25 Years of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

Anne Frank's ghost is all around...

Today, Neutral Milk Hotel’s 1998 album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea turns 25. A version of the following essay appeared in print in Issue 7 of GoldFlakePaint but has never appeared online (many thanks to Sammy Maine, Lior Phillips & Tom Johnson at GFP for editing the piece and giving it a home). The occasion seemed like an appropriate excuse to share my essay.

(A Steve Keene rendition of the In the Aeroplane Over the Sea album cover, from The Steve Keene Art Book)

An unusual downstream effect of the 2019 government shutdown was that TSA agents at JFK airport, forced to work without pay, started DJing over the loudspeakers. Some travelers reported hearing the uncensored version of “SICKO MODE” by Travis Scott; others were surprised with Kanye West’s “scoop-di-poop” song “Lift Yourself.” And so it came to be that on January 6th of that year, I and the rest of Terminal 5 were treated to the title track of Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, a folk-rock song about Anne Frank. Even as the grandson of a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau, I had not been expecting to engage with Holocaust representation in an airport security line.

To those who are familiar with In the Aeroplane Over the Sea – Pitchfork’s 4th favorite album of the 90’s and 4chan’s favorite musical source of memes – its celebrated origins are well worn. Jeff Mangum, Neutral Milk Hotel’s front man and songwriter, purchased a copy of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl. He was overwhelmed by what he read, and he wrote much of Neutral Milk Hotel’s 1998 lo-fi indie rock album in response. The story is surprisingly difficult to verify. Mangum is notoriously reclusive, and of the interviews that he granted around the album’s release – a 1997 interview for the music zine Puncture, 1998 radio interviews with XFM and Peter Curran, a 2002 interview with the indie music review site Pitchfork – only the Puncture interview contains any mention of Anne Frank. Despite first mentioning her as an afterthought, Mangum would elaborate: “a lot of the songs on this record are about Anne Frank…. I spent two days reading [The Diary of a Young Girl] and completely flipped out… spent about three days crying… It stuck with me for a long, long time.”

In the 25 years since the album was released, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea has not only ascended into indie rock canon as “that album about Anne Frank” but also been absorbed into American culture in a way that no other art about the Holocaust has: it has become completely normalized within everyday consumption. It’s a kind of garden-variety consumption – marked by heartbroken teenagers looking for consolation and millennials dancing along at parties – that most would find utterly incongruous with Schindler’s List or Shoah or Maus. I think it’s time we consider what it means for Aeroplane to be many people’s most frequent form of engagement with the Holocaust, in light of two decades of music critics, message board posters, older siblings, and friends of friends professing love for the album’s relationship with Anne Frank.

“I know they buried her body with others
Her sister and mother and 500 families
And will she remember me 50 years later
I wished I could save her in some sort of time machine” 

– Oh, Comely (Track 8)

On the eve of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea’s release, the Puncture interview found Jeff Mangum not only offering answers but asking questions of his own:

“Here I am as deep as you can go in someone’s head, in some ways deeper than you can go with someone you know in the flesh. And then at the end, [Anne] gets disposed of like a piece of trash. I would go to bed every night and have dreams about having a time machine, having the ability to move through time and space freely, and save Anne Frank. Do you think that’s embarrassing?”

Mangum’s self-consciousness is embedded within the album itself: though the album’s narrative cadence is set by repeated references to Anne Frank, her full name is never uttered, and the allusions are coded, difficult to discern without prior knowledge of the album’s subject matter. Mangum’s unease could also be found in his hesitancy to discuss the album’s inspiration publicly, both in interviews and on stage. At a show in Athens, Georgia, six days before the album’s release and well before the publication of the Puncture interview, Mangum introduced the song “Holland, 1945” with the cryptic interstitial, “This is a song about … uh, … ah, well, I still can’t say it.” It is from this vantage point that Mangum’s self-consciousness about Aeroplane’s reception is rendered most clearly. “Do you think this record’s lyrics are going to weird people out?” he asked. 

On February 10th, 1998, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea was released to lukewarm critical reception. As described in 2016 by Luke Winkie of The A.V. Club: “It received decent, plainspoken reviews: Rolling Stone offered three out of five stars, kissing it off with the kicker, ‘Aeroplane is thin-blooded, woolgathering stuff.’ A prototypical version of Pitchfork blessed the record with 187 words and an unstandardized 8.7 rating. Robert Christgau rated it a ‘neither’ with a frowny face and didn’t bother drafting a capsule.” The list goes on. Entertainment Weekly graded the album a B+. Spin gave it a 7/10, singling out lyrics about “radio-equipped Siamese twins and dysfunctional Cold War adolescents.” NME volunteered a 6/10 and called Jeff Mangum a “sick and demented fellow” who was “obsessed with pronouncing the word ‘semen,’” making a point of “Holland, 1945,” “wherein the only woman the protagonist has ever loved has been buried alive with her sister by her side.” The A.V. Club called Mangum a “good-natured folkie trapped in an absurdist carnival of World War II Europe.” Perhaps the Puncture interview had yet to spread. Not a single major review mentioned Anne Frank.

