Translated from Rolf Gutte/Freerk Huisken,Alles bewältigt, nichts begriffen! Nationalsozialismus im Unterricht. Eine Kritik der antifaschistischen Erziehung, VSA-Verlag, Hamburg, 2007, p. 257-264.
The Diaries of Anne Frank –
a girl like you and meWhy has the diary of a young girl who writes about her love and digestion problems, who indulges in fantasies, describes family disputes and badmouths her roommates, who writes down her favorite jokes, complains about unfair treatment, and has nothing else special to say, become a bestseller that no school library should be without and strongly recommended reading for all German schoolchildren?
The educational interest in this girl’s intimate notes from the years 1942 to 1944 is less in the content of the diary than in the circumstances in Holland under which it was written. Because of the Jewish author’s later fate in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, her diary is considered a “harrowing contemporary historical document” and is evaluated and treated accordingly. This is noticeable in the teaching materials. They exploit every trick of pedagogical shock value and discover in Anne Frank a figure who can be put to excellent use as an object of identification in schools. Teachers can bring a lot together here: she was a German child like students today; a German child, hence innocent; moreover, a girl, hence especially innocent; on top of that, she was completely normal, hence in 95% of the diary’s text she shares worries known to every girl, especially if she grew up in cramped living conditions with constant contact with strangers. She doesn’t even behave in an especially Jewish way and she is no role model in terms of virtue and decency. She has her little faults and admits to them in her diary. The fact that someone like this became a victim of the fascists makes the persecution of the Jews seem particularly senseless.
There are plenty of opportunities for students to identify with the story. So the teacher asks his students to put themselves in the shoes of Anne Frank in her hiding place on the Prinsengracht. He aims for a comparison. The student who is supposed to pretend to be Anne Frank must ideally step out of his current life situation and put himself in the shoes of the girl in the attic. “It must have been terrible back then!” is the obvious comment that the teacher aims at. And: “I wouldn't want to live through that!”
This would not be objectionable if it didn’t imply a ready-made judgment on fascism. It is presented as just a catalog of denials and prohibitions. By learning that the Frank family was forbidden to drive, own bicycles, listen to the radio, use the swimming pool, go to the theater, etc., the student learns that fascism is whatever Anne Frank was not allowed to do! So fascism is nothing but an attack on everything I am allowed to do today! This is a child-friendly way of explaining what runs through all anti-fascist instruction as a common thread: Fascism is the negative deviation from the democracy of today.
If you not only take this message from the strained comparison, but also take it seriously, then you realize that it is based on a conceptless abstraction. The children of today are supposed to put themselves in the shoes of a child back then. The abstraction is simple: a child is a child. The exercise in empathy is indifferent to the fact that there were no “children” in the Nazi era, but that they too were already sorted by race and incited against each other. What is ignored is that a blond, blue-eyed, German, Christian child with – perhaps – a staunchly German nationalist family would certainly have been spared the fate that today’s schoolchildren are supposed to imagine themselves in during the Nazi era. By means of the abstraction of “child,” the contrast between “Germans” and “Jews” created by the fascists, and thereby also the relationship between Jewish and non-Jewish children which could unlock the causes of the persecution of the Jews, is swept under the carpet. The exercise in empathy is aimed solely at sympathizing with a victim of the same age and thus at ideally illustrating the judgment that “things” were “bad” back then.
2. Learning through identification is also said to have another function. It should be “indispensable for the fictitious, that is, imaginative removal of historical, personal, and political distance in order not to develop the coldness that made Auschwitz possible in the first place.”[1] Because, say educators in the face of Bergen-Belsen or Auschwitz, it is “actually impossible to make it clear to students what a concentration camp really was if we ourselves can’t even grasp it properly.”[2]
The didactic imperative here is: only experience means understanding! This is as wrong as the grumbling of a war-wounded grandfather who tries to deny his grandson’s right to his pacifist views. Everyone is familiar with this! And just like the grandfather’s wish that his offspring would live through his experience of a storm of steel before daring to tell off his grandfather who never chickened out of any world war, this learning theory also complains that “learning through identifying” is only a surrogate. That’s striking, because if you think it through, it means that learning opportunities would be much better if fascism still existed. Because if only personal experience is actually suited for understanding fascism properly, i.e. as desired, then the best thing would be – the idea could be expanded on in all didactic naiveté – to occasionally include an internship in fascism or in Auschwitz for the purpose of truly understanding the horrors of fascism.
