2

If the Story Cannot End: Deferred

Action, Ambivalence, and Difficult
Knowledge
Deborah P. Britzman

In the middle of my life I fell into a trouble that was to grip, occupy,
haunt, and all but devour me these twenty years. I’ve used the word
“fall.” It implies something accidental, a stumbling, but we also use the
word in speaking of “falling in love” in which there is a sense of
elevation and where a fatedness is implied, a feeling of being
inevitably bound in through all the mysterious components of
character to this expression in the life process, whether in the end
beautifully gratifying or predominantly painful.

—Meyer Levin, The Obsession

So begins Meyer Levin’s postwar epic and lonely account of his

unsuccessful thirty-year struggle with Hollywood moguls, lawyers, and
Otto Frank over the rights to produce his own play based on

Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl.1 Frank chose the team of

Goodrich and Hackett to write the 1956 Broadway play that
subsequently won a Pulitzer Prize. Recently the play was adapted by
Wendy Kesselman and directed by James Lapine and had another
run on Broadway during the 1997–1998 season. Inevitably, the
reviews of the revised play returned to Levin’s earlier fights over the
rights to make a play from the diary and to his profound dissatisfaction
with the play Otto Frank chose. Levin was deeply pained over the first
play’s emphasis on family melodrama and its figure of relief, a
comedic Anne. He argued

50
that this structure downplayed Anne’s Jewishness in order to make
the play more palatable to what the producers thought of as the
general Broadway public, and, in so doing, could not offer audiences
insight into the devastating daily situations and the larger context
European Jews confronted. Levin, of course, was not the only figure to
be dissatisfied with the packaging of Anne

Frank’s diary,2 but his fight with Otto Frank, the father of Anne Frank,
was so spectacular in affect, so scandalous in the trade of
accusations, so traumatic in expression, that its belated force
continues to be debated, retold, and even repeated. Indeed, the figure
of Meyer Levin, the man who sued Otto Frank over the rights to
Frank’s daughter’s diary and who attempted to mobilize Jewish
leaders against what he saw as a Stalinist conspiracy to

forget the Jewish loss,3 now haunts the secondary history of Anne
Frank’s diary.

Levin was trying to respond to that first history—the near destruction

of European Jewry—that called Anne Frank to rewrite her diary for
others to read. But he could only encounter what Anne Frank left
behind, and then everywhere he found traces of all that betrayed her,
including the Broadway play that, in Levin’s view, emphasized the
uplifting and universal qualities of the diary to the detriment of
grasping the magnitude of the disaster. From this belated meeting, he
tried, not just in writing a script that would never be produced, but in
his thirty-year public struggle with Otto Frank and his representatives,
to craft from the diary both his own relation to the event of the Shoah
(the Hebrew term widely used to reference the Nazi genocide of
European Jewry) and what he hoped would be future understandings.
This interminable work of making a relation to loss, the fragile work of
mourning, is part of what troubles the history of Levin’s troubles.

Levin’s phrasing—whether his efforts to save the diary would be

beautifully gratifying or predominantly painful—seems, at first glance,
to be a part of contemporary pedagogical efforts brought to the
question of what manifold forms attachment can mean for scenes of
social recognition. We would do well to reconsider the poles of this
wavering in our own attempts to work with the diary in school settings,
through the terms of Levin’s fall. Since the discovery and publication
of the diary, profound arguments about the import of its use have also
been a part of its reception. While

51

we wish our students to make some insight from reading the diary, to
identify with Anne Frank’s struggles, to learn something about what it
is like to confront one’s own destruction, and to appreciate the power
of narrating, indeed, of bearing witness to the relation one’s life has to
others—all forms that encourage the reader’s attachment to the import
of this text—we are just beginning to consider the psychic difficulty of
learning from the traumatic experiences of others. Contemporary
pedagogy and popular representations, however, seem to emphasize
the idealized outcomes of learning; perhaps the most common
concerns the inscription of hope. This approach assumes that the
problem of making an attachment to the diary can be solved by the
figure of Anne Frank, who has been used as a model of courage and
as a child martyr. Perhaps educators believe these representations of
Anne Frank can call their students to attention, provide suitable role
models, and even speak to something desirable within the student.
The problem with these appeals, however, and what this chapter is
largely concerned with, is twofold. One dimension has to do with how
pedagogy might consider the difficult qualities of approaching
experiences of profound loss. Most generally, this chapter explores
what the work of mourning means in learning. How might a
psychoanalytically inflected theory of learning from the reception of
difficult and traumatic events inform the ways teachers and students
approach these events in relation to understanding profound loss?
Another dimension is more specific and involves an exploration of
whether the idealization of any figure, as a strategy of inciting
identification, can allow insight into the conditions that invoke the urge
and weight of idealization, the psychical needs that animate
identification and its limits, and the intimate work, indeed the
difficulties, of confronting what it means in the learner’s present to
respond to the questions of loss the diary continues to pose.
Perhaps this idealization of the figure of Anne Frank on the part of
educators is a reaction formation, a defense mechanism used to ward
off the significant anxieties that their students may not see any relation
to the diary, see it as irrelevant to their own lives, and even deny that
the text is authentic and truthful. Idealizing the figure of Anne Frank as
the transitional object into school-based Holocaust studies, however,
may work to inhibit any efforts on the part of students and teachers to
understand not just what Anne

52

Frank responded to but also how the diary has been used over the
course of post-Holocaust years and the uses we make of it today.
Certainly, idealization may be one way to avoid the painful dilemmas
of confronting the traumatic residues of this devastating history. But
these reactions and their attendant worries, themselves ego defense
mechanisms that try to ward off the traumatic perception of
helplessness and loss, can foreclose the very processes of what it
means for contemporary students to attach to the diary: to make from
the diary new meanings in their own lives; to become attentive to
profound suffering and social injustices in their own time; to begin to
understand the structures that sustain aggression and hatred; and to
consider how the very questions of vulnerability, despair, and
profound loss must become central to our own conceptualizations of
who we each are, not just in terms of reading the diary as a text but
also in allowing the diary to invoke the interest in the work of
becoming an ethical subject.

If the question of ethicality does not begin with what is successful,

ideal, or familiar about our actions and thoughts but rather with what
becomes inaugurated when we notice the breakdown of meaning and
the illusiveness of signification, then our pedagogical efforts must also
begin with a study of the difficulty of making significance from the
painful experiences of others, the confrontation with the recursive
structure of trauma, and the ambivalence toward the very question of
loss. To return to the arguments over the import of the diary may allow
us to make some fragile insight into the difficulty within and defense
against considering its reception. This is where the figure of Meyer
Levin plays a role. However, to make some sense of what happened
to Meyer Levin, to consider his painful dilemmas as more than a
curious footnote in post-Holocaust history—indeed, to view his
struggle as possessing the capacity to comment upon something
difficult within our own contemporary efforts in pedagogy—one must
bring something more to his story than his view of what went terribly
wrong.

Hannah Arendt’s discussion of what it is to learn from the remnants of

another’s life struggle suggests something about Levin’s fall and his
use of Anne Frank’s diary. For this moment of learning from another’s
life and making from this learning a

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relation to a difficult history is also part of what structures the

persistent use of the diary today. In her preface to Between Past

and Future,4 Arendt brings the question of biography closer to the

problem of encountering the vicissitudes of thought:

If one were to write the intellectual history of our century, not in the
form of successive generations, where the historian must be literally
true to the sequence of theories and attitudes, but in the form of the
biography of a single person, aiming at no more than a metaphorical
approximation to what actually happened in the minds of men, this
person’s mind would stand revealed as having been forced to turn full
circle not once but twice, first when he escaped from thought into
action, and then again when action, or rather having acted, forced him
back into thought. (9)

We would do well to notice the trajectory Arendt traces: In taking an

action, one cannot know in advance its effects on the self or its effects
on others. This is certainly the dilemma with Anne Frank’s diary and
Meyer Levin’s response to it. Arendt suggests it is thought that
completes the signification of action or experience, but not in terms
that necessarily affirm the intentions of the actor or even make closure
for the action itself. It is not the case, at least in Arendt’s view, that
action is devoid of thought. But the thought that invokes action
responds to what went before, and being forced back into thought
after our actions allows for a revision of the time of experience,
opening experience to something more than the immediacy of our
needs, our capacity to disavow the ramification of traumatic events,
and the obscurity of

recognizing historical breakdowns in our own times.5 This point is

crucial in exploring questions of trauma as encompassing the time of
deferred action. One could say, for example, that Meyer Levin’s
traumatic response to the diary opens a different awareness to Anne
Frank’s own traumatic contexts. While Anne Frank registered the force
of traumatic events, our susceptibility to this force must, however
precariously, exceed traumatic repetitions; new meanings of time must
be developed. Freud named this

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dynamic Nachträglichkeit, as the revision of experiences, memories,

and impressions are made to fit new circumstances. The force of
experience undergoes a revision at a later time, but the qualities of the
revision may lead to repetition or working through. If action is that first
scene, it takes a secondary scene of thought to revise and even bring
to the fore the ramifications of our actions. But, for the revision to
affect the quality of thought, our present preoccupations, and how we
come to understand what is past, action must be considered again,
retrospectively. It is not experience that undergoes a change but
rather how one perceives the aftermath of experience in relation to
both previous experiences and those not yet made. This rather
complex psychical dynamic is explored throughout this chapter, for
even the criticism of contemporary pedagogical efforts constitutes a
deferred action, a retranscription of how the diary’s reception might be
thought and encountered.

What, then, is it to be forced back into thought when the object of

thought eludes comprehension, when the remnants of history cannot
make coherent our present stories, and when thought itself is
overwhelmed by profound emotions made from the psychic events of
living with irrevocable loss, suffering, anxiety, and despair? We know
that Anne Frank could not turn full circle twice. Meyer Levin tried, but
his attempts in the end were predominantly painful. We are just
coming to know that contemporary readers themselves must now
accept this difficult obligation in ways that Meyer Levin and those who
crafted the North American reception of the diary could not have
imagined. This is because the infinite details of the Holocaust, details
that continue to shock perceptions of our present and our past (for
instance, the myth of neutrality in World War II, the Swiss banking
scandal, the stolen art in museums, and so on) disturb the view that
the past can be put to rest through declaring an event over. If there is
to be a capacity to learn from the advent of social breakdown, then
and now, can a reading of the historicity of the diary’s reception begin
to approximate some of this interminable work (a work that I will
describe as the work of mourning) without foreclosing and forgetting
not just the troubles made in history but that which should trouble us
because of the history that becomes our lives? For someone like
Meyer Levin, the sad conclusion must be no. In many ways, Meyer
Levin’s response to the diary suggests a

55

reenactment of the fragments of the diary’s traumatic context: a family

in hiding that could not save itself, a young girl whose promise of life
was betrayed by a profoundly violent and cruel social, a people whose
subjectivity was cut off by legal design and its popularized sanctioned
violence, and finally Levin’s own view that he could not save his own
version of the diary’s crafting from falling into oblivion. And, in many
ways, contemporary pedagogical attempts to teach the diary seem
caught in Levin’s dilemma of attempting to control how the diary will
be received. Yet, even the consideration of these fragments is not the
end of the story of the diary’s reception and its fragile pedagogical
yearnings in post-Holocaust North America. Something resists the
force of thought.

