With Passover a month away I suggest this wonderful GERMAN review of the role Anne Frank plays in Judaisms today, from two years ago: From Spiegel: First German Movie abut Frank; how her image is used, conflicts between two foundations in her name, new novels
sample: What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank:
Englander’s stories are clear-sighted and humorous, full of fear and violence, revenge and dogmatism. His characters include settlers and their tragedy, a top lawyer at a peepshow, two Auschwitz survivors and schoolchildren in a summer camp.
Englander is constantly redefining morality. An eternal question — Who am I? — addresses how this is done, and how moral decisions shape an identity. In Englander’s Jewish world, the question is constantly connected to another one: Who was I?
“The entire book is about the question of who owns identity, who owns history and what memory is,” says Englander, 42, on a morning in Berlin, where he is on a book tour. He likes Berlin. In fact, the book took shape at the American Academy on Wannsee, the historically contaminated lake where the Nazis discussed the “final solution of the Jewish question.” Englander sat there, expressing his surprise over how obsessed he was with the Holocaust. It made him feel uncomfortable, he says. “I didn’t know why I am the way I am,” he says, a man with black hair, black eyes and clever words tumbling out of his mouth.
As a child growing up in New York, he was convinced that there would be a second Holocaust. “It was pathological and ridiculous. America is the best country the Jews have ever had. On the other, things have never ended well for the Jews, have they?”
As a child, he and his sister invented a game, one that revolved around an outrageous, dangerous morality: Who would hide us, and who would betray us if there were another Holocaust? Would it be a neighbor, a son or a husband who turned us in?
Englander describes this game in the central story of his new book. “We Jews talk about ourselves, about our fear and about this very Jewish feeling,” he says, “that nothing in the world is safe.” “For many people, the Holocaust is Anne Frank. What do you see when you think about the Holocaust: A mountain of dead bodies or this girl?”
In his book, Englander describes how memory becomes policy and how policy influences our memory of the individual. It’s also a reflection on the role and importance of the Holocaust today in discussing the question of identity, including the identity of nations. In a Germany that is powerful once again — this question arises with each new film about Hitler or Rommel. In Israel, on the other hand, the question is posed very differently: Was this country born out of the Zionist dream or the nightmare of the Holocaust?