The Diary of a Young Girl
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"The Diary of Anne Frank" redirects here. For other uses, see The Diary of Anne Frank (disambiguation).
_-_front_cover,_first_edition.jpg)
1947 first edition cover
| |
| Author | Anne Frank |
|---|---|
| Original title | Het Achterhuis |
| Translator | B. M. Mooyaart |
| Cover artist | Helmut Salden |
| Country | Netherlands |
| Language | Dutch |
| Subject | World War II, Nazi occupation of the Netherlands |
| Genre | Autobiography |
| Publisher | Contact Publishing |
Publication date
| 1947 |
Published in English
| 1952 |
The Diary of a Young Girl (also known as The Diary of Anne Frank) is a book of the writings from the Dutch language diary kept by Anne Frank while she was in hiding for two years with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. The family was apprehended in 1944, and Anne Frank died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The diary was retrieved by Miep Gies, who gave it to Anne's father, Otto Frank, the family's only known survivor. The diary has since been published in more than 60 different languages.
First published under the title Het Achterhuis. Dagboekbrieven 14 Juni 1942 – 1 Augustus 1944 (The Annex: Diary Notes 14 June 1942 – 1 August 1944) by Contact Publishing in Amsterdam in 1947, the diary received widespread critical and popular attention on the appearance of its English language translation Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Doubleday & Company (United States) and Valentine Mitchell (United Kingdom) in 1952. Its popularity inspired the 1955 play The Diary of Anne Frank by the screenwriters Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, which they adapted for the screen for the 1959 movie version. The book is included in several lists of the top books of the 20th century.[1][2][3][4][5][6]
Contents
[hide]Background[edit]
During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, Anne Frank received a diary as one of her presents on June 12, 1942, her 13th birthday.[7][8] According to the Anne Frank House, the red, checkered autograph book which Anne used as her diary was actually not a surprise, since she had chosen it the day before with her father when perusing a bookstore near her home.[8] She began to write in it on June 14, 1942, two days later,[9][10] On July 5, 1942, Anne′s older sister Margot received an official summons to report to a Nazi work camp in Germany, and on July 6, Anne went into hiding with her father Otto, mother Edith, and sister Margot. They were joined by another family, Hermann van Pels, Otto's business partner, his wife Auguste, and their teenage son Peter.[11] Their hiding place was in the sealed-off upper rooms of the annex at the back of Otto's company building in Amsterdam.[11][12] The rooms were concealed behind a hidden bookcase. Mrs. van Pels' dentist, Fritz Pfeffer, joined them four months later. In the published version, names were changed: the van Pels are known as the Van Daans and Fritz Pfeffer as Mr. Dussel. With the assistance of a group of Otto Frank's trusted colleagues, they remained hidden for two years and one month.
They were betrayed in August 1944, which resulted in their deportation to Nazi concentration camps. Of the eight people, only Otto Frank survived the war. Anne died when she was 15 years old in Bergen-Belsen from typhus in early March, a few weeks before the prisoners were liberated by British troops in April 1945.
In manuscript, her original diaries are written over three extant volumes. The first volume (the red-and-white checkered autograph book) covers the period between June 14 and December 5, 1942. Since the second surviving volume (a school exercise book) begins on December 22, 1943, and ends on April 17, 1944, it is assumed that the original volume or volumes between December 1942 and December 1943 were lost—presumably after the arrest, when the hiding place was emptied on Nazi instructions. However, this missing period is covered in the version Anne rewrote for preservation. The third existing volume (which was also a school exercise book) contains entries from April 17 to August 1, 1944, when Anne wrote for the last time before her arrest.[13]:2
The manuscript, written on loose sheets of paper, was found strewn on the floor of the hiding place by Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl after the family's arrest,[14] but before their rooms were ransacked by the Dutch police and the Gestapo. They were kept safe and given after the war to Otto Frank, with the original notes, when his daughter's death was confirmed in the autumn of 1945.
Format of the Diary[edit]
The diary is not written in the classic forms of "Dear Diary" or as letters to oneself, but as letters to imaginary friends "Kitty," "Pop," "Phien," "Emmy," "Marianne," "Jetty," "Loutje," "Conny," and "Jackie." Anne used the various names in the first volume, from September 25, 1942 until November 13, 1942, when the first notebook ends.[15] It is believed that these names were taken from characters found in a series of popular Dutch books written by Cissy van Marxveldt.[15]
Anne's already budding literary ambitions were galvanized on 29 March 1944 when she heard a London radio broadcast made by the exiled Dutch Minister for Education, Art and Science, Gerrit Bolkestein,[14] calling for the preservation of "ordinary documents—a diary, letters ... simple everyday material" to create an archive for posterity as testimony to the suffering of civilians during the Nazi occupation. On May 20th, she notes that she started re-drafting her diary with future readers in mind. She expanded entries and standardized them by addressing all of them to Kitty, clarified situations, prepared a list of pseudonyms, and cut scenes she thought would be of little interest or too intimate for general consumption. By the time she started the second existing volume, she was writing only to Kitty.
