Anna Frank Diary - Movie Review Example

Anna Frank Diary Review The diary of the Dutch girl Anne Frank is one of the most known and impressive documents on fascism atrocities. It made her name well-known around the whole world. Anna kept the diary from June 12, 1942 to August 1, 1944. At first the girl wrote only for herself while in the spring of 1944 she heard the speech of the Minister of Education of the Netherlands Bolkenstein on the radio. He said that all certificates of Netherlanders during occupation period had to become national property. Under impression of these words Anna decided to publish the book which would be based on her diary after the end of the war. Anna started copying the notes, she changed some entries which she considered uninteresting, and added some new memoirs. Along with this work she kept writing her initial diary, the last record of which is dated by August 1, 1944. Three days later, on the fourth of August all eight inhabitants of the Shelter were arrested by the German police. Miep Gies picked up Anna`s notes right after arrest. Miep stored them in a box of a table of the office and gave to the father of the girl Otto Franck, when the death was Anna was confirmed. Otto Franck died in 1980. He bequeathed the original of the diary to Amsterdam State Institute of Military Documentation. Institute made the investigation and established undoubted authenticity of the records, after that the new version of the diaries were published.In the second version of the diary Anna gave pseudonyms to all the characters including herself. Otto Franck kept them partially in the first edition, having left real names for the members of the family. In the subsequent publications the original names of the assistant of Shelter were also kept. Only Albert Dyussel and Augusta, Hermann and Peter Van Daan remained as pseudonyms. The Franks were Jews living in Vienna during the Nazi power installment. Naturally for the Jewish family, all Anna`s relatives found themselves in the situation of pursuit and persecution in the beginning of 1940s. The Franks understood possible consequences of the Nazi invasion for their family that is why they moved to Holland, nevertheless, the threat did not disappear there. In order to survive they decided to hide in the shelter in the office of Anna`s father in 1942 hoping for near war ending. When Anna started her diary she was only thirteen, thus her teenage world perspective influenced greatly her description. Anne Frank could become a talented writer or journalist. She noticed everything with the aggravated child`s sight, and her teenage way of thinking striked with depth and tragic attitude. One of the first entries in her diary is practically a question to all the humanity and to God. “Who has made us Jews different from all other people? Who has allowed us to suffer so terribly up until now? It is God who has made us as we are, but it will be God, too, who will raise us up again.  Who knows it might even be our religion from which the world and all peoples learn good, and for that reason and only that reason do we suffer.  We can never become just Netherlanders, or just English or representatives of any country for that matter.  We will always remain Jews" (Frank, 13). The question why Jews have become the symbol of the victim arises in the minds of psychologists, historians, and scientists since the origin of anti-Semitism. Jews have always been the chosen nation with a special destiny, which was underlined in the Holy Scriptures, and probably this peculiarity drew special attention to them. Hitler was the first and the most influential historic figure that separated this nation from the rest of the world once and for all with a help of biases, prejudices, and discrimination. The notion of anti-Semitism was totally built on the prejudices of Jews as an inferior nation. Prejudice is special type of installation (mainly negative) in relation to members of a certain social group. Discrimination is the negative actions directed against these people, the installations transferred into actions. The people who are prejudiced are against certain groups, often process information on these groups differently, than information on other groups. They pay more attention to the information which is coordinated with their prejudiced views. Anna realized that unfair division; this imposed victimity and described her reflections in the diary. From the mentioned above quote of her diary it becomes obvious that she wanted to make sense of this suffering, which is typical to the victim`s behavior. However, in most cases victimization is a psychological determination, but in the case with Jewish nation it became totally imposed. Behavior of the Frank`s family is typical victim behavior. Fear, the dominant emotion, is easily explained by the Nazi`s atrocities, was felt in them according to Miep. The members of the family felt constant discomfort, bewilderment, dependence. Dependence on other people resulted in substantial neurosis, moreover, Anna`s mother used to suppress all her emotions due to the peculiarities of her character. According to Miep`s story Anne was the one who could demonstrate her aggression, depression, and discontent by the whole situation, which often resulted in rebukes from other members of the family. She could manage with this forceful feeling of injustice and ignorance only writing her diary which gave sense to her existence. Regarding a victim in a situation of social interaction, it is possible to address to the general victimology principle considering a victim, an aggressor, a savior, and a situation as a unit. At their interaction in a concrete situation certain individual and psychological features of each of the parties of this interaction are revealed. The people who voluntarily helped the Jews, Miep Gies, her husband Jan Gies, Victor Kugler, and Johannes Kleiman risked their own lives in order to save other people. It is interesting, that Miep and her husband were actually Otto`s employees, not close friends from the beginning. Those people who helped the refugees and provided them with all necessary for survival were driven by pure altruism. This concept of social psychology is interpreted, first, as motive of providing help to someone which is not consciously connected to personal selfish interests. Secondly, as the act directed to the benefit of the other person. In the case of altruism person always has o choice whether to provide help or not (Stepien & Baernistein, 2006) It is difficult to find any other motive of this people except support of human values. They understood senseless fascist ideology and being citizens of Holland