Fritz Pfeffer - Posthumous Reputation

Posthumous Reputation

According to the research done by Melissa Müller for her book Anne Frank - The Biography, Charlotta married Pfeffer posthumously in 1950, with retrospective effect to 31 May 1937. She had become estranged from his son Werner but both were united in their defense of Pfeffer after the publication of Anne Frank's diary in 1947, feeling that Anne's portrait of him—and of the pseudonym she had chosen for him, Mr. Dussel, which in German is "Mr. Nitwit"—was injurious to his memory. Otto Frank tried to placate them by reminding them of Anne's youth and of the unflattering portraits of some of the other people in hiding. The subsequent exaggerations of this portrait in the 1955 play and 1959 movie (in which he was played by comic actor Ed Wynn) led Charlotta to contact the screenwriters Albert Hackett and his wife Frances Goodrich to complain that they were libelling her deceased husband, who was depicted as ignorant about Jewish traditions. The Hacketts replied that their script did not mirror reality and that to inform a non-Jewish audience of the significance of Judaic ceremonies one character had to be ignorant of them. Charlotta pointed out that her husband was far from unbelieving and a master of Hebrew, but the character of "Mr. Dussel" remained unchanged.

Embittered by the unrepresentative portrait, she severed her links with Otto Frank and Miep Gies as Anne's fame grew in the decades after the war, and refused requests to be interviewed about her memories of him.

Werner remained in touch with Otto and had the opportunity to meet Miep shortly before he died of cancer in 1995, to thank her for her attempt to save his father's life. The meeting between Miep and Werner was recorded for the documentary film Anne Frank Remembered.

A collection of letters written by Pfeffer to Charlotta and a box of photographs of him were rescued, with some of Charlotta's possessions, from an Amsterdam flea market after her death in 1985.