“The Diary of Anne Frank”: A pamphlet for freedom – Times Online

Recently, we have heard a lot about Anne Frank. But most was not that of the murdered by the Nazis girl in the foreground, which was hiding for two years with her family in an Amsterdam Behind House and during this time diary led famous story. Instead, it came to matters of legitimate appropriation and availability of Anne Frank’s records in order of interpretation as well as to recycling sovereignty.

were entitled Anne Frank’s diaries with the beginning of 2016 – she died in early March 1945 in the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen – made freely accessible on the Internet be? According to German copyright law, which can be public domain texts seventy years after the death of the author or the author, that would be possible. Opposition appealed in the specific case of the Anne Frank Fund, because he saw the rightful copyright in Anne Frank’s father. This had the records of his daughter treated after the war and have it published.

Otto Frank died in 1980, and therefore could be the public domain for some years on to wait. The question of whether the public domain for the purposes of distribution of the records would not necessarily desirable, obviously plays no role in the decision-makers. So also failed a Notified 2015 film version of Anne Frank’s story for ZDF about to be realized because the producers did not get the rights to the diaries.

New film Anne Frank’s diary premiere Full directly addresses the German director Hans Steinbichler with his work here at a young audience.

Harmonious family

this extent can claim ever as a success of the director Hans Steinbichler that his adaptation of Anne Frank’s diaries now come to the cinema and even at its world premiere was celebrated at the Berlinale. And perhaps fueled precisely from the knowledge of the expected success, at least part of indignation which is established during the viewing of the film. Another part results from that Steinbichler not seem to have possessed the ambition to give his film its own signature. Rather is The Diary of Anne Frank as pretty historicizing equipped family history, therefore, that hardly differs from other pretty historicizing equipped Histories.

This may also be because of Anne Frank parents with Martina Gedeck, but especially with Ulrich Noethen are cast with actors who are so pervasive that one always wonders if them when they are in the breaks at catering units, must briefly recall from time to time, what character they there actually playing.

In addition, Steinbichler narrows the narrative perspective tremendously. So you learn in the first few minutes of the film know a strikingly harmonious family, which was indeed forced by the adverse political circumstances, to emigrate from Frankfurt to Amsterdam, but which nevertheless leads a relatively gutsituiertes life and until recently holidays with relatives in the could spend a deeply green color luminous Swiss mountains.

Closer return bombings

Who suspected that Steinbichler idyll initially therefore does so explicitly to them then the more to break, is wrong. The tyranny of the Nazis is set at best in small, not really threatening scenes into the picture. When about Anne must learn together with their Jewish friends during a beach visit, that it is forbidden for Jews to bathe in the sea. Even as the reign of terror draws near to the point where the Franks go into hiding in the the Father prepared for a long time hiding, a 50-square-meter background House over his former company, presents itself more an impression of a pragmatic than an existential decision.

About the claustrophobia, which are characterized by the inclusion of four other Jews – the couple van Pels with their son Peter and the dentist Fritz Pfeffer – may have strengthened, the film tells so well like nothing. The fear of being discovered, fear of bomb attacks that move over the last years of the war closer, purring along on each scene. This may have been justified in assuming that even in the most extreme and most depressing time historical situations of concrete life and the surrounding environment but essential for people as the political contexts. However, if one assumes that Steinbichler film has to fulfill in view of its young target group certainly also an educational task, the director seems to be in this respect a little too easy to have made.