By 2003, Pitchfork had fallen head-over-heels in love. In just a few years, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea had jumped from #85 on its list of top 100 albums of the 90’s all the way to #4. With the change in ranking came a change in description: “The world of Aeroplane is haunted by Anne Frank – the specter of childhood's unimpeachable innocence amidst the unfathomable horror of the holocaust.” Two years later, on the occasion of Aeroplane’s British re-issue, the website declared the album a perfect 10, as well as something of a curiosity: “What the hell? A guy in a rock band saying he was emotionally devastated by a book everyone else in America read for a middle-school assignment? I felt embarrassed for him at first, but then, the more I thought about it and the more I heard the record, I was awed.” The calculus was clear: a sad lo-fi album was an 8.7, but a sad lo-fi album inspired by the Holocaust was a 10.

The change of heart would be echoed elsewhere. In the ensuing decade, Rolling Stone would bump Aeroplane’s 3 stars to 4 and then to 4 ½, a half-star from Pitchfork’s perfection; Spin would include the Aeroplane, initially a 7 out of 10, in the top 100 albums from 1985-2005; NME would name the 6-out-of-10 album one of the top 100 albums of all-time. All the while, Anne Frank – no stranger to posthumous appropriation – would become central to the Aeroplane discourse. In 2005, Kim Cooper authored Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 volume on the album, featuring interviews with bandmates and friends of Jeff. The comprehensive ethnography presented Anne and Jeff as kindred spirits, equating Jeff’s disappearance from the public eye with Anne’s prolonged demise in Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen: “When Jeff vanished, his voice [was] suddenly silenced—much as Anne’s had been by death.”

By the end of 2008, Aeroplane – originally slated to sell 7,100 total physical copies – had become the 6th bestselling vinyl album of the year. That same year, Pitchfork republished the Puncture interview for the 10th anniversary of the album, spreading it to a large audience for the first time. In addition, the music website published a retrospective quoting musicians on what the album meant to them. Musician Christopher Willits recounted, “When I was in art school, I lived in the dorms for a year (try to avoid it) and this couple in the room next to me would always put on In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and get it on… it took years of not hearing this release to realize that this music is actually way better than Anne Frank.” Somehow, the album was both sadder than the Holocaust and better to fuck to. Three years later, The New Yorker proclaimed that the album “wasn’t a series of songs so much as a type of testimony,” invoking the language of Holocaust testimony for full hyperbolic effect. It came as no surprise that for the 20th anniversary of the album, Newsweek ran the clickbait headline “Do Anne Frank Scholars Like Neutral Milk Hotel’s ‘In the Aeroplane Over the Sea’? An Investigation.” Stereogum declared “Holland, 1945” – in which “Mangum laments Frank’s death in a Nazi concentration camp” – “one of history’s great ‘What the fuck are we singing about?’ shout-along anthems.” Aeroplane was a Holocaust banger, too.

And one day we will die
And our ashes will fly from the aeroplane over the sea
But for now we are young
Let us lay in the sun
And count every beautiful thing we can see

-In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (Track 3)

The cultural history of Aeroplane’s canonization reveals to us a fault line on the landscape of Holocaust memory. What I see laid bare is Holocaust remembrance as rhetorical performance, feigning engagement with Anne Frank’s story in service of hyperbolic praise. I think this has given way to a guilt-free transformation of genocidal atrocity into a self-absorbed melancholy and catharsis for indie rock lovers. 

“It took me a while to figure out the songs [on Aeroplane] were positive, they were okay, not just fucked up nightmares I was throwing up,” Mangum would confess in the Puncture interview. The annals of YouTube bear witness to this. Among the covers of Aeroplane’s title track performed by Phish, fun., and The Avett Brothers are SKA covers, punk covers, ukulele covers, accordion covers, chiptune covers, a cappella covers, flash chorus covers, some talented, some not, all seeking likes and shares, comments and clicks. The lyrics “And one day we will die / And our ashes will fly from the Aeroplane over the sea” ring out in harmony at high school talent shows, college concerts, churches, and wedding ceremonies. They are aestheticized re-imaginings of industrialized genocidal cremation as veritable sing-alongs with parents and parishioners and lovers, reminding us of the fragility – and beauty – of life. “How better to describe that moment where you’ve woken smiling next to your wife/husband/girlfriend/boyfriend?” asked The Paris Review about the track.

