Sometimes a concept is so mesmerisingly dreadful that you need something blindingly good to blot it out. So after reading about Anne Frank the musical I spent yesterday evening reading Paul Celan's poetry.
Why is the idea of Anne Frank the musical so outstandingly emetic? The Anne Frank Foundation has given the Spanish production its blessing after the composer spent 10 years of trying to get it off the ground and I am prepared to concede that the actual production might be so brilliant it blows all preconceptions out of the water. But still the idea appals. There is something beyond bad taste in trying to squeeze show-stopping numbers out of the real diary of an adolescent girl destined to be slaughtered by the state.
What worries me about Anne Frank the musical is not that it is bad taste squared, but that it is a brand of tastelessness in which we've come to indulge too often where the Holocaust and creativity are concerned. I'm talking about the way the Holocaust has become a cheap and easy emotional staple - a cathartic-free-for-all - in creative writing classes, particularly for young people.
Musicals give us pumped-up-and-easy emotional hooks and I fear this is the path we have gone down in using the Holocaust as creative writing material. There's a troubling "write something creative" approach that has crept into teaching of the subject. In 2007 the Aegis Trust ran a creative writing competition on the Holocaust for school students, one of the instructions being to "Reflect upon your own feelings and thoughts (and the impact upon you) of learning about the Holocaust". Similarly, a creative writing project in Washington DC that runs a course with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum encourages students to "work on their own creative responses to the moral and ethical issues raised". Narcissism has run riot indeed when we teach young people the Holocaust is all about YOU and your creative responses.
What I particularly dislike about the get-creative-with-the-Holocaust brigade is that they seek to provoke an all-too-easy emotional response in the individual. The overwrought products of creative writing competitions and courses that focus on the Holocaust bear witness to this. Such queasy "self-expression" has not helped us think more deeply about the Holocaust, but made it an easy cue for very cheap pathos. If you think I overstate this case let me give you one example from the Holocaust Memorial Day's information leaflet about this year's theme, Imagine.
The leaflet advises that a "first step to empathy" might be to imagine an event in which you felt disorientated, such as your first day at work or being unable to speak the language in a foreign country. Such inane empathy-by-numbers is nonsense and we all know it. Most of us do not know what it "felt" like and it's the height of self-indulgence to pretend that we can. Professor Frank Furedi has warned that the "Holocaust is not for sale" and it is a warning we would do well to heed.
I do not think that the Holocaust is off-limits to the arts - only that it's best left to great artists who won't indulge in emotional narcissism. This is why I read Paul Celan last night, and urge you to do so, too. His complicated poetry, drawing on first hand experience of lethal persecution in the war years, takes work to try to understand, and it doesn't offer easy emotions. Any proper artistic response to the Holocaust will, like these brilliant poems, challenge hearts and minds. But if you want to look at one of history's most troubling and difficult questions, only troubling and difficult art will do.
