How Anne Frank Inspired Neutral Milk Hotel’s Classic Album ‘In the Aeroplane Over the Sea’

In 1998, Neutral Milk Hotel released their landmark second and final album, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. It’s remembered as not only one of the best indie albums of the ’90s but of all time.

While the lyrical content is often vague, it explores a variety of themes, one of its major inspirations was Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, which chronicled her experiences while her family was in hiding during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.

“A lot of the songs are about her,” Mangum told Puncture in 1997, before the album was released.

The Influence of Anne Frank

“I was walking around wondering, “If I knew the history of the world, would everything make more sense to me or would I just lose my mind?” And I came to the conclusion that I’d probably just lose my mind,” Magnum told Puncture.

When he was in a book store the next day, he came across Frank’s diary and spent the following two days reading it. He was haunted by dreams of using a time machine to rescue her and admitted Frank’s writing “stuck with me for a long, long time.”

“While I was reading the book, she was alive to me,” he once said, calling to mind the line “In my dreams, you’re alive and you’re crying.”

She’s never mentioned by name, but songs like “Holland 1945” present more overt references to Frank—Mangum seems to be addressing her spirit directly. In “Oh Comely,” he mentions her death and his dreams of saving her, singing, “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.”

Other songs, however, are open to interpretation or have multiple meanings. “Ghost,” for example, came from Mangum’s belief there was a ghost in the house, but he has also said the song “ended up being more of a reference to Anne Frank.”

Frank’s influence continued even after the album was finished. The track “Untitled” has become known as “The Penny Arcade in California” because the band saw a girl in an arcade who resembled Frank.

Even when Mangum isn’t referencing Frank directly, many of the album’s themes, such as youth, trauma, and the loss of innocence, are still tied to her. The fact that the album’s inspiration is so specific but with themes that are so universal is part of its unwavering appeal.

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