Stilled life: traumatic knowing, political violence, and the dying of Anna Frank

Abstract

This paper is a meditation caused by an encounter in a documentary (Blair, 1995) with the only known moving footage of Anna Frank, who, as a result of the posthumous publication of her diaries as The Diary of Anne Frank (1947, English, 1952) then made into a play (1955) and a film (USA, 1959), was gradually framed as the iconic image of, and narrative fetish (Santner, 1990) for the Holocaust. In hanging cultural memory upon the forever-stilled image of a 12-year-old girl, what is occluded is the true horror of her unnoticed death from starvation, disease, and hopeless loneliness in April 1945. It is the purpose of the paper to move between the affect of encountering the lively image in the footage of 1941 and the realization of the missing engagement with the death of Anna Frank enabled by the substitution for traumatic knowledge of consolatory iconicization. What happened to Anna Frank and her diaries was, as many scholars have pointed out: Universalization, Americanization, deJudaization. These trends raise for me a deeper question I want to pose through this case study: can we mourn the other, or does the experience of mourning for, or sharing the trauma or suffering of, another always require identification, that is, the abolition or reduction of their alterity and particularity so that we find common ground not interrupted by the pain beyond our own knowing or the experience that marks difference: race, class, or sexuality? Is Holocaust commemoration so troubled because it requires a grieving for the other (the Jewish or Sinti/Roma victims) in a place of pain beyond any human experience except for those who endured it? Anna Frank's gender and childhood function as de-particularizing attributes that make her accessible for maximum identification as an innocent victim. This paper plays the universalizing representation of “Anne Frank” against the other kinds of trace we have of Anna Frank as a gendered, religiously affiliated, modern subject and victim of fascism, using Blair's documentary to trouble the iconic image, and yet also noting that film's equal inability to face the traumatic knowledge of her brutal destruction.