This chapter, then, returns to the stakes of Levin’s “fall,” but not to
settle what happened, not to tell a more adequate story in order to
bring this drama to closure. The chronology at stake in this chapter is
not a lineal progression but rather is recursive, akin to the
transcriptions of Nachträglichkeit and transference, moving from
present to past and back to our present. This is because the
irremovable past sutures the present, but not in ways that make
automatic our capacity for conscious apprehension of events that
should call us to attention. But, as we will see throughout this chapter,
to become susceptible to the forces of our own attention, to be called
to attention and to make from this call a revision in one’s own life, also
invokes, at the level of the psychical, manifold forms of attachment
and disassociation that signal some of the dilemmas of identification.
My focus on the need for educators to consider a theory of attachment
in learning stems from a consideration of the question of learning: of
what it means for the learner to encounter and engage the
experiences of another; to craft significance from how Anne Frank has
been represented; and to consider in more general terms the question
of learning from suffering and injustice. Over the course of the chapter
I will signal very different forms of attachment, such as identification,
idealization, clinging, splitting, incorporation, over-familiarity, numbing,
uncanniness, and thinking, as some of the possible scenes that
structure social recognition and mis-recognition. The model of
attachment I believe to be the most helpful to the problem of learning
to become an ethical subject is drawn from Sigmund Freud’s essay
“Mourning and Melancholia,” for there

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experiences of loss invoke the contradictory desire to attach, to be

touched and changed by a relation that is no longer. If there is to be
an attachment to that which has gone but still exerts force upon our
present experiences, and if the attachment is not to invoke rigid ego
boundaries, mirror-like apprehension, the insistence upon familiarity,
or profound modes of idealization and clinging that foreclose the
ambivalent feelings that do accompany loss, then we are obligated to
explore how what has been lost in the self and in the social affects the
dynamics of learning.

If there can be a story of working through the repressions a story

inaugurates, then that story of working through is closer to a
consideration of a complex of stories and to an acknowledgment that
part of this complex is made from the failure of imagination both at the
level of the social and the individual. To settle these accounts through
either discouragement or idealization, through the binary of what
historian Saul Friedlander (1992, 42) names “catastrophe or
redemption,” is part of the trouble. The other part is equally troubling.
It has to do with contemporary attempts to make from Levin’s struggle
over the import of Anne Frank’s diary a final judgment on either
Levin’s efforts or the question of what it should mean in the learner’s
present life to attach to the diary’s reception. What is it to attach to the
arguments raised over the reception of Anne Frank’s diary? Why
study the secondary breakdown of meaning, the contemporary crisis
of witnessing, which is also the crisis made from the diary’s reception?
To consider these large questions, each section of this chapter
explores a play of fragments: those of thought, those of the
unconscious, those of transference, and those of working through. I
will suggest something unsettling about how the dynamics of the ways
Anne Frank has been represented may say something about the limits
of our own pedagogy, about how our pedagogical past presses into
form that which is not yet. Indeed, while contentious discussions over
the import of the diary’s reception and over the loss that inaugurated
its postwar crafting have not yet appeared to affect how the diary is
encountered in schools, these very arguments seem to be repeated in
educators’ worries

over the diary’s pedagogical potential.6

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APPEALS TO THOUGHT
For one to be forced back into thought may be just the beginning of
one’s attempt to break through the terrible confines of reenacting the
transpositions of trauma. And, to be forced back into thought cannot
be seen as either comparable to the insistence upon a facile and
willed rationalism or the demand to make closure. Arendt suggests
that thinking is a problem of ethicality; thinking may open the question
of what conceptuality can mean for the working though of traumatic
events. If trauma is the incapacity to respond adequately to a terrible
and shattering event, the incapacity to think an afterward, and to make
meaning from the ruins of experience, and if, as Cathy Caruth
suggests, what makes trauma traumatic is the loss of the capacity to
experience, trauma “does not simply serve as a record of the past but
precisely registers the force of an experience that is not fully owned”
(1995, 151). Part of the terror of the event can return and repeat as
one attempts to make from loss a learning, a learning to live with an
unresolved past. Within this difficult experience of what is not yet and,
indeed, may never become fully experienced, a new subjectivity must
be crafted from its traumatic ruins.

Sigmund Freud called this interminable work of living with loss “a

working through.” He used this term most poignantly in his

important paper “Mourning and Melancholia.”7 Freud suggests there

are infinite ramifications of what the painful experience of loss can
mean and what loss does to the bereft, whether the experience of loss
be the loss of an important ideal or the loss of an actual person.
Contemporary pedagogical efforts that focus upon Anne Frank’s diary
must engage the working through of both kinds of loss: the loss of the
idea of the social bond and the loss of actual individuals. These losses
must be considered as intimately entwined, and thus any curriculum
that invokes the difficulties and the sufferings of others must come to
terms with both the events of loss and how these events are received
and reworked. And, in considering both losses, the loss of an idea of
the sanctity of the value of life and the loss of an individual, the appeal
to thought must work against the sentimental consolation that the
diary can somehow replace the loss that it signifies. Can a
pedagogical encounter with the history of the diary, a history that is
also our

58

present, offer an insight into what learning means in relation to the

work of mourning?
For Freud, the work of mourning is the work of memorializing the loss,
of allowing the loss not just to become a part of one’s memory, but of
permitting its force to reconstitute the very transcription of memory.
The mourner herself must change, and all that is familiar must be
transformed. For a memory to become a memory, the first shock of
reenacting the abandonment that loss invokes must be exceeded and
the ambivalence that accompanies loss must be acknowledged.
Otherwise, the memory can work as persecution and then must be
defended against. Slowly, detail by detail, memory by memory, the
grief made from loss must encounter the utter singularity of loss, and
still, the griever must find a way to resume the obligations of learning
to live, to risk new attachments in the world, and to demand something
of the living. These new attachments are not substitutes for what has
been lost. There can be no substitute for the singularity of loss, and
this may be why Freud poses the question of crafting a memory from
painful losses as a problem of

ethical love.8

The work of mourning, of memory, requires that the mourner work

through her or his own impulse to idealize the lost object, to split off
the affect from the fact of loss, and hence attempt to bring back as
unchanged and familiar what can no longer exist. Idealization inhibits
the mourner’s work of learning to come to terms with what has been
lost in the self, what has been lost to the social, and to the working
through of the ambivalence that such knowledge can bring. When
idealization interrupts mourning, the lost object becomes incorporated
and confused with the ego. The singularity of the other is thus
displaced because, in incorporating the other, the other’s singularity
as a separate being

is lost.9 Freud called this displacement—when libidinality regresses

back into the ego—melancholia, a profound loss of the self’s capacity
to be interested in the world and to work through the vicissitudes of
what loss can signify. Melancholia is a form of narcissistic
identification, where the ego confuses itself with the lost object,
becomes split, and then attacks itself and the loss. One form
narcissistic identification can take is idealization of the lost object, a
form of controlling and judging the conflictive

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dynamics of loss. But what is actually idealized is not the object but
the self, for in melancholia the object becomes the ego, or more
accurately, the ego becomes split into absolute forms of good and bad
that then wage for dominance. Neither the ego nor the object can
become understood as vulnerable to forces other than good ones.
Idealization then becomes a substitute for engagement and a
mechanism of control that wards off the capacity to acknowledge the
profundity of loss. It can neither restore the loss nor allow for the
working through of the ambivalent feelings that accompany loss.
Freud thus offers us two stories of psychical attachment, one bound to
the nostalgia for an idealized and unchanged world that he calls
melancholia, the other bound to an ethical struggle with reconstituting
the self as subject to a relation that is no longer. Melancholia can be
understood as a form of attachment called clinging, not to the object
that is gone but to the ego that existed before the loss. Mourning is
work because what is lost in the self and what is lost in the world
become a part of the ego after the loss. In the work of mourning, it is
the ego’s own boundaries that are altered.

Because contemporary readers only encounter the

textualizations of Anne Frank,10 processes of idealization and

attempts to restore as unchanged both the lost object and the ego
who perceives the other may actually be invoked in the very design of
the encounter, with the consequence that the relationship between
reading and mourning is foreclosed. Saul Friedlander’s discussion of
“working through” in the context of encountering the inconsolable
documents of living in and with the Shoah suggests this difficulty for
historians and, we should add, for anyone encountering the
documents of historians: “to keep some measure of balance between
the emotion recurrently breaking through ‘the protective shield’ [of
defense against trauma] and a numbness that protects this very
shield.... ‘Working through’ means, first, being aware of both
tendencies, allowing for

a measure of balance between the two whenever possible”11 (1994,

260–261). The difficulty, Friedlander suggests, is that at first, neither
emotion nor numbness can be consciously apprehended and both of
these responses are forms of identification and dis-identification that
unconsciously serve to protect and defend against traumatic
perception. Whereas

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numbness is the incapacity to consider what has been lost in the self
and what has been lost in sociality, the emotion that breaks through in
identification obscures the historian’s own statement of need and,
hence, inhibits an analysis of the historian’s transferential relation to
the writing of history. These responses can be thought of as
resistance to thought.