Dear Kitty[edit]
There has been much conjecture about the identity or inspiration of Kitty, who in Anne's revised manuscript is the sole recipient of her letters. In 1996, the critic Sietse van der Hoek wrote that the name referred to Kitty Egyedi, a prewar friend of Frank. Van der Hoek may have been informed by the 1970 publication A Tribute to Anne Frank, prepared by the Anne Frank Foundation, which assumed a factual basis for the character in its preface by the then chairman of the Foundation, Henri van Praag, and accentuated this with the inclusion of a group photograph that singles out Anne, Sanne Ledermann, Hanneli Goslar, and Kitty Egyedi. Anne does not mention Kitty Egyedi in any of her writings (in fact, the only other girl mentioned in her diary from the often reproduced photo, other than Goslar and Ledermann, is Mary Bos, whose drawings Anne dreamed about in 1944) and the only comparable example of Anne's writing unposted letters to a real friend are two farewell letters to Jacqueline van Maarsen, from September 1942.[16]
Theodor Holman wrote in reply to Sietse van der Hoek that the diary entry for 28 September 1942 proved conclusively the character's fictional origin. Jacqueline van Maarsen agreed, but Otto Frank assumed his daughter had her real acquaintance in mind when she wrote to someone of the same name. However, Kitty Egyedi said in an interview that she was flattered by the assumption, but doubted the diary was addressed to her:
| “ | Kitty became so idealized and started to lead her own life in the diary that it ceases to matter who is meant by 'Kitty'. The name ... is not meant to be me. | ” |
—Kitty Egyedi[17]
| ||
Synopsis[edit]
Anne had expressed the desire in the rewritten introduction of her diary for one person that she could call her truest friend, that is, a person to whom she could confide her deepest thoughts and feelings. She observed that she had many "friends" and equally many admirers, but (by her own definition) no true, dear friend with whom she could share her innermost thoughts. She originally thought her girlfriend Jacque van Maarsen would be this person, but that was only partially successful. In an early diary passage, she remarks that she is not in love with Helmut "Hello" Silberberg, her suitor at that time, but considered that he might become a true friend. In hiding, she invested much time and effort into her budding romance with Peter van Pels, thinking he might evolve into that one, true friend, but that was eventually a disappointment to her in some ways, also, though she still cared for him very much. Ultimately, the closest friend Anne had during her tragically short life was her diary, for it was only to Kitty that she entrusted her innermost thoughts.
In her diary, Anne wrote of her very close relationship with her father, lack of daughterly love for her mother (with whom she felt she had nothing in common), and admiration for her sister's intelligence and sweet nature. She did not like the others much initially, particularly Auguste van Pels and Fritz Pfeffer (the latter shared her room). She was at first unimpressed by the quiet Peter; she herself was something of a chatterbox (a source of irritation to some of the others). As time went on, however, she and Peter became very close, though she remained uncertain in what direction their relationship would develop.
Editorial history[edit]
The first transcription of Anne's diary was in German, made by Otto Frank for his friends and relatives in Switzerland, who convinced him to send it for publication.[18] The second, a composition of Anne Frank's rewritten draft, excerpts from her essays, and scenes from her original diaries, became the first draft submitted for publication, with an epilogue written by a family friend explaining the fate of its author. In the spring of 1946 it came to the attention of Dr. Jan Romein and his wife Annie Romein-Verschoor, two Dutch historians. They were so moved by it that Anne Romein made unsuccessful attempts to find a publisher, which led Romein to write an article for the newspaper Het Parool:[19]
| “ | This apparently inconsequential diary by a child, this "de profundis" stammered out in a child's voice, embodies all the hideousness of fascism, more so than all the evidence of Nuremberg put together. | ” |
—Jan Romein in his article "Children's voice" on "Het Parool", April 3, 1946.[19]
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This caught the interest of Contact Publishing in Amsterdam, who approached Otto Frank to submit a draft of the manuscript for their consideration. They offered to publish but advised Otto Frank that Anne's candor about her emerging sexuality might offend certain conservative quarters and suggested cuts. Further entries were also deleted. The diary was published under the name Het Achterhuis. Dagbrieven van 14 juni 1942 tot 1 augustus 1944 (The Secret Annex. Diary Letters from June 14, 1942 to August 1, 1944) on June 25, 1947.[19] Otto later discussed this moment, "If she had been here, Anne would have been so proud."[19] It sold well; the 3000 copies of the first edition were soon sold out, and in 1950 a sixth edition was published.