tried to save Jews from death. Altruism is mostly based on the empathy, the ability to understand the emotions of the others and experience sympathy. It is interesting to learn why some people in the situation of terror were showing altruism while others were driven by conformism and obedience. Obedience was studied in a number of experiments among which a greater part was conducted by Stanley Milgram. He was studying the method of Nazi simple citizens’ involvement in the process of massacre. In the experiments volunteers received instructions to subject to an electroshock of increasing intensity of the actor representing pain, in case of incorrect answers to the volunteer`s questions. Milgram drew conclusions, summarizing data on the cases of volunteers` refusal to hurt pseudo-experimental in his work "The Perils of Obedience"(1974). In the experiment the authority of the head was opposed to the strongest moral value as that which presupposes not to hurt another person. Nevertheless, in most cases the authority overweighed the morality. Extreme readiness of adults to follow the increasing orders of the authority is the main conclusion of the experiment, and this readiness demands an explanation. Ordinary people, doing the work daily, living without special personal hostility, can be turned into tools of awful destructive processes. Moreover, even when disruptiveness of results becomes obvious to them and they receive instructions to continue the actions incompatible with their fundamental standards of morals, few people find forces to resist to authority taking into account their own possible losses.(Milgram, 1974). It is disturbing how easily people can be converted to the actions which they would not consider possible when there appears authority. Obedience is obviously connected with the concept of conformism. The process of change of the attitudes, opinions, perception, behavior of the individual towards a consent with group in response to real or imagined group pressure in situations when there is no the direct requirement to agree with group. Pressure upon the individual is usually expressed in the fact of demonstration of the consolidated position of other members of group and the subsequent need to express individual position afterwards (Asch, 1951). German people supporting the idea of fascism with its outrageous concepts of discrimination of inferior nations and people voluntarily submitting to Gestapo were majorly attracted by the power of fascism. Hitler managed to persuade millions of people that it is possible to give up moral rules with an aim of “cleaning” the land from “racial impurity”. Fromm emphasized that the middle class became a kernel of Nazism. Middle class was turned into the most progressive and leading layer of society. Fromm underlined that Nazism is an economic and political problem, but without psychological factors it is impossible to understand how it got the power over the whole people (2013). Submission to fascist dictatorship Fromm explains by masochistic tendencies of collective and individual unconscious, caused by fear of loneliness and the responsibility, those primitive tendencies which have remained after destruction of natural connection with nature. The individual seeks to get rid of own personality, to lose himself, in other words, to get rid of burden of freedom (Fromm, 2013). Thus, strong inner motive of masochism, freedom escapism, and responsibility avoidance dominant in people behavior stimulated Nazi regime installation. Even its flagrant aggressiveness did not serve as the sign of it wrongness. With the help of aggressive behavior Nazi got the chance to install their regime and to implement their philosophy in the minds of people. Most of the nations tolerated aggression negatively but could not resist in a decent way. It is interesting that people are usually prone to avoid aggressive behavior toward others. And the splash of atrocities of that period was probably explained by strong influence. Aggression can be divided into two forms: in the form of hostile aggression which is generated by such emotions as anger and intention to do harm, and in the form of the tool aggression which achievement of any other purpose. The theory of instinctive aggression is traditionally connected with Freud who considered that aggressive energy is collected in a person naturally. It is confirmed that aggression of the individual, nevertheless, depends on such biological factors, as heredity, a chemical composition of blood and a brain structure. According to other theory, the anger and hostility is frustration consequences. In the presence of aggression activators the similar anger is capable to provoke aggressive actions. The frustration is not a consequence of a deprivation as that, and a gap consequence between expectations and real achievements. According to the theory of social learning, the aggressive behavior is result of learning. On own experience and watching progress of people around, we are sometimes convinced that aggression can bear useful fruits. Social learning of aggression happens under the influence of a family, subculture and mass media(Geen & Donnerstein, 1998). In the case of fascism, aggression was the result of all rthe factors: natural aggression, which arose after failure in WWI as well as aggression that was imposed, learned by and from the rest. The motives of human behavior are unimaginably complicated. In many cases real peoples` values and personalities become evident in the most critical situation. Holocaust became that turning point when the major patterns of human behavior could be changed under the influence of power. Jews become innocent victims, while the rest had the chance to decide whether to accept the role of aggressor or savior. The diary of Anna Frank reflects difficult inner feelings of a young girl who found herself in a trap of circumstances, revealing psychology of the surrounding people. References Asch, S. E. (1951). Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgments. Groups, leadership and men. Pittsburg, PA: Carnegie Press. Frank, A. (1993). Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. (B. M. Mooyaart, trans.) Bantam (Originally published in 1952). Fromm, E. (2013). Escape from freedom. Oxford: Open Road Media. Geen, R & Donnerstein, E. (1998). Human aggression: theories, research, and implication for social policy. San Diego: Academic Press. Milgram, S. (1974). «The Perils of Obedience». Harpers Magazine. Abridged and adapted from Obedience to Authority. Stepien, K.A. & Baernstein, A. (2006). Educating for empathy. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 21, 524–530. Read More