Characters
Anne Frank
Anne is the writer, the narrator, and the subject of her own book, and the strange thing about reading her is that she keeps insisting she is harder to know than she looks. On the surface she is exactly the thirteen-year-old she announces in the first entries: chatty, vain, smart, full of opinions, fond of attention, prone to being scolded for talking too much in class. She arrives in the Annex in July 1942 with her cat already given away and her old life folded into a satchel, and within weeks she is keeping a precise inventory of who in the household she likes, who she doesn't, and which of them eat with their mouths open. By the time the diary breaks off in August 1944 she is fifteen, has been kissed, has read Dickens and Galsworthy and a small library on Greek mythology, and has started writing essays on solitude, womanhood, and what kind of adult she means to become. The journey from one to the other is the actual story of the book.
What makes Anne unusual as a narrator is how openly she revises herself in front of the reader. She catches herself being petty and writes the pettiness down anyway, then circles back six months later and argues with the earlier entry. The diary's introductory note tells us she reworked many of her own pages in 1944 with an eye toward publication, and you can feel that double consciousness throughout — Anne the diarist scribbling about the dishes, Anne the would-be author quietly building a portrait of a girl growing up.
Anne's arc is the most fully developed in the book because she is the only character whose interior life she has unrestricted access to, and the change in her over twenty-five months is dramatic enough to register as a literary achievement rather than a calendar effect. The thirteen-year-old of summer 1942 is a recognizable schoolyard type: the smart, talkative girl who keeps a list of which boys cycled past the house. The fifteen-year-old of summer 1944 is something rarer — a writer with a working theory of her own personality. The most decisive marker of that change is the 1 August 1944 entry, in which she splits herself into "two Annes": a "giddy clown" who dominates in company, "exuberant," "high-spirited," willing to laugh at a kiss or a dirty joke, and a second, hidden Anne who is "much better, deeper and purer." The lighter Anne, she writes, "is usually lying in wait and pushes away the other," and she suspects the better one will never be allowed onstage because she is too easily mocked: "the deeper Anne is too frail for it." The entry is searching, self-critical, and unfinished — three days later the Gestapo came up the stairs — and any reading of Anne as a character has to grapple with the fact that her last act on the page is to admit the work on herself isn't done.
Her relationships organize the rest of the diary's emotional weather. With her father, Otto, whom she calls Pim, she is openly worshipful — "Daddy is a darling" is a sentence she writes some version of twenty times — though the relationship grows more complicated late in the book, when she realizes even his patient love does not quite see her real self ("Even Pim is different lately. He is trying not to treat me as such a child, and it makes him much too cool"). With her mother, Edith, the ledger runs the other way: Anne records, at thirteen, that "I have to be my own mother. I've drawn myself apart from them all; I am my own skipper and later on I shall see where I come to land." It is one of the harshest sentences in the diary and one she partly rescinded later, but the relationship never fully heals on the page. With Margot, distance and sisterly guilt; with Peter, an enchantment she half-talks herself out of in real time; with the Van Daans and Dussel, an alert, sometimes cruel comic intelligence directed at adults she can't escape. Out of all those tensions Anne builds a self by writing about it. She is the protagonist of a Bildungsroman that the Bildungsroman form was not designed to handle: a coming-of-age story whose ending is not adulthood but Bergen-Belsen, and whose protagonist was working on herself when she was taken.
Otto Frank ("Pim")
Otto Frank is the moral center of the household and, for Anne, the parent whose approval she cannot stop seeking. He is a businessman in his early fifties — formerly an officer in the German army during the First World War — who has spent months quietly preparing the hiding place above his Amsterdam office, stocking it with food, books, and packing crates while telling no one outside a tight circle of trusted employees. In the Annex, he is the resident peacemaker: the one who breaks up the Van Daans' shouting matches, dictates Anne's lessons, smooths over Mrs. Van Daan's flirtations, and reminds the others, when Mr. Dussel's neediness wears on everyone's nerves, that "if we can save someone, then everything else is of secondary importance." Anne calls him Pim — her own private nickname — and writes some version of "Daddy is a darling" so often that the phrase becomes a kind of refrain.
