Anne Frank Abroad: The Emergence of World Atrocity Literature

Abstract

28 World Literature Today essay K nown to the English-speaking world by its translation, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank’s diary marks what many regard as the seminal example of testimonial literature. Today, the international fame of the diary is well known; the number of its translations now reaches over sixty. Taking a long journey from its original Dutch, translations of the Diary reach globally into languages such as Farsi, Sinhalese, and Esperanto. Yet little has been documented about its afterlife in these numerous non-European languages. Despite the Diary’s wide circulation, most examinations only focus on the text’s proliferation throughout Europe and North America. Here, I would like to trace the Diary’s circulation outside the West, examining the text’s influence in places like North Korea, Cambodia, Bosnia, Palestine, and Algeria. Looking at the ways a familiar text is interpreted in less-familiar settings not only tells us about the transnational circulation of atrocity testimonies but also tells us something about the way world literature works. Anne Frank Abroad The Emergence of World Atrocity Literature Katherine Wilson “If she was going to be thought exceptional, it would not be because of Auschwitz and Belsen but because of what she had made of herself since.” – Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer photo : anne frank fonds basel / anne frank house / getty images may–june 2013 • 29 When we examine the Diary’s foreign translations , we might be surprised to discover unexpected and, at times, disconcerting interpretations of the Diary emerging from areas such as North Korea, Palestine, and Cambodia. The “Anne Frank Translation Project” in Cambodia, for example, has proven to be an important teaching tool used to combat the widespread public belief that mass atrocity is unique to Cambodia. “Genocide did not only happen in Cambodia,” cites the Diary’s Khmer translator, Sayana Ser, in an interview for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s podcast, Voices on Antisemitism. Ser’s mission is to offer Cambodians a way to make sense of the Khmer Rouge genocide within the broader framework of the world history of atrocity: “I think if [Cambodians ] know that genocide has happened in other places, they would not feel like they are the only ones that suffered.” So far, so good—right? You might be more scandalized to learn how the Diary is officially used in North Korea. In 2004 a Dutch film crew gained rare access to cover the Diary’s adoption as a required text in all secondary schools in the nation. They revealed firsthand that the Diary was being used as an allegory to paint then-President George W. Bush as Hitler and the North Koreans as the Jews. As one North Korean student explained in an interview, “According to our respected leader, Kim Jong Il, The Diary of Anne Frank is one of the great classics of the world. That is why we read the diary—out of great respect for our leader.” When questioned about what they had learned from reading the Diary, one student stated, “That warmonger Bush is just as bad as Hitler. Because of him we will always live in fear of war.” Another student declared, “For world peace, America will have to be destroyed. Only then will Anne’s dream of peace come true.” The negotiation between the host culture and source culture of a work is complicated— much can arguably be lost in translation. In What Is World Literature?, David Damrosch sees this as a natural attribute of world literature: “The receiving culture can use the foreign material in all sorts of ways: as a positive model for the future development of its own tradition; as a negative case of a primitive, or decadent, strand that must be avoided or rooted out at home; or, more neutrally, as an image of radical otherness against which the home tradition can more clearly be defined.” Damrosch concludes that world literature is “always as much about the host culture’s values and needs as it is about the work’s source culture.” We may believe that the Diary’s circulation will advance an accurate education about the Holocaust—a value held by...