Anne Frank

by Francine Prose

  A few days later, Anne lay on the floor and sobbed until the idea of herself as a writer lifted her out of despair. “I must work, so as not to be a fool, to get on to become a journalist, because that’s what I want! I know that I can write, a couple of my stories are good, my descriptions of the ‘Secret Annex’ are humorous, there’s a lot in my diary that speaks, but—whether I have real talent remains to be seen….”

  On April 14, she had serious misgivings about her abilities. Even so, she was imagining the Dutch ministers as her potential audience, and her critics: “Everything here is so mixed up, nothing’s connected any more, and sometimes I very much doubt whether anyone in the future will be interested in all my tosh. “The unbosomings of an ugly duckling’ will be the title of all this nonsense; my diary really won’t be much use to Messrs. Bolkestein or Gerbrandy.”

  In May she again wrote that she wished to become a journalist and a famous author—only now she had a sense of the book that might make her reputation. “Whether these leanings towards greatness (insanity!) will ever materialize remains to be seen, but I certainly have the subjects in my mind. In any case, I want to publish a book called Het Achterhuis after the war. Whether I shall succeed or not, I cannot say, but my diary will be a great help.”

  The most important result of this new sense of vocation was that Anne began to refine and polish her diary into a form that she hoped might someday appear as Het Achterhuis. On May 20, she wrote, in a passage her father deleted, “At long last after a great deal of reflection I have started my ‘Achterhuis,’ in my head it is as good as finished, although it won’t go as quickly as that really, if it ever comes off at all.”

  In The Ghost Writer, Roth’s hero, Nathan Zuckerman, remarks that the diary’s dramatic scenes seemed to have gone through a dozen drafts. The truth is that many of them did go through at least two.

  Returning to the earliest pages, Anne cut, clarified, expanded her original entries, and added new ones which in some cases she predated, sometimes by years. Thus the book is not, strictly speaking, what we think of as a diary—a journal in which events are recorded as they occur, day by day—but rather a memoir in the form of diary entries. The translator of the Definitive Edition, Mirjam Pressler, has written one of the few books that acknowledges the importance of Anne’s revisions. Published in English as Anne Frank: A Hidden Life, and, oddly, targeted at a young-adult readership, Pressler’s book mixes biographical information, a meditation about Anne and the others in the annex, and illuminating comparisons between the original diary and the version Anne rewrote. “The Diary of a Young Girl is not a diary kept in chronological order from beginning to end as one might expect. The main part of the book consists of the second version of Anne’s original diary, revised with additions by Anne herself, with some stories from the account book in which she also wrote.”

  Judith Thurman got it right, as few have, when she questioned even calling the book, as Anne’s American publishers did, The Diary of a Young Girl. “That ingenuous title corresponds to what is in fact an epistolary autobiography of exceptional caliber. It takes the full measure of a complex, evolving character. It has the shape and drama of literature. It was scrupulously revised by its author, who intended it to be read. It is certainly not a piece of ‘found art,’ as one Dutch critic has suggested.”

  One can understand Doubleday’s belief that The Diary of a Young Girl was a catchier title than The House Behind. Though Anne Frank imagined Het Achterhuis as a novel in the form of a journal, it has come down to us as a diary. In The Ghost Writer, Philip Roth—who, as a fellow novelist, would be naturally sensitive to a writer’s prerogative to call her book what she wants—refers to Anne’s book only as Het Achterhuis, and to the Broadway play by its name, The Diary of Anne Frank.

  DESPITE Anne’s initial misgivings, the revision of Het Achterhuis went very quickly. Correlating the penmanship of the loose sheets against that of the notebooks, the forensic handwriting analysts later employed by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation concluded that “if we take May 20, 1944, as the starting date (on the basis of the comment in part 3) and August 1, 1944, as the date of the last entry, then the average daily entry would run to from 4 to 5 pages a day. These must have been written in addition to the entries in the diary, part 3…. It appears that the writer worked more intensely on the loose sheets, particularly in the period between July 15 and August 1, 1944. During that period, 162 pages were completed, or about 11 pages a day.”

  Working at this astonishing rate, Anne rewrote her early draft in the weeks before her arrest, making major and minor changes. Like any memoirist fearing hurt feelings, or accusations of misrepresentation, she made a list of pseudonyms for the Jews and their helpers. The Frank family would become the Robins, the Van Pelses would be called the Van Daans, while the dentist, Fritz Pfeffer, would appear in the book as Albert Dussel. Perhaps for fluency, she continued to use the real names when she wrote her second draft.

  “I am the best and sharpest critic of my own work. I know myself what is and what is not well written. Anyone who doesn’t write doesn’t know how wonderful it is.” By the time she made her final entry, on August 1, 1944, she had revised the passages that preceded the March radio broadcast and kept the diary up to date in an unrevised first draft.

  After the war, when Otto Frank read over his daughter’s work and became convinced that she’d meant it to be published, he prepared a version of the book that combined passages from Anne’s first draft and from her revisions, in some cases using earlier versions of passages that she had subsequently revised. All in all, Otto Frank did an admirable job of editing—omitting needless details, choosing between alternate versions of events, preserving the essence of the diary, and intuiting what would make the book more appealing to readers. In many cases, that meant reversing Anne’s decisions about what she wanted omitted—for example, the intensely emotional entries from the start of her romance with Peter van Pels, with whom she had become disenchanted during the time she was rewriting her diary.

