Looking for Anne and Finding Meyer, Part 1

2,639 words

Part 1 of 3

If we examine Levin’s career, the following portrait emerges: An extremely thoughtful and talented creator. A man with a strong fighting spirit. A hardcore Jew who moved all the way from the U.S. to Palestine . . . Hard-line Zionist. A professional who mixes false information with real information, produces and disseminates propaganda films and books under the guise of documentaries, and directs public opinion. . . . For Levin, immediately after the war, contributing to the realization of the State of Israel was the very purpose of life. No one was more intensely motivated than he was to bring the suffering and tragedy of the Jews to the world, in order to boost the Zionist movement . . .[1] ^[3]

Meyer Levin ^[4] (1905-1981) has been put forth as the most likely primary author of Anne Frank’s diary in its original published form. Several other contributors and editors left their mark on the final product as well, both in the late 1940s and in modern times. For a comprehensive analysis of the history of the diary and its different versions, I suggest reading Ikuo Suzuki’s excellent Unmasking Anne Frank, as well as earlier revisionists such as Robert ^[5] Faurisson ^[6] and Ditlieb Felderer ^[7].

On the revisionist side, there are roughly two positions on the Anne Frank issue. One, represented by Faurisson, Felderer, and Suzuki, points out the many inconsistencies within the diary — or rather, diaries — and comes to the conclusion that someone else must have written the text after Anne’s death. The question then becomes not only who wrote it, but also why any forger would create two different versions of the same diary (versions A, the “original” text, and B, the text allegedly edited by Anne for later publication) as a prop? To troll posterity?

The other position, as exemplified by Simon Sheppard, takes the view that all these inconsistencies are meaningless, because the diary was never meant to be an authentic description of life in hiding; Anne Frank wrote the text as a novel, a fantasy. Of course, this position immediately comes with questions of its own. For example, why does the “novel” end on a perfect note (Suzuki has looked at the structure of the tale and attests to its novel-like qualities) shortly before the arrest of the Franks and the other inhabitants of the annex? Coincidence? Was Anne a clairvoyant? Second, even if we agree with Sheppard, we still don’t know how Anne’s writings made it out of the hiding place without the Sicherheitsdienst confiscating them.

Another point revisionists have made repeatedly is the text’s mature tone, the advanced writing style, and the “deep sense of culture, insight, and sometimes intense Jewishness,”[2] ^[8] indicating an author far older than a 14-15-year-old girl. Suzuki, following Faurisson’s comparison of the texts, points out the strange discrepancies between the Dutch and German first editions that, to him, go beyond the ordinary divergences between an original and a translation.

Then there is the handwriting issue. Karl Haemers, in the Postscript to Suzuki’s book, points out the matter of the two “secret” pages ^[9] in the red-checkered diary. Haemers makes valid points, such as why had nobody, in all these decades, ever made mention of the two covered pages or tried to decipher them, or pointed out the fact that the handwriting looked radically different from the rest of the diary? Although I have to disagree with him here. Yes, the handwriting is startlingly different than the lines directly above it and from the diaries’ main body, and my first thought was that even though its pages are written in cursive and the dirty jokes of the covered pages are in block letters or handprinting, the divergence is so striking that it couldn’t have been the same person who wrote them. But Simon Sheppard gives us another example ^[10] of the same occurrence, and I don’t see any evidence of a later addition there.

Now, both handwritings do not look at all like that of the two letters from 1940 that Anne sent to a pen pal in the United States[3] ^[11] — if those are authentic. Could someone’s handwriting change so much in just four years? Although the block letters do appear to be identical to the writing on a postcard from 1942 (the same year as the covered pages), as shown in Suzuki, page 145. Of course, that card is also somewhat questionable. Suzuki makes no mention of it, but why does Edith Frank’s writing go around the postmark — which the post office would have stamped on it only after the card had already been sent?

So the whole thing is a mess of contradictions. One would need handwriting samples of all the actors in the long and complicated process that was the publication of The Diary of Anne Frank to be certain. I will offer you another hitherto overlooked suspect in the course of this essay.

The deeper you get into this particular rabbit hole, the greater the danger becomes that your head will explode. Since I’d rather avoid that, I’ll just examine the thesis of Meyer Levin as the author of Anne Frank’s diary in this essay. What makes sense? What doesn’t? And what else was Levin up to that is worth mentioning?

While I do not think Levin was an outstanding human being — quite the opposite, in fact — he does not strike me as the kind of person who would have been able to pull off a hoax like that; he was too emotional by far. Sure, there is a difference between the real person and his literary persona, and there certainly are arguments to be made for his authorship of the diary.