But it isn’t just the obviously cynical consequence of the learning theory taken to its end that needs to be attacked. It is the scandal itself, since it lays out, of all things, a lack of theoretical distance and an immersion in the worries of dealing with practical life problems as the best means of understanding a state of affairs. Is this where reason should best come into play – where it is completely preoccupied with an interest shaped by worries and the accompanying feelings? “Coldness,” which always means the coldness of theory, is here opposed to an alleged warmth of feeling. Yet no judgment based on feelings – not for nothing is it called that – comes without intellectual findings: Why do certain people become ecstatic at the sight of Kohl/Reagan/Hitler/Saddam Hussein and others angry? The pedagogy of shock value or of experience thus claims that the student should call up all the desired judgments about the world as a habit of his subjective mind, without thinking separately about it, and make it into his maxim for action.[3]
3. Learning through identification is also an excellent way of discrediting any criticism that students express about their lives today. Anyone who wants to complain should from now on think about what happened to Anne Frank and what could have happened to them under the fascists. The epitome of a fulfilled life is when it is possible to do whatever Anne Frank so desperately missed: “dancing, whistling, looking out into the world, feeling young, to know that I’m free – that’s what I long for”(p. 108). And that’s what you’re allowed to do in this country: dance, whistle, cycle and see the world. There you have it! This gives a new sheen to fact that “youth today” doesn’t just consist of dancing, whistling and cycling, but that young people have to dance when their father whistles, that the dance varies according to what class one belongs to, and riding a bike is also learned for completely different reasons.
4. A more detailed appraisal of the content of the diary can’t be found in any textbook or teaching material. Nor is it recommended anywhere. No teacher thinks of taking these notes seriously and asking whether they are worth recommending to today’s children. There is certainly no warning about Anne Frank’s scattered views on German fascism, nor a rejection of her assumptions about the causes of the persecution of the Jews and the standards by which she judged the war from her hiding place. Nor are her views excused by referring to her immaturity and desperate situation. One therefore suspects that her sometimes disastrous insights are not even considered worthy of criticism.
It is easy to see from the diary that this Jewish victim of German fascism was not only unable to make sense of her situation in her Dutch hiding place, but was completely absorbed in religious moralism. Anne Frank’s awareness of her own innocence dictated her judgment of fascism and the world, which was based on the following logic: since the victims were innocent, the perpetrators could only be evil. So for Anne Frank, the whole world was sorted into good and evil. The fascists are evil. Their victims are good because they are victims and also innocent: “The world has turned topsy-turvy, respectable people are being sent off to camps, prisons, and lonely cells, and the dregs that remain govern young and old, rich and poor...”(p. 200) “... good, innocent people accompanied by crying, walking on and on, in charge of a couple of these chaps, bullied and knocked about until they almost drop.”(p. 49)
For Anne Frank, the world would only be fair again if the good triumphed over the bad and the “dregs” were put in concentration camps. But then, of course, the imprisoned fascists would be the good guys because they would be the victims and the Jews would be the bad guys because they would be the ones imprisoning others. This is what inevitably happens when the perpetrator-victim relationship is declared to be its own contentless reason: If the Jews are good because they are victimized and the fascists are evil because they victimize the Jews, then the moral judgment is reversed along with the balance of power.
The fact that Anne Frank doesn’t mention the fascists’ political declaration of enmity toward Judaism, their racist ideas about the state-destroying nature of “the Jew” which developed into a mania and was put into practice, is not due to her youth. Such things simply have no place in this logic, which is by no means childish in nature. For Anne Frank, the suffering of the victims is not the result of fascist politics, but a test from God. For her, fascism is not a rather earthly state power, but an instrument of the Almighty who only wants to emphasize the exceptional status of the Jews with the suffering imposed on them: “Who has inflicted this upon us? Who has made us Jews different to all other people? Who has allowed us to suffer so terribly up till now? It is God that has made us as we are, but it will be God, too, who will raise us up again. If we bear all this suffering and if there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example. Who knows, it might even be our religion from which the world and all peoples learn good, and for that reason and that reason only do we have to suffer now … God has never deserted our people. Right through the ages there have been Jews, through all the ages they have had to suffer, but it has made them strong too; the weak fall, but the strong will remain and never go under!” (p. 173)
In her religious interpretation of the persecution of the Jews, Anne Frank also concedes to the anti-Semitic ideologies invoked by the fascists. By taking the ideology of the chosenness of the Jewish people seriously and emphasizing the “exceptional status” of the Jews, she turns the fascists’ message on its head: the chosen people are not the Aryans, but the Jews, and they will prove to be the strongest! In her diary, she takes the imagined reward for suffering to a racist conclusion: suffering, she writes, promotes a sorting process that leaves only the strong and denies the weak the right to live. For her part, she predicts a natural evolutionary “ultimate victory” for Judaism. The fascists would probably have rejoiced at such involuntary proof of the validity of the anti-Semitic ideology they cobbled together.[4]
The fact that Anne Frank’s story turns the fascists into a tool which God uses to test the Jews is not just “precocious” childish babbling, but a sign of the kind of intellectual maturity that is still highly valued today. For she has begun to give meaning to her suffering. She does this as she was taught. That all suffering “must be good for something,” that “the Lord puts our trust in God to the test,” that “he tests us,” “that he punishes us for something,” etc., are all articles of faith with which not only the Jews under fascism have given meaning to their suffering. This is how every religious person who is eager to find meaning in life or death proceeds. His clouded mind transforms life into a fate that man cannot escape and to which he can therefore only adapt. And the adaptation includes the invention of an otherworldly rationality according to which even the mass murder of Jews is “good for something.” The victim thus becomes a gentle lamb who must actually forgive his tormentor.
