The Diary of a Young Girl
The Diary of a Young Girl, commonly referred to 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 in 1945. Anne's diaries were retrieved by Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl. Miep gave them to Anne's father, Otto Frank, the family's only survivor, just after the Second World War was over.
"The Diary of Anne Frank" redirects here. For other uses, see The Diary of Anne Frank (disambiguation).Author
Het Achterhuis (The Annex)
B. M. Mooyaart-Doubleday
Helmut Salden
Dutch
25 June 1947
Netherlands
1952
949.207
DS135.N6
Het Achterhuis (The Annex) at Dutch Wikisource
The diary has since been published in more than 70 languages. It was 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 Vallentine 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]
The copyright of the Dutch version of the diary, published in 1947, expired on 1 January 2016, seventy years after the author's death, as a result of a general rule in copyright law of the European Union. Following this, the original Dutch version was made available online.[6][7]
Background[edit]
During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, Anne Frank received a blank diary as one of her presents on 12 June 1942, her 13th birthday.[8][9] 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 browsing a bookstore near her home.[9] She entered a one-sentence note on her birthday, writing "I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support."[10][11] The main diary was written from 14 June.[12][13]
On 5 July 1942, Anne's then-15-year-old sister, Margot, received an official summons to report to a Nazi work camp in Germany, and on 6 July, Margot and Anne went into hiding with their parents Otto and Edith. They were later joined by Hermann van Pels, Otto's business partner, his wife Auguste and their teenage son Peter.[14] Their hiding place was in the sealed-off upper rooms of the annex at the back of Otto's company building in Amsterdam.[14][15] Otto Frank started his business, named Opekta, in 1933. He was licensed to manufacture and sell pectin, a substance used to make jam. He stopped running his business while in hiding. But once he returned in the summer of 1945, he found his employees running it. The rooms that everyone hid in were concealed behind a movable bookcase in the same building as Opekta. Fritz Pfeffer, the dentist of their helper Miep Gies,[16] joined them four months later. In the published version, names were changed: The van Pelses are known as the Van Daans, and Fritz Pfeffer as Albert Dussel. With the assistance of a group of Otto Frank's trusted colleagues, they remained hidden for two years and one month.[17][18]
On 6 June 1944, the Allied forces commenced the Normandy landings, in France; the group was aware of this development, and hopeful for eventual liberation. On 4 August 1944, six weeks before the Allies breached the Belgian-Dutch border, the group was discovered and deported to Nazi concentration camps. They were long thought to have been betrayed, although there are indications that their discovery may have been accidental, that the police raid had actually targeted "ration fraud".[19] Of the eight people, only Otto Frank survived the war. Anne was 15 years old when she died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, in Nazi Germany. The exact date of her death is unknown, and has long been believed to be in late February or early March, a few weeks before the concentration camp was liberated by British troops on 15 April 1945.[20]
In the manuscript, her original diaries are written over three extant volumes. The first volume (the red-and-white checkered autograph book) covers the period between 14 June and 5 December 1942. Since the second surviving volume (a school exercise book) begins on 22 December 1943, and ends on 17 April 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 17 April to 1 August 1944, when Anne wrote for the last time three days before her arrest.[21]: 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,[22] but before their rooms were ransacked by a special department of the Amsterdam office of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD, Nazi intelligence agency) for which many Dutch collaborators worked.[23] The papers were given to Otto Frank after the war, when Anne's death was confirmed in July 1945 by sisters Janny and Lien Brilleslijper, who were with Margot and Anne in Bergen-Belsen.[24]
Format[edit]
The diary is not written in the classic forms of "Dear Diary" or as letters to oneself; Anne calls her diary "Kitty", so almost all of the letters are written to Kitty. Anne used the above-mentioned names for her annex-mates in the first volume, from 25 September 1942 until 13 November 1942, when the first notebook ends.[25] It is believed that these names were taken from characters found in a series of popular Dutch books written by Cissy van Marxveldt.[25]
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,[22] 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 20 May 1944, she notes that she started re-drafting her diary with future readers in mind.[26] 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.
