Anne and Fritz Pfeffer

Anne and Fritz Pfeffer’s relationship in the Secret Annex is shaped by forced proximity: Anne shares her small room with a man who joins the hiding group in November 1942, and ordinary needs—sleep, quiet, study, and access to a table—become negotiations over scarce space. In her diary, Anne presents the arrangement in two registers at once: a sacrifice made for a life-saving cause and a source of persistent, sharply observed domestic resentment.

The Room Shared for a Cause

Pfeffer is identified in the edition as born in Giessen, Germany, on April 30, 1889. Anne’s manuscript and the book call him Alfred Dussel, the name under which he appears in her diary. When he arrives at the Annex, he has been given only a few belongings in advance. Anne is not pleased at the prospect of a stranger using her things, but she accepts sharing the room as a small sacrifice for the group’s safety. Her father’s argument that saving even one friend matters more than the inconvenience frames the room-sharing not as a private choice between two people but as part of the Annex’s collective obligation.

The welcome also involves instruction. On his first day, Pfeffer asks about the cleaning lady’s schedule, how the residents arrange use of the washroom, and when they may go to the toilet. Anne patiently explains that during the day they must avoid noise that could carry downstairs, and that the presence of someone working in the building requires extra caution. She finds him slow to absorb the rules, saying he asks questions repeatedly and still has trouble remembering the answers. She allows that the abrupt change may have confused him, but the passage establishes a basic imbalance in their new arrangement: Anne must teach the routines of hiding even as she loses the privacy of her room.

Routine, Privacy, and Irritation

The room’s limits are made tangible by the mechanics of sleeping. In Anne’s account of an ordinary evening, bedtime at nine sets off a household rearrangement: chairs move, beds are pulled out, and blankets are unfolded. Anne sleeps on a divan only five feet long, extended with chairs; meanwhile, the bedding used for Pfeffer’s bed has to be taken from where it is stored during the day. The room is not simply shared space but a space repeatedly converted from one use to another, with each resident’s comfort dependent on cumbersome furniture and cooperation.

Anne’s complaint about nighttime noise gives the arrangement a more personal edge. Already frequently told to be quiet during the day, she resents Pfeffer shushing her at night as well, even objecting to the suggestion that she should not turn over in bed. She resolves not to heed him and threatens, in her diary, to shush him in return. The irritation grows from the contradiction of being expected to make herself nearly inaudible in a crowded refuge where another person’s movements and demands are unavoidable.

She also depicts his Sunday exercises as an intrusion into sleep. At the crack of dawn, he switches on the light for a ten-minute workout, jostling the chairs Anne uses to lengthen her bed. After exercising, he repeatedly passes her bed to retrieve his underwear and tie. The details—the light, the shifting chairs, the repeated passage through the narrow room—show why an apparently brief routine feels prolonged to someone sleeping in a makeshift bed. Anne’s description turns the room’s physical constraints into a record of accumulated annoyance.

Discipline and the Table Dispute

Anne characterizes Pfeffer as an old-fashioned disciplinarian who gives lengthy sermons on manners. Because she is considered the worst-behaved of the three young people, she expects to be a particular target of his admonitions. What makes the scolding more galling is that, in her account, he reports her conduct to her mother; her mother then lectures her again, and Mrs. van Pels may call her to account afterward. Anne feels that criticism travels through the household and returns to her, making her the center of attention in a family of fault-finders.

The conflict becomes concrete in the question of where Anne may study. In July 1943, she asks whether she can use the table in the shared room for two afternoons a week, from four until five-thirty. She already uses it from two-thirty until four while Pfeffer naps, but otherwise the room and table are off-limits to her. Studying next door is difficult because of the activity there, while her father sometimes needs the desk. Her request is therefore an attempt to carve out a predictable period of quiet in a crowded household, not merely a demand for the room to herself.

Pfeffer resists, arguing that Anne is self-centered and that her sister Margot has a stronger claim to workspace. He nevertheless says he will have to let her use the table, because he does not want people later to say that she failed her exams because he withheld it. Anne hides her hurt while he continues at length, and her diary records a fleeting impulse to strike him followed immediately by the effort to calm herself. He leaves with an expression Anne reads as a mixture of triumph and anger, his coat pockets bulging with food. The episode ends with access granted but the underlying dispute unresolved: permission comes wrapped in accusation, and a practical compromise deepens their mutual resentment.

Shared Work and the Limits of the Portrait

Their relationship is not presented only through direct quarrels. In the Annex’s daily routine, Anne records Pfeffer making the beds at midday, though she judges that he makes them incorrectly, and whistling the same Beethoven violin concerto as he works. This small domestic scene sits beside her complaints about his strictness and noise. The diary thus preserves him as both a source of friction and one participant in repetitive household labor, rather than reducing their shared life to a single confrontation.

The surrounding conditions intensify that friction. Anne writes of the residents living in a converted schedule of quiet hours, constrained washing and toilet use, makeshift beds, and meals organized around the danger of being heard downstairs. Food shortages add another pressure: after the suppliers of their food coupons are arrested, the group is left with five black-market ration books and no coupons for fats and oils, while Miep and Mr. Kleiman are ill and Bep cannot manage the shopping. The account does not make each hardship a dispute between Anne and Pfeffer, but it shows the setting in which their room and its routines acquire such weight.

Anne’s portrait is personal and openly exasperated, but its details also reveal how hiding reorganizes relationships. A bedside shush, a ten-minute exercise session, or a request for a table becomes consequential because there is little privacy and no easy alternative space. Their bond remains a strained coexistence, shaped less by intimacy than by shared confinement and the constant negotiation of ordinary needs.