The surviving members of Anne Frank's family are outraged by the publication of Annexed, a fictionalized retelling of the Anne Frank tale from the point of view of Peter van Pels, the teenage boy whose family hid with the Franks during the Holocaust. While Anne Frank's diary hinted at romance between the 14-year-old Frank and van Pels, Annexed takes the relationship a step further. The hot and heavy scenes stop short of outright lovemaking, but the book's publisher says author Sharon Dogar only removed a sex scene from the final version of the book. Dogar "feels they had sex," the book's publisher tells the U.K.'s Telegraph. "After all, the hormones of both were raging." Should Anne Frank's short life be fair game for fiction?
As Frank's memory fades, fiction will keep her story alive: It's understandable that Anne Frank's relatives would want to preserve the memory of the girl they knew, says Terence Blacker in Britain's Independent, but they're "fighting a battle that is already lost." When a person becomes "larger-than-life" after death, "the scope for myth-making, for finishing an unfinished story, is all the greater." As with all contemporary heroes, the memory of Anne Frank will be replaced with an "odd conflation" of who she really was, and who the world wants her to be.
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