"Owning" Anne Frank

Two organizations, one which obdurately insists on emphasizing Anne Frank's Jewishness, the other, Anne Frank House, keeper of the Anne legacy, which insists on the "universal" message supposedly inherent in Anne's diary/story, are at odds over who "owns" Anne:

The organizations have sparred for years over similar legal questions — ownership of archives, issues of copyright and trademark — in disputes that have seeded longstanding mistrust. The current lawsuit, however, has exposed a basic philosophical rift between the groups, a divergence in their visions of Anne and of what her legacy ought to be.  

In addition to its lawsuit, the Fonds has accused the House of transforming Anne into a sort of child saint without context, an appealing icon of hope but one whose Jewish identity and place among the millions killed in the Holocaust are too little emphasized. Officials at the House, which maintains a network of exhibitions and centers across the world, insist their portrayal of Anne is strictly in keeping with the wishes of her father, Otto Frank, who survived Auschwitz and made it his life’s work to spread the message of tolerance he believed his daughter carried. 

“Both organizations want to own Anne Frank,” said Melissa Müller, an Austrian biographer of Anne. “Both want to impose a way for the world to see Anne Frank.”  

Anne succumbed to typhus at age 15 at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.  

Ronald Leopold, the House’s executive director, said Mr. Frank wished his daughter to be a “symbol of the future” and not of the past. To that end the House, which draws more than one million visitors annually, seeks to spread a “universal message” of tolerance, Mr. Leopold said, but that message is anchored in the “very specific” history of the narrow building at 263 Prinsengracht. ...

If I had to pick, I'd opt for the "very specific" history over the "universal message," knowing that, while the "universal message if apt to be more appealing (because it is less specifically Jewish), it is unlikely to spare Jewry from that all-too specific form of hate (especially since in our time it is manifested as Zionhass, the irrational obsession with/hatred of Israel, Zionism and "Zionists").

As for who "owns" Anne, I would suggest that no one does--not even her father, who loved her, and who is largely responsible for the whole ownership conundrum. I prefer Cynthia Ozick's way of unpacking it--that harping on the "universality" of the story loses the entire point of it. As I recall, Ozick ended her brilliant New Yorker essay by suggesting that, that being so, it might have been better had the diary never been found.