Otto's literary function in the diary is to be the parent Anne can love without revising. Where her relationship with Edith is corrected and recorrected across two years — the early "I have to be my own mother" softened later into something more rueful — her relationship with Pim is mostly stable, which is why the moments when it cracks carry real weight. The most telling of these comes in spring 1944, when Anne realizes that even her father, whose love she has organized her childhood around, doesn't see the deeper self she has been growing in private. "I cling to Daddy because it is only through him that I am able to retain the remnant of family feeling," she writes — a line that, looked at carefully, is less a tribute than an admission of how thinly the rest of her family bonds have worn. By the time she's writing about Peter in spring 1944, she has begun, gently, to outgrow her father. The diary doesn't dramatize the transition; it just lets the reader notice that she is no longer running her every thought through Pim's approval first.
Outside the Annex, history gives Otto another role the diary itself cannot record: he is the only one of the eight residents to survive the war, and the editor who would later carry his daughter's pages into print. The 1952 edition's epilogue tells the reader that Anne died at Bergen-Belsen and that Otto came back to Amsterdam alone. Every line he speaks in the diary acquires a second meaning under that knowledge — the reassurances about the future, the dictated history lessons, the patient handling of the household — because the reader knows what Anne does not, that this is the parent who will outlive every other person in the room. Otto's restraint as the diary's later editor (he removed some of the most cutting passages about Edith and the Van Daans before publication) is itself part of his characterization: a man who chose what to do with his daughter's record once that record was the only thing left of her.
Edith Frank
Anne's mother is the parent the diary is least generous to, and the unfairness is part of how the diary works. Edith comes onto the page as a tired, capable woman somewhere in her early forties, devout in a way Anne is not, more comfortable with Margot than with her noisy younger daughter. She is responsible, in practical terms, for half of the household's running, and Anne records her lecturing, her sermons at the dinner table, her habit of taking the Van Daans' side in arguments — and almost never her exhaustion, her grief for her own mother who died not long before the family went into hiding, or her steady, anxious work of keeping eight people fed during a war. The Edith Anne writes about is, by Anne's own later admission, more caricature than portrait.
The Anne–Edith relationship is the diary's clearest demonstration that Anne is a partial narrator, and one of the reasons later editions of the diary include footnotes acknowledging it. The 7 November 1942 entry is the locus classicus: "I have to be my own mother. I've drawn myself apart from them all; I am my own skipper and later on I shall see where I come to land. All this comes about particularly because I have in my mind's eye an image of what a perfect mother and wife should be; and in her whom I must call 'Mother' I find no trace of that image." The line is unforgettable, and also, by Anne's own later judgment, unjust. In the spring of 1944 she rereads her old entries and recoils from how she sounds: she can't, she writes, recognize the angry girl who wrote them, and she resolves to be kinder. She mostly fails — the resentments come back when Edith says the wrong thing — but the resolution is part of her growth, and Edith functions as the figure against whom Anne has to learn that her own perception of a person isn't the whole truth of them.
Read against the historical record, Edith comes into clearer focus than her daughter let her. She was the first of the four Frank women to die: Auschwitz, January 1945, of starvation, after refusing to eat so that Anne and Margot could have her share. The diary cannot know this, and Anne's portrait of her stops where adolescence stopped. What the book preserves instead is the painful, ordinary truth that a teenage girl can be living through a genocide and still find her mother insufferable, and that the genocide does not, by itself, dissolve the friction of family life. That refusal to sentimentalize is one of the diary's most honest features. It is also the thing that makes Anne's late-1944 attempts to revise her view of Edith feel earned rather than performative.
Margot Frank
Margot is the older sister Anne is constantly compared to and constantly losing the comparison. She is sixteen when the family goes into hiding, eighteen when she dies, and Anne paints her, especially in the early entries, as a kind of impossible standard: studious, pretty, modest, agreeable, the favorite of every adult in the room. "Margot doesn't need it, she is such a goody-goody, perfection itself," Anne writes, "but I seem to have enough mischief in me for the two of us put together." The phrasing is jokey, but the resentment is real, and it shapes Anne's view of herself for most of the diary. Margot says little and is allowed to read fewer books than Anne; she takes shorthand classes by post, helps with the dishes, and absorbs her family's expectations without obvious complaint.