  The cooling of the love affair and Anne’s focus on the revisions may not be entirely unrelated. Once she had stopped thinking semiobsessively about the boy upstairs, Anne had more time and energy to devote to her writing. She would not have been the first artist to discover that the end of a romance can inspire a return to work with new energy and sharpened concentration.

  IN 1986, the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation published The Critical Edition of the Diary of Anne Frank, a huge volume, over eight hundred pages long, that includes all the extant drafts of Anne’s diary; the English edition would appear three years later. Missing from the book were the five pages that Otto Frank and the Frank family chose to leave out, pages that subsequently appeared in the more recent Revised Critical Edition, which was published in Dutch in 2001 and in English in 2003. Both the earlier and later editions contain an account of the methods and conclusions of the forensic experts employed by the institute, who proved that the diaries, except for a few minor editorial corrections, were written entirely by Anne Frank. Their meticulous research demonstrated how the evolution of Anne’s handwriting over the course of the two years in hiding took the exact trajectory that the penmanship of a child—the same child—would be expected to follow between the ages of thirteen and fifteen.

  In The Critical Edition, the original draft of Anne’s diary is referred to as the “a” version. The revisions that she made on the loose sheets constitute the “b” version. And the book that her father produced by combining those first two drafts is reprinted as the “c” version. All three drafts are printed in parallel bands, so that it is possible—painstaking, time-consuming, and at times maddening, but possible—to read all three versions and to determine what Anne originally wrote, what she rewrote, what she intended to appear in Het Achterhuis, and at what points her father respected or reversed her decisions. Judith Thurman observed, “What a comparison of the texts does reveal is both how spontaneously the diarist
composed her prose and how finely she then tuned it. In order to make such a comparison, however, one needs a certain amount of motivation. The editors’ instructions on how to read The Critical Edition are more arcane, and harder to follow, than those for a build-it-yourself hang glider.”

  What makes the task of comparing Anne’s original draft with her revisions and with her father’s compilation even more challenging are all the unanswered and unanswerable questions. When Anne said that she had begun writing Het Achterhuis, did she mean that she had just begun? Long gaps in each version must be filled in by consulting the others. Even in the cloth diary, pages are misnumbered and dated out of order. If Anne omitted something from her second draft, did that mean that she intended to excise it completely, or that she felt the first version was sufficient? And finally, for those of us who don’t read Dutch, there is the problem of knowing how much we are missing by reading the work in translation. According to David Barnouw, one of the editors of The Critical Edition, only readers of Dutch can appreciate how much Anne’s style changed over those two years. In the published version, explains Barnouw, Anne’s incorrect word choices and other youthful mistakes were rectified, and the rougher passages were smoothed out. “Otherwise, it would have seemed that the editor made a mistake.”

  One of the most clear-sighted experts on the diary is Laureen Nussbaum, a childhood acquaintance of the Frank family (after the war, Otto would be the best man at her wedding) who went on to become a professor at the University of Oregon. She was the first to note that the revised, or “b,” draft—Anne’s own version of the text—has never been published as a stand-alone volume. The 1995 Definitive Edition, commented Nussbaum, only further muddied the waters since many of the cuts it restored (Anne’s reflections on her sexuality and outbursts of rage at her mother) were sections that Anne herself had removed from the book she hoped to publish.

  AS SOON as I had taken the time to understand what The Critical Edition contained, and the implications of the alternative versions, I realized that to write about Anne Frank as an artist would be more involved than a straightforward close reading of The Diary of a Young Girl. Suddenly, it was as if Anne had written two books—at least two books—that needed to be considered.

  The first was the diary that has had, and continues to have, such a powerful effect on readers, the book that has been adapted for Broadway and Hollywood, and that is still taught in classrooms everywhere. That is the so-called “c” version. Any discussion of Anne’s influence, of the intensity with which her diary has been taken to heart by its fans, and of the ways in which her “message” has been interpreted requires us to look at the “c” version (regardless of what we might think of the successive drafts, or of Otto Frank’s editing) as if it were the only version of the diary. Which, in effect, it is—except for the few readers, among millions, who have professional or private reasons for wanting to study the published diary alongside the alternate drafts.

  At the same time, it seemed unfair to Anne Frank as a writer to ignore what the variant drafts provide: evidence of her creative process, of her gifts for revision, of her first and second thoughts about how she wanted to portray herself and those around her. What was added to, and lost from, the book during those final months as Anne feverishly rewrote—on the loose colored sheets—the observations, reflections, and self-representation of an earlier self?

