Trauma tourism or educational tool? The murky ethics of recreating Anne Frank’s house abroad

The largest proportion of visitors to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam – more than a quarter – comes from the United States. But next week, the 300,000 American pilgrims will no longer need to voyage to the Netherlands to see the attic from which the world’s most famous diary emerged. It is coming to them.

The Dutch museum is launching the “first-of-its-kind, full-scale recreation of the Annex” in New York, in the form of a 7,500 sq ft replica that, if successful, could itself be copied and taken around the globe.

It is the latest in a long line of Anne Frank-inspired creations designed to share the message of one of Time magazine’s 20 “heroes and icons of the 20th century” – the German-born Jewish girl who, aged 15, was betrayed after two years in hiding.

The 2023 Disney+ drama series A Small Light told the story from the perspective of Anne’s rescuer, Miep Gies. The 2019 picturebook The Cat Who Lived with Anne Frank relayed it from the point of view of a feline. Meanwhile, the Nathan Englander play What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank reopened at the Marylebone Theatre in London this month “owing to unprecedented demand” – despite the publicity boasting that, in fact, Anne is “not in this play” at all.

Many enterprises associated with the teenager have proved controversial and some may worry that any Anne Frank exhibit risks becoming a kind of “trauma tourism”. The unedifying Dark-Tourism.com website already lists the Amsterdam house as a “major dark tourism destination” and gives it a “darkometer rating” of four stars. Others might wonder about the future limits to how European Holocaust-related sites could be recreated for export worldwide.

Ronald Leopold, executive director of the Anne Frank House, says that the museum has been thinking for a long time about how to cater to people keen to visit but who can’t owing to distance or disability, or because the tickets simply sell out so fast.

“Of course, we have a beautiful virtual tour,” he says, referring to the 3D navigation guided by a multilingual AI avatar of British TV presenter Rachel Riley. “But the special part of experiencing the life of Anne Frank is really to be in situ here at the museum.”

Those who buy tickets to the “immersive” show in New York will actually see more than those who travel to the original. Anne’s father, Otto, was adamant that he wanted the Amsterdam house to remain empty – as it was left after the family was deported and the Nazis ransacked the annex. In an interview in 1962, he said: “They asked me if I wanted to have the rooms refurnished. But I said, “No. They took everything out during the war, and I want to keep it that way.’”

The American exhibit, however, will be “furnished as it would have been when Anne and her family were forced into hiding”. Leopold said “we pondered on it for a very long time”, but eventually concluded that Americans, “in a different place”, would need a helping hand to bring them “close to history”.

One month before opening, 30,000 tickets had already been bought. The House hopes to sell 400,000 during the year, if the run is extended beyond April – in addition to the 1.2 million visitors who go to the Prinsengracht.

London-based Rabbi David Soetendorp, who was conceived in hiding in Holland, grew up knowing Anne’s father as “Uncle Otto” and “a member of the family”. His own father, Rabbi Jacob Soetendorp, was one of the first people to see Anne’s diary after Gies had handed it over to Otto in 1945.

Rabbi David co-founded the Anne Frank Trust UK, having brought an exhibition to Bournemouth in 1988, which went on to tour the UK. A later version would feature a replica of Anne’s bedroom. He says he thinks the new display is “a good idea”, as he supports any educational project that takes her message out into the world, and believes Otto would have “wanted the story to have maximum reach”.

Bart Wallet, professor of early modern and modern Jewish history at the University of Amsterdam, sees it as part of a trend triggered by “the realisation that we have fewer and fewer people who actually experienced the Holocaust themselves. So instead of the witnesses, it becomes the spaces that basically have to become the anchors of the story. Because it’s temporary and in this educational setting, I can see the use of it.”

However, he predicts that as the number of survivors continues to dwindle, we will see even more reinterpretation of The Diary of a Young Girl, not less.

“One of the problematic aspects is that the whole story of the Holocaust is basically reduced to the story of Anne Frank, so she is not just the icon of the Holocaust, but her story also becomes the Holocaust story, par excellence. The whole diversity of the Holocaust experience is at risk of being lost if the story of Anne Frank will be the only one taught.”

Of the commercial exploitation of her words and image – which have been used, unauthorised, to sell everything from Hallowe’en costumes to luxury homes – as well as recent pictures of Anne donning a Palestinian keffiyeh, he adds: “She has become very much like Che Guevara – some sort of hero for teenagers. I’m pretty sure that we haven’t seen the end of the commercialisation and misuse of her for all kinds of political agendas.”

Meanwhile, historian Simon Schama last week criticised digital simulations of Anne Frank on the SchoolAI.com website. Responding to an online post citing the chatbot’s answers to questions including “How did you die?” (“I was deported to a concentration camp, where I sadly passed away”), Schama said: “Jew-free as usual. Absolutely appalling.” SchoolAI responded by saying they immediately “review[ed] the prompting for anything that would lead to Holocaust denialism or minimisation” and “added new prompting and safeguards”.

One educator, who asked to remain anonymous, has worked for years to disseminate the message of Anne’s diary and said he fears that the American exhibit may become “Disney World in a Jewish museum”.

“It’s really the opposite of what Otto Frank wanted because he always said, ‘I don’t want to have a mausoleum.’ How would people react if you would rebuild the prison of Nelson Mandela in New York? It is a little bit difficult to understand.

“Anne Frank wrote the diary, which was hundreds of pages of content. Why should one need to see the hiding place? In America, the level of [Holocaust] education is very low, so it’s important to discuss: what do you represent?”

In 1997, novelist Cynthia Ozick wrote in The New Yorker that the story of Anne had for 50 years, despite good intentions, “been bowdlerised, distorted, transmuted, traduced, reduced; it has been infantilised, Americanised, homogenised, sentimentalised; falsified, kitschified”.

She complained that the diary – which stops before Anne can report on the horrors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, where she died – allows readers “to stew in an implausible and ugly innocence”.

Those who focus on some kind of optimistic message of redemption may fail to realise that the Dutch Holocaust story was even less redemptive than most; a higher proportion of Jews were killed in the Netherlands than anywhere else in western Europe.

I ask Leopold what he would say to someone who feels uncomfortable about a place so sacred being replicated and turned into a tourist attraction. “I usually say, I’m not interested in why they come,” he replies. “I’m only interested in how they leave this place. And the same is true for this exhibition in New York.”

Against a backdrop of record levels of anti-Jewish racism in the US, he says: “We still are convinced that education is one of the best instruments in fighting these forms of anti-Semitism and of group hatred in general.

“Reflecting on her life, it reminds us that it’s not just about the past – it’s also very much a call to action for the present. I feel that this exhibition, in that sense, is also in a way a response to the responsibility that we feel has never been greater.”

Anne Frank: The Exhibition opens at the Center for Jewish History in New York on Monday. Tickets are available at AnneFrankExhibit.org