Let's start from the beginning. I'm very close to Jewish culture: my maternal grandmother survived the Holocaust, but 70+ members of her family were murdered. I've heard stories of life in Poland during the Holocaust and the trauma experienced under the Nazi regime; I've heard all about Anne Frank and, like so many people around me, came to see her as a quintessential symbol of the Holocaust. I decided to read her diary before arriving in Amsterdam, not only in preparation for visiting her house, but also in order to have a general feel for the city. Reading her diary made me feel a little bit wiser and lucky to gain an insight into her thoughts and personality. I felt like I could identify with her intellectual articulations, and I'm certainly glad I read her diary. (Isn't there something a bit voyeuristic about reading somebody's diary that was meant to stay private? But I digress.) It was a tense and stressful read, yet I thought I was prepared to visit her house. I wasn't. I wasn't prepared for the commercialism, the hype, or the pain that was to accompany the trip.
I left her house with more questions than answers: why is her story being glorified? Why are people romanticizing her life and her national symbolism, and what exactly was I expecting to encounter? Was it a room full of people, furniture, and objects just like when she lived there? No, that wouldn't make sense. I hadn't even thought about what I was going to see, just where I would be walking. I knew I would be able to walk up the same staircase that she would have walked on, I would have seen the same plumbing that she used, and I would have walked past the infamous bookcase/door that saved her life countless times when intruders entered her home. However, the context in which I see her house isn't the same as that in which she saw it. She wasn't able to think about how little light was able to enter into the room because she didn't have the freedom to open the windows; she wasn't able to think about how tiny and restrictive her room was because she had no other choice. So I started thinking. What kind of space does this museum create and what kind of meaning can we take away from it? What is the role of a museum? Can a museum charge a fee for visitors to visit a place of pain and suffering? It's become a landmark known all over the world, but at the end of the day, it's still impossible to recreate the exact experience and life of Anne Frank when she was hiding there.
Museums are a kind of 'imagined geography' or "representations of place, space, and landscape that structure people's understandings of the world, and in turn help shape their actions" according to Felix Driver. In this sense, it is the job of the museum to represent an idea in a such a way that establishes a specific response from the visitor. Take for example the text used in the Anne Frank House. There isn't much commentary from the curators except for a pamphlet describing the one-way route through the house that's given out at the ticket counter. Everything else is either a label describing a picture or object, or it's a quote of Anne's that's on the wall. This format allows visitors to walk through the space while thinking about a thought of hers, but of course this already is a different way of experiencing her house than when she lived there. A visitor sees the space she lived in, but cannot see her experiences in that space. A few of her film posters have survived, but they're protected behind a glass shield. It's almost as if her life has been transformed into a spectacle to watch from a distance instead of a life to be remembered and cherished.
Since there's no way to actually recreate the same experience that Anne Frank had herself when she was in hiding, it is up to the visitor to imagine what it would've been like to live in hiding; the museum constructs a space for the visitor to create, critique, and capture a glimpse of her life during the war. It is only an imagined experience and imagined understanding of trauma. Thus, the museum creates a kind of illusion for establishing an authentic experience. I'm not trying to say that museums shouldn't exist, merely that we should be aware of our experience and be comfortable questioning the means by which they exist in the first place.
While personal experiences are important, I think it's also worthwhile to take a look at the "industry" behind the Anne Frank House, including tourism and the museum's international reputation. According to the Anne Frank House website, the museum sees around one million visitors a year. Similarly, on the iamsterdam tourism website, the city claims that "no visit is complete without seeing the Rijksmuseum, Van Gogh Museum or the Anne Frank House." The city of Amsterdam has realized that the Anne Frank House is one of the biggest attractions within the city and uses it as a way to draw in more visitors. In other words, the Anne Frank House has become a kind of marketing tool in which to help sell the city. It's taken on a form of place-selling, which -- according to a lecture given by Ward Rennen -- can be defined as "a strategy to safe-guard and increase the socio-economic vitality of a place by (pro)actively attracting and retaining important target groups." Here, the target groups are tourists/visitors, yet in order to attract this group of people, the museum has to capitalize on the trauma of Anne's story. At the end of the day, Anne's story is still one of pain and tragedy and there's something a bit uncomfortable and troubling about the commercialization of her legacy.
I anticipated the experience to be deeply moving, and indeed, I was profoundly affected by the exhibition. It's one thing to read about her life, but it's another thing to literally set foot on the floor she walked on; it's one thing to talk about an experience, but it's another thing to try and recreate it. You can see the effect of the museum by the wear and dents on the stairs that millions of visitors have walked on. Her story touches the lives of millions of people and seems to offer a sense of truth to some people. Perhaps her story offers redemption for people who want to believe that there's something hopeful and positive to come out of the Holocaust.
I'm glad I had a chance to pay tribute to Anne Frank, but why do I still feel so ... guilty?
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