So yeah, Justin Bieber visited the Anne Frank House and left a note in the guestbook calling her “a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a belieber.”
Of course everyone went nuts, myself not excluded. There’s the narcissism thing, and the weird time traveler thing — is he imagining her as a belieber now, in her 80s, or imagining himself as a wartime pop star?
But there’s another layer down below all that. Check out this clip, the only moving picture footage of Anne Frank known to exist:
Those few seconds of film were shot in July 1941, on the day of a neighbor couple’s wedding. Anne had just turned twelve. She was a year away from going into hiding, forty-three months away from death.
I don’t know if they show that clip at the Anne Frank House, but if they do, it’s not hard to imagine Bieber watching it and seeing one of his fans. To express that as he did was clumsy, but also somehow sweet.
We know next to nothing about what music Anne Frank liked. Beyond a reference to a Mozart concert on the radio (“I can hardly listen in the room because I’m always so inwardly stirred”), there’s virtually nothing in her writings that speaks to that question.
But we do know that she was a girl who cut out pictures of celebrities and glued them to her bedroom wall, though, because that wall survives at the Anne Frank House. (“Thanks to Daddy,” she wrote, “who had brought my picture postcards and film-star collection beforehand … I have transformed the walls into one gigantic picture.” Over her years in hiding, she added new pictures and covered up older ones, swapping out Deanna Durbin for Leonardo Da Vinci like any self-respecting teen.)
And here’s something about that wall. For all the obsessive documentation of Anne Frank’s live that the last sixty-eight years have seen, and for all the ways that the web facilitates tracking and analyzing and plumbing visual culture artifacts, there’s apparently no full listing of the subjects of the photographs anywhere on the internet, no annotated reproduction of the wall itself. The wall is a document that Anne and her sister created and maintained as their link to the outside world and that life they’d left behind, and hoped to return to, but it appears that none of us have cared enough about that act of creation to excavate and display it in the most thoughtful and fullest way our era can.
Isn’t it possible that Bieber, seeing that wall, imagined his photograph on it? And doesn’t that kind of break your heart?
So yeah, I don’t know. It’s easy to mock. But the more I think about it, the less I want to.
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April 14, 2013 at 5:22 pm
profreplogle
I couldn’t agree more. I, too, initially re-tweeted the story of his allegedly “stupid” comment in the Anne Frank guestbook, only to find myself thinking later about how he would have logically seen her as a *teenager* and thus *a potential fan*. Any teen heartthrob might have had the same reaction, though perhaps fewer would have written the same thing in the guestbook. But, the more I think about it, the more I think that it was a rather sweet — even innocent — though still awkward, thing to write in the guestbook. The Anne Frank house issued a statement essentially saying that they know he leads an odd life and that he meant no harm by it. I agree, and think we should stop tormenting him for….being a teenager.
April 14, 2013 at 10:31 pm
Craig
The problem isn’t that he had a reaction that revolved around Anne Frank as a little girl and what sort of music she might have listened to. The problem is that, once he went down that road, his thought process stopped being about her and started being about him, and her (potential) relationship to him. That is narcissism at its purest, crystalline essence, and he deserves every ounce of the scorn that is being heaped on him because of it.
April 14, 2013 at 11:33 pm
Corey Robin
This is a great post. Wonderful: hadn’t thought of this angle at all.
April 15, 2013 at 10:18 am
Angus Johnston
Craig, my take is that he was saying — or at least that he can plausibly be read as saying — that after visiting the Anne Frank House he saw Frank as a girl who could, under other circumstances, have been someone he had a personal connection to.
When I see that film, I think “she looks just like my kids’ friends.” And maybe that’s not the most lofty ground on which to forge an empathetic connection, but it’s not all that unusual either — and I don’t see it as particularly blameworthy.
April 15, 2013 at 10:25 am
Angus Johnston
Have to run out to teach, but quickly:
In contemplating historical actors, in trying to make sense of their lives and their meaning to us, there’s a danger in erasing the gap between us and them. But there’s also a danger in rendering the gap unbridgeable. The distance between Anne Frank and ourselves can’t be collapsed, but it shouldn’t be artificially extended, either.
Anne Frank couldn’t have been a Belieber, not really. But she might, in other happier circumstances, have grown up to be a screaming, swooning, Sinatra fan.
Figuring out how to make sense of that alternate history, and what to do with it? It may not be a project for the historian, but I’m not sure that it’s a completely unworthy one.
April 16, 2013 at 6:44 am
Snippets of random
[…] So yeah, I don’t know. It’s easy to mock. But the more I think about it, the less I want to. [link] […]
April 16, 2013 at 12:17 pm
Reaction to Justin Bieber comment in Anne Frank guestbook | canada.com
[…] attention also led American student activism historian Angus Johnston to reflect upon the pictures posted on the bedroom wall at the Anne Frank House — full details about which remain elusive despite the fact that some were of her favourite […]