Context
About the Author
Anne Frank was born Annelies Marie Frank on 12 June 1929 in Frankfurt am Main, the second daughter of Otto Frank, a businessman from a long-assimilated German-Jewish family, and Edith Hollander Frank. After the Nazi Party came to power in early 1933, the Franks left Germany — Otto first, the rest of the family by stages — and resettled in Amsterdam, where Otto built up a small spice and pectin firm at 263 Prinsengracht. Anne grew up Dutch-speaking, attended the Sixth Montessori School, and in the surviving photographs reads as a quick, talkative, somewhat theatrical child. The book the world knows her by began as a thirteenth-birthday present: a red-checkered autograph album she chose herself in a Saturday-afternoon shop window. She received it on 12 June 1942 and started writing in it the same week. The Gestapo arrested her in the Annex two years and seven weeks later. She died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen in late February or early March 1945, weeks before British troops liberated the camp, and a few months before her sixteenth birthday.
She is, in a strict literary sense, an author of one book — but she revised that book intensively in the last months of her life and clearly intended to be more. By the spring of 1944 Anne had begun to think of the diary as raw material for a postwar novel she planned to call Het Achterhuis (The Secret Annex), and she was also drafting short stories and sketches that her father later collected as Tales from the Secret Annex. The diary we read is therefore the work of a developing writer, not just a recording adolescent.
The clearest way to read Anne as an author rather than as a symbol is to follow her own revisions. On 28 March 1944 the exiled Dutch minister of education, Gerrit Bolkestein, broadcast an appeal from London asking citizens to preserve diaries, letters, and ordinary documents of the occupation so that a future record of Dutch suffering could be assembled. Anne heard the broadcast in the Annex and began, in May, to rewrite her existing entries on loose sheets of carbon paper with a postwar audience in mind — sharpening characterizations, condensing redundancies, inventing pseudonyms for the helpers and the Van Pels family (whom she renamed Van Daan), and shaping the material toward something like a book. Diary scholars now distinguish three texts: the "a" version (her original notebooks), the "b" version (her own 1944 revision), and the "c" version (the heavily edited text Otto Frank assembled and published in 1947 as Het Achterhuis). The 1995 Definitive Edition, prepared after Otto's death, restores roughly thirty percent of the material he had cut — particularly entries about Anne's emerging sexuality and her sharper criticisms of her mother — by drawing on a and b together. Reading the diary as literature means reading a writer who was already her own first editor.
Within the broader tradition of Holocaust testimony, Anne's diary is unusual precisely because it isn't survivor literature. Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Charlotte Delbo, Tadeusz Borowski — the canonical voices — all wrote from the camps and after them. Anne wrote before and up to. Her closest formal cousin is probably the Warsaw Ghetto diarist Mary Berg, whose journal was published in English in 1945, or the Łódź ghetto diary of Dawid Sierakowiak; like them, Anne writes inside the noose, without knowing how the story ends. What sets her work apart is the literary self-consciousness — the willingness to hold a domestic comedy of manners (Mrs. Van Daan and her chamber pot, Mr. Dussel and his complaints) and a coming-of-age novel and a wartime testimony in the same paragraph, and to keep all three honest. The diary is the ancestor of every later "girl coming into selfhood under a totalitarian regime" book, but none of them have its formal accident: a real person doing it for real, in real time.
Historical Background
The diary cannot be separated from what was happening in the Netherlands between May 1940 and August 1944. Germany invaded the Netherlands on 10 May 1940; the Dutch army surrendered five days later, after the bombing of Rotterdam, and Queen Wilhelmina fled to London. The occupation that followed was administered by a civilian Reichskommissar, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, and it became — by the cold arithmetic of survival — the deadliest in Western Europe for Jews. Roughly 75 percent of the Dutch Jewish population was murdered, a higher proportion than in France or Belgium. The destruction was carried out by stages of paperwork: registration of all Jewish residents in early 1941, exclusion from civil service jobs, then from public schools and universities, then from cinemas, parks, libraries, and trams. By the spring of 1942, Jews could not own businesses, ride bicycles, sit on park benches, visit Christian friends after eight in the evening, or shop outside designated hours. From May 1942 they had to wear a yellow Star of David sewn to the outer clothing. In July 1942 the deportations from the Westerbork transit camp to Auschwitz and Sobibór began, and the Frank family's hiding date — 6 July 1942, the morning after Margot's call-up notice arrived — falls in the first week of those transports. Anne wrote her diary inside that calendar.