To understand the stakes of Friedlander’s argument, it is useful to

consider how emotion and numbness can work as transitory
identifications in a common daily scene, elaborated by the analyst
Rafael Moses (1986):

Some years ago Joseph Sandler talked to me about how, when we

see a stranger faltering a few meters from us, we feel, somehow,
somewhere, in relation to our own body the “almost falling” of the
other (Sandler and Joffee, 1967). Our ego boundaries will be
momentarily inattentive and allow us to identify briefly with the
stranger in this “almost falling.” We will therefore try to counteract the
hardly noticeable, momentarily unpleasant sensation. We do so either
by the fantasy, acted out in a minute way, of righting our body so as
not to fall; or by disidentifying with the person who stumbles. Both
mechanisms serve our need to be reassured that what happens to the
other does not happen to us, that we are different from him. (137)

The only way out of this imaginary safety that, in fact, serves to make
ego boundaries rigid, is, of course, to try to help the other who
stumbles. But prior to this moment, a certain susceptibility to the
other’s action unconsciously plays itself out. Identification is precisely
this susceptibility to the other but a susceptibility that is incomplete
and subject to its own reversals into its opposite: disregard for the
other. The sort of emotion and numbness also described by Moses
suggests that fleeting identifications cannot, in themselves, allow for
ethical thought. The embarrassment that some may feel, the
arrogance at not being the one who “almost falls,” and the judgment of
the stranger as somehow less than oneself suggest that emotion and
numbness are not so much the

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opposite of each other but a to-and-fro movement, an attempt at

sustaining one’s illusory sense of stability and continuity. Feeling the
“almost fall” and then distancing oneself are symptoms of the
incapacity to distinguish the time of trauma from, in the case of the
historian, the trauma of time. To return to Friedlander’s point, the
difficulties of writing and reading history as a transferential problem,
where what belongs to the historian and the reader and what belongs
to history and the other cannot be distinguished, remind us of how the
traumatic perception of encountering the remnants of the Shoah
poses significant questions for what “working through” requires from
each of us. For part of what must be worked though are the projective
identifications that impede our capacity to make an ethical relation to
the stranger, to encounter vulnerability as a relation and thus move
beyond the impulse of repeating the trauma by placing helplessness
and loss elsewhere.

Meyer Levin’s view of his own fall suggests one sort of crisis made
when one is forced back into thought. He cannot decide if his
obsession with controlling the diary is worthy of either himself or the
diary’s meaning. This question, posed on the precipice of a fall, can be
further elaborated within the qualities Arendt offers when she
discusses what it is to undergo “an appeal to thought.” The appeal can
only be staged in a twilight time: the belatedness
of a realization that a fall has already taken place.12 Arendt (1993)
described this moment of retrospection as “an interval of time which is
altogether determined by things that are no longer and by things that
are not yet” (9). Such an interval is precisely what circumscribes the
work of mourning and the work of pedagogy. Levin’s fall, his
accidental stumbling, is made, I think, as an appeal to thought, but an
appeal that has lost its address. Shoshana Felman’s (1992)
discussion of both the nature of accidents and the nature of a fall, in
her chapters on literature and the Shoah, also suggests something
about remorse, loss, and working through the demands this interval of
time presses into form. Felman turns to the obligation such an appeal
poses and suggests that what is required is: “the witness’s readiness,
precisely, to pursue the accident, to actively pursue its path and its
direction through obscurity, through darkness, and through
fragmentation, without quite grasping the full scope and meaning

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of its implications, without entirely foreseeing where the journey leads

and what is the precise nature of its final destination” (24). But what is
it to become ready? And, if pedagogy repeats the fall without pursuing
its own accidents, without appealing to thought, what can we learn
about learning to live a life?

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UNCONSCIOUS PEDAGOGY
If one can enact the tensions of a history one may not have conscious
knowledge of, this speculation suggests something about the
unconscious play of pedagogy. While much of the writing in pedagogy
considers questions of the curricular knowledge teachers and students
engage, a significant feature also operative in the pedagogical
exchange that requires our attention is the affective dynamics
teachers and students enact in relation to the knowledge learned and
in relation to anxieties over what resists learning. This transitional
space is where manifold forms of attachment and disassociation, and
where “almost falling,” become reenacted. One of the most common
experiences in teaching Anne Frank’s diary is that school-structured
encounters with the diary waiver between what Friedlander refers to
as numbing and emotion. There is a profound idealization of
adolescent yearning, where Anne Frank’s voice is often taken as
capable of transcending or even redeeming the very history that cut
her life so short. To ward off the traumatic perception of what actually
happened to Anne Frank, there is a comparable move toward the
enactment of an unconscious rescue fantasy. This fantasy attempts to
rescue Anne and her readers from the painful history that invokes the
diary’s writing, finding, and crafting. Transcendence and rescue,
however, are two sides of the same coin. These imaginary actions are
comparable to Friedlander’s point that the historian may be caught
between the poles of numbness and emotion, and to return to Moses’
insight, repeat the phenomenon of “almost falling.” The numbness of
idealization and the illusionary satisfaction made from the emotion of
rescue defend against the traumatic perception of loss and
helplessness. In both responses, the actual event is taken over by the
anxieties of its encounter and the chance to return to thoughtfulness
may actually be felt as a threat to the integrity of pedagogy itself. This
is because, to return to Felman’s insight on pursuing the accident, one
cannot know in advance where the pursuit will lead, and often the
integrity of pedagogy is dependent upon a preordained goal.

While it may be strange to claim that pedagogy can also become a

defense against thought and defend itself against its own capacity for
ignorance, this view is meant to call attention to

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the fact that school curriculum does not have an adequate grasp of
conflict in learning, either the conflict within the learner or the

conflict within knowledge itself.13 Mainstream discussions of

curriculum, with their insistence on technical procedure and
measurable outcomes, foreclose consideration of the conflict that
inaugurates the very possibility of any knowledge and how the illusion
of knowledge can work to dissolve the problem of ethics. Along with
curricular efforts that tend to push the educator toward the valorization
of technique and then toward the fear of its breakdown, another
problem is foreclosed. This has to do with the limits of the educator’s
own education and her or his own forgetting that knowledge is
interminable and hardly settled either in learning theories or in
interpretive practices. This means that the limits of the teacher’s own
education persists unconsciously in pedagogical efforts. In drawing
our attention to the unconscious qualities of education and to what
educators must repress in order to stabilize knowledge, I mean to
signal two meanings of the word unconscious: that knowledge does
not structure action and that the wishes that structure the unconscious
as a psychical event preclude a rigorous conceptualization of time and
of history. The unconscious qualities of pedagogy can then reenact,
as opposed to work through, the limits of the teacher’s education.

Exquisitely thoughtful engagements with the difficulty the diary poses

do exist, for example, in the work of Alvin Rosenfeld and

Judith Doneson.14 Yet this work remains shut out of pedagogical

thought. The very structure of pedagogical engagement—the ways
history is treated as if its narrative can somehow make restive the
conflicts that remain unresolved and the wish that students should
naturally find their own meaning in the text

without teacher interference15—precludes the work of making insight

into the experience of history, not as a progression or process that is
made by individuals but rather, to return to Arendt’s appeal, to
approach history as an incomplete project of becoming an ethical
subject in relation to other ethical subjects. For this work to even be
considered, the teacher must become willing to explore not just her or
his own relation to the diary’s difficult knowledge but also how the
students’ experiences of the diary affect the teacher’s own
pedagogical actions and thoughts.

65

The project of becoming an ethical subject in relation to other ethical

subjects is, perhaps, one of the most difficult problems opened when
encountering representations of the Shoah. Those who were
murdered in the Shoah were murdered precisely because they could
not be considered, by their neighbors, fellow citizens, jurisprudence,
and the pedagogical imaginary, as ethical subjects. This loss of ethical
imagination is part of what must be confronted, mourned, and
reconstituted. Many writers on the

Shoah have pointed this out,16 but perhaps one of the most urgent
formulations is offered by analyst Dori Laub (1992), who considers
survivor testimonies as an attempt to reconstruct, through the
language of receiving their own testimony, a profoundly wounded
subjectivity. Laub argues that the gift of testimony and its reception is
an act of intersubjectivity, where the listener becomes willing to
witness the painful inauguration of the testifier becoming an ethical
subject. And yet receiving the testimony may well be precisely the
place where the possibility of ethicality breaks down, for the receiving,
as Laub and others have suggested, is belated, too late to prevent the
trauma, too fragile to ensure that the trauma itself will not be repeated,
albeit this time in the form of a feeling that cannot attach to what Ernst
van Alphen (1997) calls “the urge to reconstruct an affective
community” (176). Testimony must be received as a provocation of
this urge and hence as a restoration of the capacity for subjectivity to
be rebuilt from the ruins of destruction. And yet this work, as van
Alphen suggests, is interminable: “Is it possible to get in touch with
what cannot be understood?” (176).

Van Alphen’s question is deeply disturbing to an education that

presumes understanding. But there is something difficult about
learning from history, particularly the history of a destruction. At the
most intimate level, Derrida (1994) offers a view of the trouble: “What
is most painful is that the painful is not painful for others, thereby
risking the loss of its value” (263). And also, what perhaps is painful is
that the singularity of the pain must be made relevant to those who, at
first glance, feel beyond its reach and hence cannot accept—indeed,
to return to Friedlander’s point, defend themselves against—the reach
of pain. Let us look more closely at the dynamic relations at stake
when one confronts the pain of another but does not enact the
unconscious identification of
66

“almost falling.” To study the difficulty of others is actually to study how

one comes to relate to the conditions of difficulty expressed, as
opposed to somehow attempt to reacquire the felt experience of the
other. To be receptive to the difficulties of the other is not the same as
feeling another’s pain, itself impossible, because at first, when
confronted with expressions of pain, one tries to attach

by imagining how one would feel in similar conditions.17 This

imaginary move, sometimes mistaken as empathy, is closer to the
reenactment of “almost falling” and, hence, still within the confines of
the narcissistic impulse to control and judge. To make relevant
experiences beyond one’s own, indeed, even within one’s own realm,
means that one must work through the remittances that primary
identifications put into place.

