Who hasn’t read Anne Frank’s diary? Translated into 70 languages and having sold more than 30 million copies, the book has become an international bestseller. The diary’s author, a Jewish German teenager, died 80 years ago in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. We don’t know the exact day she died. The Red Cross reported that Anne and her older sister Margot died of typhus sometime between the beginning and the end of March 1945.
It wasn’t until July that year that Otto Frank, the two girls’ father, received confirmation of his daughters’ deaths. Otto was the only member of his family to survive the Nazi’s death camps. The same year, his former colleague Miep Gies gave him the personal diary of his youngest daughter. During the war, Gies had helped the Frank family hide themselves in a secret annex on the grounds of Otto’s business in Amsterdam. After the family’s arrest in August 1944, she managed to keep Anne’s writings safe.
“I heard the doors open, the workers arrive, greet each other, chat, have coffee,” she wrote in her autobiography “Her Name was Anne Frank”. “I slid open the bottom drawer of my desk and took out the papers that had waited for Anne’s return for almost a year now. Neither I nor anyone else had touched them. From now on, Anne won’t be coming back to look for her diary.”
For two years, Anne wrote about her family’s day-to-day life in the annex that had become their only sanctuary against the worsening persecution of Jews in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands. More intimately, the teenage girl wrote down her innermost thoughts and feelings during her years of confinement. When her father Otto read her diary, he was shocked.
“At first, he wasn’t in favour of her writings being published,” said Thomas Sparr, a specialist in German literature and the author of “The Diary of Anne Frank: A Book’s History”. “But then he understood that these writings were extraordinary, and that he should allow them to be more widely read.”
‘All the cruelty of fascism’
There were two versions of the diary at first: the original, known as version A, and version B, which included corrections. After having heard on Radio London that testimonies of the Dutch people’s oppression under the Nazis would be published once the war was over, Anne had begun to rework her writings before being arrested. In an effort to turn them into a coherent text, Otto Frank introduced some of these changes into a third draft, called version C. He also cut out a number of passages that seemed shocking or compromising to him, Sparr explained.
“He cut out parts that seemed too intimate on the awakening of his daughter’s sexuality, parts where Anne criticised her mother and even parts where she was too critical of the Germans,” he said. “But he didn’t add anything. It’s really Anne Frank’s diary.”
In 1946, the historian Jan Romein wrote glowingly about the diary for a Dutch newspaper. In the piece, he wrote that Frank’s writing, “stammered by a child’s voice, embodies all the cruelty of fascism, more than all the evidence that the Nuremberg trials have been able to gather”.
Although Otto Frank had until then received nothing but rejections from publishers, this review finally drew their attention. The diary was published in the Netherlands one year later with a first printing of 3,000 copies.
Anne Frank’s diary quickly found fame beyond the Netherlands’ borders. The book was published in France in 1949, then in her home country of Germany in 1950 and in the US in 1952. But its phenomenal success rose to new heights following the launch in 1955 of a Broadway adaptation of the diary. Night after night, scenes from the last years of Anne Frank played out on stage in sold-out performances.
“After seeing it on stage, people went straight to the bookstore the next day to buy her diary,” Sparr said. Over the following years, the play toured the world and the diary was translated into dozens of different languages. A film adaptation, “The Diary of Anne Frank”, was released in 1959 and won three Oscars.
A global phenomenon
The daily life of this persecuted young Jewish woman fascinated readers across the world. Anne Frank became the symbol and the face of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis over the course of the Second World War. Her diary even became a phenomenon in countries without a direct connection to the Holocaust. Sparr said that it was in Japan that the book had found the most success.
“The Japanese didn’t read it as a historical account, but rather as the story of a teenage girl, of her own development and her desires,” he said.
Reading the intimate story of a teenage girl’s first experiences with puberty gave generations of young Japanese women a new framework through which to prepare themselves for their own changing bodies. A teenage girl’s first period is still sometimes referred to in the country as “Anne’s Day”.
Even further afield, Nelson Mandela read the book during his imprisonment on Robben Island. Having become South Africa’s president in 1994 following the end of apartheid, the former political prisoner opened an exhibition dedicated to Anne Frank in Johannesburg.
“Apartheid and Nazism shared the inherently evil belief in the superiority of some races over others,” he said at the exhibition’s opening. “This drove adherents of these ideologies to perpetrate unspeakable crimes and to derive pleasure from the suffering of their fellow human beings. But because these beliefs are patently false, and because they were, and will always be, challenged by the likes of Anne Frank, they are bound to fail.”
Lessons from the last survivors: How to remember the Holocaust?
One of your browser extensions seems to be blocking the video player from loading. To watch this content, you may need to disable it on this site.
Until his death in 1980, Otto Frank continued to work to bring the writings of his youngest daughter to as many readers as possible.
“Without him, the diary wouldn’t exist,” Sparr said. “It’s a father’s battle.”
Otto was deeply involved in the work of the Anne Frank Foundation, which he founded to channel the money raised by the book’s sales into projects building better understanding between the world’s peoples. It is thanks to this foundation that the Anne Frank House, which stands today on the site of the secret annex that sheltered the Frank family in Amsterdam, was able to open its doors in 1960. The museum welcomes more than a million visitors every year as people come to see the place where Anne Frank wrote her final diary entries.
Finding immortality
German writer and translator Mirjam Pressler was tasked with editing a new version of the diary in the 1980s. It is this version, version D, that we are most familiar with today.
“It’s a complete version – there are no more cuts,” Sparr said. Anne Frank’s story continues to be told in different ways. Ari Folman’s animated film “Where is Anne Frank” was released in 2021, reframing the teenage girl’s writings in the context of the plight of 21st century refugees.
Anne Frank’s work continues to find new lives as well across social media. On Instagram and TikTok, the teenage writer sometimes seems to be everywhere; in photos, videos and posts sharing the words that she wrote in hiding: “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.”
Read moreMan suspected of betraying Anne Frank to Nazis identified after 77 years
Sparr said he was delighted with the enduring popularity of Anne Frank’s diary.
“She plays a major role in every society where there are threats,” he said. “It goes beyond the genocide of the Jews.”
But he stressed that it was vital for fans of the teenager’s writing to always return to the source.
“In terms of social media, the danger is to break the diary into fragments,” he said. “It is fundamental to read it in its entirety to properly grasp who Anne was and what she experienced, to understand that it’s a story of persecution, of racism and of anti-Semitism. We must never forget the history behind the diary, and I’m sure that new generations will continue to discover it.”
In her diary, Anne wrote: “I want to go on living even after my death!” Her diary has granted her that immortality.
This article has been adapted from the original in French by Paul Millar.
Leave a Comment