Tuesday Oct. 10th – The “Other” Anne Frank House
Posted by Tina Landau on 11/03/2006(Forgive me for not getting this posted sooner. Of course as soon as I returned from my trip abroad, “real life” hit, and much delay ensued.
So, here is what I wrote on Tuesday, Oct. 10th:)
Today we rented bicycles and rode through Amsterdam, attempting to find various locales that Anne inhabited before she went into hiding. There is a great map I found online here which shows a ton of the places Anne traveled in and through during her time here.
We began by trying to find Merwedeplein 37, the apartment building where the Franks lived from 1933-1942. Anne and her family arrived in Amsterdam in 1933 when she was 4 years old, fleeing the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany. Otto Frank believed Amsterdam would provide a safe haven – and he also had contacts and work in the area. The Franks moved into an apartment in a recently constructed complex in the “new” Jewish quarter, Rivierenbuurt, at Merwede Square (in Dutch: Merwedeplein) – which still exists today more or less as it was when it was first built in the early 30s.
The only known film footage of Anne (in which you get to see her moving, active, ALIVE) is of her leaning out of the window at this building – a brief, shaky, black-and-white clip showing her at her window on the second floor, watching a wedding down the street. In many still photographs, you can find Anne playing at the Merwedeplein with her sister Margot and other neighborhood friends.
It was to this place, to these images, that we traveled today.
We departed from a corner right at the Anne Frank House (Annex) on Prinsengracht. I wanted to see exactly how long this journey was – from Anne’s original apartment home to her new home in the Annex. The play begins with the Franks tumbling in from the outside having just walked this very path. July 6, 1942. They had walked this distance early in the morning, before light and traffic hit the streets, bundled up in layers and layers of clothes (so they could have more with them in hiding), wearing their yellow stars, and trying not to look suspicious. The ride today seemed long and hard – and we were on bicycle, in daylight, sans rain. I can only imagine (well, no I actually cannot) what it was like for the Franks on that terrible morning. It is ostensibly only a two and a half mile walk, but it felt like the other side of the world, certainly the city. It is a different Amsterdam you find once you are out of the charming historic canal rings. There are suddenly broad streets and thoroughfares, residential complexes, cars, modern buildings…
Amsterdam is a tricky city to navigate and it was an adventure trying to find these dots on our map. But we did – and we stood outside the apartment building for quite a while – doing what? Why? As I wrote on my first blog entry, “What do I hope to find”? Why do we go to these historical sites? What does it mean to “stand where s/he stood?”, to walk where our heroes walked, to see what their eyes saw…?
I suppose I’m simply continuing to try to remember her, as well as make her more real, more dimensional. In the theater I feel that we are often doing this: conjuring ghosts. Sometimes they are the ghosts of the theater itself – past players and writers and audiences. And sometimes they are the ghosts of the subject matter we are “doing.” Spirits – memories – that stay alive through our writing and talking about them – through “performing” them. We breathe currency into the past. We strive to keep memory alive. And we do it together – a communal act - as we sit in the dark – straining to reach across time, or place, or ethnicity, or any barrier which separates us one from the other, or from the past. Perhaps, as E.M. Forster wrote, the urge is to “Connect…. Only connect.” And to do so through remembrance. He also wrote, “Unless we remember we cannot understand.” Somehow, I am standing on this street corner because I want a glimpse, a touch, of Anne’s three-dimensionality. As if the more I meditate on her, the more I fill up with the details of her life, the more likely she is to join us, grace us, when we are in rehearsal. I want her to be there with us. I want to feel her presence. I know this might sound like mystical hokum to some of you. But it is genuinely how I think of the possibilities of our theatrical – and haunted – spaces (i.e. our theaters): that they are spaces in which we can invoke, access, and converse with those who have come before us and those who will follow, through the art we make. At least this is my hope.
I stand in Merwedeplein hoping to imagine more fully who Anne was. I know “she played hopscotch here on this sidewalk. These trees had only just been planted when she lived here, because it was a brand new (and fairly upscale) housing development, far from the more working-class ‘Joodsche Wijk’”. At the vertex of the Merwedeplein triangle you see ‘de Wolkenkrabber,’ Amsterdam’s first real skyscraper. Anne writes in her diary about this building, where she used to go to have play-dates with friends. These are the sights, sounds, textures, that were of her daily life.
