The last time I was in Amsterdam I tried to visit the Anne Frank House Museum. I could not do it. Tickets sold out over the next few months. You read that correctly, dear reader. Months.
Apparently the Jewish teenager’s final refuge receives more than a million visitors every year. This is due to the diary, which has already sold tens of millions of copies worldwide.
But author Dara Horn tells an exemplary story in her disturbing book “People Love Dead Jews”: Years ago, a museum employee tried to wear his yarmulke to work.
Management was against it and recommended that he wear the accessory under a baseball cap. For reasons of “neutrality”.
It’s funny: the guardians of Anne Frank’s memory order a Jew to hide his Judaism again.
Someone probably didn’t like the joke and after four months of internal debate, the yarmulke was allowed.
It is episodes like these that lead Dara Horn to formulate her hypothesis: people like Jews, yes, but only if they are already dead.
To test her hypothesis, the author asks us to imagine an Anne Frank who miraculously survived the Holocaust.
And that when she was older she would be ready to share her experiences in Auschwitz or BergenBelsen with the world. There would undoubtedly be people who would listen to her.
But 1 million people every year? Tickets sold out for months?
The fascination with Anne Frank is explained by her early disappearance. But also for the “inspirational” message she left in her diary: the belief that humanity is essentially good despite being essentially bad towards it.
In other words: We like Anne Frank, Dara Horn accuses, because she absolves us of all responsibility.
The same goes for Elie Wiesel: Before Wiesel published “The Night,” this theological meditation on God’s silence and abandonment in the face of the tragedy of the Holocaust, he had already published an initial version of the work in Yiddish.
In “And the World Was Silence,” responsibility for the crimes was attributed to more earthly beings such as neighbors, collaborators, and Nazis. Anyway, me and you. Success only came with “A Noite”.
Deep down, we like works about the Holocaust as long as they have a “positive” message. This is why, I add, the masses loved Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful and not László Nemes’ masterpiece Son of Saul.
Of course, Dara Horn’s hypothesis people only like dead, friendly Jews also has exceptions. Jews can be alive as long as they are geniuses, she admits.
This is what the journalist Varian Fry says, who set out for Marseille in 1940 and 1941 with the good goal of saving “European civilization”. As? Helping to escape hundreds of writers, artists and scientists persecuted by the Nazis.
From Hanna Arendt to Marcel Duchamp, from Max Ernst to Claude LéviStrauss, from André Breton to Marc Chagall, the list is long.
But isn’t it also an elitist form of intellectual eugenics? Let’s save the geniuses and leave the others behind?
The question would haunt Varian Fry until the end of his days.
Reading Dara Horn would always be a disturbing experience. But it is particularly worrying as Europe plunges back into antiSemitic hatred with frightening fury: Stars of David spraypainted on buildings, attacks on shops, attacks on Jews on the street, a woman stabbed in Lyon and a swastika on her door. .
They say the reason is the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. Reason or pretext?
Apparently a pretext: antiSemitism began to bubble up as soon as the first news of the massacres … in Israel emerged.
George Orwell explains this cognitive dissonance very well. When the British saw the first images of the Holocaust in 1945, Orwell remembered a kind housewife replying, “Please don’t show me these photos, they’ll only make me hate the Jews more.”
The ongoing attacks are not directed against “Zionists,” Netanyahu voters, religious fanatics who support illegal settlements, or genocides against Palestinians. These are attacks against Jews just because they are Jews.
But there is no reason to despair: if the antiSemitic escalation continues into the unimaginable, I am sure that one day we will visit the houses that are now being attacked. The owners just need to leave us “positive” and “inspirational” messages about the beauty of human kindness.