The rumor of Meyer as the diary’s true author originally started because of a misunderstanding. Levin had written a stage adaptation of it, but in a series of odd events that he describes at length in his book The Obsession, Anne’s father Otto Frank dropped him as the scriptwriter and went with Frances ^[14] and Albert Hackett ^[15] instead. Their first drafts, according to Levin, went nowhere until an earlier scriptwriter, Lillian Hellman ^[16], and her producer Kermit Bloomgarden ^[17] were brought in. When Levin finally saw the finished play in 1955, he at once recognized key scenes — that had not been in the book — from his own script. So he sued Otto Frank as well as Hellman and Bloomgarden for plagiarism. This is how the idea that the plagiarism claim referred to the diary itself came about.

But people wondered. Meyer Levin had the perfect background — Zionist, novelist, screenwriter, a member of the US Army’s Psychological Warfare Division during the Second World War, being in Europe in the immediate post-war era, and translator of Kibbutz Buchenwald, another supposedly genuine diary by Jewish concentration camp inmates that comes with a lot of questions.

Levin describes in his autobiography, In Search, how he met up with the kibbutzim again after the founding of the state of Israel. By then, they called themselves and their new kibbutz Nitzanim ^[18]. Now, I’m not trying to be nasty here; I actually have a great deal of respect for the Israeli pioneers. But something is fishy about this story, or at least with Levin’s telling of it. According to Wikipedia, the Nitzanim kibbutz was founded in December 1943 by “Holocaust survivors.” I’ll let that slide; Holocaust survivor is a legal term that doesn’t actually mean much. But at any rate, Levin’s Buchenwald survivors were not the founders of this kibbutz. They probably joined an already existing kibbutz after they had left Germany for Palestine. So far, so good. But the kibbutz was destroyed ^[19] in 1948 during the Arab-Israeli War, when in Levin’s account the war “had not touched them here, but one of the comrades had been killed in the Negev, and another in Tel Aviv the time when the bus station had been bombed ^[20].”[4] ^[21] I don’t know — is this another instant of the supposed writers of a diary translated, edited, or publicized by Meyer Levin dying before Levin’s memoires of the whole affair were published? Or was there another kibbutz named Nitzanim?

Kibbutz Buchenwald ^[22] was undoubtedly real; but what I can’t seem to find out is what happened to the original diary. Levin’s translation carries the addition “selections from the kibbutz diary.” An article ^[23] goes further into details:

The journal of Kibbutz Buchenwald is the collective diary that was kept by the members of this group. It contains letters, sketches, and stories in addition to dated entries, and was written in Yiddish, German, Polish, and Hebrew. It comes to us from Meyer Levin, the American novelist, who learned of its existence in Palestine and translated much of it and arranged for the translation of the rest.

Fine. But where is the original? Is it among Levin’s papers? Do the descendants of one of its writers have it? Was it destroyed in kibbutz Nitzanim? Its current whereabouts appear to be unknown.

As for Meyer Levin’s involvement in the publication of Anne Frank’s diary, he advised Otto Frank on finding an American publisher for the diary. He wrote the major review in the New York Times that helped promote the book. Frank appointed Levin as his copyright agent in the United States. Levin was the driving force behind the adaptation of the diary for the stage; he also wrote a radio play based on it.

Suzuki put forth an interesting theory when he compared the Dutch and German first editions of The Diary of Anne Frank which showed strange discrepancies: Both editions, Suzuki argued, were in fact translations of an original English text written by Levin.

Of course, there is no proof of this and probably never will be, but in my experience, no writer of fiction escapes the need to put something of his or her own biography into their work. So I decided to test this theory. One thing that stood out to me was that both Anne’s mother and the mother of Anne’s love interest Peter, Auguste van Pels (“van Daam” in the published version), are both depicted very negatively. I wondered. Did Meyer Levin, if he really was the author, have a problem with either his mother or his wife? The fictional Otto Frank of the diary did not love his wife and possibly had been unfaithful to her. So how did that compare to Levin’s marriage?

In Search, Meyer Levin’s 1950 autobiography, is a 524-page-long treatise on being a Jew. No wonder young Levin had problems finding a publisher for his novels, all centered around — you guessed it — being a Jew. His failed writing career was a source of constant frustration to him, and he blamed his failure on the omnipresent fascists and anti-Semites in America. He wanted to write the great Jewish epic of his time, and so he repeatedly adapted true stories of American and Palestine Jews for novels. He also repeatedly attempted to adapt those novels for the stage, which is exactly how his name entered the Anne Frank debate. Is that a clue? You decide.