Van Alphen’s own recollection of his high school days suggests some
possible defensive measures. He recalls that, as a high school student
in the 1960s in Amsterdam, Holocaust education bored him. The
figure of Anne Frank haunted his boredom; he refused, until very
recently, to read Anne Frank’s published diary, a document written in
the very city in which he now lives. This refusal was, at least initially,
something that made van Alphen proud; as a youth he became the
hero in his own drama of refusing to be affected. During his
compulsory education, van Alphen could find no reason to make
relevant the disclaimed pain of his parents and their actions, because
in his education there was no pain or remorse, only stories of war
heroism, emplotment, and redemption, all defenses that sustain what
he now views as repressions of “Holocaust effects.” These effects are
not just symptoms of absence. They also haunt the question of how to
obligate oneself to that which was destroyed but has not gone away.
The material of his education did not reenact the past in a way that
could give insight into the present question of what it is to encounter
the Holocaust today. There was no obligation in van Alphen’s
education, and the congratulatory insistence that the present is better
because the past made it so literally left van Alphen with nothing to do,
nothing to think.
What then is it to learn from disclaimed history? Feeling pain, or
refusing to recognize the pain of others, may be closer to trauma and
to the incapacity to make sense of experience than it is to the complex
question of making a relation to others by acknowledging

67

or witnessing the incommensurability of pain. While one pedagogical

wish may be that if we can learn from another’s pain we can avoid
doing more harm and another wish may be to avoid the dissonance
that the difficulties of others can invoke, there is still a problem with
what these conflictive desires can signify. The paradox is that because
learning from another’s pain requires noticing what one has not
experienced and the capacity to be touched by what one has not
noticed, identifying with pain requires a self capable of wounding her
or his own ego boundaries, the very boundaries that serve as a
defense against pain. The intimate problem is for the learner to notice
how she or he is affected in the present because disclaimed history is
being reconstructed. So, in actuality, it is not the pain that one can
identify with but rather the secondary effects of distress, helplessness,
and loss that the pain symbolizes. The line between trauma and its
working through, however, becomes frayed when feelings of pain
cannot become attached to conscious thought or when the pain and
suffering of the other is viewed as an interruption of one’s unconscious
wishes for a life without conflict. This seems to be van Alphen’s
dilemma, where rather than confront the conditions of hiding and,
indeed, what the Frank family was hiding from, which Anne Frank
speaks of, he reverses the position and now hides from Anne Frank.
His feelings of boredom repeat the very structure of his education, for
there transcendence can only lead to becoming bored, to refusing to
be touched. To learn from disclaimed history requires a willingness to
confront one’s own discomfort, one’s own inadequacy, and the
conditions and actions that coalesce to foreclose the possibilities of
self and other as ethical subjects.

In pedagogical attempts to teach Anne Frank’s diary, however, the

profound ambivalence as to where to locate her pain prevents
contemporary students from even considering who they can become
because of what Anne Frank might offer. This ambivalence is not
often admitted as part of the tension involved in thinking through the
questions Anne Frank asks of her readers. Rather, situating the place
of pain seems to speak more to educators’ worries over how the diary
can be made relevant to their students. Should, for example, Anne
Frank be viewed as an adolescent struggling, like any adolescent, with
growing up? Is it then easier for identification to occur if identification
is with what is

68

deemed universal? And, if Anne Frank can be encountered in all of

her normality, would identification with her become easy? Should
Anne Frank’s pain be located solely in her growing awareness of a
specific time of what it meant to be Jewish, of the family as trapped in
anti-Semitic cruelty, and of the ways she noticed how the larger social
denied herself as an ethical subject? If contemporary readers have
never encountered the question of what it is to have one’s subjectivity
shattered, what would be the basis of this identification? How would
those who encounter Anne Frank identify with what it is like to become
so marginalized? Should Anne Frank’s pain be associated with her
wish for a magical healing, for her desire to make from hopelessness
a hope for goodness? Would readers then identify with the command
to have hope? In each of these speculations, what it might take to
identify with Anne Frank depends upon which Anne Frank one is
encouraged to meet. However, the problem with each formulation is
that these desires for readerly identifications preclude the possibility of
turning full circle twice and making from action a mode of thought that
is ready to pursue the accident, without recourse to knowing in
advance what might happen.

Within these choices, what tends to be emphasized is not the learning

the diary provokes but the wishes it also offers. This is a different form
of idealization in that wishes are on the side of fantasy. Our
susceptibility to the wish suggests the force of the unconscious. For
Freud the wish is a statement of both need and want and it is difficult
to distinguish, once and for all, the difference between these two
demands. The wish also defends against the anxiety that ego
boundaries, so broken in trauma, will be further shattered. Van
Alphen’s boredom can also be considered a defense against the
traumatic perception that there is no recovery or redemption in history
and that stories of heroism may actually work to cover over the very
painful questions of loss, helplessness, and even implication. Van
Alphen wished that the history would just go away: His boredom, that
there is nothing to learn, says as much. This secondary trauma,
described earlier in this chapter as a deferred action, works to refuse
what Derrida (1994) calls in his meditation on debts that cannot be
repaid a learning “to learn to live with ghosts, in the upkeep, the
conversation, the company, or the companionship, in the commerce
without commerce of ghosts. To live otherwise, and

69

better. No, not better, but more justly. But with them” (xviii). For van
Alphen, the boredom he made from his education severed the
possibility of even the thought of a debt.

As a high school student, van Alphen refused to identify with his

country’s capacity to shatter and with his country’s wish for a heroic
past. His schooling seemed to invoke this position of numbness
through idealization, offering a closed narrative about World War II
through endless details of battles fought and, then, in the
congratulatory insistence that his country’s present bears no traces of
its past. But something else marks the experience of closure. It has to
do with what is foreclosed in the act of closure, with what must literally
be missed, or given over to loss, for experience to be experience at
all. And, while Holocaust education must reply forcefully to revisionist
accounts that negate the genocide, the questions of what happens to
experiences, what happens to facts, when no conceptuality can order
their shattering are also missed in an unconscious pedagogy. As the
next section suggests, these dynamics are not outside of the history of
the diary’s popular crafting.

70

THE TRANSFERENCE
The skeletal details of the contentious history of the diary’s reception
can offer us insight into the difficulties of “learning to live

more justly.”18 Many of these details conflate the question of

representing and popularizing Anne Frank with the problem of
identifying with her short life. While those who crafted her work for
popular consumption did not pose this as a question of transference,
one of the startling and uncontrollable effects of attempting to provoke
identifications concerns the ways transference, or the capacity to bring
new editions of old conflicts into present relationships, structures
object relations as a question

of static continuity 19 and perception as a return of internal conflicts. In

this affective and imaginary relation, however, the transference is
ambivalent, invoking both unresolved conflicts and profound desires
for love. If the transference is to be the imaginary grounds of working
through, ego boundaries as played through the structures of
perception and mis-recognition must become a question. That is, the
very act of finding continuity and making events familiar must become
the new problem.

In 1956, Meyer Levin sued Otto Frank and the Broadway

producer Kermit Bloomgarden over the rights to publish his play.20

Levin’s account of what he thought happened is aptly titled The
Obsession. Even though the legal settlement that Levin won contained
a clause that he was never to speak of the case, Levin could not keep
quiet. Running over 300 pages, The Obsession tries to tell the story of
what cannot be settled in a court of law and what cannot be settled in
life. His worries concern not just the content of these stories and what
the content must foreclose for the story to become a story; Levin also
worries about aporia: the question of loss itself and whether a story
has the capacity to work through—indeed, mourn—the story of loss.
For the story of loss is also the story of the infinite details of loss, and
these details are always specific details. The question that remains is:
How can any reader come to identify with the diary’s specificity if this
specificity is forgotten and if these details cannot be those of the
contemporary reader? Saul Friedlander puts this tension well:
“Whether one considers the Shoah as an exceptional event or as
belonging to a wider historical category does not affect the

71

possibility of drawing from it a universally valid significance. The

difficulty appears when this statement is reversed. No universal lesson
seems to require reference to the Shoah to be fully comprehended”
(1992, 54).

How one comes to find relevance for one’s present world in events
that are not one’s own but that have the capacity to say something
more to the stories one already has is, as many acknowledge, a
central question of any pedagogy. Transferential processes, however,
suggest that social recognition must first pass through complex
psychical dynamics that can work to impede or inhibit the significance
of the other’s knowledge. The problems of transference become even
more demanding within pedagogies that seek to restructure memory
with the details one has not experienced but nonetheless must
ethically confront. And yet, to make memory from the difficult and
chaotic events of the past requires, on the one hand, a distancing of
the impulse to reenact the traumatic knowledge through unconscious
transferential relations. And, on the other hand, it requires an effort in
crafting new desires to relate to what is now, at least in the beginning
of encounter, a nonevent, something that has already occurred and
can only be touched and touch in return through its representation.
This doubling of space and time means that learning from such history
is extremely difficult and demanding. Geoffrey Hartman (1996)
suggests that a secondary trauma can be provoked: “The
insemination of horror, or of horror and guilt, may produce terrible
fantasies or else feelings of impotence. How does one teach a
traumatic history without increasing inappropriate psychological
defences?” (1997, 24). Van Alphen suggests the tension this way:
“[T]here is a need to explore and develop manners and means of
representation that preserve contact with this extreme history; means
that continue to transmit knowledge of it, that simultaneously prevent
forgetting and making familiar” (1997, 35). These are the psychical
issues in any difficult knowledge: a knowledge that demands
something of the learner; a knowledge of the working through of the
defense and the resistance to reorganizing one’s ego boundaries in
such a way that the original defense against encountering the other is
not reenacted.

72

Meyer Levin argued that the play first staged in 1956 neither
addressed the horror nor prevented forgetting and familiarization. The
play that was staged in 1956, and had its revival on Broadway, was
authored by the Hollywood team of Francis

Goodrich and Albert Hackett.21 Structurally, the play repeated the

familiar theatrical formula of melodrama, and as critic Vincent

Canby noted, was written just ten years after World War II,22 when
Manichaean opposition, or the absolute splitting of good and evil

and the evacuation of ambivalence was the rule.23 However, that play
seems to break unconsciously the decisive rule of melodrama with the
last sentence, uttered by Anne: “I still believe in spite of everything
that people are truly good at heart.” The missing detail in this
Broadway play is Anne’s struggle with the question of belief, her
terrible understanding that people are not good at heart.

A few years before this play, Meyer Levin wrote the first review of the
English edition of the diary. He, too, offered a sentence of haunting
force: “Anne Frank becomes the voice of six million.” Both sentences
are addressed to the heart: the first, conditional, “I still believe . . .”
attempts repair; the other, “Anne Frank’s voice . . .” is the sound
meant to break the heart that believes. These directions—the making
of belief and its shattering—are not outside contemporary pedagogical
efforts, particularly those that attempt to understand the history we
have become. And this

appeal to the heart found in every field,24 is one that structures the
literary and empirical, one that perhaps can be refound in a certain
humanistic longing and, more significantly, is made from the force of
attachment (the desire to touch and to be touched) that inaugurates
subjectivity and its ethical crafting. While this appeal to the heart is a
part of our interminable pedagogical design, the appeal to the heart
must also appeal to thought. If the heart can be broken, that which
breaks the heart is the story of the heart that is broken.