Margot's literary function is to be the silent counterpoint that lets Anne's noise mean something. Almost nothing Margot says reaches the page directly — she is filtered through Anne's eye for most of the diary, and Anne sees her as a competitor she keeps losing. The portrait shifts in 1944, when Anne starts spending afternoons with Peter and realizes, with a jolt, that Margot may have liked him too. The exchange Anne records is one of the quietly devastating moments in the book: "'I think it's so rotten that you should be the odd one out,' I added. 'I'm used to that,' she answered, somewhat bitterly." It is one of the few times Margot speaks in her own voice in the diary, and the line opens a door onto a sister Anne has been writing past for two years — a girl who has been the obedient one and felt the cost of it, and who is generous enough not to make Anne pay for being chosen.
By the late entries, Anne has started writing about Margot as a person rather than a measuring stick: "Margot is very sweet and would like me to trust her." The reconciliation never finishes because there isn't time. Margot, who kept her own diary in the Annex, did not have hers survive — only Anne's pages were saved off the floor. The two sisters were transported together to Auschwitz, then to Bergen-Belsen, where they died of typhus within days of each other in the late winter of 1945. The diary's last image of their relationship is one of cautious, late-blooming closeness, a relationship reaching for honesty just before it ends.
Mr. Van Daan (Hermann van Pels)
Hermann Van Daan (the Van Pels family in reality) is Otto Frank's former business partner, a German-Jewish refugee in his late forties who joins the Annex with his wife and son a week after the Franks. He brings a working knowledge of the spice trade and a personality Anne finds unbearable in close quarters: opinionated, sarcastic, a heavy smoker who runs out of cigarettes early and sulks, a man who picks fights with his wife at the dinner table about money, food, and household management. Anne's portrait of him is consistently uncharitable — a hypochondriac, a "first-rate selfish lout," prone to grand pronouncements about politics and women.
Mr. Van Daan is the household's volatile element, and the diary uses him the way a play uses its loudest character: to detonate the routine. The most extended set piece of his marriage is the long-running argument over money, which culminates in his decision to sell his wife's rabbit-fur coat — "a fur coat made from rabbit skins, and she has worn it seventeen years" — for 325 florins to keep the household running. The fight that erupts shakes the house; Mrs. Van Daan refuses to part with it, then is overruled, and the episode becomes shorthand in the diary for a marriage in which two people are exposed to each other under conditions no marriage was built for.
There is a literary cost to Anne's harshness here that the careful reader has to notice. Mr. Van Daan was a man whose business had been swallowed by the Reich, whose freedom had been swallowed by the Annex, and whose every cigarette had been counted out by his hosts; the fights about food and money were fights inside a system that had stripped him of every other adult role. None of this excuses his behavior toward Anne, who he sometimes mocks, but it changes the moral shape of her portrait. Anne herself never quite makes that allowance — she is fifteen and writing in real time — and the diary preserves both the man Anne saw and, between the lines, the man she could not yet see. He was murdered in the gas chambers at Auschwitz in October 1944.
Mrs. Van Daan (Auguste van Pels)
Mrs. Van Daan is the Annex's reigning grievance, by Anne's account: vain, flirtatious with Otto, sharp-tongued with Edith, fond of giving advice on other people's daughters, expert at hiding her better dishes from common use. Anne introduces her with the half-comic detail that she arrived at the hiding place "with a chamber pot in her hat box," and the line sets the tone — Mrs. Van Daan is the comic foil through whom the diary processes the indignities of forced cohabitation. She likes her possessions, complains when they are touched, and delivers regular sermons at the table on what she would do if Anne were her daughter. "These are always her first and last words," Anne writes wearily, "'if Anne were my daughter.' Thank heavens I'm not!"
Mrs. Van Daan's role in the diary is comic until it isn't, and the shift happens around the rabbit-fur-coat fight in spring 1943, when her possessiveness over a single garment becomes legible as something other than vanity. The coat, worn seventeen years, is the last fragment of her old life she can still touch; her husband sells it without her consent to feed the household; and Anne records the row in the kind of detail that suggests even she, half a floor below, registered something more than the usual nuisance. The episode is a small structural turn: it gives the most caricatured adult in the Annex a real loss the reader has to take seriously. After it, the comic Mrs. Van Daan keeps appearing, but she is shadowed by a woman whose marriage is unraveling in front of seven witnesses with no privacy and nowhere to take the fight.
