Abstract
The Anne Frank House, site of Anne Frank’s hiding place 1942-1944, has become a leading tourist attraction in Amsterdam and among heritage sites of the Holocaust. This paper reviews the historical context of the political events from 1933 to 1945, the circumstances for the betrayal, and arrest of the group in hiding, the saving of Anne Frank’s diary and its publication after her death at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945. Further, the paper reconstructs the beginnings of the heritage site as a small museum at 263 Prinsengracht in 1960 as well as the management issues and capacity problems that led to a larger museum complex including an educational center in 1999. During the years of 2007-2010, when the annual visitation of the museum surpassed one million, the Anne Frank House decided to introduce a high quality version of the Secret Annex on the Internet. In the final part of the paper, trends in museum management and the more frequent uses of a digital documentation of heritages sites are reviewed.
Hartmann, Rudi. “The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam: A Museum and Literary Landscape Goes Virtual Reality.” Journalism and Mass Communication 3, no. 10 (October 2013): 625-644.
Author
The author of this publication is Dr. Rudi Hartmann. He is currently a geography professor at the University of Colorado Denver.
“Since the completion of his Ph.D. dissertation at the Technical University of Munich 1983, a cross- and intercultural study of recreational travel and tourism in Germany and North America, his research specialization has remained in the field of tourism geography with present foci on heritage tourism, ecotourism and sustainable tourism planning” – Bio