ABSTRACT
The Diary of Anne Frank is one of the critical plays to understand how postwar theater picked up on the genocidal past. Research consisted of examining how words, artifacts and locations were recognized as traces of a past that had yet to take its public form, and then how these sites and citations became part of a circulation of signs to express relationships of likeness and identification. The play impacted 1950s Dutch society’s handling of the murder of more than 100,000 Jewish civilians and played a key role in a process that stretched far beyond the shores of the theatrical field. The staging was an event that sparked a proliferation of performative acts to engage with the memory of the Shoah. The Fassbinder affair gave rise to a rich cultural production. The Fassbinder uproar was a milestone, if only because after a century of complaints, a ‘Jewish lobby’ had finally succeeded in putting a stop to a disturbing play.
