History on Display–Anne Frank: The Exhibition
Photo credit: John Halpern, Courtesy of Anne Frank House
My Own True Love and I recently spent a morning at an extraordinary exhibit about Anne Frank, at the Museum of Science and Industry[1], or as I suppose we should call it now, the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry. Created by the Anne Frank House museum in Amsterdam, the exhibit does not focus solely on the often told and heartbreaking story of Anne’s life and death. It uses the Frank family’s experience as a lens for telling the broader story of the rise of the Nazis, the Holocaust, and what happened after the war to those who survived the death camps.
The exhibit is a brilliant example of the use of modern museum technology. It begins with the family’s privileged life in Germany before Anne’s birth and through her early childhood—all of which felt very new to me.[2] It does an excellent job of narrating the Nazi rise to power with a combination of a well-done audio guide,[3] film, photography, and artifacts— and then zooms in to consider the impact on the Frank family. Once the Franks are in Amsterdam, the exhibit once again gives us the larger context for their life in Amsterdam, before and after the arrival of the Nazis, alongside the specific experience of the Frank family. Again, much of this felt new to me.
The heart of the exhibit is a full-scale recreation of the Secret Annex in Amsterdam where the Frank family and four of their friends hid from the Nazis for two years. The recreation brought to life just how tight the space was—something that the flow of visitors emphasized. I don’t know if it was a deliberate design choice, but we were packed tightly enough at each stop through the annex that it triggered a bit of claustrophobia for me. The narrated account described the limitations on their lives and evoked their discomfort, fear, and monotony.
The annex recreation also serves as the narrative hinge for the exhibit. Once outside the annex, the exhibit follows family’s arrest, their movement through the camps, the deaths of the Frank family women, Otto Frank’s experiences after liberation, and the path to publishing Anne’s diary.
For me the most powerful moment came at a single panel after the report of Anne’s death—I’m not going to describe it because I don’t want to spoil the impact for any of you who make it to the exhibit.
The exhibit will be at the Museum of Science and Industry through early 2027.
[1] Wondering what Anne Frank has to do with Science and Industry? The link is Jewish-American philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, who was, among other things, the moving force behind the creation of the museum. (I will point out that he did not ask that it be named the Rosenwald museum.) The more I learn about Rosenwald, the more impressed I am.
[2] It’s been many years since I read The Dairy of a Young Girl, so it is not entirely clear to me what was new and what I had simply forgotten. However, I’m quite sure that I did not know that Otto Frank did a one year internship at Macy’s in New York, for instance.
[3] As some of you may know, I have historically been anti-audio guides. In this case, the auto-guide is absolutely essentially to the experience.
From the Archives: Stranger in the Shogun’s City
Over the last few weeks the book Stranger in the Shogun’s City has come up several times in conversations with fellow history buffs and book nerds. Each time, my response has been “I love that book!” And after a while I decided it was time to tell those of you who didn’t read this review when I first posted it in 2020 that I loved this book. I hope you love it too.
One of the major challenges historians face when writing about the lives of non-elite women of the past is the absence of sources. Sources written by men that describe their lives are rare. Those written by the women themselves are rarer yet. Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World, by historian Amy Stanley, demonstrates how rich history can be when such sources are available.
The project began when Stanley became fascinated with a family archive that included dozens of letters written in early nineteenth century Japan by a rebellious woman named Tsuneno and the letters (and legal documents) created by her family in response. Together, these letters created a rare picture of the life an unconventional, non-elite woman, written in her own words.
Born in 1804 in a rural village, Tsuneno was the daughter of a Buddhist priest. She tried to settle into the traditional (and relatively privileged) life that her family expected of her, but it didn’t take. After three divorces and faced with another arranged marriage, she ran away to Edo (now Tokyo), then one of the largest cities of the world. Her life in Edo was always hard and often scandalous by the standards of her family and society. She made horrible decisions. She moved from tenement to tenement, took menial jobs that didn’t pay enough to support her, and married, divorced, and re-married a violent man from her home region. Her life can be summed up in a single line from one of her letters: “I ended up in so much trouble.”
Stanley places Tsuneno firmly in her historical context, creating a multi-layered picture of life in Japan in the decades before it was forcibly “opened” to the West by Commodore Perry’s fleet in 1854. Stranger in the Shogun’s City is a vivid and often lyrical portrait not only of Tsuneno, but of Edo, the city she loved.
Idols of Perversity
In the course of reading around the edges of the book topic I’m exploring[1], I was surprised to come across a discussion of a book I found useful while writing my dissertation: Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture by literary scholar Bram Dijkstra. I found the way the author used Dijkstra’s work as a theoretical prop for her own arguments inappropriate, unconvincing, and actively annoying.[2] On the other hand, it has been at least 25 and probably closer to 40 years since I read Dijkstra, so I decided to take another look.[3]
Jean Delville. Idol of Perversity. 1891
The title, Idols of Perversity, comes from a graphite drawing by Belgian Symbolist painter and author Jean Delville (1867-1953) The painting has been described as embodying fin-de-siècle fascination with the femme fatale as a force of temptation, corruption, and hidden power; Dijkstra, in turn, is fascinated with that fascination.
Dijkstra describes his work as an “iconography of misogyny” —a term that seems more accurate than the “feminine evil” of the title. He explores a number of repeating themes as they appear in images drawn from the visual arts in the academic tradition of the late nineteenth century: sleeping women, dead women, women looking at themselves in mirrors, women with dangerous animals,[4] women as dangerous animals. Many of the works draw from classical mythology and medieval stories[5], though Dijkstra also looks at images of nineteenth century women through the same lens. All are erotic to some degree. (Not surprisingly, since Dijkstra links nineteenth-century discomfort with female sexuality and feminism through the book.) He enriches his arguments with related examples from poets, scientist, and social theorists of the period. His analysis of any given painting can feel far-fetched; the iterative effect is powerful.
In my memory, Idols of Perversity was lush, dense, and challenging. Certainly it was an intriguing model for my dissertation, in which I chased recurring themes from art and literature in the early nineteenth century. The book did not capture my imagination in quite the same way returning to it decades and thousands of books[6] later. I suspect that has as much to do with me as a reader as it does with the book itself.
[1] Nope. Still not prepared to put it out into the world.
[2] Yes, I have opinions. And your point?
[3] Procrastination comes in many shapes and sizes. There is a reason that my to-be-read piles never seem to get smaller.
[4] Lots of big snakes. Iconography is not always subtle.
[5] Mythological rapes and murders are easier for viewers to handle.
[6] Not an exaggeration.