SANCTUARIES
by
Jim Ruland

Ironically, it’s easy to miss. Like the other canal-side houses on Prinsengracht, the Anne Frank House is tall and narrow, more deep than wide. The museum has expanded since it opened in 1960. A new structure has been added to the offices and warehouse that sheltered the secret annex where Anne and seven others hid from July 6, 1942, through August 5, 1944. It is not an ostentatious building. Extensive renovations have camouflaged the museum’s façade. The result is subtle and innocuous. If it weren’t for tourists queued outside the entrance, I might not have realized it was there at all.

To reach the annex one has to navigate the reconstructed rooms where Otto Frank worked as a buyer and seller of spices. The visitor moves through dreary offices and storerooms, past rows of empty desks and stacks of tins used for measuring the spices that were ground on the premises. At the secret entrance to the annex proper the movable bookcase is left propped open and the effect is reminiscent of a haunted house, a scene from a Nancy Drew novel. Ascending the tight, narrow staircase, the wealth of information about Mr. Frank’s business I have just absorbed strikes me as petty and irrelevant. The creaking stairs tell as much as the plaques and typed note cards in the display cases. Unlike most famous homes that have been converted into museums with their roped-off rooms like a precious full-scale diorama, the visitor’s experience at the Anne Frank house is intimate and intense. Eight people hid here for over two years. These are the rooms.

No space appears more lived in than Anne’s bedroom, which she shared, first with her sister Margot and then with Fritz Pfefferan, a middle-aged dentist who had gone into hiding with the Frank’s. It is very much a child’s room. The museum’s curators have taken great pains to give the room a lived-in look. A dressing gown hangs from a hook. A piece of flimsy fabric is draped over a chair. A replica of Anne’s journal sits on the desk. The soft light from the desk lamp suggests a writer at work. It is a room that is always awaiting Anne, but Anne, of course, is never coming back.

The Anne Frank House is the second most popular tourist attraction in Amsterdam; the Vincent van Gogh Museum is the first. In the Vincent van Gogh Museum hangs a composition called “The Bedroom,” which depicts a small, close room in the south of France. The room, or rather Vincent’s representation of it, bears an eerie similarity to Anne’s bedroom in the annex (see plate). While the actual rooms were separated by over sixty years and nearly 800 miles, the two representations, one a reconstruction, the other a visual composition, have been brought together in Amsterdam and are separated by a brisk walk across the city. There is something uncanny about the similarities between these two rooms. I was struck by the arrangement of the furniture, the identical perspective, the strange yellow light behind the green windows--even the lines in the floorboards run a parallel track. Though the two are not usually associated together, if Anne is Amsterdam’s best known daughter, Vincent is the city’s favorite son.

What are we to do with Vincent van Gogh? We are fascinated with him for all the right reasons: his violent outbursts, the savage self-immolation and, ultimately, his spectacular suicide, which was foretold in his last work in oils “Crows in the Wheatfield.” His notoriety outshines his most well known work; his creations are forever fixed in his Promethean shadow. Perhaps it’s all those self-portraits. Maybe Kirk Douglas’s portrayal in Lust For Life has something to do with it, giving birth to the myth of Vincent as a brooding Romantic, a misanthropic genius, the protean Beat who cared more about ideals than filthy lucre.

In 1888 Vincent fled to Arles where he rented rooms in the now famous Yellow House at 2 Lamartine Place. He went to work on new projects remarkable for their bold use of color. Both “Sunflowers” and “The Bedroom” are from this period. This is Vincent’s description of the latter: This time it’s just simply my bedroom, only here color is to do everything, and giving by its simplification a grander style to things, is to be suggestive here of rest or of sleep in general. In a word, to look at the picture ought to rest the brain or rather the imagination.

A study of these near identical rooms leads the viewer’s eye to the pictures Anne pasted on the wall above her bed and writing desk, and those that decorate the walls of Vincent’s painting. The photos Anne glued to the wall are still there, preserved behind glass. The Canadian film star Deanna Durbin seems to have been a favorite. Words from Anne’s famous diary provides an indication of her motive:

Our little room looked very bare at first with nothing
on the walls; but thanks to Daddy who had brought
my picture postcards and film-star collection on beforehand,
 and with the aid of paste pot and brush I have transformed
the walls into one gigantic picture. This makes it look much
more cheerful. (July 11, 1942)

Anne’s description would have delighted Vincent. His walls were decorated with his own work, among them portraits of the poet Eugène Boch and the soldier Paul-Eugène Milliet. It is pleasing to think that if Anne had seen Vincent’s bedroom, she would have recognized the room for what it was – a place of refuge, a sanctuary.

