Behind the Bookcase
April 29, 2010 11:14 AM   Subscribe

In honor of the museum's 50th anniversary, the Anne Frank House has created a virtual tour of the Secret Annex and the rest of the house. The complete manuscript of Anne's diary has also gone on display at the museum for the first time.
posted by Horace Rumpole (18 comments total) 16 users marked this as a favorite
 
I had the opportunity to visit the Anne Frank house when I was in Amsterdam. I can't seem to find the words to describe the experience right now.
posted by tommasz at 11:19 AM on April 29, 2010 [2 favorites]


Annex! Geddit?!

Sorry.
posted by pyrex at 11:36 AM on April 29, 2010 [1 favorite]


Thanks very much for this post. The Secret Annex is one of the most compelling places I have ever been.
posted by bearwife at 11:45 AM on April 29, 2010


Unfortunately, this has twice utterly crashed Firefox for me. I wish there was a non-full screen option. I'm not sure a lot of schools will be able to open and use this.
posted by anastasiav at 11:53 AM on April 29, 2010


Thanks for this.

anastasiav, I used Firefox and it wasn't in fullscreen for me. There was a toggle at the top of the viewing screen.
posted by Ruki at 12:07 PM on April 29, 2010


I used Firefox and it wasn't in fullscreen for me

I can't get that far to toggle. The entire thing locks up about 80% of the way into page loading.
posted by anastasiav at 12:08 PM on April 29, 2010




This is a wonderful site.
posted by gallois at 12:34 PM on April 29, 2010


I was there just about two weeks ago and this exhibit was just being built. It's disappointing to know that we missed it by so little.
posted by c0nsumer at 1:07 PM on April 29, 2010


For a serious study of Anne Frank's work, in full and carefully rendered:

http://tinyurl.com/2ewuepb

for Frank as a growing literary figure, a careful study of emendations that show a
growth as artist in her writing and the impact etc of her Diary:
http://tinyurl.com/2atdtev
posted by Postroad at 1:26 PM on April 29, 2010


I had the opportunity to visit the Anne Frank house when I was in Amsterdam. I can't seem to find the words to describe the experience right now.

The thing that struck me were the clippings hung in her room: the stars of the day, monkeys having tea... seeing these made me feel so terribly sad for reasons I can't explain.

Are those clippings authentic or are these a staging to look the period/part?
posted by mazola at 1:38 PM on April 29, 2010


Horace Rumpole: "The complete manuscript of Anne's diary has also gone on display at the museum for the first time. "

So is this the actual complete original, or is it still missing the sexual stuff that her father had cut before publication?
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 2:48 PM on April 29, 2010


My understanding is that certain sexual passages were cut from the original publication manuscript, but not out of Anne's actual diaries. I believe that material has since been published. What makes this is exhibition noteworthy is that some of the diary material had been held in a separate archive, and it's now all together at the House.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 3:29 PM on April 29, 2010


The museum is excellent, BTW, should definitely be a place to visit if you go by Amsterdam.
posted by Artw at 3:56 PM on April 29, 2010 [1 favorite]


I found this somehow more and less interesting than I thought it would be. The computer-rendered bits were reminiscent of video games and kind of distracting but the photo overlays made it kind of reactive-interesting.

The Secret Annex was the only time I've ever intersected the Holocaust and it fucked me over pretty well. Like many tourists I took fair advantage of the fruits of the city and was high as hell that morning: the sideways perspective opened me up to things I probably wouldn't have absorbed in my normal tourist-about-world viewpoint. German being spoke by fellow tourists was completely abhorrent, the language of the final oppressor. Children there on schooltrips underlined the tragedy of it, the innocent -- one of a nearly uncountable many but one hugely personal to anyone who had read her published diary as so many had.

So many little moments of little horrors: the preservation of space, the window from which one could furtively glimpse the vibrant scene outside, the ladder reaching to the relative sanctuary of the attic above. This was her world, poor little girl.

At the end, coming down there was this pile of sandwitches. Hell if I know what they were there for, maybe they were for one of the school groups or a meeting or something. Somehow and perhaps it was the buzz but it seemed like they were there as a parting gesture for those as drained as myself: something to hold in one's hand and find the ground of living, prepare oneself for the outside world. A safer, less innocent place. With a sandwitch. I doubt they were for me, but I took it as a humane gesture at the time.
posted by Ogre Lawless at 10:33 PM on April 29, 2010 [1 favorite]


Well that was probably a better idea than what I did, which was getting onto an insane fairground ride run by stoned Dutch pikeys that was in the middle of Dam square at the time. "you like that huh?" they shouted over the PA as they prepared to slam the thing into overdrive "well now we fuuuuuck yooooooooo uuuup!".

Yeah, that was a bad idea.
posted by Artw at 10:42 PM on April 29, 2010 [1 favorite]


Regardless of circumstances, I can't think of anything more boring than to explore the recursive life of a shut-in.
posted by markkraft at 3:23 AM on April 30, 2010


Put me down as another well it's on the list of touristy stuff to tick off - wow, that was a lot more moving than I expected...

I can't quite compare with insane fairground rides but I think my life-long love of art really started when I later wandered around the Van Gogh baked out of my mind... and misunderstandings in various Dutch grocery shops meant I ate a cooking apple instead of an eater and a carton of custard instead of milkshake / flavoured milk (well it was yellow and had cow on it)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 3:37 AM on April 30, 2010


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