At the end of 1950, a translator was found to produce an English-language version. Barbara Mooyaart-Doubleday was contracted by Vallentine, Mitchell & Co. in England and by the end of the following year her translation was submitted, now including the deleted passages at Otto Frank's request and the book appeared in America and Great Britain in 1952, becoming a bestseller. Translations into German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, and Greek followed. The play based on the diary won the Pulitzer Prize for 1955, and the subsequent movie earned Shelley Winters an Academy Award for her performance, whereupon Winters donated her Oscar to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.[20]
Other English translations[edit]
In 1989 The Diary of Anne Frank: The Revised Critical Edition presented the Barbara Mooyaart-Doubleday translation alongside Anne Frank's two other draft versions, and incorporated the findings of the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation into allegations of the diary's authenticity.[21]
A new translation by Susan Massotty based on the unexpurgated text was published in 1995. It was also translated into Chinese.[22]
Reception[edit]
In the 1960s, Otto Frank recalled his feelings when reading the diary for the first time, "For me, it was a revelation. There, was revealed a completely different Anne to the child that I had lost. I had no idea of the depths of her thoughts and feelings."[18] Michael Berenbaum, former director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, wrote "Precocious in style and insight, it traces her emotional growth amid adversity. In it she wrote, 'In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.'"[18]
Denialism and historical authenticity[edit]
Anne Frank's story has become symbolic of the scale of Nazi atrocities during the war, a stark example of Jewish persecution under Adolf Hitler, and a dire warning of the consequences of persecution. However, there have been many claims by holocaust denialists that Anne Frank's diary was fabricated.[23] Holocaust deniers such as Robert Faurisson have claimed that the diary is a forgery,[24] though critical and forensic studies of the text and the original manuscript have supported its authenticity.[25]
In his will, Otto Frank bequeathed his daughter's original manuscripts to the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation. After his death in 1980, the Institute commissioned a forensic study of the manuscripts. The material composition of the original notebooks and of the ink and handwriting found within them and the loose version were extensively examined. In 1986, the results were published; the handwriting was positively matched with contemporary samples of Anne Frank's handwriting and the paper, ink and glue found in the diaries and loose papers were consistent with materials available in Amsterdam during the period in which the diary was written.[25]
The survey of her manuscripts compared an unabridged transcription of Anne Frank's original notebooks with the entries she expanded and clarified on loose paper in a rewritten form and the final edit as it was prepared for the English translation. The investigation revealed that all of the entries in the published version were accurate transcriptions of manuscript entries in Anne Frank's handwriting, and that they represented approximately a third of the material collected for the initial publication. The magnitude of edits to the text is comparable to other historical diaries such as those of Katherine Mansfield, Anaïs Nin and Leo Tolstoy in that the authors revised their diaries after the initial draft, and the material was posthumously edited into a publishable manuscript by their respective executors, only to be superseded in later decades by unexpurgated editions prepared by scholars.[26]
In Japan, in February 2014, 265 copies of the Frank's diary and other material related to the Holocaust were found to be vandalized in 31 public libraries in Tokyo. In an effort to keep further destruction from occurring, some libraries in Japan have removed the book from their shelves. The vandalism is thought to have been caused by one culprit, not a group.[27][28] 300 copies of Anne Franks diary were donated by Israel to replace the vandalized copies.[29] An anonymous donor under the name of 'Chiune Sugihara' donated two boxes of books to the Tokyo central library pertaining to the Holocaust.[30]
Banning[edit]
In 2010, the Culpeper County, Virginia school system banned the 50th Anniversary "Definitive Edition" of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, due to "complaints about its sexual content and homosexual themes."[31] This version "includes passages previously excluded from the widely read original edition.... Some of the extra passages detail her emerging sexual desires; others include unflattering descriptions of her mother and other people living together."[32] After consideration, it was decided a copy of the newer version would remain in the library and classes would revert to using the older version.
In 2013, a similar controversy arose in a 7th grade setting in Northville, Michigan, focusing on explicit passages about sexuality.[33] The mother behind the formal complaint referred to portions of the book as "pretty pornographic."[34]
The American Library Association stated that there have been six challenges to the book in the United States since it started keeping records on bans and challenges in 1990, and "Most of the concerns were about sexually explicit material".[32]
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