The aesthetic of Aeroplane has too been consummated with flesh. Tattoos on bare shoulders, forearms, and thighs display Aeroplane lyrics and iconography. The transgression is particular to the tattoo as a corporeal symbol of the Holocaust, resonances forgotten.

At its most extreme, the performance of Holocaust empathy manifests as the cult of personality surrounding Jeff Mangum, indie rocker-cum-prophet. Over the years following Aeroplane’s release, the language describing Jeff has taken an explicitly religious tone, most noticeably around the time that Jeff returned to playing live shows. The rhetoric of Jeff’s Second Coming, tossed around by news outlets such as NPR, aligned with the analogy of Jeff as messiah. The Jersey City Independent’s coverage of back-to-back shows in 2011 was par for the course: “The crowd attempted to sing along, although even that sounded more like hymns in a cathedral than generational anthems at a big rock show. Worship may be too strong a word to describe the relationship between Mangum and his fans, but barely so.” The religious overtones speak to a certain posthumous proselytism of Anne. “If Anne were alive today, what would be her favorite band?” asked Kim Cooper in her 33 1/3 volume, reminiscent of Justin Bieber’s entry in the Anne Frank House guestbook in 2013: “Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a belieber.” Bieber was roundly criticized.

The only girl I've ever loved
Was born with roses in her eyes
But then they buried her alive
One evening 1945
With just her sister at her side
And only weeks before the guns
All came and rained on everyone

…

And it's so sad to see the world agree
That they'd rather see their faces fill with flies
All when I'd want to keep white roses in their eyes

- Holland, 1945 (Track 6)

With no claims of p-values or statistical significance tests, I conducted my own half-decade long study in dorm rooms and bars to find out what opinions, if any, my friends had about In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Some considered the album among their favorites, the kind of music that merited rationing listens for special occasions. Others chuckled and dismissed the album and its veneration as a joke. It came as no surprise that professing love of Aeroplane was genuine to some and a trope to others, a signifier of a hipster aesthetic. Indeed, the album’s many acolytes have certainly not been let off scot-free on the public stage. The NBC sitcom Parks and Recreation’s fictional character April Ludgate – hipster personified – answered the game show question, “Which rock star would [you] bang if [you] could bang one rock star?” by skipping over her aspiring rocker boyfriend and choosing Jeff Mangum instead. The online satire website Clickhole ran the piece: “Disgusting: ISIS Just Released A 2-Star Review Of ‘In The Aeroplane Over The Sea.’” But during my ethnographic pursuits, it became clear that something else was at play with my friends’ musings: the opinion of Aeroplane-as-joke was better characterized as Aeroplane-as-meme, less informed by writers’ room-style lampooning and more informed by internet culture. 

At the source of Aeroplane’s diffusion across the web lies 4chan, the online imageboard infamous for offensive content of all flavors. An Aeroplane meme greets every user on the homepage of /mu/, 4chan’s music board, which is reliably littered with anonymous posts referencing the album in both text and meme form, especially emphasizing the sexual nature of Jeff Mangum’s lyrics in relation to Anne Frank. As with much of internet culture, 4chan has successfully pushed its in-jokes about Aeroplane into the mainstream discourse surrounding the album. In 2012, its users were responsible for spreading a conspiracy theory that Jeff Mangum realized his dream of saving Anne Frank in a time machine and disguised her as his sister, who bears a resemblance to Anne. Magnum-gate, as it became known, was widely circulated, reaching online publications such as Buzzfeed. Likewise, 4chan’s discovery of the original postcard from which Aeroplane’s cover is derived was covered by Spin. The search reflected a broader in-joke on 4chan regarding the album’s cover, that the head of the girl on the cover – in truth, a snare drum – was a potato. Indeed, meme-ifying the cover of Aeroplane has evolved into another internet pastime: on knowyourmeme.com, there are hundreds of memes parodying the album cover alone.

It is no coincidence that 4chan’s favorite album is a work of Holocaust representation. Despite the fact that many /mu/ posters may genuinely love the album, I ascribe a fraction of this obsession to a toxic blurriness of anti-Semitism masquerading as jokes about the cult-of-Aeroplane. This co-optation is rendered explicit through derivative Anne Frank jokes, reimaginings of Hitler and Anne on the album’s cover, and manifold repurposing of the album’s lyrics for crass Holocaust jokes that have bled onto Reddit and other message boards as well. And thus, whether through a Pitchfork retrospective, a sonically inclined friend, or a 4chan meme, encountering Aeroplane is a pedagogical exercise, demonstrating that the album cannot be disentangled from Anne Frank.