Yet there is nothing at Merwedeplein 37 to let you know this is the “real” house where Anne Frank lived. It is the antithesis of the thriving tourism of the “Anne Frank House” that millions come to visit. There is no sign, no plaque, nothing.
Across the street, in the park, there is a small statue of Anne which was only erected in 2005 (an initiative of a Mr. Jimmink, who now owns the bookstore in the shop - just around the corner of Merwedeplein, at Rooseveltlaan 62 - where Otto Frank bought the diary that was to become so famous.) This one small statue at the edge of the park is what is there. Other than that, it is simply her neighborhood.
What I learned about the apartment online last night is that, as of 2005, it has been restored to an approximation of what it was like when the Franks lived there and is now being rented by the Amsterdam Foundation for Cities of Refuge which each year invites a foreign writer threatened with censorship or persecution in their home country to come live there and write for one year. The first resident of the apartment was Algerian novelist and poet El-Mahdi Acherchour.
From an article in the Christian Science Monitor, by Frank Renout:
“Last December, Ymere, a housing corporation, bought the apartment and developed a relationship with the Amsterdam Refugeetown Foundation,… part of the international Cities of Asylum Foundation, which evolved out of the Rushdie Defence Committee.
‘It is of rare historical symbolism that writers can finish their work at the exact location where Anne Frank started her diary,’ Mr. Asscher says….
While many in Amsterdam are happy about the city’s new port of refuge, not everybody is jubilant. ‘It’s just a new branch of what I usually call the ‘Anne Frank industry,'’ says Dutch academic David Barnouw, one of the Netherlands’ foremost experts on Anne Frank. The little girl has become an icon, he says, used and abused by everybody in his or her own political battle against oppression or war.
‘Today it’s this project for writers from abroad, tomorrow Anne Frank is being used to combat racism, and the day after tomorrow, there will be yet another project,’ says Mr. Barnouw, who works at the Dutch Institute for War Documentation.
Ms. Bosboom, of the Anne Frank Foundation, disagrees. ‘We’re not exploiting Anne’s name, and the apartment will not become a public place for visitors. It’s just meant to be a safe place for writers while, at the same time, we can preserve its historical meaning.’”
I found this interesting. There seems to be heat around Anne Frank wherever you turn. People become proprietary, defensive, passionate, righteous – so quickly - around her memory and how to handle it. It interests me, and scares me a little too in terms of the production. Sometimes I feel like the material offers foremost a series of minefields that I am going to walk into… or spend a lot of time trying to avoid….
But back to today: the square was utterly peaceful and quiet. There were, in fact, no people in sight – except for two little girls on the far end of the park who were playing on the grass and rock formations. This seemed perfect to me – a sign. I kept taking photos of their tiny distant bodies, as Niki wondered why. In my thinking-state about ghosts and spirits, I had this sense that one of them was a version of Anne – certainly her age, it seemed to me, when she lived in this exact spot. And they were playing so naively, and oblivious to anything outside of their own play-world – even me, with my intrusive camera and studying eye. It felt to me such a perfect moment of metaphor – and one that probably existed exactly the same 70 years earlier – a distilled moment of purity and play and innocence, at the back of which there certainly was then, and probably is now (unbeknownst in specificity to me, and hopefully not of the same scale as then) some danger, some foreboding, some excruciating pain laying in wait. That’s the way life is – two little girls playing, while Life looms up ahead. And there they were today, climbing the same rock Anne undoubtedly climbed – and having no idea of either her (I think) or of their future heartaches… why should they? It wouldn’t quite be “childhood” if they knew all that.
We drove our bikes to find Rooseveltlaan 62, the address listed on the map for where Otto Frank bought the diary as a gift for Anne on her 13th birthday, just several weeks before they went into hiding. It is virtually around the corner – and there we found a stationary store! – well, a book store too – but full of journals, diaries, pads, pens, etc. I’m not sure if it’s the “same” store, (i.e. owners, lay out, etc.) but it is certainly the same “kind” of store and at the same “address.” A “stationary store” has apparently been in operation there continually since Otto Frank bought the diary.
We were less successful at finding Anne’s school – which was not correctly on the map and no one seemed to know of – and the home of the Van Pels, at Zuider Amstellan 34. But we did see where Anne walked, and played, and even bought ice cream (at Oasis.)
