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Literary Review
A hero betrayed
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From the woman who recently wrote a biography of Anne Frank, comes a biography of Otto Frank, a man who fought bravely for his country in the First World War but found himself being persecuted by its rulers hardly 30 years later. A review by BOB MOORE.
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BUILDING on her recent biography of Anne Frank, Roses from the Earth (reviewed in the TLS, June 4, 1999), Carol Ann Lee has now turned her attention to Anne's father Otto. Captivated by reading some of his early correspondence during her initial research, she also became aware of the paradox of a man who had fought bravely for his country in the First World War but found himself persecuted by the rulers of that same country less than 30 years later.
The Hidden Life of Otto Frank is divided into two distinct chronological parts. The first deals with the years between Frank's birth in 1889 and the end of the Second World War in 1945, from his own birth to the death of his first wife and children in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen respectively. It begins by chronicling the history of the Frank family and its business ventures. Otto's early life in Frankfurt, his first experiences in employment, his extensive and meritorious military service during the First World War. His continuing loyalty to the country he served with such distinction seems to have remained with him throughout his life. The book then deals with the family's financial problems during the Weimar period, Otto's marriage to Edith Holländer in May 1925, the birth of their children, the rise of the Nazis in Germany, the decision to move to the Netherlands in 1933, his struggles to establish a new business, the German occupation of 1940, the decision to go underground in 1942 and the family's concealment in the secret annexe before their betrayal in 1944. Some issues are given more time than others. Thus Lee chronicles Otto's attempts to protect his financial interests and his reaction to increasing German persecution, but not how unusual the Frank family really were. A brief glance at the experience of the majority of Dutch Jews, or even other refugees, would indicate how atypical their situation was — not least in terms of having business premises which could accommodate them in secret, and having non-Jewish friends and helpers to support them in hiding.
The second half of the book is concerned primarily with Otto's attempts to have the diary of his daughter published, first in the Netherlands and then in the wider world. A good deal of space is then devoted to the acrimonious and long-winded attempts to have the diary turned into a stage play in the United States.
Linking the two sections is a theme which Lee says did not form part of her original plan, but came to light during the course of her research — namely the identity of the person who betrayed the Frank family to the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) in August 1944. Her suspect is Tonny Ahlers, a small-time crook, fraudster and SD informer who had apparently intercepted a denunciation against Otto Frank and had then suppressed the information in exchange for a financial consideration. Ahlers later established a business, which acted as an intermediary for contracts between Frank's firm and the Wehrmacht. When his business faltered, Ahlers used his knowledge about the Frank family's whereabouts to betray them to the SD in exchange for the bounty. Whether Otto knew this to be true is unclear, not least because he wrote in defence of Ahlers when the latter was in jail after the war, but Lee also suggests that Otto's lack of interest in pursuing the issue may have been due to his reticence about opening up his wartime contacts with the enemy.
While it is true to say that much of the detail contained in this book has not been made available to the general public before — and Lee should be congratulated for tracking down so many sources — the basic outlines of Otto's life, his conduct after the war, and his motivation for spending so much time and energy in disseminating his daughter's diary through publications, stage plays and a film are reasonably well known, having been covered in the essays included in the Critical Edition of the diaries (1989). This prompts the question of what further insights this book can bring into the character and motivations of Otto Frank. For the most part, Lee uses the words of people who knew him, his family and friends, but seldom posits an opinion of her own. Allowing the sources to speak for themselves is an admirable trait in any historian, but this needs to be tempered with a modicum of analysis that is largely absent here. In spite of almost 400 pages, Otto still remains something of a mystery. In part, this may be an inevitable result of the biographer's method. She has assiduously followed the life of her subject, but without a context for what befell him. Thus the details on the wider history of Germany and the Netherlands are sketchy in the extreme, and in some cases misleading.
There is also no real reflection on Jewish life in Germany during the late Kaiserreich and Weimar periods. Without this essential background, the narrative is inevitably rather one-dimensional. A second concern is her lack of knowledge of Otto Frank's two main languages, Dutch and German (freely admitted by the author in her introduction). She thanks two individuals for translating documents, but her lack of expertise may be responsible for some very strange phrasing at times. Thus on one occasion, "ground stuffs" are mentioned — presumably a translation of the Dutch grondstoffen (raw materials). Elsewhere, reference is made to the "Foreign Police", which is presumably a reference to the Aliens Police. These may not be damning errors, but they do suggest that the author is not in complete control of her material.
One final complaint is that the introduction claims that all the citations (of which there are very many) are traceable to the notes and bibliographies at the end of each chapter. This is palpably untrue. While most citations are attributed to individuals, there is no indication of whether these are written or oral testimony, collected by the author or by others, let alone where the originals might be found. Most of the notes (and there are only half a dozen per chapter) contain additional explanatory text rather than information about the sources. Given the time and effort expended by scholars to substantiate and authenticate beyond doubt every aspect of the diary of Anne Frank, this laxity in a biography of her father seems all the more remiss.
The Hidden Life of Otto Frank, Viking, p.364, £17.99. 0 670 91331 6
©The Times Literary Supplement
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