Anne Frank inspires wax statue in Berlin

Anne Frank: First she was made a Mormon, and now she’s been turned into wax.

Madame Tussauds, the celebrity-obsessed wax museum, on Friday unveiled Frank as its latest subject. The statue, at the museum’s Berlin location, depicts the murdered Jewish teen working on her famous diary, and is intended to have educational value. The ceremony revealing the Frank statue was officially opened by Thomas Heppener, the director of Berlin’s Anne Frank Center, which collaborated on the project, and was attended by sixth graders from the city’s Anne Frank Primary School.

“We want our visitors, and children in particular, to feel an emotional connection with the figure, rather than to feel that they’re in a history class,” a museum spokesperson told Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine.

The display features Frank as a 13-year-old in the Amsterdam hiding place where she wrote most of her diary, and attempts to convey the “oppressive nature of her surroundings,” the article says.

Der Spiegel notes that other wax figures at the city’s Madame Tussauds include President Obama and Heidi Klum. The Frank statue is situated not far from a wax rendering of Sophie Scholl, a hero of Germany’s anti-Nazi resistance.

The museum also displays a statue of Albert Einstein, noting his German birth and education on its website. It does not mention his Jewish identity or his emigration to the US in 1933, after the Nazis barred Jews from German universities and began burning his books.

Not far from the Frank statue is a wax figure of Adolf Hitler. The statue was beheaded by a visitor not long after the Berlin Madame Tussauds opened in 2008, but was fixed and put back on display.