The Hidden Life of Otto Frank

This is the complex story of Anne Frank's quixotic father Otto, the only member of the Frank family to have survived the European holocaust. While the material assembled had the makings of a first rate detective thriller, one fears that here the author squandered away much of the thriller quality and currency (and much of the reader's time in the process), all beneath an onslaught of too many, and ultimately too uninteresting and irrelevant details of upper middle class German Jewish life under the siege of Nazi terror. It seems that the author lost all sense of proportion between the need for descriptive details and the exigencies of the times, and more importantly, of the plot. After the first few chapters of agonizing details: family squabbles, their sicknesses, divorces, summer vacations, shopping trips to Paris, etc, etc, ad infinitum, I found myself skipping ahead desperately trying finally to get to the meat of the story. Ideally the internal tension between scenery and plot should work themselves out smoothly and seamlessly enough that a reader will feel that everything is resolved satisfactorily in the end. Respectfully, but unfortunately that was not the case here. Getting to the meat of this story was like pulling teeth. All the while that Germany is over-running most of Europe, and the worse genocide in world history is taking place, the author is dragging us through all of the weddings of every member of the Frank family, all of the family gossip about dowries, the quality of expensive china and jewelry. If this is some kind of a backhanded way of trying to "overly-humanize" the Frank family, the author failed miserably. For it simply made them seem pompous, shallow, elitist, unconcerned about the realities going on outside their own little self-contained bubble, and ultimately quite ignorant people. After a while the plot gets so lost amid, and bogged-down in, descriptive bourgeois irrelevances that the reader could care less about anything other than getting on with the story: which only if one is lucky, will he then eventually discover it, tucked away somewhere in between the weddings, describing the furnishings, jewelry and kitchen china, and all the talk about what boarding schools the kids will be sent to. Giving the author the benefits of the doubt, the reader is expecting this to be the story of the hidden life of Otto Frank, not an exercise in "Finding Elmo." The point being that the plot is so carefully absconded behind a virtual wall of bourgeoisie irrelevancies that it becomes an exercise in frustration for the reader. One wants to shout out: Would this author please "get on with the story" Ferreting out the Story The mystery of the century turns out to have been that Otto Frank, who at a minimum, was a man of colossal poor judgment and was having what could only be described as an incestuous flirtation with his favorite daughter Anne, was also a war profiteer, selling goods to the German Army while all along prepari

Apparently the news that Otto Frank had sold some of his product for making jam to the Nazi Germany during the war caused quite a stir in the occupied country The Netherlands. What is really strange is how we create heroes out of people who do not choose to be heroes. Otto Frank was a remarkable man. The story of his life is equally remarkable. He was the father of one of the most famous people who ever lived, Anne Frank. If it were not for Otto, his daughter's diary would not have been published. The fact that he would want to edit things out that were personal to him and his wife is completely understandable. We will never know whether Anne would have published her diary if she had survived. This is a balanced portrait of a man caught in extraordinary times. If it had not been for the publishing of the diary we would probably never know about this survivor of the holocaust. I think he was quite remarkable.

While there are many things that are explained about the characters in Anne Frank already, this book goes into very deep detail about them, even more than what one would've thought possible. I will reinforce what has been said by saying that the text was a little dry at times, but still a good read. Some of the complaints I have with this book are, the author tries way too hard to make Otto be the good guy. She contradicts herself when she does this. For example, she claims that Otto married Edith, Anne's mother because he was in need of money. She then goes into great detail about how he needed this for his business and his family, but leaves out that he married her for her money. There are several other little things like that in there, also. Another thing is with Tonny Alhers. The entire book basically makes the case that Tonny Alhers turned the people living in the secret annex, but in the epilogue, she contradicts herself by suggesting that Tonny's wife did it. Still, this is a very good and eye-opening book. It shows that there was a lot more issues that went on than is mentioned in the Diary.

The Hidden Life Of Otto Frank is a lively new biography provides important new clues to the question of who betrayed Anne Frank and her family to the Nazis. New documented information about Anne's father Otto and the individual who would claim responsibility makes for an involving study which is packed with excerpts from Frank's own secret journal and exhaustive research results. The Hidden Life Of Otto Frank is a 'must' for any library offering a definitive collection on the Frank experience in particular and Nazi survivors in general.