The hiding itself depended on four employees of Otto Frank's firm: Miep Gies, Bep Voskuijl, Johannes Kleiman, and Victor Kugler (whom Anne calls Elli, Mr. Koophuis, and Mr. Kraler in the Mooyaart translation). They brought food, books, and news daily, at lengthening risk; ordinary Dutch citizens caught helping Jews were sent to camps themselves. On the morning of 4 August 1944 the Gestapo, almost certainly acting on a tip whose source has never been definitively identified, raided the Annex; the eight residents and two of the helpers were arrested. The Franks were sent first to Westerbork, then on the last transport that ever left Westerbork for Auschwitz — 3 September 1944. Edith Frank died in Auschwitz in January 1945. Anne and Margot were transferred to Bergen-Belsen and died there of typhus weeks before the camp's liberation by British forces on 15 April 1945. Otto Frank, the only Annex resident to survive, returned to Amsterdam in June 1945, learned of his daughters' deaths, and was given the loose pages of Anne's diary by Miep Gies, who had collected them off the floor after the arrest and kept them, unread, in a desk drawer.
Otto Frank's decision to publish was not obvious and was not quick. He spent more than a year typing transcripts, translating passages for relatives, and circulating selected entries among friends before any publisher would take the manuscript. Dutch houses turned it down repeatedly; Het Achterhuis finally appeared from a small Amsterdam press, Contact, in June 1947, in a print run of 1,500 copies. The American edition, translated by Barbara Mooyaart-Doubleday with an introduction by Eleanor Roosevelt, came out from Doubleday in 1952 and was the version that broke the book to a global audience. The 1955 Broadway adaptation by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, and the 1959 George Stevens film, completed the canonization — and, in the view of many later critics, distorted it. Both stage and screen flattened Anne's voice toward universal uplift and ended the story before Bergen-Belsen, leaving the curtain on her line about people being "really good at heart" rather than on the deportations. The most influential challenge to that softening is Cynthia Ozick's 1997 essay "Who Owns Anne Frank?" in The New Yorker, which argues that the play and film stripped Anne of her Jewishness, her specificity, and the historical violence that killed her, in order to convert her into a feel-good emblem. Ozick's reading is harsh — she suggests it might have been better if the diary had been burned — but it changed how serious readers approach the book. Subsequent scholarship has continued the recalibration: Francine Prose's Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife (2009) reconstructs the revision history; Carol Ann Lee's biographies investigate the betrayal; and the 1995 Definitive Edition put the previously censored entries about menstruation, sexuality, and family conflict back into the public text where Anne's own b-version had placed them.
Reception in the United States has had a second life as a censorship story. Despite — or because of — its iconic status, The Diary of a Young Girl is one of the most frequently challenged books in American school libraries, repeatedly appearing on the American Library Association's banned-and-challenged lists. The complaints generally target the same restored passages: a 1944 entry in which Anne describes her own genitals with anatomical curiosity, and entries describing her mounting frustration with her mother. School boards in Virginia, Michigan, Florida, and Texas, among others, have at various points pulled the Definitive Edition from classrooms, sometimes substituting the older, sanitized version. The pattern is its own form of historical commentary: a book that exists because a fifteen-year-old refused to flatten herself into something acceptable continues, eighty years on, to be flattened by adults who find her too uncomfortable to teach as written. Reading the unabridged diary is, among other things, an act of refusing that flattening — which is what Anne, in the spring of 1944, was trying to do for herself.