Meyer Levin was obviously a deeply neurotic individual. The son of Eastern European immigrants, he grew up in a predominantly Italian neighborhood and with a sizeable inferiority complex because of his Jewishness. This, as the reader notices from page one of In Search, turned into a giant superiority complex; yet he never escaped his need to prove himself to the world.

Meyer tried to exorcize his personal demons in all his works. There are always bits and pieces that give us clues. His journey to Poland during the filming of The Illegals was his connecting with his ancestral roots, as he himself writes. His curious description of the casting process for the main actor in My Father’s House — “I had imagined a child violent in his smallness” — certainly points to his own childhood trauma of being bullied by Italian immigrant children. This becomes even more pronounced in his second autobiographical work, The Obsession (1973).

Interestingly, Levin married a gentile. The couple eventually divorced, which is not surprising given the fact that Levin does not appear to have spent much time at home. He lived and worked on a kibbutz in Palestine for a time. That is really the extent to which Levin talks about his wife in In Search — and his mother, for that matter; although later in the book he lyrically compares the Torah he is transporting to Cologne to a stainless bride. In The Obsession we learn that his first wife, after a failed second marriage, committed suicide. He also mentions his mother “with her hysteria.”

After some years as a journalist for various American newspapers (and a time living in a nudist colony — until fascists and anti-Semites entered the scene, once again ruining things for him), Levin ended up as a war correspondent in Europe after D-Day and travelled with the US forces into Germany (“that smiling and evil land”). I had not memorized his name back in the day, but I now learned that I had actually read about Meyer Levin before: In Stephen Harding’s book The Last Battle, about the now famous incident ^[26] at Castle Itter in Tyrol where American and German troops, French hostages, and Austrian civilians had fought against Waffen-SS troops during the last days of the war. I have reservations concerning some of the story’s details, but it’s still a good one.

Meyer Levin, along with his French colleague and co-ethnic Éric Schwab ^[27], arrived with the relief troops and thus missed most of the fighting. In his autobiography, Levin makes no mention of any German participation in the battle except, of course, as the bad guys on the other side. His ^[28] 1945 ^[29] article ^[30] in the Saturday Evening Post is more than dismissive of them, but that’s standard war propaganda for you. Well, post-war propaganda — the article was published in the July 21 issue; the events had taken place on May 4 and 5, 1945. Gratifyingly, Josef Gangl and his men are known by name today, instead of being referred to as “a German major [Captain Lee] had captured” and “the resident German soldiers who had been so happy to become prisoners the night before.” (I’m still thinking about writing a blog post ^[31] titled “Gangl’s Gang” someday.)

The problem with In Search is that one hardly knows where reality ends and fiction begins. The lampshades are there: “the tattooed human skin.” The tale of a German officer “attentively lining up a number of Jewish children, patting their heads until they were precisely one behind the other, and then putting a single bullet through the line . . . and over and over each image was stamped with the ever-recurring line, ‘I saw it. I saw it with my own eyes.’”[5] ^[32] Levin even tells us that the Völkerschlachtdenkmal ^[33], the Monument to the Battle of the Nations in Leipzig, had been a “vast monument to the last [world] war.”

Much later, in a paragraph pertaining to the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, Levin has this to say:

The fighting Jew, resourceful, spirited, modern, was a revelation to [the gentiles]. Even Julius Streicher, in jail in Nuremberg, cried out, “If I had known Jews were like that, I would have joined them. Yes, I would fight on their side!”[6] ^[34]

Streicher had been hanged in 1946. If we believe Wikipedia ^[35], as part of his last words he “delivered his last sneering reference to Jewish scripture, snapping ‘Purimfest ^[36]!’”

As far as fantasies go, those are relatively harmless, because they are stupid and easily debunked. Not in 1950, obviously, but they have aged very badly. We’re about to get into a whole other set of fantasies that have little to nothing to do with the Anne Frank debate. I’m including them anyway, because they show not only what was going on in Levin’s head but also how he crafted a narrative based on real-life events.

Notes

[1] ^[37] Ikuo Suzuki, Unmasking Anne Frank (2022), p. 157.

[2] ^[38] Ibid., p. 149

[3] ^[39] Ibid., p. 146

[4] ^[40] Meyer Levin, In Search (1950), p. 484.

[5] ^[41] Ibid., pp. 239-240.

[6] ^[42] Ibid., p. 510.