In purely literary terms, Mrs. Van Daan is Edith's foil — flirtatious where Edith is reserved, theatrical where Edith is dutiful — and Anne uses her to triangulate her own ideas about womanhood. The 1944 entries on what kind of woman Anne wants to become are written in implicit conversation with both older women: Edith (too pious, too domestic, too quick to defer), Mrs. Van Daan (too vain, too dependent on male attention), and a third woman Anne is trying to invent, who would have a profession, an inner life, and the freedom to refuse both models. Mrs. Van Daan died in transit between camps in the spring of 1945; the diary's last reference to her is a small, almost affectionate note about her singing.
Peter Van Daan (Peter van Pels)
Peter is fifteen when the Van Daans move into the Annex, and Anne's first description of him is dismissive: a shy, awkward boy, "a fool" who "lounges around" and reads in the attic. For a year and a half he barely figures in the diary. Then in January 1944, almost overnight, Anne notices him — partly because she has been dreaming of an earlier crush named Peter Wessel, and her unconscious has helpfully fused the two — and the diary's emotional register changes. She invents reasons to climb to his attic room, sits with him by the window, and begins writing about him with the breathless intensity of a teenager in love. By spring they are kissing carefully among the packing crates.
The Peter material is the most novelistic stretch of the diary, and the most easily misread. Anne writes about Peter the way a fifteen-year-old in love writes — adoringly, recklessly, sometimes embarrassingly — but she also writes about him with an intelligence that sharpens as the months pass, and the relationship changes shape on the page in real time. By 14 June 1944 she is already auditing it: "Peter is good and he's a darling, but still there's no denying that there's a lot about him that disappoints me. Especially his dislike of religion and all his talk about food and various other things don't appeal to me." She suspects he loves her "not as a lover but as a friend"; she suspects she has talked herself into the relationship because the Annex left her no other way to fall in love. That kind of clarity, inside a romance she is still actively conducting, is the diary's most novelistic gesture — it's the kind of self-correction most romantic narratives postpone for years, and Anne does it in eight weeks.
Peter himself, as a character, is gentler and shallower than the figure Anne briefly tries to invent for him. He is kind to her, patient, a little passive; he lets her say things to him he would never accept from his mother; he has a cat (Mouschi) and an ability to disappear into the attic when the household gets too loud. His function in the diary is double: as the object of Anne's first real love, and as the foil against which she finally articulates that her interior life is not something any one person can answer. The diary's Peter is not the great love of Anne's life. He is the catalyst that lets her notice she has one. He died on a forced march in the spring of 1945, days before liberation.
Mr. Dussel (Fritz Pfeffer)
Albert Dussel — a dentist (Fritz Pfeffer in reality) — is the eighth resident of the Annex, taken in in November 1942 after the Franks and Van Daans decide they have room for one more. Anne shares her tiny bedroom with him and finds him insufferable almost immediately: pedantic, slow on the uptake, a creature of small rules and long sermons, a man who claims her writing desk for his own work and resents her use of it. She nicknames him "His Lordship" and inventories his offenses with a satirist's eye — the way he eats, the way he times her at the table, the way he asks the same question three times. "He is very slow on the uptake," she writes after their first conversation. "He asks everything twice over and still doesn't seem to remember."
Dussel is the diary's most pointed example of how Anne's portraits both reveal and distort. He is, by Anne's account, a fussy, self-important roommate, and her irritation with him is some of the funniest material in the book — the 1943 entries describing the Annex's daily timetable use him as a kind of running gag, "the pedantic doctor . . . clock in hand, because I'm one minute late in clearing the table for him." But Dussel was also a man who had been separated from his non-Jewish partner Charlotte — an arrangement his unmarried legal status forced — and who passed letters to her through Miep at considerable risk. The diary registers almost none of that. Anne is fifteen, sleeping in a room she did not ask to share with a stranger, and she writes him as the obstacle he is to her, not the man he was outside her sightline.
