On April 3rd, 1946, in the Dutch newspaper Het Parool, historian Jan Romein marveled at an astonishing yet “apparently inconsequential diary by a child.” Finding it far more “lucid … intelligent … [and] natural” than the two hundred other wartime diaries being held in the new Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation, Romein thought it read like “de profundis stammered out in a child’s voice.”
Decades after Romein’s glowing article brought Anne Frank’s diary to the attention of a Dutch publisher, plenty of myths and misconceptions persist about the writings left behind after her arrest.
In this compelling new biography, prize-winning literary critic Ruth Franklin reminds readers that the published diary wasn’t a “found object” written by the same loquacious girl who’d gone into hiding in Amsterdam with her family and four others in 1942. Franklin’s study points to the deliberate and carefully edited work of a maturing artist.
Anne’s turn from diarist to artist is linked to an event that took place on March 28th, 1944. The Franks, along with the Van Pels family and a middle-aged dentist, had gathered on the upper floor of their secret annex at Prinsengracht 263 to tune into a radio broadcast from London.
The Dutch minister of culture in exile announced that an archive of wartime documentation (the one Romein mentions in Het Parool) would be established after Germany’s assumed defeat. Writing from everyday civilians would be gathered so that future generations could appreciate the horrors of life under occupation.
Anne began weighing how to turn her private entries from various notebooks (version A of the diary) into writing suitable for public consumption. Stylistic changes gave her work a more consistent voice throughout. She also added context for imagined postwar readers about the plight of Dutch Jews. But the biggest change involved omitting much about her fading romance with the older teenage boy, Peter van Pels.
As Anne worked on loose sheets of vellum paper, her revised diary (version B) became a memoir-in-letters addressed to “Kitty,” a character from a book series she adored.
In her close reading of the edits made in the months before Anne’s August 1944 arrest and deportation, Franklin highlights how an older Anne shifted from merely documenting her sequestration to grappling with what it means to hide. One especially insightful observation is the oft-overlooked role of Anne’s faith, which sustained her during her two years in the annex between the ages of thirteen and fifteen.
In the second half of the biography, Franklin recounts the “afterlife” of the diary, which her father, Otto Frank, helped publish after surviving Auschwitz and returning to Amsterdam — his wife and two daughters having been murdered. He lightly edited Anne’s Version B into a Version C, while restoring some of the writing that Anne had removed from Version A.
Franklin notes that Otto has been unfairly maligned for “censoring” some of Anne’s passages about menstruation, her sexuality, and even her pointed criticisms of her mother, Edith. In Franklin’s pages, Otto earns vindication. He hadn’t removed these entries, as is so often thought; Anne had. Otto tried to reinstate them. When the publishers of the Dutch and French editions omitted the material out of apparent concern for propriety, it was Otto who convinced the English-language publishers to bring it back. (Whether Otto Frank was justified in taking these liberties is worth pondering.)
Franklin’s cultural history of the diary includes a look at how the American publisher, Doubleday, marketed its edition to the non-Jewish reader in 1952. Anne’s story was universalized, minimizing her Jewish identity and her persecution as Jew. This trend continued in adaptations for the stage and screen. The real Anne became a generic “figurehead against prejudice” in the broadest sense.
In the book’s closing pages, readers may find themselves wincing more than once at the ways Anne’s story has been used and misused. It’s easy to feel inured by the appropriations of Anne’s writing and legacy, each example more infuriating than the last.
One of Franklin’s goals is to reclaim Anne the person from Anne the symbol by recognizing her intentions as an artist. In this, Franklin’s biography shines. But there’s a flipside. That Anne was a literary giant in the making, that her trajectory was cut unforgivably short, and that the particulars of her identity and experience were later deemphasized — this makes the silence of her unfinished entries and unknowable body of work all the more excruciating.
Maksim Goldenshteyn is Seattle-based writer and the author of the 2022 book So They Remember, a family memoir and history of the Holocaust in Soviet Ukraine.
