The Return of Anne Frank

...The alibi most frequently heard was: "Let bygones be bygones...

...Several added, in the words of a 19-year-old student, that "Anne keeps looking to others for help, advice, communion, but must discover that she is all alone...

...these words have little meaning to them...

...Both represent the dangerous, destructive "older generation" (though, to be sure, the Nazis appear as the extreme, deadliest symbol of that generation's stupidity and wickedness, while the Nazi-imposed immurement in the attic appears as the extreme symbol of the young generation's helpless isolation...

...60,000 prisoners, among them many Jews, were crammed into the barracks built for 8,000 soldiers...

...Nobody had asked the 2,000 young people to join in this journey...

...Students who had read the German translation ignored the fact that the heroine was Jewish: what interested them was "how this American girl deals with experiences and problems which puzzle us, too...

...In their eyes, the older generation—ranging from parents to Nazis—-deprived them of their security, acted in cowardly, selfish, sometimes vicious ways, and proved unable to cope with life or to practice the standards of decency they preached...

...One exception was a 14-) ear-old public-school student who...

...She is a martyr of German history," a student who participated in the Bergen-Belsen journey explained, "and martyrs are not only victims of evil forces, but teachers of coming generations...

...They seek and see more in their heroine than merely a tragic symbol of rejection and destruction...

...if she represented a group, it was—rather than the Jews or Hitler's victims— that of young people in general...

...You know how parents are," a 17-year-old who had come with his Athletic League team explained with a wry grin...

...As suggested by the initial public indifference and the current enthusiasm, and borne out by this reporter's observations, it is first and foremost the youngest age group which has been responsible for the triumphant return of the dead Jewish girl...

...The reaction of these teen-age girls was typical...

...They were vaguely acquainted with its program, not at all with its practice...

...Every youngster carried a few spring flowers...

...When I mentioned Anne Frank, she said: "Isn't it wonderful that a young girl who had to undergo all those horrible things should nevertheless still say: 'I believe in the good in man.'" This entry in the diary is probably more widely quoted by young Germans than any other passage...

...One of the prisoners was a young girl named Anne Frank, born in Frankfurt-am-Main fifteen years before her death in Bergen-Belsen in March 1945...

...Most young Germans still resent adults or at least judge them with profound skepticism...

...A great many Germans over 25 have also met Anne Frank on the stage—often not by choice, but as a captive subscription audience which made them a rather representative cross-section...

...In the past year, both have scored unprecedented successes in Germany...

...The Nazi past holds almost no interest for them because it seems too patriotism, self-preservation and protest which still condition the reflexes of many older Germans when pictures of the Nazi past are conjured up...

...being gassed to death is much better than life in a Siberian camp...

...As it turned out, this was not at all the effect on young people...

...Even the form of her diary as a dialogue with a fictitious friend strikes them as a symbol of their own situation...

...weather, or because the occasion was so sad, or because they disliked the whole idea...

...and whether they had observed in strange, too distant, and too difficult for them to understand, many youngsters told me...

...He has interpreted the German scene for such periodicals as Reader's Digest, the Saturday Evening Post, Commonweal, Commentary and the Reporter...

...Although book and play refer often to Jews and Jewishness...

...Only a few admitted that they wanted more cheerful entertainment (a sentiment this writer heard openly expressed among New York and Zurich audiences of the Diary1- The majority offered a variety of criticisms of the play's psychology, history or production, apparently in an attempt to rationalize their personal discomfiture at the subject matter...

...Their destination was Bergen-Belsen, a place in the Heath whose name stirs horrible memories...

...They were mostly young people —school-children, students, young workers, and a group of teen-agers in eccentric clothes and haircuts who, a sticker on their chartered bus announced, were members of the "Hamburg Jazz Fan Club...

...An intelligent 20-year-old office employe summed it up when she explained to me why this play had moved her more than anything she had seen before on the stage...

...Almost 400,000 copies of the book have now been sold, while the play is being presented by 34 theaters, and is slated for eight more...

...it is harmful for our young people to be burdened with these old problems...

...Whether she acts toward them as a rebel or as a "good child," she is oppressed and helpless...

...The reappearance of the dead girl in her native country, and the extraordinary role which she has come to play there, is of very recent date...

...As it turned out, she asked the question for a personal reason: Her father had been an SS leader...

...after the teacher had read the book lo the class, got up to ask "whether all SS men were like those who murdered Anne and the other Jews in the concentration camps...

...As the youngsters see it, Anne, victimized and yet surviving in spirit, is the symbol of their fight against the older generation...

...We have the same problem...

...At least a million Germans have by now seen and/or read Anne Frank's diary...

...Among dozens of high-school and university students, I met only two who had ever read anything about the Third Reich...

...But the adults direct every step in her life and push her around until in the end they kill her...

...After it became a best-seller and a Pulitzer Prize-winning play in the United States, the book was reprinted in Germany in a paperback edition in 1955 and the play was presented on six West German stages in 1956...

...under one of them—which one is unknown—rests Anne Frank...

...Condemned to a monologue, Anne daydreams of an escape from her isolation—like nearly half the young Germans between 15 and 24 who, according to a recent survey, asserted they had "no real friend...

...Without a word, they placed their flowers on every hill...