Herein lies the pedagogical dilemma. Appeals to affect, whether they

be affects of pain or those of identification, are, by definition,
incomplete. If the affect is a wound to thought, how then is it possible
to think the affect? Historian Michel de Certeau (1986) turns to fiction
and notices that “psychoanalysis takes up the definition given to fiction
as being a knowledge jeopardized and

73

wounded by its otherness (the affect, etc.) or a statement that the

speaking subject’s utterance deprives of its ‘serieux”’ (27). The
discourse, he goes on to say, is “touched,” i.e., something from within
threatens its cohesiveness. This is the terrain of the troubling Freudian
drive, the demand to work, the force within that is not bound by
intention, but follows the rules of that other otherness, the
unconscious: no time, no contradiction, no “no.” This psychoanalytic
turn to affect allows for a question typically foreclosed in educational
efforts, namely, how do people attach to knowledge, specifically the
knowledge of the other’s suffering? Of what would such knowledge
consist? What is the status of our susceptibility to histories we do not
live, to stories that disturb one’s sense of cohesiveness, to what I
(1998) have called elsewhere “difficult knowledge”?

In psychoanalytic terms, the affect is a borderline concept, something

in between the fault lines that suture thought, and yet

something that also threatens thought from within.25 The threat has
something to do with the speculation that while affect is a statement of
need, its force is prior to its representation. We feel before we know,
and this uncertainty allows affect its strange movements: Affect must
wander aimlessly; it arrives too soon; it is too encrypted with other
scenes to count upon understanding. The affect that may propel
identifications is subject to this flaw in that, without knowledge,
identification can only depend upon the urge to make familiar what is,
after all, outside the range of understanding. Curiously, identifications
can work to sustain, rather than enlarge, ego boundaries. Affect, then,
is precocious, it disrupts the thought’s attention, its time is both too
early and too late and, finally, its aim must be insufficient to its object.
This is because affect seeks its representative and in settling on an
object to express its force, there is still the question as to both the
meaning of the affect and the adequacy of its attachment. Perhaps
this is why Lyotard noted that thinking and suffering

overlap.26 But, if there is an overlapping, the combination, as

Friedlander suggests, is also the space of resistance to working
through.

This overlapping quality of thinking and suffering is part of the

historicity of the crafting of Anne Frank’s diary and of how its
presumed structure of appeal was imagined. But the limits of

74

imagination are also the limits of imagining the subjectivity of the other
and, hence, the place where meanings of both the self and the other
can shatter. Aspects of this overlapping are present in current debates
over whether universality or particularity allow insight into knowledge,
appeals for social justice, and appeals for the right to an everyday.
One view suggests that if the other can be made familiar,
understanding might be easier to invoke. This seems to be the
dominant educational approach. But familiarity, as van Alphen
suggests, can also lead to forgetting. To return to Moses’ description
of “almost falling,” itself a familiar experience, the familiar can also be
defended against, through narcissistic identification. These are not the
only forms of identification. There are all kinds of identifications, such
as the desire to make a relation, to create affective bonds, and to
allow the scene of social recognition to include groups that may well
challenge the more
normotic defenses27 against the other. Identification is also the
imaginary site where individuals attempt to consider experiences
outside of themselves and, if carefully thought about, attempt the
fragile work of extending the self in relation to what is other to and
beyond the self. One could say that identification is a relation to a
nonevent but contains the material for the self to transform itself,
provided that mental work reconsider affective impulses. The tension
exists because identifications cannot work holistically— that is,
because only fragments of the other’s dynamic experience can be
incorporated—and because identifications are, at least at first,
unconscious, contradictory, and ambivalent. There is always a breach
between the experience of actuality and the means of attachment,
between social recognition and mis-recognition. Something must
appeal to the self for there to be an identification. But also, there must
be an appeal that is beyond the sympathetic bond identifications
sometimes invoke. We are back to Arendt’s appeal to thought, an
appeal that requires one to make a new relation between thought and
affect, precisely because of this subjective and unfinished experience.

Some of these tensions structured Anne Frank’s own writing as

well as the crafting of her diary.28 Still, the story of the Anne Frank
play, and indeed, the reception of this diary in our own pedagogy, has
not settled the question of how readers make the diary relevant. The
newly adapted play that had a recent run on

75

Broadway enacts this ambivalence.29 This play, too, continues the

argument over how to present the diary and what this presentation
might mean to contemporary audiences. In this version, previously
edited out sections of the diary are restored and contemporary
audiences now meet a Jewish Anne Frank, not just any refugee. The
updated play invokes our present preoccupations with identity, with
presenting role models, with questions of self- esteem, perhaps our
own sort of sentimentality and familiarity. These contemporary
preoccupations still require melodrama, the separation and splitting of
good and bad, the idealization of the good subject, the appeal to affect
as the means to make meaning from the other’s suffering. Still, the
“new” Anne on Broadway is no longer a comedic Anne, but someone
who cares deeply about the possibility of living a life through
acknowledging the ravages of destruction on the streets below.
Ironically, this was Anne Frank’s original dilemma, how to live in the
attic with the knowledge of the despair and aggression on the streets
below. And yet, no matter how much this new version tries to learn
from the flaws of its predecessor, it cannot be separated from its
shadow; the play still suffers from its traumatic origins. This may be
why current discussions must also return to the difficult history of this
play, an attempt, perhaps, to work through what the original
production and those involved could not tolerate, at least according to
Meyer Levin, namely the question of Jewishness, of the utter
particularity of its suffering, and of what it is to confront, in the murder
of one girl, the destruction of a people.

Levin insisted that only a Jew could identify with and convey

Jewish suffering.30 He was heartbroken that Otto Frank chose

Christian writers over him. And, in this insistence, we have an early
example of “epistemic privilege,” the view that some identities
understand events better because of their own experience in identity.
However, what is foreclosed in this sort of argument is the difficult
acknowledgment that there is never just one experience, one identity,
particularly during times when both experience and identity are
shattered. The debate that Levin could not quite reach concerns not
whether there is one experience to know and to convey adequately,
but rather, what happened to experience? This was certainly Anne
Frank’s question, as she grappled with not hiding her knowledge of
the streets below. With

76

this question, we might encounter the magnitude and the excess of

suffering in ways that give insight into questions of how the idiomatic
qualities of suffering can be ethically encountered and what such
knowledge can mean to our present. What happens to our experience,
when we ask what happened to Anne Frank?
One tension in the history of reframing Anne Frank’s diary for popular
circulation is that a great number of Jewish intellectuals were also
involved, some of whom worried over whether a representation can be
“too Jewish” to have any currency for those who are not Jewish. In
many contemporary debates, this worry has been viewed as a
question of assimilation versus the unambivalent claiming of religious
and cultural identity. Otto Frank, for example, insisted that his
daughter’s diary was not first and foremost a Jewish story, but a story
of adolescence. For Levin, the diary was a Jewish diary, and to
preclude this from representation was, for him, a reenactment of the
original destruction of European Jewry. The tension, in all of these
debates, has to do, in part, with the worry over how the diary can
retain its power of susceptibility, how contemporary readers become
subject to the obligations of its call. And yet, if this tension can be
viewed as a question of ethicality, the difficult acknowledgment is that
the ethical is not a place of privilege but of obligation. The obligation,
as Derrida put it, is one of “learning to live . . . more justly.” And yet, if
these worries are to have currency when encountering the diary,
contemporary readers must also have the opportunity to encounter the
history of such worries.

With the publication of the definitive edition of the diary, and now, with
the new discussions of the finding and ownership of the missing pages
of the diary, we know that Otto Frank edited out not only Anne’s
description of her sexual researches and passages that angrily
denounced her mother and criticized her parent’s marriage but also
passages where Anne becomes attached to her Jewish obligations.
Otto Frank desired a universal message, and his way to this goal was
to censor much that was particular to Anne Frank. This desire may
well be a defense against the knowledge that it was the particularity—
of being Jewish—that the Nazi imaginary and its sympathizers felt as
intolerable, as rupture, and as persecution of its dream of no
difference. Perhaps, for Otto Frank, a return to what was used to
divide could only be a return

77
of pain. If so, we might now consider Otto Frank’s belated knowledge
as more ambivalent than the choice between assimilation and roots.
He, too, wondered what it would take for the larger social to identify
with Anne’s humanness when this identification was not a possibility
during Anne’s brief life. We are left with this wonder, that the
restoration of one’s humanness in contexts of profound
dehumanization must be part of the work of reparation. We must also
consider how this work proceeds bit by bit, how it has the capacity to
reverse its content and become lost in disparagement, hatred, and
aggressive returns that cannot be avoided merely in the appeal for
humanity. The first Broadway play tried to close these questions by
scripting, from the diary, something uplifting, a lesson, a story that
could end. What they forgot, in their attempt to make Anne Frank
something familiar, was that the return of the diary to Otto Frank, the
return that opens the first act of the 1956 play, was not the ending of
the diary.

This fight over the rights of Anne Frank’s diary is now the subject of
two book-length studies, academic commentary, and

contemporary polemics.31 Transferential relations seem to structure

how each debate critiques the next, and many of the debates continue
to repeat the painful dynamics of Meyer Levin’s encounter with the
diary. It seems almost impossible not to take a side in these debates,
to transfer one’s old conflicts and wishes onto new situations. The
small reason has to do with the question of identification, for the sheer
numbers of characters involved in the casting of the diary’s reception
offer us desires that are very familiar: the desire to be recognized, to
have one’s own story accepted, to refind the lost object, to be
understood and to have understanding. The big reason, which is also
at the heart of this history, resides in the attempt to answer the
pedagogical question of what might constitute a “good enough”
understanding if understanding itself eluded those who experienced
the event and again eludes our own present. Both directions raise
significant issues for the pedagogical. We desire others to attach to
stories that cannot be their own but, in this attachment, we worry
about what might also be foreclosed if these stories fit too closely or
are too familiar with those we already know. We may forget that
acknowledging the loss of understanding is also one of the

78

obligations of witnessing the crisis of witnessing. But we also worry

how this very desire to attach can destroy the otherness of object.
What, then, is it to become susceptible to both the call of the diary and
to the historicity of its reception? If identification, the capacity to attach
passionately not just to the social but to the self’s desire for a social, is
the sine qua non of understanding, how do the arguments of history
suture and undo our quest, our refinding of the lost object?

These questions must be placed in a troubling dialogue with the event

of the Shoah. And it is precisely in this difficult relation that universality
becomes an empty signifier, a normotic defense. What troubles is the
contemporary insistence that the Shoah has moved from the
inconceivable to the unrepresentable, from the question of address to
the crisis of witnessing, from the specificity of the absolute horror and
mass murder of Jewish individuals to what Lawrence Langer (1998)
calls the desire for finding universal redemption, the consequence of
which preempts the Holocaust. Alongside these difficult and conflictive
conceptualizations, there remains the question of identification itself
and the problem of what impedes or propels our capacity to notice the
vantage of the other and to make from this notice an obligation for our
own implication with the other. What many of these arguments
suggest is that the very act of noticing can also instigate ego defenses
that work against noticing the utter horror of mass murder.