Synopsis[edit]
Anne expressed the desire in the rewritten introduction of her diary for one person that she can call her truest friend – that is, a person to whom she could confide her deepest thoughts and feelings. She observes that she has had many "friends" and admirers, but (by her own definition) no true, dear friend with whom she could share her innermost thoughts. She originally thought her girl friend 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 considers that he might become a true friend. In hiding, she invests much time and effort into her budding romance with Peter van Pels, thinking he might evolve into that one, true friend, but that is eventually a disappointment to her in some ways, although she continues to care for him. Ultimately, 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 self-admitted chatterbox (a source of irritation to some of the others). As time went on, however, she and Peter became very close and spent a lot of time together. After a while Anne became disappointed in Peter and on 15 July 1944, she wrote in her diary that Peter could never be a 'kindred spirit'.[29]
Authenticity[edit]
As reported in The New York Times in 2015, "When Otto Frank first published his daughter's red-checked diary and notebooks, he wrote a prologue assuring readers that the book mostly contained her words".[75] Although many Holocaust deniers, such as Robert Faurisson, have claimed that Anne Frank's diary was fabricated,[76][77] critical and forensic studies of the text and the original manuscript have supported its authenticity.[78]
The Netherlands Institute for War Documentation commissioned a forensic study of the manuscripts after the death of Otto Frank in 1980. The material composition of the original notebooks and ink, and the handwriting found within them and the loose version were extensively examined. In 1986, the results were published: the handwriting attributed to Anne Frank 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.[78]
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.[79]
Nazi sympathizer Ernst Römer accused Otto Frank of editing and fabricating parts of Anne's diary in 1980. Otto filed a lawsuit against him, and the court ruled that the diary was authentic. Römer ordered a second investigation, involving Hamburg's Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt (BKA)). That investigation concluded that parts of the diary were written with ballpoint pen ink, which was not generally available in the 1940s. (The first ball point pens were produced in the 1940s but they did not become generally available until the 1950s.) Reporters were unable to reach out to Otto Frank for questions as he died around the time of the discovery.[80]
However, the ballpoint pen theory has mostly been discredited. There are only three instances where a ballpoint pen was used in the diary: on two scraps of paper that were added into the diary at a later date (the contents of which have never been considered Anne Frank's writing and are usually attributed to being Otto Frank's notes) and in the page numbers (also probably added by Otto Frank while organizing the writings and papers).[81][82]
Copyright and ownership of the originals[edit]
Anne Frank Fonds[edit]
In his will, Otto Frank bequeathed the original manuscripts to the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation. The copyright however belonged to the Anne Frank Fonds, a Switzerland-based foundation based in Basel which was the sole inheritor of Frank after his death in 1980. The organization is dedicated to the publication of the diary.[83]
Expiration[edit]
According to the copyright laws in the European Union, as a general rule, rights of authors end seventy years after their death. Hence, the copyright of the diary expired on 1 January 2016. In the Netherlands, for the original publication of 1947 (containing parts of both versions of Anne Frank's writing), as well as a version published in 1986 (containing both versions completely), copyright initially would have expired not 50 years after the death of Anne Frank (1996), but 50 years after publication, as a result of a provision specific for posthumously published works (1997 and 2036, respectively).
When the copyright duration was extended to 70 years in 1995 – implementing the EU Copyright Term Directive – the special rule regarding posthumous works was abolished, but transitional provisions made sure that this could never lead to shortening of the copyright term, thus leading to expiration of the copyright term for the first version on 1 January 2016, but for the new material published in 1986 in 2036.[7][30]
The original Dutch version was made available online by University of Nantes lecturer Olivier Ertzscheid and former member of the French Parliament Isabelle Attard.[6][84]
Authorship[edit]
In 2015, the Anne Frank Fonds made an announcement, as reported in The New York Times, that the 1947 edition of the diary was co-authored by Otto Frank. According to Yves Kugelmann, a member of the board of the foundation, their expert advice was that Otto had created a new work by editing, merging, and trimming entries from the diary and notebooks and reshaping them into a "kind of collage", which had created a new copyright. Agnès Tricoire, a lawyer specializing in intellectual property rights, responded by warning the foundation to "think very carefully about the consequences". She added "If you follow their arguments, it means that they have lied for years about the fact that it was only written by Anne Frank."[75]
The foundation also relies on the fact that another editor, Mirjam Pressler, had revised the text and added 25 percent more material drawn from the diary for a "definitive edition" in 1991, and Pressler was still alive in 2015, thus creating another long-lasting new copyright.[75] The move was seen as an attempt to extend the copyright term. Attard had criticised this action only as a "question of money",[84] and Ertzscheid concurred, stating, "It [the diary] belongs to everyone. And it is up to each to measure its importance."[85]