What struck me most today about all these locations was how NEW this section of Amsterdam is compared to the historic districts in which we’ve been spending our time. It is, indeed, not old at all. THIS past is recent. These characters of OUR time. The architecture at Merwedeplein 37 is modern, and suddenly that removed for me a large gap between Anne’s moment and my own. The illusion of distance between the historical and the contemporary vanished. The Diary of Anne Frank is not a play that takes place in a remote past but in a disturbing proximity to our present.
I realized then that Anne Frank, were she alive today, would be two years younger than my mother. Had she lived, she would have lived through the same cultural moments as my Mom, seen the same movies, heard the same music, watched the same man walk on the Moon…
After spending the bulk of the day in the Franks’ and Van Pels’ neighborhood, we rode to the “old” Jewish quarter to visit a different aspect of Jewish life in Amsterdam. (I crashed a couple times on my bicycle getting there, once even stopping some pedestrians who gathered round to see if I was okay! Niki had no problems. But bicycling in Amsterdam is a trip, pun intended, especially at rush hour when the streets fill with SWARMS of daring bicyclists. Bicycles are the preferred form of transportation here, constituting over half of “all traffic movements” in the city and far outnumbering cars, buses, trains, etc. Anyway, I was fine – traumatized but fine… and invigorated… but traumatized… and fine. I loved riding today. It’s the most exercise I’ve gotten in over a decade, I’m sure.)
The old Jewish quarter was largely destroyed during the Nazi occupation and has been mostly abandoned as a practicing center of Judaism today; only the “Snoga,” the Sephardi synagogue, remains in active use. Nonetheless, the quarter is still full of monuments and historical sights: the Rembrandt House is there as well as “Het Muziektheater” (the new opera house/arts center), the Waterlooplein Market, where we shopped for souvenirs for our nieces and nephews, and of course the “Joods Historisch Museum”, where we spent some time. Needless to say, as is the ongoing theme of our trip, most of the buildings at the museum were closed for renovation.
A large complex houses the Great Shul (built in 1670), the Obbene Shul (1672), the Dritt Shul (1700) and the Neie Shul (1730); all four were badly damaged during WWII and its aftermath, and have recently been renovated. It was very moving to see the BEFORE and AFTER pictures/footage of these great synagogues – the images of their glory days, followed by their complete ruin at the hands of the Nazis. The “shuls” reflect the rapid growth of Dutch Ashkenazi Jewry in the 17th and 18th centuries – each synagogue was constructed when the previous one proved too small for the expanding community. Unfortunately, most of the exhibits that pertain to WWII at the Jewish Historical Museum were closed for renovation, but we were still able to get a good sense of these remarkable buildings, as well as a glimpse into some of Amsterdam’s earlier Jewish history and culture. It’s amazing to realize how thriving this community once was – with the Jewish population of 1941 estimated at 154,000 – and then how decimated that population became – with roughly 75% of the Dutch-Jewish population perished by 1945. You can sense this loss, this silence, in these large, somewhat empty spaces of the “shul”s, which now stand not as houses of worship but as museums.
On a very different note, and to complete our day, we went this evening to see a theatrical production of Wings of Desire at the “Stadsschouwburg,” a beautiful, ornate theater at the center of the Leidseplein. It’s a co-production of the Dutch Toneelgroep and Boston’s American Repertory Theater (where I will be directing next year.) On the first day we were in Amsterdam, we were walking along a street and I heard someone say, “Tina?!” I turned to find Stephen Payne, an actor from NYC who I had just directed in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He is in Amsterdam as one of four American actors doing this WINGS, along with another actor, Jesse Lenat, who I directed in Floyd Collins and 1969. I learned too that Robert Woodruff and Gideon Lester from A.R.T were in town for the opening, as well as various other fellow theater-makers that I know from our own USofA. So we saw them all at their opening party this past Sunday, and tonight we saw the show. It was a wonderful small-theater-world encounter, and I was happy to find such familiar friends and exciting theater on this Dutch soil. I love how theater can make the world so small and knowable for me at times – like stumbling across these folk here – and how too, at other times, it can make the world so large and mysterious – an ever-expanding adventure, as it continues to do for me as I work on this play. Through the theater, for me, the world is one moment contracted, and the next expanded.
And speaking of expansion…. I did try to keep this shorter. It clearly did not work. Forgive the length. I am excited, and when I get excited, I get long. So, vaarwel voor nu – or, goodbye for now – Tina