For van Alphen, the act of noticing concerns movements from

continuity to difference, or what he describes as wavering between
feelings of the uncanny to what is sublime in thought. The example
that he offers for this claim startles. It begins in his own house, when
he decides to learn who owned the house in Amsterdam before he
took occupancy. The house was owned by a Jewish architect who
was arrested and died in the Theresienstadt camp. This knowledge,
so entangled in van Alphen’s disavowal, provoked for him profound
anxiety, the worry that somehow the original owner’s family would
return to reclaim their home and push him out. His anxieties defended
against his capacity to even notice what it was like for the original
owners to lose their possessions and resided instead with his own
shame in repossession. Van Alphen names this as the uncanny affect,
where one is worried about being mistaken for the perpetrator

79

and, hence, defends against this thought by feeling persecuted. In the

uncanny, something is not strange but terribly familiar, and this
familiarity is what must be repressed. For the uncanny affect to
become sublime in thought, van Alphen must become obligated to this
knowledge and notice that nothing about his house and his present life
can be the same. Continuity with the ignored past must become
broken. “The uncanny,” writes van Alphen, “is threatening because
one’s ego boundaries become lost. One’s self-experience is at stake
and must be defended. The question I must ask, then, is: How can the
return of the idea of somebody who died in the Holocaust threaten my
experience of self? And why do I need to repress this person . . . or
memory or awareness of his dying in the Holocaust, in order to feel at
home?” (1997,

202).32 To bear this question, van Alphen suggests that the uncanny is
not so much the opposite of the sublime but part of its process. To
work through defenses against the inconceivable, without transferring
his own aggression onto the other, he must refind, not the ego’s
boundaries, but the capacity to live without the boundaries that
preclude the experience of the other.

80

WORKING THROUGH
The personal implications of reading the diary—of how the reader’s
conceptualization of her present life might be altered—is perhaps the
most stressed pedagogical issue. But the diary looms larger than the
reader’s regard for the personal, and it has to do with the troubling
question of evil itself. For Cynthia Ozick (1997), the various castings of
the diary are not meant to come to grips with the profound evil that
engulfed Anne Frank, for the representations are still stuck in uncanny
time, even if Anne Frank’s diary should invoke its own otherness.
Writes Ozick, “A story may not be said to be a story if the end is
missing. And because the end is missing, the story of Anne Frank in
the fifty years since The Diary of a Young Girl was first published has
been bowdlerized, distorted, transmuted, traduced, reduced; it has
been infantilised, Americanized, homogenized, sentimentalized;
falsified, kitchified, and in fact, blatantly and arrogantly denied” (78).
No one is innocent in Ozick’s account: She accuses dramatists,
theatergoers, translators, educators, and even Otto Frank. “Almost
every hand that has approached the diary with the well-meaning
intention of publicizing it,” writes Ozick, “has contributed to the
subversion of history” (78). This may even be the case for the writing
about the last fifty years of the diary’s reception: the history of its
refinding and public circulation—of Anne Frank’s lonely death, of Otto
Frank’s censorship, of the House Unamerican Activities Committee
hearings that formed the backdrop to the play’s production, of the Nazi
actress given the part of Mrs. Frank in the first Broadway production,
of Eleanor Roosevelt’s attempt at intervening between Meyer Levin
and Otto Frank, of Carson McCuller’s interest in trying to write the play
but having to excuse herself, of Lillian Hellman’s hand in the writing, of
intellectuals such as Bruno Bettelheim, Hannah Arendt, and Martin
Buber’s commentary on the treatment of the diary, and finally, of our
own contemporary debates on its symbolic reach and pedagogical
value.

In all this crowded and contradictory history, the “subversion of

history” is still a difficult learning, wavering, perhaps like the question
of love, between the beautiful and the painful. What remains are
questions of what it is to subvert history, to live in

81

deferred actions, to attempt to make a lesson from the

incommensurable nature of cruelty, genocide, and even one’s own
desire for reparation. Meyer Levin suggested as much in his poetic
insight into the fall and his own troubles. But the suggestion could not
help him live with what he believed was lost.

This fall is not yet over; we are still falling. Here is how Cynthia Ozick
offers her own horrid fall: “It may be shocking to think this (I am
shocked as I think it), but one can imagine a still more salvational
outcome: Anne Frank’s diary burned, vanished, lost— saved from a
world that made of it all things, some of them true, while floating lightly
over the heavier truth of named and inhabited evil” (87). But should
one even imagine salvation in the context of profound evil? And
should we expect that the representations and reception of Anne
Frank can exceed the reach of the traumatic events that, in the first
instance, gave us the diary? The desire to save the diary, this time
from a history of its own usages, has come full circle, but not yet twice.
There is something understandable about Ozick’s fantasy, particularly
if we can think metaphorically, for the crafting of the diary is not
outside of the reenactment of its traumatic fragments, the force of
Nachträglichkeit, the infinite traces of Holocaust effects in our own
time. And, yet, even this fantasy, because it is still inside the traumatic
encounter, still possessed in the time of deferred action, cannot
transcend the wish to rescue Anne Frank, this time from
commercialization, from banality, and from a circus of affects that
cannot attach to thought. These responses, as Ozick rightly suggests,
are defenses against encountering evil, and they also sustain rigid ego
boundaries in such a way that what is foreclosed is the capacity to
recognize the social actions that induced the suffering of others. This
is the secondary evil. Such missed encounters, made from the mix of
projections, wishes, and identifications defend against the traumatic
perception of a lost social. What is missed, and Ozick’s response
centers the problem, is the difficult knowledge that a social can
destroy itself through destroying the desires for what van Alphen
describes as “the urge to reconstruct an affective community,” a
community of ethical subjects. We might consider Ozick’s polemic as
an attempt to restore two kinds of loss: the loss of the idea of ethical
conduct or the ethical capacity for the social to do less harm, and how
this incapacity leads to the loss of individual lives. In bringing these
82

two experiences together, in naming such destruction evil, Ozick

offers us the most stunning argument against the idealization that
structures popularized accounts. In doing so, she may well inaugurate
the work of mourning a pedagogy that cannot address and work
through its own limits, its own passion to ignore.

If pedagogy is to create the conditions for the idiomatic urge to

reconstruct an affective community, it must begin with how
communities can also be destroyed. This is an appeal to thought and,
in doing so, thought must touch what is both uncanny and sublime.
And yet, all of these falls, these flaws that make the engagement with
the diary so difficult must, however painfully, be considered as the
beginning and not the end of pedagogy. For if we are to make
something from the diary, we must learn to work through our own
defenses against learning from the complex and unfinished history of
the diary’s reception. If something must break for the heart to break,
when the heart breaks, there must be made, from this loss, a work of
mourning. Anne Frank must not, indeed cannot, be rescued from
history. But to encounter her writing in all of its historicity requires a
great deal of thought on the part of students and teachers, a
willingness to bring the diary into the present, not as repetition or as
overfamiliar, but as a means to work through what the diary might
offer to our own contemporary understandings.

The teacher’s own engagement must begin with enlarging her

knowledge of contemporary debates on the uses of Anne Frank, on
the changing structures of engagement for each generation of
readers, on the popularization of the figure of Anne Frank, and on how
a study of Anne Frank—the Anne Frank that is no longer but who still
seems to give life to her diary—can say something about our own
capacity to mourn and to make part of our everyday lives our urges for
an affective community. Such knowledge is no longer a knowledge of
closure but rather a knowledge that appeals to the thought of ethical
urges and that can work through the urge to close down knowledge
through idealization. Teachers must also become open to learning
something about the confines of trauma, for the urge without the
thought is subject to unconscious reversals and displacements.
Symptoms of these dynamics can be located in the desire for rescue,
in the idealization of the lost object, and in the numbness of

83

disassociation. If contemporary students are to do more than be

subject to the traumatic combination of the unconscious of both their
teachers’ and their own anxieties, then teachers will have to grapple
with questions of transference and countertransference in pedagogy.

The lesson of Anne Frank’s diary may be the history of how there is
no salvation in history, only difficult knowledge, fragile attempts to
make, from the diary, a lesson. A story that has no ending is, after all,
a story that has lost something. And this loss agitates the efforts at
restoration, at refinding the lost object, at reconstructing a subjectivity
that can encounter loss without becoming lost in traumatic
reenactments. Here, gone. The story is not yet over, for we have not
yet faced what is persistent and evil in our own time. We might ask,
why return again to Anne Frank? Are there not better texts that can
exceed such dilemmas? And yet, even this question forecloses the
work readers must commit themselves to when reading about the
difficulties of others. Perhaps, like Meyer Levin, we have never left
Anne Frank. She has left us. We cannot be done with Anne Frank
because, at least in what she left behind, her diary, we might learn
from her own broken urges for affective bonds.

This unfinished story is the story pedagogy must learn to tolerate. It is

the story of the breakdown of meanings and, in this difficulty,
attempting to learn from others, learning to tolerate and accept the
ethical obligations the other offers. That first obligation, another story
that has no ending, is learning to become an ethical subject as one
witnesses the crisis of witnessing. The tension such an obligation
opens is that one cannot know in advance what the ethical demands;
one can only be open to the twists and difficulties of its content and
trajectories, of its breakdowns and broken hearts. Becoming willing to
take on such obligations means turning full circle twice, moving from
the thought that invokes action back to the capacity to think. If
knowing others is limited by the way one imagines how one is
known—if transitory identifications without recourse to examining the
desires that structure modes of social recognition and mis-recognition
and thus repeat the syndrome of “almost falling” seem to complete the
story—we may be trapped in an uncanny time, where repression,
forgetting, and familiarization precariously defend the boundaries

84

of the ego. When education mistakes the question of subjectivity and

turns it into a familiar answer, it does so at the risk of losing the
interminable question of understanding itself. But understanding itself
can offer no consolation, and if it is treated as if understanding settles
anything, all we are left with are repetitions of the suffering, a suffering
unattached to thought, a suffering whose value has shattered, a
suffering that cannot become the transference that is also crucial for
the work of

mourning.33 For what is transferred in the work of mourning is not the

ego’s boundaries onto the lost object, but the ego’s capacity to exceed
those first protective gestures that require the ego to defend itself
against acknowledging the loss of boundary. Yes, it is important to
think. But then, we are no longer in the realm of interpretation, where if
we have the proper story all will be settled. Learning to live with ghosts
means learning to understand what has been lost in the self and what
has been lost in the social. This is a question of becoming an ethical
subject in relation to other ethical subjects, a question Freud called
“the work of mourning.” The loss must be made into a memory, which
in itself requires a distance called thought. And, in thinking the thought
of loss and the loss of thought, we may also begin the interminable
work of making more generous, more righteous, more just, the urge
for affective community.