Read straight, Dussel is the figure who most exposes the moral structure of the diary's "characters": these are real people Anne caught in the small, demoralizing geometry of forced cohabitation, and the portraits she makes of them are accurate to her experience of them and unfair to who they were beyond it. Dussel was deported to Neuengamme and died there in December 1944. The 1952 edition leaves Anne's caricature of him largely intact, and modern readers have to do the second work the diary itself doesn't — to read the irritation as real and the man as larger than the irritation.
Miep Gies, Bep (Elli Vossen), Mr. Koophuis, and Mr. Kraler
Anne calls them "the helpers," and they are the reason eight people survived in hiding for two years. Miep Gies is a young Austrian-born employee of Otto's firm, married to Jan Gies, and the warmest presence in the diary outside the family — she shops for the household on forged ration cards, brings books and birthday flowers, gossips with Anne about clothes, and risks her life every day on a calendar of small, criminal errands. Bep (called Elli in the US edition; in reality Bep Voskuijl) is the youngest helper, in her early twenties, often sick, often anxious, treated by Anne as a confidante and near-sister. Mr. Koophuis (Johannes Kleiman) and Mr. Kraler (Victor Kugler) are the two senior men who run Otto's businesses while the family hides above them — Koophuis chronically ill, gentle, a careful source of news from the city; Kraler more brisk and businesslike, "helter-skelter upstairs— a short, firm knock on the door and in he comes rubbing his hands."
The helpers are the diary's quiet ethical center, and the way Anne writes about them tells you what she values when she isn't busy being a teenager. None of the four ever takes a wrong note in her portraits — they are not flattered, exactly, but they are spared the satirical attention she lavishes on the residents, because the residents are people she has to live with and the helpers are people who keep her alive. They are also the only adults in the diary whose work is fully directed outward: while the eight residents are turning their attention inward by necessity, Miep and Bep and the two men are walking out into Amsterdam every morning and bringing back what's needed. The diary's most domestic scenes — Bep coming up at 5:30 to eat with the family, Miep hunting down strawberries or shoes for someone's birthday, Koophuis arriving with the latest news from town — are also its most quietly heroic ones. They are doing this in a city where helping a Jew was a deportation offense.
After the August 1944 raid, the helpers' story is what allows the diary to exist as a book. Mr. Kraler and Mr. Koophuis were arrested with the residents and sent to labor camps; both survived. Miep and Bep, left behind because the Gestapo officer let them go, climbed up to the ransacked Annex and gathered the loose pages of Anne's diary off the floor — Miep kept them in her desk drawer for nine months without reading them, and gave them to Otto when Anne's death was confirmed. The book exists because Miep picked up the paper. Any analysis of the diary's "characters" has to end with the four people in this section, because they are the reason there is a diary at all.
Anne's Friends and Other Figures
A handful of figures from outside the Annex appear briefly but matter to the emotional shape of the book. Hanneli "Lies" Goosens is Anne's best friend before the war, the girl she walks to school with on the diary's first page, and she returns later in a way Anne cannot shake — the November 1943 dream in which Lies appears "clothed in rags, her face thin and worn," eyes "imploring," asking why Anne deserted her. The dream is the moment survivor's guilt enters the diary openly, and Anne writes the question she cannot answer: "I am not more virtuous than she; she, too, wanted to do what was right, why should I be chosen to live and she probably to die?" (In a piece of history the diary cannot record, Lies actually survived, and the two girls met again briefly through the wire fence at Bergen-Belsen weeks before Anne's death.)
Jacqueline "Jopie" van Maarsen is Anne's other close friend — the one who teases her about boys and slept over the night before everything changed. Harry Goldberg, the sixteen-year-old admirer of the opening entries, exists mostly to belong to the lost ordinary world — a boy on a bicycle, a few flirtations, the kind of small adolescent business that the diary spends its first chapter establishing so it can spend the next two years living without. Peter Wessel (Peter Schiff in reality), Anne's pre-war crush, returns in a January 1944 dream that fuses, for one disorienting night, with the Peter living upstairs; Anne uses the dream to convince herself she has fallen in love with Peter Van Daan, and the merging of the two Peters is one of the diary's quiet jokes about how desire works. Mouschi, Peter's cat, and the warehouse cat Boche are the Annex's only nonhuman company, and they get more uncomplicated affection from Anne than most of the humans do — a small, telling fact about a teenager who has been forced to live with her grievances at unbearably close range.