Sweden: Far-right party official suspended for Anne Frank comment | News | DW
An Instagram story critical of Jewish teenage diarist Anne Frank has sparked major controversy, prompting the far-right Sweden Democrats party to suspend the official who posted it.
Rebecka Fallenkvist, the 26-year-old head of the Sweden Democrats’ television program, described Anne Frank as “immoral” in an Instagram story that was later deleted.
The Sweden Democrats’ media director, Oskar Cavalli-Bjorkman, told Swedish media that the party took Fallenkvist’s post seriously, describing it as “insensitive and inappropriate”. The party suspended Fallenkvist and investigated the incident.
Party leader Jimmie Åkesson was also quick to condemn Fallenkvist, describing her post as a “reprehensible way of expressing herself”.
Anne Frank has long been portrayed as a symbol of the scale of Nazi Germany’s atrocities against Jews. She died at the age of 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she had been transferred with her sister after living and hiding in Amsterdam.
Her diary was later published by her father Otto Frank in 1947 and is one of the foremost accounts of Jewish life under the Nazis.
What did the Swedish party official say?
A screenshot of what appeared to be an Instagram story by Fallenkvist on Anne Frank went viral on social media. The story showed a photo of a book with Anne’s picture on the cover.
Among those who shared and condemned the screenshot was the Israeli ambassador to Sweden. Ambassador Ziv Nevo Kulman described the story as a “despicable insult” and “disrespectful to the memory of Anne Frank.”
Fallenkvist addressed the controversy in a text message to the Swedish newspaper Today’s newsand said she had been misinterpreted.
She said she tried to portray in her story how the book portrayed “the good and the bad of man”.
“The good Anne, who in the first chapters is like any other young girl who lives her life in peace and finds an interest in boys (which I highlighted), is contrasted with the evil of Nazism. My story was focused on the good and human in Anne while she did not downplay the evil to which she was subjected.”
The Sweden Democrats party was founded in the 1980s by members among them neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists. This year, the party received the second most mandates in Sweden’s elections.
On Friday, the leader of the Moderates, Ulf Kristersson, said that his party had reached an agreement with the Christian Democrats and the Liberals to form a minority coalition government.
The anti-immigration Sweden Democrats have agreed to support the formation of a government but will not be part of it.
Who was Anne Frank?
In 1933, Anne Frank and her family fled Germany to the Netherlands to escape the Nazis. At the beginning of World War II, she had to go into hiding during the German occupation. For two years she lived hidden in the secret annex of a house in Amsterdam. During this period, Anne wrote in her diary almost every day. It became a sort of friend to her, and she called it Kitty. “What I like the most is that I can at least write down what I think and feel, otherwise I would completely choke,” she wrote.
Anne Frank and her sister were taken from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen on October 30, 1944. More than 70,000 people died in this concentration camp. Anne and Margot Frank were among those who died there of typhus, on an unknown date in March 1945. Anne was only 15 years old.
Her big dream was to become a writer. Thanks to her father, her diary was published on 25 July 1947.
rmt/jsi (AP)