Cultural depictions of Anne Frank

The following lists some references to the Holocaust-era Jewish diarist Anne Frank in popular culture.

Image of 5535 Annefrank taken by the Stardust space probe

Books[]

• Time magazine considered Anne Frank one of the most influential people of the 20th century.
• A picture of Anne Frank appears in LIFE's 100 Photos that Changed the World.
• Philip Roth — U.S. novelist whose novel The Ghost Writer (1979) imagines Anne Frank surviving World War II and living anonymously as a writer in the United States.
• Geoff Ryman's novel 253 features an elderly Anne Frank as a passenger on the London Underground.
• In Douglas Coupland's book Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, two of the characters have a discussion about World War II. Anne Frank is brought up as an example (the only one given) of someone who became famous because of the war but did not personally profit from that fame.
• In the novel The Company of the Dead by David J. Kowalski, which depicts a timeline in which the Titanic sank later and different survivors escaped the disaster, a reference is made to Anne Frank as a pro-German writer in the new timeline (although it is also suggested that the Nazi party never rose to power in this reality, as Germany won the First World War without America becoming involved in the conflict and Hitler is specifically identified as an artist rather than a political figure in the new timeline).
• The book The Freedom Writers Diary (and its 2007 film adaptation) chronicles the lives of high school students whose English teacher encourages them to read The Diary of Anne Frank. Through their experience with the book, the students then raised funds to bring Miep Gies, the woman whose house Anne Frank hid in, to their high school to speak with them of her experience with Anne. The events portrayed in the book and the film are actual events due to the impression caused by reading the diary.
• Anne Frank Conquers the Moon Nazis, a tongue-in-cheek webcomic by Bill Mudron, about a resurrected Anne Frank rebuilt cybernetically to defend the Earth from an extraterrestrial Nazi assault, ran online until 2003.^[1]
• Annelies is a novel that imagines how Anne would have reacted had she survived the Holocaust^[2]

Music[]

• Dnevnik Anny Frank is a Russian language opera, composed in 1968.
• On their 1980 album Fig. 14, Boston college rock band Human Sexual Response included a song called "Anne Frank Story", which relates the unusual emotional experience of viewing the Anne Frank House as a tourist.
• Neutral Milk Hotel — US indie rock band whose 1998 album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea was inspired by the lead singer Jeff Mangum's affection for Anne Frank. It includes the songs, Holland 1945 ('The only girl I ever loved/ Was born with roses in her eyes/ But then they buried her alive/ One evening 1945/ With just her sister at her side/ And only weeks before the guns all came and rained on everyone'), In the Aeroplane Over the Sea ('Anne's ghost all around...'), Oh Comely ('I know they buried her body with others/ Her sister and mother and five hundred families/ And would she remember me fifty years later/ I wish I could save her/ In some sort of time machine'), "Ghost" ("She was born in a bottle rocket, 1929"), and many other songs on In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.
• In 2004 Robert Steadman composed a twenty-minute musical work for choir and string orchestra entitled Tehillim for Anne which commemorated Anne Frank's life with settings of three Psalms in Hebrew.
• The British composer James Whitbourn wrote a concert-length choral work entitled Annelies (Anne Frank's real name) which sets larger portions of the diary text itself and which was premiered in London in 2005 by American Jewish conductor Leonard Slatkin.
• A Punk rock band from Colorado named themselves "Anne Frank on Crank", which by their explanation vaguely suggests the "down-trodden rising up with an attitude."
• The Indonesian progressive rock band have in their second album a 19-minute track titled "Anne" adapted from the diary.
• There are some public domain folk songs about Anne Frank, including the "Dear Diary" and "A Father And His Daughter" folk songs.^[3]
• The Beauty That Still Remains is a choral work by Norwegian composer Marcus Paus based on Frank's diary
• Bob Dylan's 2020 song "I Contain Multitudes" contains the lyric "I’m just like Anne Frank - like Indiana Jones / And them British bad boys the Rolling Stones / I go right to the edge - I go right to the end / I go right where all things lost - are made good again".^[4] When asked about the lyric in a New York Times interview, Dylan responded that Frank's story was "profound".^[5]

Films[]

Television programs[]

• The comedy show Robot Chicken ran a tongue-in-cheek sketch depicting a preview for a teen film about Anne Frank. It referenced many teen film clichés (such as casting Hilary Duff as Anne, and having her dot the letter i in her diary with hearts) and included a teen pop song. It ended with the tagline "Nazis are so uncool".
• The animated show Family Guy had Peter discussing how his appetite had previously gotten him into trouble. The scene cuts to black-and-white footage of Anne Frank and family crouched in an attic, with the Nazis downstairs looking for them, only to hear a loud crunch. They look over, to find Peter loudly and slowly eating potato chips, (implying that he was responsible for their having been found out.)
• In one episode of the 1990s TV show My So-Called Life, Angela, after her class read The Diary of Anne Frank, says she thinks Anne Frank was lucky because "she was trapped in an attic for three years with this guy she really liked".
• In The Venture Bros. episode "", Henchman 21 and Henchman 24 have a debate on who would win in a fantasy fist fight, Anne Frank or Lizzie Borden.
• In The Sarah Silverman Program Sarah recites a portion out of the diary in the Little Miss Rainbow Pageant.
• In an episode of 8 Simple Rules Bridget gets the role of Anne Frank in the school play.
• In the two-part episode "I Am Anne Frank" of the of American Horror Story, Franka Potente portrays an adult Anne Frank, having escaped Auschwitz concentration camp under the alias "Charlotte Brown".

Theatre plays[]

• The Diary of Anne Frank (play) — premiered on October 5, 1955.
• The Bernard Kops play Dreams of Anne Frank (1992) re-imagines her concealment in Amsterdam, using elements of fantasy and song.
• And Then They Came for Me — by James Still.

Others[]

• 5535 Annefrank — an asteroid named after Anne Frank.
• Marc Chagall — illustrated a limited edition of The Diary of Anne Frank.
• The city of Boise, Idaho erected an Anne Frank memorial in response to concerns about neo-Nazis making a home in northern Idaho cities such as Coeur d'Alene^[6][7] On May 10, 2017 it was discovered that vandals had defaced the memorial with racist and anti-Semitic language.^[8]
• Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl — a radio play by Meyer Levin.

References[]