And she was born in a bottle rocket, 1929
With wings that ringed around a socket
Right between her spine
All drenched in milk and holy water
Pouring from the sky
I know that she will live forever
She won't ever die

- Ghost (Track 9)

I think it’s only natural that we’ve responded to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea with hyperbolic praise, having been collectively conditioned on decades of puff purveying Holocaust representation that is best characterized as misrepresentation. Consider, for example, the rich genealogy of appropriating Anne Frank’s memory, which can be traced back to just after the 1952 publication of the first English translation of The Diary of a Young Girl. Frances Goodrich’s and Albert Hackett’s 1955 Broadway play The Diary of Anne Frank, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and their 1959 movie adaptation, the recipient of 3 Academy Awards and 8 nominations, not only purged Anne’s diary of much of its Jewish content but also fostered the narrative of hope that dominates Anne’s legacy today. The saccharine hue of the film is reminiscent of It’s a Wonderful Life, the 1946 Christmas movie for which Goodrich and Hackett wrote the screenplay; both films sit on the American Film Institute’s 100 Years…100 Cheers: America's Most Inspiring Movies. As described by the writer Cynthia Ozick, Anne’s diary has since been “bowdlerized, distorted, transmuted, traduced, reduced; it has been infantilized, Americanized, homogenized, sentimentalized; falsified, kitschified, and, in fact, blatantly and arrogantly denied.” We have been habituated to render Anne the face of the Holocaust but distract ourselves from her fate, rendering her a bastion of hope and focusing instead on elements of her story that are decidedly removed from the Holocaust: her romance with Peter van Pels, the story of the diary’s preservation, and the true crime mystery of who betrayed her and her family. 

When I see the cultural absorption of Aeroplane, I see Schindler’s List as Hollywood’s golden Holocaust child. Despite all the good that Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film managed to accomplish – helping to broaden American interest in the Holocaust, paving the way for the Spielberg-founded USC Shoah Foundation and its 55,000+ recorded video testimonies – Schindler’s List is an exercise in profound distraction. Spielberg doubled down on Goodrich’s and Hackett’s kitsch and was awarded proportionally, with 7 Academy Awards and third place on the American Film Institute’s 100 Years…100 Cheers to boot. Yet, more remarkable than Spielberg’s smoke and mirrors in rendering the Holocaust into an uplifting narrative was his decision to make the protagonist, German businessman Oskar Schindler, a righteous gentile and savior of the Jewish people. His goodness was quantified by the number of names on his list of workers to protect, perversely rendering the Jewish people of the Holocaust into yet another statistic. The heaps of praise thrown on the movie (“I implore every one of you to go see it,” said then-sitting president Bill Clinton) reinforced two notions: first, that it was okay for Holocaust remembrance to be a performative gesture, and second, that the Holocaust was just as much about those who felt for the victims as it was about the victims themselves. 

It is no surprise, then, that our post-Schindler optics of Aeroplane render Jeff Mangum sharply in the foreground, leaving Anne Frank out of focus: we are in awe of Aeroplane not because of Anne but rather because of Mangum and his empathy of her. It is through this insulation – the occluding mediation of Mangum – that we can perform Holocaust remembrance without any trace of self-awareness.

In 1927, a girl by the name of Rita Schorr was born to a Jewish family in the town of Boryslaw, Poland. Two years later, a girl by the name of Annalies Frank was born to a Jewish family in Frankfurt, Germany. Both were precocious; both had beautiful dark hair; both would spend extended periods in hiding. They would arrive in Auschwitz-Birkenau within a month of each other: Rita in August, 1944, and Anne in September, each with her only sister by her side. Fifty-four years later, in February, 1998, Anne’s story would be called upon in Jeff Mangum’s lyrics in homes and record stores across the country. The following month, Rita’s story would be recorded in a four hour USC Shoah Foundation testimony. As was customary with the Shoah Foundation, Rita’s family was interviewed as well, featuring her husband, her daughters, and her grandchildren, including her 3 year-old grandson: me.

Implicit in the Shoah Foundation’s rush to record testimonies in the late 1990’s and the early 2000’s was an urgency following the realization that all of the survivors would soon be gone. My appearance in the testimony was intended to invoke the perspective of the second and third generation survivors, the ones who would remain after the last of the survivors had passed on. This, of course, called upon a larger question: how do we collectively remember the Holocaust when we reach a point in time in which none of us are survivors ourselves?

The question has, I would argue, to a certain degree already been answered by the collective canonization In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Despite the fact that survivors such as my grandmother have shared their stories to school groups, historians, and ethnographers; despite the incorporation of Holocaust education into curricula across the United States; despite the proliferation of museums and memorials devoted to Holocaust remembrance and education, Jeff Mangum’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is the most resonant form of Holocaust remembrance to a remarkable number of people. It is a hollow resonance, the sound of Aeroplane dissipating throughout JFK.

The second photo is of my grandmother, Rita Schorr, with her record player, taken sometime in the 1950’s.