85

NOTES
I would like to thank Roger Simon, Sharon Rosenberg, and Claudia
Eppert for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts. This chapter
was also written with the support of the Social Science and
Humanities Research Council of Canada, grant #410-98-1028,
“Difficult Knowledge in Teaching and Learning: A Psychoanalytic
Inquiry.” The views expressed here do not necessarily represent the
council.

1 By 1974, still hoping for vindication and sympathetic acceptance,

Levin had published his own story of what he felt had gone terribly
wrong. After all, Levin had sued Otto Frank for the rights to publish a
play based on the diary, and this legal action was scandalous. Much
of Levin’s book, The Obsession, is a struggle to understand his three
engagements in psychoanalysis where he tried to confront his own
compulsion to control the reception of the diary. His second analyst
asked, “The enemies you tell of are undoubtedly real. The question is,
are they worth all the trouble you give yourself over them?” (19). The
question cannot be answered, for a larger struggle preoccupies him.
Levin cannot decide whether some obsessions are worthy, even as
the cost in his life is misery.

2 One of the most commented upon critiques on the worldwide

acclimation of the diaries was made by Bruno Bettelheim in his
controversial essay “The Ignored Lesson of Anne Frank.” Although by
the end of his life Bettelheim did soften his views on the family in
hiding (admitting that while the Frank family was in denial over the
profound danger they faced, the expectation that they should have
known in advance their fate is too harsh a judgment), the essay does
offer a significant overview on the problems of learning about the
Holocaust in the postwar years. Bettelheim suggests three reactions
on the part of people to the knowledge of concentration camps: (1)
that the actions were done by only a small group of people; (2) that
the reports were exaggerated (and this reaction originated with the
German government); and (3) that the reports were believed but the
knowledge of horror was repressed. It is largely this last reaction that
Bettelheim attributes to the popularity of Anne Frank’s diary.

86
Writes Bettelheim:

What is at issue is the universal and uncritical response to her diary

and to the play and movie based on it, and what this reaction tells
about our attempts to cope with the feelings her fate—used by us to
serve as a symbol of the most human reaction to Nazi terror—
arouses in us. I believe that the world-wide acclaim given her story
cannot be explained unless we recognize in it our wish to forget the
gas chambers, and our effort to do so by glorifying the ability to retreat
into an extremely private, gentle, sensitive world, and there to cling as
much as possible to what have been one’s usual daily attitudes and
activities, although surrounded by a maelstrom apt to engulf one at
any moment. (246)

Adorno (1998) also commented upon, albeit with ambivalence, the

problem of what individuals are identifying with when they encounter
Anne Frank. He recalled a story about one woman’s becoming upset
at seeing the play: “To be sure even that was good as a first step
toward understanding. But the individual case, which should stand for
and raise awareness about the terrifying totality, by its very
individuation became an alibi for the totality the woman forgot” (101).

3 Ralph Melnick’s The Stolen Legacy of Anne Frank: Meyer Levin,

Lillian Hellman, and the Staging of the Diary is structured around the
view that Lillian Hellman had a great deal of behind the scene
responsibility in writing with the team of Goodrich and Hackett. He
argues that Hellman’s Stalinist sympathy for an uplifting and
universalized art ensured that Anne’s Jewishness would become
erased.

4 Arendt’s (1993) collection of essays can be read as a response to

the bitter battles inaugurated in her reportage of the Eichmann trials in
Jerusalem. In a recent study of Arendt, Jennifer Ring (1997) argues:
“It has been obvious from Arendt’s notes, in nearly everything she
wrote after Eichmann in Jerusalem, that Eichmann

87
impressed upon her the importance of articulating a worldly way of
thinking in order to prevent the recurrence of thoughtless evil” (21 –
22).

5 The refusal to believe that one will be affected by social violence is

one possible way an individual might rationalize her or his wish for
safety. For a discussion of the ways disavowal works to impede the
recognition of one’s own danger in repressive military regimes, see
Hollander 1997.

6 I am indebted to Roger Simon for this insight. Judith Doneson

(1987), for example, suggests that contemporary students are meeting
a 1950s version of Anne Frank, a criticism that still plagues the newly
revised play, according to Vincent Canby (1997). We might also
observe how reading theories that are dominant in English education
are also a throwback to the 1950s and 1960s literary theory school of
close textual readings. In this theory, historical and authorial biography
are kept separate from the act of textual interpretation.

7 The title of Freud’s 1917 [1915] paper conveys the difficulty of

experiencing loss, for at first there is no distinction between mourning
and melancholia. The question Freud grapples with concerns what it is
to identify, or what are the means of identification with loss. For Freud,
identification comes before and can replace an awareness of the
separateness of the object. Freud offers the following speculation:
“[O]ne feels justified in maintaining the belief that a loss of this kind
has occurred, but one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost .
. . cannot consciously perceive what he has lost either. This indeed,
might be so even if the patient is aware of the loss which has given
rise to his melancholia, but only in the sense that he knows whom he
has lost but not what he has lost in him” (245). In melancholia, the loss
is unconscious, in mourning, the loss is made conscious. This is
because the identification that grounds melancholia is not with the
object but with the ego that has become an object. Freud notes three
preconditions of melancholia: “loss of the object, ambivalence, and
regression of libido into the ego” (258). It is the third condition, where
the object unconsciously becomes fused
88

with the ego, that interrupts, in Freud’s view, the coming to terms with
what has been lost on the outside and inside.

8 For a discussion of Freud’s acknowledgment of the limits of

mourning, see Caruana 1996. For a discussion of what Freud could
not admit in his thinking about mourning, see Haver 1996.

9 Freud’s view of the workings of ambivalence in love are complex

and dynamic. Ambivalence is a borderline concept, figuring
somewhere between the desire for love and the fear of the loss of
love. Whereas in the desire for love, the ego is willing to make more
flexible its own boundary maintenance, the fear of the loss of love
renders the ego rigid and incorporative.

In melancholia the relation to the object is no simple one; it is

complicated by the conflict due to ambivalence. The ambivalence is
either constitutional, i.e., is an element of every love-relation formed
by this particular ego, or else it proceeds precisely from those
experiences that involved the threat of losing the object . . . . In
melancholia, accordingly, countless separate struggles are carried on
over the object, in which hate and love contend with each other; the
one seeks to detach the libido from the object, the other to maintain
this position of the libido against the assault. (“Mourning and
Melancholia” 256)

In mourning, the ego must de-cathect libido memory by memory. That

is, the ego must stop demanding satisfaction from the lost object and
begin demanding something from itself and from others in the world.

10 James Young’s (1998) reconsideration of Art Spiegelman’s two-

volume graphic novel, Maus, suggests some of the stakes in learning
from textualized representations of the Holocaust. Young suggests
that Spiegelman’s work offers readers the means to conceptualize the
difficulty of understanding the event, even as the event is graphically
drawn. This difficulty of understanding is a generational question,
where the children of survivors have
89

memories of their parent’s stories as a “vicarious past.” Young

suggests: “What distinguishes many of these artists from their parents’
generation of survivors is their single-minded knack for representing
just this sense of vicariousness, for measuring the distance between
history-as-it-happened and their own postmemory of it” (670). The
story of how Art came to know the history of his father’s experience as
a survivor is now a part of the history of the handing down of the
event. Comparing this view to contemporary school study of Anne
Frank’s diary, one gets a sense of how learning the historicity of its
reception might allow students the distance to consider their own
“vicarious pasts.”

11 In an earlier essay, “Trauma, Transference and ‘Working

Through,’” Friedlander (1992) focuses on the difficulties that writing
requires of the historian. He observed a split between the historical
discourse and testimony that resulted in a catch between stories of
catastrophe and stories of redemption. Both directions, Friedlander
argues, are symptoms of a desire for a closure that is not yet
conscious and actually is a defense against the excess of the Shoah,
or that which cannot be symbolized yet remains. For Friedlander, the
sheer geometry of human loss has not yet been integrated with the
singularity of each particular loss, each particular voice. Friedlander
defines working through as “confronting the individual voice in a field
dominated by political decisions and administrative decrees which
neutralize the concreteness of despair and death” (53). This
confrontation is also just the beginning: “Working through ultimately
means testing the limits of necessary and ever-defeated imagination”
(54).

12 Shoshana Felman’s (1992) discussion of Camus’ novel The Fall

suggests the traumatic consequences of “the lost chance of encounter
with the possibility of rescue” (177). Her discussion of this novel is a
way to consider two views of history enacted in the disputes between
Camus and Sartre, where Sartre accuses Camus of failing to see the
progress of history and Camus views Sartre as refusing the
implications of an unresolved past that persists in the present. Sartre
accuses Camus of not making history. Camus accuses Sartre of being
unable to contemplate or look upon, and hence witness, history. This
tension between viewing history as something to make and thus
centering human

90

rationality and its capacity to shape the world in its own image verses
looking at history as that which exceeds human intention, objective
patterns, and totalizing conceptualization because history is not a
grand plan that can be known in advance is a central distinction also
made by Arendt (1993) in her essay “The Concept of History.” Arendt
argues that the view that centers making history over the singular
actions that constitute what we now look back upon as history is the
basis of political totalitarianism.

13 I explore education’s capacity to shut out as well as shut down

conflict in Britzman 1998.

14 Rosenfeld’s (1991, 1993) work has been quite central to my own

thinking about the diary and has been central to recent scholarship on
the Levin-Frank disputes. His work focuses on the profound
idealization of Anne Frank and the ways such idealization works as
disavowal in translations of the diary, in the censorship of the diary,
and in the reworking of the diary for Broadway and Hollywood.