5. “What can we learn from Anne Frank?” This is the regular pedagogical final offensive which has now almost been answered: “Anne Frank’s diary is an example of what it means to be deprived of your freedom, but at the same time to develop the strength to resist and not lose hope... However, the picture of fascism is only complete if the ‘positive’ sides are also discussed: People retained their humanity despite the inhuman circumstances. Anne Frank, despite her sad situation, did not give up her faith in the goodness in people.”[5]
Here anti-fascist morality unfolds completely freely beyond any rational analysis of fascism and sets out to find an answer to the ultimate question: What is man? Is he good or evil? And because Anne Frank emphasized that she “still believed in the good in people,”[6] that she “drew her strength from this” and had “not yet given up hope,” we can draw the appropriate lesson, and this time explicitly adopt her written message.
The question of what benefit Anne Frank got from her belief in the goodness in people is not allowed. The effectiveness of faith is not to be measured by how successfully misery is averted. On the contrary, it is meant to provide consolation in difficult times: one should endure the suffering that befalls one.
These strange saints do not even think of checking whether something can be done about it. Rather, in the face of God’s tests, they keep to intellectual self-deception. The situation they find themselves in is simply “the situation.” It is not the result of nationalist politics, not the product of wars and crises, but fate. And those involved are not perpetrators, accomplices, and/or victims, rulers and ruled, but all human beings. Not even the moral qualification of their political actions – fascists are evil, their victims good – is ultimately still the object of the search for meaning here. Every office and every function, every interest and every intention, every deed and every allowance is disregarded.
The key question that is pursued is: How must one think of “man” – despite all the ongoing lived experience that there are just fascists, their followers, and the Jews they declare to be enemies – so that he can still be trusted? Indeed – as Anne Frank demonstrated in her faith-based law of threes – Hitler is evil. But since there is also the good Miep, who was one of the Dutch helpers, if you remove Hitler from Hitler and Miep from Miep, if you leave only the human being in both, you can still identify the good in man. So she promptly ends up where she wanted to be: Hope is the order of the day, even if only as an ideal reconciliation with a bad world.[7]
This points to a final inconsistency. Strangely enough, the doctrine of the good in people propagated by school textbooks is not only supposed to apply to life under the fascist “criminal regime,” but also to life in a democracy – after all, it is being taught to the young today! But why is there a need to search for meaning in a society that claims to have eradicated evil and fascism? Why should the young acquire a mental technique for enduring “inhuman circumstances” that are considered “singular,” i.e. unique and unrepeatable? Nevertheless, educators in the “perfect society” steadfastly preach a morality that Anne Frank adopted in the “evil society.” They themselves do not seem to believe that democracy guarantees that people will never again find themselves in similar situations. Instead, educators seem to know that putting up with a state of affairs is a virtue always in high demand.
Quotes from The Diary of Anne Frank, London: Hutchinson, 1986.
[1] Abram/Heyl, p. 128.
[2] Anne Frank: Series of teaching materials for school practice, Issue 50 of the Teacher Training Institute of the City of Bremerhaven, 1990, p. 62.
[3] It is no irony of world history that fascism, of all things, relied completely on this learning principle and made no secret of its distrust of the “intelligentsia,” i.e. “cold theory.” Hitler’s instructions on popular propaganda read like a somewhat antiquated formulation of modern experiential education: “The art of propaganda consists precisely in being able to awaken the imagination of the public through an appeal to their feelings, in finding the appropriate psychological form that will arrest the attention and appeal to the hearts of the national masses. That this is not understood by those among us whose wits are supposed to have been sharpened to the highest pitch is only another proof of their vanity or mental inertia.” (A. Hitler, Mein Kampf)
[4] As shown, fascist anti-Semitism does not owe itself to such meaningful religious zealotry; rather, it can use it for the political purpose of finding the culprit for the decomposed German national body. See also the chapter on “The Jews.”
[5] Anne Frank: Series of teaching materials, p. 4 and p. 60.
[6] Ibid, p. 309.
[7] The fact that this logic can also be reversed is an undesirable side effect. If evil is placed in the foreground instead of good, then man is evil by nature and hope is not appropriate at all. It is well known that there are sects that have made precisely this reversal their doctrine of salvation.