page_title: Fritz Pfeffer
section_title: Posthumous reputation
hierarchical_section_title: Fritz Pfeffer / Posthumous reputation
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Stolperstein, Fritz Pfeffer, Lietzenburger Straße 20b, Berlin-Schöneberg, Deutschland. Text: Hier wohnte Dr. Fritz Pfeffer Jg. 1889 Verhaftet Neuengamme Ermordet 20.12.1944 English: "Stolperstein" (stumbling block), Fritz Pfeffer, Lietzenburger Straße 20b, Berlin-Schöneberg, Germany
context_page_description: Friedrich "Fritz" Pfeffer was a German dentist and Jewish refugee who hid with Anne Frank and her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. He perished in the Neuengamme concentration camp in Northern Germany. Pfeffer was given the pseudonym Albert Dussel in Frank's diary, and remains known as such in many editions and adaptations of the publication.
context_section_description: According to research done by Melissa Müller for her book Anne Frank: The Biography, Charlotte Pfeffer married Fritz 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 Frank's portrait of him—and of the pseudonym she had chosen for him, Mr. Dussel (German for "nitwit")—was injurious to his memory. Otto Frank tried to placate them by reminding them of his daughter's youth and of her unflattering portraits of some of the other people in hiding. The subsequent exaggerations of this portrait in the 1955 play and 1959 film (in which Pfeffer was played by comic actor Ed Wynn) led Charlotte Pfeffer to contact screenwriters Albert Hackett and his wife Frances Goodrich to complain that they were libeling 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. Pfeffer pointed out that her husband was a devout Jew and master of Hebrew, but the character of "Mr. Dussel" remained unchanged.
  Embittered by the unrepresentative portrait, Charlotte Pfeffer severed her links with Otto Frank and Miep Gies as Anne Frank's fame grew in the decades after the war, and refused interview requests.
  Werner Pfeffer remained in touch with Otto Frank and had the opportunity to meet Gies shortly before dying of cancer in 1995, to thank her for her attempt to save his father's life. The meeting was recorded for the documentary film Anne Frank Remembered.
  A collection of letters written by Fritz Pfeffer to his wife and a box of photographs of him were rescued, with some of Charlotte Pfeffer's possessions, from an Amsterdam flea market after her death in 1985.
  Ed Wynn's portrayal of Pfeffer (as Dussel) in George Stevens' film The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) earned him a nomination for an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor.
caption: Stolperstein, Lietzenburger Straße 20b, Berlin-Schöneberg, Germany
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