...In a steady downpour whipped by strong winds, the caravan of buses, motor-scooters and bicycles moved toward the Liine-burg Heath, a tract of wasteland favored by North German nature-lovers as a hiking ground...

...Anne lived our own tragedy," she said...

...The Diary of Anne Frank was published in Germany as early as 1948, but little attention was paid to it for seven years...

...Germany's young generation responds to her inner struggle The Return of Anne Frank By Norbert Muhlen On a Sunday morning in Hamburg several months ago, 2,000 Germans set out on a strange excursion...

...The girl in front of me—a 15-year-old high-school student—wept when she put her primroses on the ground...

...From their early childhood, they still remember the last war years and the first postwar years with their hunger and chaos...

...The Hamburg University Student Council resolved to send delegates to the ceremony...

...and he has written on America for leading Swiss and German publications...

...They had been 12 at most when Hitler fell, had had no share in the events of the Nazi era, and were free of the pangs of guilt, the memories of enthusiasm and disillusionment, the conflicts of them anything "alien to the German nature" ("artfremd," in the Nazi expression), they had no answer because they hardly understood what I was talking about...

...What interests young Germans most is Anne's fate at the hands of the adults...

...When this was reported by local newspapers, hundreds, then thousands of young people responded to the idea...

...It has resulted from the diary which she wrote at the age of 13-14, while hiding from the Nazis in an Amsterdam attic...

...To mv intentionally provocative question whether they found Anne and her group "typically Jewish...

...Nearly one out of four legitimate theaters are showing it to crowded houses...

...Because young Germans find their own personal problems embodied in and expressed by Anne Frank, they identify with her...

...all were hushed, solemn, almost silent...

...Indeed, many had been discouraged by their parents against making the trip—because of the bad Since 1945, Norbert Muhlen, author of The Return of Germany, has been shuttling back and forth between the United States and West Germany...

...They had come spontaneously, almost on impulse...

...She never has a chance to act for herself and to become what she wants to be...

...It had all started last fall when a Hamburg University student went to Bergen-Belsen to visit Anne Frank's grave, could not find it, was saddened by the absence of flowers in the cemetery, and decided to return with a few fellow-students to deposit a wreath...

...The adults cannot understand her, and she cannot understand the adults...

...The Hamburg youngsters came on this March Sunday in 1957 as pilgrims to seek her grave...

...Their response to Anne Frank marks the debut of a new generation—whose oldest members are about 24—on the German scene, and the reasons for their response pinpoint the gap that divides them from their elders...

...The other children in the class, the teacher reports, were "deeply and seriously concerned with Anne's inner difficulties, as she confided them to her diary...

...I love Anne as if she were my older sister," she said...

...None of the gay animation that usually goes with Sunday outings was evident among the participants...

...In fact, the political basis of Anne Frank's tragedy appeared to most young Germans only as historical background, comparable to that in Shakespeare's or Schiller's historical plays...

...The most frequent reaction to the picture of persecution shown in the Diary was a shocked rhetorical question: "How could all this happen here...

...In the young generation's view, the line between Anne's parents and the other Jews in her hide-out on the one hand, and the Nazis on the other, becomes blurred until both almost merge into a single image of enemies...

...They, too, would come to bring flowers to Anne Frank...

...The flat, shrubby expanse served during World War II as a minor German troop-training camp, but in 1944 it was evacuated and filled with the inmates of several Nazi concentration camps on the Allied invasion road...

...Only a minority shared the shock of a middle-aged nurse who left the performance sobbing...

...In a few cases, playgoers denied even this measure of solidarity to Anne Frank and her fellow-sufferers...

...They huddled around the huge obelisk flanked by a wooden cross and a Jewish memorial stone in the center of the field, while a young pastor said the Lord's Prayer and a Jewish resident of Hamburg recited the Hebrew Kaddish...

...They saw their heroine as an individual...

...A 24-year-old dancer told me about her parents, who had been faithful Nazis...

...But then there was a chief usher who had overheard countless conversations among the audience and told me: "Many are moved by the play because it reminds them of their own fate—we Germans have also lost so much...

...A second article on German youth will appear in coming issue...

...They showed a similar reaction toward Herman Wouk's novel, Marjorie Morning-star...

...An embittered man in his forties, recently returned from ten years in Soviet labor camps, complained to me about "all the fuss being made about the Jews...

...After a few brief speeches, the young visitors wandered in a long line over the heath, seemingly without aim, stopping here and there at one of the rectangular, foot-high elevations on top of which a marker announces: "Here lie buried 1,000 bodies" (or 2,000, or 800, or 5,000...

...With "belief in the good in man" as the slogan of the unorganized youth movement centering upon Anne Frank, young Germans show their longing for an order in which no room is left for old or new roots of Nazism and racism...

...When they entered the gate to the former camp, their hands seemed to hold the flowers in a firmer grip —like a weapon against some fearful presence...

...Only now, she explained, did she realize "the detailed truth" on Nazi crimes, and she asked for advice: Was there something she could do, late as it was, to help the Jewish survivors...

...In the next months, 30,000 died of disease and hunger...

...Today's young Germans have their own special reasons for engaging in this "war between the generations...

...But most older Germans simply did not like the play very much...

...Most reacted to the story and its message in a lukewarm, uneasy, defensive fashion...