines of daily life. During daylight hours they must move in stocking feet, speak only in whispers, and refrain from using the lavatory, for fear of revealing their hiding place to the employees below in the warehouse. At night they are able to play games, listen to the radio—especially to reports of Allied offensives—and argue among themselves. Books are brought to them, along with basic provisions, by Miep and Mr. Kraler, faithful employees who are risking their own lives by aiding these fugitives. The young people pursue their studies, under the tutelage of Mr. Frank. Anne shows special aptitude for literature and languages.

Although all the inhabitants of the annex are assimilated Jews, who have always regarded themselves as citizens of the countries in which they have lived, the Nazis have made their Jewish identity central. Anne shows affection for the conspicuous emblem the Nazis have forced them to wear on their coats, which is, as she says, “after all, the Star of David.” The little group celebrates Hanukkah, with gifts Anne is able to improvise from the meager objects at hand. Mrs. Frank, who is the most religiously observant, reads Psalm 121. Yet precisely on the night of this holiday, a burglar invades the warehouse and hears their celebration. Not long after, just as they had feared, alerted German officers break into the annex. As they are all carted away to the concentration camps, Mr. Frank attempts to console them: “For the past two years we have lived in fear. Now we can live in hope.”

In the play’s final scene, Mr. Frank, the little group’s sole survivor of the Nazi camps, is glimpsed again in the annex. He turns the pages of his daughter’s diary and hears again Anne’s voice saying, “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

Dramatic Devices

The claustrophobic atmosphere of Europe under Nazi threat and the stresses and tensions of hunted Jews hidden in the midst of a thriving city are well conveyed by the single set employed for this full-length drama in two acts and ten scenes. Three small rooms and a tiny attic space alone are visible. Furniture also is sparse: a few chairs, cots, a table. Sounds from the outside—the carillon from the nearby Westertoren church, fragments of the popular song “Lili Marlene” wafting up to the annex, the pounding of marching feet, and snippets of the German language—add to the tension and mood of mounting fear, which culminates when the door to the hiding place, obscured only by a fake bookcase, is broken down and the Nazis thunderously intrude.

The mode of the drama is realistic; the young actress who created the role of Anne (Susan Strasberg) was the daughter of the great American teacher of method acting, Lee Strasberg, and the actor who first portrayed Mr. Frank (Joseph Schildkraut) came from a famous German-Jewish theatrical family. While action in the annex is necessarily limited, the interactions among personalities, Anne’s budding romance, and the minor villainies of Van Daan and Dussel sustain interest. All the while, suspense builds as the hiding place becomes ever more precarious. Even though these people live in the shadow of death, the play retains a measure of humor and joy in family affection. Playwrights Goodrich and Hackett were a husband-wife team previously known for Broadway comedies and Hollywood musicals such as Easter Parade (1948) and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954). The skill with which they constructed The Diary of Anne Frank, injecting it with domestic warmth and pacing its action, has been much admired.

Because the play is about actual people who lived in traumatic historical times, the last scene, which forms an epilogue, was essential. Mr. Frank tells the audience how his wife and daughter, and all the others, perished in the camps, even as the end was in sight, with the liberating British and American troops sweeping through France and beyond. Millions of other lives were lost during the Holocaust; the people who managed to survive the camps were displaced, their lives irrevocably changed. Some never overcame their bitterness, remaining Hitler’s victims all their lives. Yet Goodrich and Hackett do not choose to leave their audience with this bitter message. Their play is not a tragedy; it celebrates the triumph of Anne’s spirit. Her father’s last words are “She puts me to shame.”

Critical Context

The Diary of Anne Frank and its later cinema adaptation brought wide international attention to the actual diary of Anne Frank and made her a beloved personality everywhere. Yet like all Holocaust writing, the play has generated controversy. The psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, also a Holocaust survivor, was troubled by the wide veneration of the Frank family, whose very behavior, he believed, was a manual of how not to survive the Nazi terror. The Franks did not join their relatives in safer countries, as they might well have done had they been more alert, and they did not follow the example of other Jewish parents in sending their children to live as members of Dutch families in the country. They chose to hide in Mr. Frank’s own place of business, a conspicuous spot in which they were readily discovered.

Cynthia Ozick, a major Jewish American novelist, was so disturbed by the Anne Frank phenomenon that she lamented that the diary had ever been discovered. She felt the play transformed the sadness of failed hopes and possibilities into something close to a comedy about a girl who was, in the words of one actress who assumed the role, “funny, hopeful, and happy.” According to Ozick’s thinking, the play bowdlerized and distorted not only the diary itself but also trivialized the horrors of the Holocaust. After the play, Anne Frank emerged the most famous victim of the Nazis. Yet the drama conveyed none of the torments of the death camp in which she died. In her last days, after experiencing the degradations of Bergen-Belsen and witnessing the parade of humanity to the gas chambers, would Anne still have declared that people are good at heart?

Finally, a major concern of many interpreters of Holocaust literature is that the Jewish specificity of the event never be lost. While acknowledging other victims of the Nazis, these critics stress that the Jews were treated with special ferocity. It is their agony that has generated the most philosophical and religious contemplation. The play, according to this sentiment, has made too many concessions to its multicultural international audience (it was a notable success in Germany), consequently almost suppressing the Jewish identity of the principals, the very characteristic that rendered them Hitler’s selected victims.

Sources for Further Study

Bloom, Harold, ed. A Scholarly Look at “The Diary of Anne Frank.” Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1999.

Kopf, Hedda Rosner. Understanding Anne Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl.” Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997.

Lindever, Willy. The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank. New York: Anchor, 1992.

Melnick, Ralph. The Stolen Legacy of Anne Frank: Meyer Levin, Lillian Hellman, and the Shaping of the Diary. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997.

Miller, Melissa. Anne Frank: The Biography. New York: Henry Holt, 1998.