“The Diary of Anne Frank” is something of a misnomer. Anne’s diary is really a series of letters addressed to an imaginary friend named Kitty, her sister, if you will, of the imagination. Vincent’s letters to his brother possess the intimacy of a diary and some take them as a form of autobiography. “I can write no differently than I do,” he told his brother. Both Vincent and Anne embellished descriptions of their day-to-day existence with elaborate and involved accounts of their work and what it meant to them.

Although it is folly to imagine Anne was familiar with Vincent’s “The Bedroom,” it is not only likely, but highly probable the men and women of the Anne Frank House who have preserved Anne’s room knew the work well – even if they were not altogether aware of it. It is impossible to leave the museum without feeling manipulated. On August 4, 1944, the SD (German Security Service) arrested the eight people in hiding and took them away to the SD-prison on Euterpestraat. The Franks were given a few minutes to grab what they could and they would have turned the rooms over assembling those things they thought they might need in the dark days to come. It is probably best not to dwell on this painful moment. Certainly, the SD would have rummaged through the rooms in search of clues that would lead them to other Amsterdam Jews in hiding. To present the room as if Anne might step through the door after having brushed her teeth and kissed her parents good night is to participate in the same type of evocative fantasy that we ascribe to film, television and the stage. The Anne Frank house is very much a set, an orchestrated reconstruction intended to evoke a specific type of emotion in those who set foot in it. The room is not the room, we must remember, but a terrifyingly poignant replication.

There are three versions of “The Bedroom.” When the original was damaged, Theo advised Vincent to make a copy before having the original restored. Vincent followed his brother’s advice and produced a second version, which is now displayed at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris (he also created a third, though much smaller, version for his sister and mother). The copy differed in many not-so-subtle ways from the original. The lines are skewed, the window frames bulge as if from some terrible pressure, the framed compositions on the wall hang precariously, as if they might pitch themselves to the floor. The room itself seems tilted. There is a reason for this. At the time when Vincent was making the copy, he was cut off both physically and mentally from the place that had once been a symbol of rest and refuge. It was now a place that existed only on his troubled canvas, in his restless imagination.

If indeed it was rest Vincent was seeking, he did not find it in Arles. His declining health, the many charms of the night cafés, the strain of the strong southern sun were too much for him. His relationships, namely with Gauguin, who was staying with him at the Yellow House, suffered. Gauguin’s portrait of Vincent at work behind his easel reveals a man on the brink of collapse. After a quarrel with his friend on December 23, 1888, Vincent had his much-romanticized mishap with the shaving razor. He went to a brothel and presented a piece of his ear to a prostitute with the following instructions: “Guard this object carefully.” Vincent had just received word that his brother had gotten engaged, and he feared his additional financial responsibilities would prohibit Theo from supporting him.  It was, he surmised correctly, the beginning of the end.

Upon Vincent’s return from the hospital he wrote the following to his brother: “When I saw my canvases again after my illness the one that seemed best to me was the ‘Bedroom.’” It is interesting that a scene Vincent had painted to lighten his mood brought him the greatest satisfaction, even though the painting was deeply flawed from a technical point of view.

After a series of late-night excesses, Vincent had a second attack and he was taken to the hospital convinced that someone was trying to poison him. The people of Arles petitioned for him to be confined. He was removed to a hospital at Saint-Remy where he tried to kill himself by eating paint. July 27, 1890, he shot himself in the chest and died two days later. In the last line of his last letter to Theo, found with his body in a wheat field, he asks: “What’s the use?”

Vincent’s madness was personal and private. Although the betrayal of the Frank family by an unknown agent must have felt personal, Anne was destroyed by a particularly virulent public madness. In September of 1944 Anne was deported to Auschwitz and sent to Bergen-Belsen. Cut off from anyone she’d ever known, she believed she alone had survived. Under the impression that her entire family had died in the camps, Anne lost hope and died of typhus in March of 1945, a few short weeks before Bergen-Belsen was liberated. She was a prisoner to the very end.

Both rooms are presented to the viewer from the same perspective. Each has a pair of doors positioned in opposite corners, suggesting the rooms were intended to be passed through, not occupied for long periods of time. Whatever refuge the occupants of these rooms may have found, it was bound to be temporary and fleeting, a brief respite from the madness swirling all about them. Both rooms are empty, sanctuaries no more.

Though both Vincent and Anne viewed their sanctuaries as prisons, it is in these rooms they created the masterpieces that forged their legacies. Here Anne composed her famous diary, which her father edited and published. Vincent’s work at the Yellow House, with its bold use of color, forever changed the painter’s palette and the public’s taste. At the intersection of art and history, their sanctuaries are preserved not so their art may endure--both Vincent and Anne are strangely ubiquitous--but to remind us of the tenacity of the human spirit in the face of inexorable grief, sadness and evil. These rooms tell us that sometimes the only thing that makes life bearable is a picture of a friend, a postcard from a place we’d like visit someday. Deprived of reminders of our place in the world, and those who care for us, it is all too easy to abandon hope.