HAVE MADE A rough sketch of my underground palace,” Anne Frank wrote in her diary on June 14, 1942. “I hope that this wish of mine will be fulfilled one day, but there would have to be a miracle then, since it doesn’t usually happen that… you can just disappear under the ground and then live there, it’s too beautiful to be true.”
How is it possible that Anne Frank did not know, when she wrote this lovely meditation on the imaginary—as realist and dreamlike as the best fairy tales—that her father was making plans for his family to disappear? Too beautiful to be true is possible, as fairy tales show.
The imaginary Anne Frank the world has made, since her murder, is neither beautiful nor true enough. Is it still possible to remember her by her real name? Anne Frank the author. Anne Frank the Jewess Philosopher.
Merely three weeks after Anne made the sketch of her underground palace, the Frank family walked through the rain, carrying all that they could, to Het Achterhuis (the Secret Annex). There, behind a bookcase and through a door, were stairs that led not underground but up to a space where the family would indeed “disappear and then live there” for a time. They would need to be silent all day so no one in the building, a pectin warehouse, would know that Jewish families were hiding above the ceilings. Books would be their constant companions: Dickens, Greek and Roman mythology, the Bible. Apart from certain classics (Faust), no German books were permitted, which meant that the worn, 1925 edition of Grimms’ Fairy Tales that Anne once shared with her sister had to be left behind in their real house.
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm did not make it into the Secret Annex.
Though Anne Frank had been born in Germany, the family left the country when she was four because, she writes, “we’re Jewish.”
Anne Frank’s underground palace shares not only poetics with castles in the air—an image called forth by another of my favorite Jewish philosophers, Ernst Bloch—but also its ethics. Like Ernst Bloch, Anne Frank loved fancy, knew it to be sacred to seriousness.
Yet how