  But that was only part of the complexities involved. When I began to consider writing about the diary, I had only a vague notion of the controversies it had inspired. I knew that Anne’s work and her symbolic significance have incited battles extending far beyond the book itself. I had heard that the diary’s journey from the printed page to the stage and screen was a rocky one, but I’d had no idea that it involved lawsuits, betrayals and alliances, accusations of plagiarism and breach of contract, and obsessive paranoia concerning Zionist or Stalinist plots. Few other writers have given rise to such intense emotion, such fierce possessiveness, so many arguments about who is entitled to speak in her name, and about what her book does, and doesn’t, represent. Few have had such an effect on the world, and inspired the sort of devotion that more often surrounds the figure of a religious leader, or a saint.

  IF ONE hallmark of a masterpiece is the burrlike tenacity with which it sticks in our memory, Anne Frank’s journal claims that status as a consequence of the indelible impression that its “plot” and “characters” leave on its readers. Decades after the diary’s publication, the entrance to the secret annex remains the door through which new readers, many of them young, will first enter the historical moment in which it was written. When the book is taught in classrooms everywhere, all sorts of lessons—frequently improving, occasionally peculiar, and often quite unlike anything Anne Frank could have intended—are extracted from its pages. Anne’s diary is one of the texts most frequently read and studied by incarcerated men and women in prisons throughout the United States.

  The book has been translated into dozens of languages; tens of millions of copies are in print. The extent to which the figure of Anne Frank has permeated world culture can perhaps be seen in the fact that, in Japan (where the book was an enormous success, selling 116,000 copies in its first five months in print), to have one’s “Anne Frank day” became a euphemism for menstruation, a subject Anne mentioned in her journal. A variety of rose named after Anne Frank now grows all over Japan.

  A further measure of the book’s currency is the excitement generated by each new revelation about Anne’s life or about her diary. On September 10, 1998, the New York Times ran a two-thousand-word essay, beginning on the front page, headlined “Five Precious Pages Renew Wrangling over Anne Frank” and subtitled: “A long-withheld page from Anne Frank’s diary reveals difficulties with her mother: “I am unable to talk with her. I cannot look lovingly into those cold eyes. I cannot, never!” It’s hard to think of another literary text—a lost Shakespeare sonnet? a previously unknown verse of the Bible?—whose discovery would have received such prominent coverage, especially if the passage concerned a young girl’s view of her parents’ marriage.

  Yet another major news story broke in 2005 when a cache of letters was discovered at New York’s YIVO Institute, correspondence documenting Otto Frank’s desperate attempts to find asylum for his family in the United States or Cuba. These letters inspired a Long Island congressman to campaign—in vain—to have Anne Frank granted honorary U.S. citizenship as partial atonement for our government’s refusal to save the Franks.

  A range of films and plays have attempted to tell Anne’s story, with varying degrees of success. Jon Blair’s Anne Frank Remembered won an Academy Award for Documentary Feature in 1996. Films and docudramas have included “re-creations” in which actors played the Franks and their neighbors, and one made-for-television film, Who Betrayed Anne Frank?, frames the story as a detective procedural with the sort of ominous sound track we associate with shows about the riddle of the Mayans’ disappearance. At the 2007 New York Fringe Theater festival, Days and Nights: page 121, lines 11 and 12 featured actors recognizable as the characters in Anne’s diary, but who—in Marc Stuart Weitz’s play—passed their time in the attic reciting Chekhov’s The Seagull. The 2003 hip-hop film, Anne B. Real, centers on a female rapper who finds inspiration in Anne Frank’s story, while the popular book The Freedom Writers Diary and the subsequent film, Freedom Writers, describes how an inner-city classroom was energized by a journal kept during a war that few of the students had known much about. Anne’s story has even been made into a Japanese anime cartoon, Anne no Nikki.

  In 1998, the indie band Neutral Milk Hotel released In the Aeroplane over the Sea, an album of songs partly inspired by Anne Frank’s life and death. Ten years later, a musical adapted from the diary—The Diary of Anne Frank: A Song to Life—opened in Madrid. A puppet show of the diary has appeared to sellout crowds in Atlanta, while an episode of 60 Minutes reported that North Korean schoolchildren were being assigned to read Anne’s journal with instr
uctions to think of George W. Bush as Hitler and of the Americans as the Nazis who wished to exterminate the North Koreans.

  Books of nonfiction and fiction have expanded upon, and been inspired by, what Anne confided to her journal. Periodically, the publishing industry discovers the war diary of some hapless young person and promotes its author as the Anne Frank of Serbia, or Poland, or Vietnam, or the latest place where children are the victims of their elders. Philip Roth’s 1979 novel, The Ghost Writer, includes a sustained meditation about Anne and her diary occasioned by Nathan Zuckerman’s fantasy that the beautiful mistress of his literary idol is Anne Frank, who has not only survived the camps but has come to America, where she is living under a pseudonym and has landed a job archiving manuscripts for her lover. Roth’s Anne Frank character, Amy Bellette, reappears, older and infirm, in his 2007 novel, Exit Ghost.

  That same year, newspapers around the world reported that, weakened by age and disease, the chestnut tree outside the secret annex was in danger of being cut down. Emotions ran high during the debate about whether the leafy messenger that had brought Anne news about the changing seasons could be saved. As I write this, the valiant old tree struggles on in the courtyard of the former warehouse where the Frank family hid, and plans are being made to import and plant ten saplings from the tree in the United States.

  TWO

  The Life