Neutral Milk Hotel and ‘Holland, 1945’, indie music’s most truly tragic song?
Few records garner such intensely cult fandom as indie rock outfit Neutral Milk Hotel’s sophomore album effort.
Warmly received by critics despite retrospectively glowing appraisals, 1998’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea’s enchanting swirl of psychedelic folk and ramshackle lo-fi would soon grow in lauded stature in the indie world, presaging the likes of Arcade Fire and The Decemberists with their earnest anthems and rustic instrumentation. At the album’s centre was Neutral Milk Hotel frontman and band founder Jeff Mangum’s lyrical surrealism, a strange form of diary doodle poetry teeming with personal affection yet always hiding obliquely behind a shroud of artful ambiguity.
Much debate has been had over the exact core themes of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, with many fans wading through Mangum’s existential musings to glean some clarity as to what conceptually binds the record together. Amid the general sense of mortal ponderings and the myriad dimensions of love, the haunted motif of Anne Frank maintains a phantasmic echo around the record like a strange orthodox icon, an avatar that distils all Magnum’s lyrical obsessions and anxieties into a spectral portrait.
Frank’s story is one of millions of tragic devastations that cruelly took place in humanity’s bloodiest and darkest chapter. Hiding for two years with her family and the van Pels, the family of her father Otto’s business partner, in a sealed-off Amsterdam room during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, Frank began writing in a diary, documenting the daily living turmoil of her cramped existence, everyday teenage musings, and the hope for the war’s fortunes to end. Eventually discovered in 1944, Frank was sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, where she was separated from her mother, then transported to Bergen-Belsen, where she died of typhus at 15 years old, weeks before liberation brought about by the Allied forces.
The diary entries were collated by Otto and eventually published in 1948 as The Diary of a Young Girl, edited to exclude her sexual curiosities and her artful revisions, downplayed in early issues. Frank had begun the diary casually before hearing a radio broadcast calling on Dutch civilians to keep memoirs for potential future evidence, and made appropriate rewrites. The Diary of a Young Girl would stand for decades as many’s introduction to the moral catastrophe of the Holocaust and the epochal crimes of the Third Reich.
Magnum was no different. Before cutting 1996’s On Avery Island debut, he had read Frank’s diary and become struck by the Jewish girl’s promising life extinguished by the forces of fascism. “I’m not sure I could allow myself to connect with a book that much,” he told Puncture Magazine in 1998. “While I was reading the book, she was completely alive to me. I pretty much knew what was going to happen. But that’s the thing: you love people because you know their story. You have sympathy for people even when they do stupid things because you know where they’re coming from, you understand where they’re at in their head.”
While nebulously hovering throughout In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, the disposability of life that Frank suffered is most potently explored in ‘Holland, 1945’, albeit draped in allusions to reincarnation and overlapping characters in the album’s illustrative landscape. “One evening, 1945 / With just her sister at her side / And only weeks before the guns / All came and rained on everyone,” Mangum croons, spiked with an air of incredulity at mankind’s capacity for destruction.
Of all the existential knots that tangle In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, it’s ‘Holland, 1945’ that captures Mangum as his most troubled yet wide-eyed, grabbing for clarity and an answer to a historic episode that can only ever grow more enraging.
