Perspective | Having Anne Frank’s version of the diary of hers could change the way we see it


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June 25 marked the 75th anniversary of the publication of Anne Frank’s diary. Despite the growth of her posthumous fame, one element has remained largely unchanged during this time: the publication of Anne’s work did not go as she envisioned. We know this because we have access to the version that she carefully edited and shaped, but that is not the version that circulates today.

His work was presented as a child’s war diary rather than the edited memoirs he planned. Through this process, her identity as a writer was diminished while her image as a young victim was tokenized.

Now, 75 years after her story became widely known, Anne is long overdue for recognition as a significant literary figure whose distinctive voice, perspective, and craft remain relevant to our understanding of the Holocaust.

Anne wrote her diary from June 12, 1942, weeks before she and her family (and eventually four others) hid out in a “secret annex” in her father Otto Frank’s office building in Amsterdam, until June 1 August 1944, three days. before she and the others in hiding were arrested by Nazi forces. Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, employees of Otto Frank’s company who helped those in hiding, rescued the volume of red and white squares and the additional notebooks in which Anne wrote her diary (version A) and other writings, in addition to the hundreds of “loose books”. sheets” on which she wrote her revisions (version B) until March 29, 1944.

After Anne’s death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was confirmed, Gies handed over these materials, then unread, to Otto Frank, the sole survivor of the secret annex. He selected, edited, and combined entries from both versions of the diary to form the published diary, which appeared as “Het Achterhuis” (The Secret Annex or The House Behind) in 1947 in the Netherlands, more than two years after his death. of Anne. In 1952, the first American edition appeared as “A Girl’s Diary.” The book has remained in print and has been translated into more than 70 languages ​​over the decades.

While Otto Frank’s editing, along with that of other publishers, made publication of the diary possible at the time, aspects of Anne’s intentions were compromised in the process. For example, the published diary begins with lists of her unfiltered comments about schoolmates rather than her intended initial reflection on journaling and the possibility of a wider audience: “Writing in a journal is a really weird experience. for someone like me. Not only because I have never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl. Oh well, it doesn’t matter. I feel like writing, and I have an even greater need to get all sorts of things off my chest.”

Anne repeatedly wrote in her diary about her desire to be a writer. His explicit interest in remaking his diary for publication was prompted by a radio broadcast from London on March 28, 1944, in which a Dutch government official, Gerrit Bolkestein, mentioned the value of collecting diaries and other first-person accounts that describe experiences of the Nazi occupation. . Anne’s March 29, 1944 diary entry indicates her awareness that she already had an audience for her project: “Of course, they all pounced on my diary. Imagine how interesting it would be if you published a novel about the Secret Annex. The title alone would make people think this is a detective story.”

That spring, he went back to the beginning of his diary, assiduously rewriting and turning it into a version (version B) intended for a public hearing. Publishing the diary in 1947 involved undoing aspects of Anne’s editorial work and restoring parts of the original diary that the 15-year-old had deleted, such as details about her brief affair with Peter van Pels.

The result turns her work into a strange text with multiple lead voices, with words and ideas from Anne both young and old intermingling with the priorities of Otto Frank and other adult editors.

The published diary makes Anne more of a child victim and less of a writer with intent and purpose, as is evident in the English title, “The Diary of a Young Girl.”

This effect has been amplified by the numerous adaptations of Anne’s Diary into other cultural forms, including plays and films, beginning early on with the dramatization by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett that opened on Broadway in October 1955.

What Cynthia Ozick, Alvin Rosenfield and others have argued, this popular work directed by Garson Kanin intentionally diminished or whitewashed Anne’s ethnic heritage and Jewish identity, as well as her power as a writer. She was generalized more as a child victim, more clearly as a girl with whom many others could identify, and less clearly as a Jew.

Since the late 1950s, there have been multiple challenges to the authenticity of Anne’s authorship. Claims that she did not write the diary have been based on anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial, and disbelief that a young person could write in a sophisticated way.

After the Dutch Institute for War Documentation received the diary manuscripts after Otto Frank’s death in 1980, they undertook a comprehensive study of the handwriting and original diary documents and concluded that they were authentic. These results were included with other contextual material and the multiple versions of the diary in “The Critical Edition,” published in Dutch in 1986 (1989 in English). A “Definitive Edition” of the diary followed in 1991 (1995 in English), which restored missing passages from the diary entries, included many more entries from Anne’s edited B version in a new translation, and became widely available as a standard text.

Since then, the range of Anne’s writings has been brought together in complete editions. The “Revised Critical Edition” in Dutch appeared in 2001 (2003 in English), which also included Anne’s short stories or “tales”, known as “Tales from the Secret Annex”. Published in English in 2019 (2013 in German), “all known texts of Anne Frank”, including multiple versions of the diary, poetry, stories, letters and other compositions, appeared in a large volume of “Complete Works”, which acknowledges Ana as a writer with a body of work that spans multiple genres. In 2019, a German edition appeared titled “Liebe Kitty” (Dear Kitty) based on version B, with an afterword by Laura Nussbaum, a scholar and childhood friend of Anne’s who has advocated seeing Frank as a writer. An online scholarly edition of his manuscripts was released in 2021, but is not yet available in the United States due to copyright restrictions.

Scholars and critics continue to engage with Anne’s legacy, with recent examples including by oren stier take it as a “Holocaust icon” that derives symbolic importance through literary and visual modes and Dara Horn consideration of her cultural value as a “dead Jew” in a milieu that, according to her, is more interested in dead Jews than in living ones.

At the same time, adaptations, or appropriations, as Ozick argues, continue apace. Recent efforts include a series of “video diaries” produced by the Anne Frank House and Ari Folman’s animated film, “Where’s Anne Frank?” The film follows Folman’s graphic adaptation, illustrated by David Polonsky, and places a personified diary at the center of a contemporary drama.

The energy and audience of these adult-written and produced adaptations draw people’s attention to Anne’s diary. However, we are still missing an accessible English edition of the version of the diary that she herself revised and edited.

There is one more version of Ana’s diary, therefore, that deserves to be published separately and widely available in English: version B, the version that she prepared for publication.

The published diary and cultural adaptations present Anne as a child deprived of a future rather than as a person who achieved something in her life. Reading the revised version of her own diary will allow us to recognize Anne as a skilled writer aware of her social, cultural and political world, that she grappled in her writing with her intertwined identities as young, female and male. bean.



Reference-www.washingtonpost.com

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