Anne Frank House
The Anne Frank House ( Dutch Anne Frank Huis ) is a museum dedicated to the Jewish Holocaust victim Anne Frank . It has existed since May 3, 1960 in the house at Prinsengracht 263–267 in Amsterdam .
History of the house
The house at Prinsengracht 263 was built by Dirk van Delft in 1635, as was the building next door with number 265, which the museum later bought. The facade on the canal side was created during a renovation in 1740, when the rear annex was torn down and replaced by today's larger annex. The house was originally a private residence and later a warehouse. In the 19th century, horses were housed in the front part with its wide, stable-like doors. At the beginning of the 20th century, a manufacturer of household goods moved into the building. He was followed in 1930 by a producer of piano rolls who gave up the property in 1939.
The house and the Frank family
On December 1, 1940, the Opekta and Pectacon companies moved from the Singel to Prinsengracht 263 under the direction of Anne Frank's father Otto Frank .
The ground floor consisted of three parts. In front was the warehouse and the supplier entrance, behind it the spice mills and in the back the warehouse, in which the goods were packed for the trade. The offices of Frank and his employees were on the first floor: Miep Gies , Bep Voskuijl and Johannes Kleiman in the front, Victor Kugler in the middle and Otto Frank himself in the back.
The rear building is protected from the street on all four sides by other houses, which made it a suitable hiding place for eight Jewish people during the period of German occupation and the persecution of the Jews: the two alongside Otto Frank and his wife Edith Frank-Holländer Children Margot and Anne, Hermann and Auguste van Pels with their son Peter and Fritz Pfeffer . They lived for over two years and a month in around 50 square meters in darkened rooms. Anne Frank described this in her diary . Only in the evenings and on weekends, when the employees of the companies had left the building, the hidden people could come into the front building. Finally they were betrayed, arrested on August 4, 1944 by the German Gestapo and deported . The hiding place was then "pulsed" ; the seized clothing, furniture and personal items were sold in the Netherlands or distributed to bombed-out families in Germany. However, Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl were able to save Anne Frank's diary before the eviction.
Post-war history until the museum was founded
Shortly after the publication of Anne Frank's diary, the first visitors came. The staff who had helped the Frank family took them through the rooms that had previously served as hiding places on a private tour. In 1954, after the Opekta company moved, the entire block was sold to a real estate agent who wanted to demolish the houses in order to build a factory on the site. On November 23, 1955, the Dutch newspaper Het Vrije Volk launched a campaign to preserve the house and register it as a monument. On the day of the planned demolition, the campaign representatives protested in front of the house and obtained protection from enforcement . In 1957, the owner at the time, a jacket factory, signed over the house as a sign of goodwill to the Anne Frank Foundation, newly established by Otto Frank and Johannes Kleiman on May 3, 1957. With the donations that were released, the foundation then bought the neighboring building No. 265. The hiding place remained unchanged in its original condition.
The museum
In 1960, a museum about Nazi persecution and oppression was set up in the front buildings, which was renovated several times - including 1970, 1999 and 2016 to 2018 - and enlarged to include neighboring properties. It reopened on November 22, 2018.
Prinsengracht 263 is the old Opekta building (1940–1955), to the right of it is house 265 (with steps), Keg's Koffiehandel , which is known from the diary and is now also part of the museum. The other houses up to the corner were demolished during the 1950s and replaced by a new building. There in house number 267 is today's museum entrance; the museum's postal address also refers to it. You go inside through house 265 into the old building 263.
The rooms in the rear building, which served as hiding places, remained unfurnished at Otto Frank's request. Some personal things can still be seen: Anne Frank's collection of photos of famous film stars (such as Heinz Rühmann , Greta Garbo , Ginger Rogers ), the wallpaper on which Otto Frank marked the growth of his daughters, and a map on which he was advancing Allies detained in World War II. From the small room in which Peter van Pels lived at the time, corridors lead to the neighboring houses also acquired by the foundation. In addition to the diaries, various exhibitions are presented there that document various aspects of the Holocaust and current cases of racist intolerance.
The house is now one of the central tourist attractions of Amsterdam. In the year it opened, 9,000 visitors came; within a decade the number doubled. On September 28, 1999, the museum was reopened by Queen Beatrix after a restoration and conversion based on designs by the Benthem Crouwel architectural office . It now encompasses the entire building complex, including a bookstore and a café. The office space has been restored to its 1940s state. In 2007, over a million people visited the museum.
Amsterdam
Prinsengracht 267, 265, 263 (from right to left)
Amsterdam
Prinsengracht 267
Today's entrance area to the Anne Frank House,
Prinsengracht 267
The bookshelf that hid the access to the hiding place in the Secret Annex (reconstruction)
Others
Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt am Main and lived there during her childhood until the family fled to the Netherlands. The family's two houses at Marbachweg 307 (until 1931) and Ganghoferstraße 24 (both in the Dornbusch district ) have been preserved but are not open to the public.
The museum in Amsterdam also shows the Oscar that Shelley Winters won for portraying Auguste van Pels in the film The Diary of Anne Frank and later donated to the exhibition.
In 1998 the Anne Frank Center was opened in Berlin after a cooperation agreement was signed with the Anne Frank House .
The Anne Frank House is also available as a digital museum . The rooms in the front and rear buildings of Prinsengracht 263 were temporarily furnished and photographed for documentation purposes. Using these photographs, a virtual representation of these rooms was created. During the tour of Das Hinterhaus Online , historical audio and video documents and other information can also be called up.
See also
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Anne Frank Huis. City of Amsterdam, accessed August 10, 2012 (Dutch).
- ^ Annemieke van Oord-de Pee: The Canals of Amsterdam . SDU, 1991, ISBN 90-12-06553-4 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
- ↑ Hyman Aaron Enzer, Sandra Solotaroff-Enzer: Anne Frank: reflections on her life and legacy . University of Illinois Press, 2000, ISBN 0-252-06823-8 , pp. 224 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
- ↑ Tanja von Fransecky: They wanted to kill me, for that they had to have me first. Lukas Verlag, 2016, ISBN 978-3-867-32256-0 , p. 282 ( limited preview in Google book search).
- ↑ Ewoud Sanders, Abraham Puls , September 24, 1990 at www.nrc.nl
- ^ History of the house on the Anne Frank House website , accessed on June 5, 2014.
- ↑ Welcome, the Anne Frank House has been modernized Homepage of the Anne Frank House, as seen on November 26, 2018.
- ↑ What is The Secret Annex Online? Anne Frank Stichting, accessed January 24, 2012 .
- ↑ , Anne Frank House. A museum with a story. German booklet. (PDF; 835 kB) annefrank.org, 2012, p. 11 , accessed on February 4, 2014 .
Coordinates: 52 ° 22 ′ 31 ″ N , 4 ° 53 ′ 3 ″ E