When the Tiverton, Rhode Island owners of the Atlantic Sports Bar & Restaurant posted an it's-as-hot-as-an-oven-out-and-I-should-know Anne Frank meme, they thought it was funny. Maybe because the particular realness of the girl had been commodified into a meme already:
Frank is the go-to smiling, lovely, nonthreatening Holocaust Icon reliably delivering a simple, feel-good message about our love and goodness, an antidote to those other images and facts and records that are a total disquieting bummer. Anne--she belongs to us so we can call her
we can call her "Anne" is the bright, talented, upbeat not too Jewish EveryGirl embodying who we all are we deep inside and who existed make us feel good about ourselves: the Anne Frank industry is about us, not her. So if the heat was getting to the owners of the Atlantic
Sports Bar & Restaurant and they wanted to deliver a jokey message to their customers, who better than the little girl whom they swear they never heard of but whose meme was guaranteed with its #ohboy hashtag––to brighten everyone's day.
If you are interested in what became of Anne Frank after she died of typhus in Bergen Belsen and her body was thrown into a pit, read: smithsonianmag.com/history/becomi…
And read this: newyorker.com/magazine/1997/…
One takeaway is that Anne Frank wasn't the insufferable goody-goody that many of the degrading memes seek to take down (i.e. Harvard Lampoon). As @DaraHorn speculates, she would have been a writer and probably not an upbeat one.
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