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Sunday, April 14, 2013

On Anne Frank, In Defense of Justin Bieber |

On Anne Frank, In Defense of Justin Bieber |:


On Anne Frank, In Defense of Justin Bieber

So yeah, Justin Bieber visited the Anne Frank House and left a note in the guestbook calling her “a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a belieber.”
Of course everyone went nuts, myself not excluded. There’s the narcissism thing, and the weird time traveler thing — is he imagining her as a belieber now, in her 80s, or imagining himself as a wartime pop star?
But there’s another layer down below all that. Check out this clip, the only film footage of Anne Frank known to exist:
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anne frank bedroom wall

Those few seconds of film were shot in July 1941, on the day of a neighbor couple’s wedding. Anne had just turned twelve. She was a year away from going into hiding, and forty-three months away from her death. I don’t