Enclosed emotions: The entanglement of hiders and hideouts in Amsterdam during World War II

Abstract

People engage with a place and its constituent things in terms of their perception of the material possibilities for action. These affordances also evoke emotions that express people's entanglement with the material environment, as is most apparent from the lives of human beings confined to constrictive places, such as prisons, nursing homes, and internment camps. Their lifeworld consists of limiting material surroundings and limited social relations. The exclusion from other meaningful places deprives them of impressions, experiences, actions, interactions, and emotions that would have enhanced their lives. This article examines the relation of place and emotion through an analysis of metaphors and metonyms in Anne Frank's diary in terms of conceptual metaphor theory. The diary was a private space in which she could express her emotions about hiding from Nazi persecution with seven other hiders in an annex to a canal house in Amsterdam. I will demonstrate that the metaphors and metonyms are causeways into her changing emotional state of being and the dynamic interaction with the secret annex due to its multiple affordances. I will conclude that people's confinement to constrictive places strips them of a wide array of experiences, social relations and emotions, which impoverishes them as sentient human beings.