15 The view that teachers interfere with the ways students read fiction
is debated in discussions of student-centered language arts
pedagogy. At times, romantic applications of whole language and
student-centered pedagogy stress the need for student discovery of
meanings without teacher intervention. The view is that personal
relevance will naturally aid the student in their textual attachments and
interpretations. Such an orientation cannot consider a theory of
knowledge that can grapple with times where personal relevance itself
becomes fractured and broken and when personal relevance cannot
offer insight into new encounters. This is certainly the case with
representations of the Holocaust and representations of war,
genocide, and social breakdown. But it may also be the case in
everyday encounters with strangers. While personal relevance seems
to be one answer to the interminable question of how can students
attach to the curriculum, the problem of narcissism in personal
relevancy theories is ignored.

91

16 Here, I am thinking both of writers who raise the question of

representing the Holocaust in such a way that the dynamics that
allowed the Holocaust to shatter the social are not repeated in the
representation and of those literary engagements that focus upon the
question of what happened to experience in and after the Holocaust.
For examples of the former, see Young 1988 and van Alphen 1997.
For examples of the latter, see Fink 1997, Becker 1996, and Singer
1998.

17 Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents makes this point:

“We shall always tend to consider [we can imagine] people’s distress
objectively—that is, to place ourselves, with our own wants and
sensibilities, in their conditions, and then to examine what occasions
we should find in them for experiencing happiness or unhappiness”
(89).

18 Although the diary was first published in English in 1952, its

popularization in pedagogy began with the advent of the Broadway
play and then the 1957 Hollywood film and its teaching guides. For a
longer mediation on the historicity of the diary’s reception in
pedagogy, see Britzman 1998.

19 Hannah Segal’s (1997) discussion of transference as a conflict

between fantasy and reality, is useful to this discussion for she thinks
of transference as a conflict between perception and misperception.
And while classical accounts of the transference focus on the question
of the exchange of authority, rooted in the analysand’s earliest
experience with parents, Segal also maintains that present
preoccupations are also transferred as the basis for social mis-
recognition. Here is Segal’s view:
Reacting to the analyst as though he or she were a figure of the past
is a misperception of the current relationship and, when this is
corrected, the past is also revised. In this way the misperceptions in
relation to the original figure can also be corrected, because, as we
have discovered, transference is not a simple phenomenon of
projecting the figures of the parents onto the analyst. It is internal
figures, sometimes part- objects, which are projected, and these
internal objects

92

have themselves a history in which the conflict between phantasy and

reality has led to distortions. In fact, the internal models on which we
base our attitudes to one another not only fail to correspond to current
reality; they are also, to a varying extent, a misrepresentation of past
reality. (27–28)

20 One of Levin’s charges was that the Goodrich and Hackett play
plagiarized his own. This charge of plagiarism returns to haunt Steven
Spielberg’s film Amistad, presently under consideration in the courts.
In making this association, I am not suggesting that these two
representations of history (one in the form of a play and one in the
form of a popular film) are comparable, even if in the popular press
there is the push to compare this film with Spielberg’s Schindler’s List
and even as debates over the applicability of the term Holocaust are
central to these representations as well. However, given that both
representations attempt to portray profound dislocation, the dynamics
of the event do seem to structure the history of its reception.

21 Goodrich and Hackett are best known for their writing of Frank
Capra’s film It’s a Wonderful Life. Otto Frank selected this team over
Meyer Levin’s script that was based on the diary.

22 Canby (1997) makes the important point in his review of the new
production of the diary currently running on Broadway that the 1957
play was one of the first popular representations of the diary, before
Eichmann’s trial and Hannah Arendt’s report on the banality of evil,
before the publications of Elie Wiesel and seven years into the
establishment of the State of Israel.

23 While it is well beyond the scope of this chapter to sketch out the
psychical complexities made from the splitting of good and bad into
absolute categories, a few observations on the dynamic of splitting
may be useful. Brooks (1992) identified three kinds of representations
that are split: “representations of objects, representations of affects,
and representations of the self” (335). While all of these splittings
occur through this chapter, it is the second kind, the splitting of affects,
that I stress. Very briefly, here

93

is the dynamic trajectory splitting enacts: When the good and bad of
representations are separated, both can then be displaced to the
outside. Then, these forces seem to come back at the self who splits.
Splitting is an early mode of perception that inaugurates judgment as it
returns to structure the ego. This splitting is also, according to Melanie
Klein, the basis for the possibility of guilt to allow for “the work of
reparation.” See Klein 1994.

24 For example, see Behar 1996, Clark 1997, and Spelman 1997.

25 André Green (1986) offers a way into the problem of why affect so
disturbs thought when he distinguishes affect from desire: “However,
what must be remembered is that affect is not a direct emotional
expression, but a trace, a residue, awoken by a repetition” (179).

26 Lyotard (1991) writes: “The pain of thinking isn’t a symptom coming

from outside to inscribe itself on the mind instead of in its true place. It
is thought itself resolving to be irresolute, deciding to be patient,
wanting not to want, wanting, precisely, not to produce a meaning in
place of what must be signified. This is a tip of the hat to a duty that
hasn’t been named” (19).

27 The term normotic defense is borrowed from Bollas (1987), who

considers the “drive to be normal [as] . . . typified by the numbing and
eventual erasure of subjectivity in favour of a self that is conceived as
a material object among other man-made projects in the objective
world” (134). A normotic defense works against the unknown of
subjectivity by exaggerating the ego’s own stability and capacity to
remain untouched by others. Bollas also offers the example of an
individual who, while having season tickets to the theater, refuses to
discuss the content of the plays or even acknowledge the work as “a
sophisticated mental accomplishment” (138) that requires something
of the viewer. I bring Bollas’s insight to van Alphen’s early denial of the
diary’s power.

28 The notion of “crafting” is meant to suggest that Anne Frank’s diary

went through a series of revisions. The second crafting of

94

the diary begins after Anne Frank’s death in the Bergen Belsen camp,
when Otto Frank, the only survivor of the family, returns to Amsterdam
upon his liberation from Auschwitz. He made from the documents he
was handed an edited diary that was published.

29 All of the recent writing addressing the revised play returns to the
painful debates over the uses and currency of the earlier play and of
Meyer Levin’s critique of the trivalization of Anne Frank’s identity in
that first play. Bernard Hammelburg’s “A Fresh Look at ‘Anne Frank’:
In Search of the Historical One” argues that the recent play revised by
Wendy Kesselman and directed by James Lapine was an attempt to
rethink the “superchild” and present Anne as more human. Frank
Rich’s “Anne Frank Now” recounts the diary’s history but is also struck
by the thirteen-year-old boy’s response who had accompanied him:
“But maybe adults’ reactions don’t matter as much as those of children
who are seeing it for the first time and carry none of their parents’
baggage. A 13-year-old bar mitzvah boy who came with me was
shaken by the experience—and was incredulous when I told him
afterward how the version I saw as a child ended with Anne’s cheery
testimonial to people’s goodness of heart” (A 21). And finally, in the
review of the new play, Ben Brantley notes, “This version . . . offers no
teacherly consolations about the triumph of the spirit . . . . An
uncompromising steadiness of gaze, embedded in a bleak sense of
historical context, is the strongest element in a production more
notable for its moral conscientiousness than for theatrical inspiration”
(B 1).

30 Even this insistence is not without qualification, for within Jewish

communities there is still the debate on who qualifies as “a Jew.” The
question of belonging is, of course, a question of any culture and its
capacities not just to distinguish the inside from the outside but also to
constitute, in this process, the qualities of the inside. However, Levin’s
insistence also raises a different question than the one implied in “who
can know?” And this is the question of identification with the loss that
is the Shoah. Levin, for example, was well aware of the larger social’s
woeful disregard of the destruction and murder of European Jewry. He
was a reporter in Europe at the end of World War II and was present
when Polish camps were liberated. His assumption was that the
articulation of

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the profundity of the loss must emerge from the loss itself. And
therefore, the narrator must have already been attached to the event
to convey its magnitude. But while this proximity may implicate one’s
identity, there is still a question as to whether it is identity that allows
proximity. This is the dilemma I am attempting to consider.

31 For example, Graver 1995; Melnick 1997; Doneson 1987; and

Rosenfeld 1991, 1993. In a recent review of the Graver and Melnick
studies, Buruma (1998) reviews the arguments over the crafting of the
first Broadway production but comes to the conclusion that while this
first play was a compromise, its popularization did allow for an
identification of sorts with the play’s characters. Buruma writes:
“Hollywood’s international appeal always has been its stress on
character rather than milieu. Cultural and historical accuracy suffers.
But making German audiences identify with Jewish victims is better, it
seems to me, than teaching them lessons on how to be a good Jew.
Such identification can result in sentimental self-pity, but it is more
likely to give people at least some idea that evil was done” (7).
Hoagland’s (1998) discussion of Anne Frank suggests the need to
separate the play from the writer of the diary. She argues, “Anne
Frank has always spoken for herself” (63). And yet, there is still the
question of how to receive her thoughts, particularly given the recent
public discussions on the “missing pages” of the diary. Blumenthal’s
(1998) reportage on the newly found five missing pages of Anne’s
diary suggests how old battles are replayed as new conflicts. These
pages were given to Cornelis Suijk by Otto Frank with the instruction
not to publicize them until his death. In these five pages, Anne
discusses her parents’ marriage and insists that the diary is not to be
read by her family. Along with questions as to how to interpret these
pages in relation to the history of the diary’s crafting by Otto Frank and
others, and now to the definitive edition, there are now disputes over
who owns these pages.

32 The term uncanny is the English translation of Freud’s term

unheimlech. In Freud’s essay, “The ‘Uncanny’” (1919) he considers
the etymology of this German word that depends upon the meaning of
home. The home is a place of secrets, and it

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becomes unhomely when the secrets threaten to erupt. Freud also

suggests that another person can be viewed as uncanny “when we
ascribe evil intentions to him. But that is not all; in addition to this we
must feel that his intentions to harm us are going to be carried out with
the help of special powers . . . . The layman sees in them the working
forces hitherto unsuspected in his fellowmen, but at the same time he
is dimly aware of them in remote corners of his own being” (243). The
uncanny is thus a relationship that cannot be made even if its force is
felt.

33 This notion of the transference is borrowed from Derrida’s reading

of Freud (1987), where Derrida marks the place that Freud
acknowledged the limits of interpretation:

1. Failure of a purely interpretive psychoanalysis, its time is over.

Psychoanalysis is no longer what it was, “an art of interpretation” . . .
an interpretation the consciousness of which in reality had no
therapeutic effect for the patient. At the moment of this practical failure
another means has to be found . . . . It is through the “transference”
(Ubertragung) that one will attempt to reduce the “resistances” of the
patient, who cannot be reached by simply becoming conscious of a
Deutung. Transference itself displaces, but it only displaces the
resistance. (339)

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