On June 12, 1942, a Jewish schoolgirl from Amsterdam received a blank notebook on her thirteenth birthday. Threatened by Nazi raids, she and her family took refuge shortly after at number 263 on rue Prinsengracht, a shelter whose walls shrank a little more each day. In the 75 square meters of the “Annex” (which she shared with her parents, her sister and four other people), Anne Frank wrote pages and pages, confiding in her diary her dreams, her frustrations, her secrets. His last words date from 1er August 1944. Arrested by the Gestapo three days later, she died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp (Lower Saxony), a few days after her sister Margot, probably around March 1945.
The only survivor among the eight residents of the “Annex”, Otto Frank, Anne’s father, returned to the Dutch capital in June 1945. He then found many of his daughter’s writings, carefully preserved in a drawer: notebooks, letters, loose black sheets of words. While going through them, the man is surprised to discover his daughter’s private thoughts, which she usually kept to herself. “It was a very different Anne from the one I knew”he will admit. At the insistence of those close to him, he nevertheless set about reworking the text with a view to publication.
A watered down version
What changes is Otto Frank making? Anne’s father begins by eliminating passages in which the teenager was harsh with classmates or members of her family, notably her mother Edith, with whom she had a conflictual relationship. Certain sweeping judgments, understandable in the mouth of a 13-year-old girl, disappear from the version published in 1947 under the title Het Achterhuis (“The Secret Annex”). Some passages evoking his daughter’s sexuality are also excluded.
Before crying for censorship, we must keep in mind that it was Anne Frank herself who made some of these cuts. In the spring of 1944, the Dutch government in exile launched an appeal to the population, insisting that the texts be preserved which would shed light on the “dark years”. Dreaming of herself as a writer, Anne undertakes to thoroughly revise the diary she began writing a year and a half earlier, deleting certain passages that she considers too intimate or explicit.
“When I asked Mom what this growth (the clitoris) was for, she told me she didn’t know. No wonder, she always has these stupid reactions!”
While, until now, she devoted herself body and soul to her journal – affectionately nicknamed “Kitty”–, Anne Frank decides to rework the text, even if it means scratching the authenticity of her testimony a little. She adds details, spins metaphors, improves the account of her memories. In return, she censors passages that mention her rules (a “sweet secret”* which she nevertheless welcomes with pride), hides a few daring jokes and silences the first stirrings of her sexuality.
For example, this passage from January 6, 1944 in which Anne is surprised by the upheavals of puberty: “I find it so astonishing what happens to me and not only what is seen on the surface of my body, but what is happening inside. (…) Sometimes, in the evening in my bed, I have a terrible urge to feel my breasts and listen to the quiet and regular beat of my heart.” Further on, she talks about a friend she had “terribly want to kiss” and adds: “I am in ecstasy every time I see a naked female body, like a Venus in Springer’s art history book.”*
This extract will be redacted by its young author in the revised version of her Newspaper. Just like the one where, on March 24, 1944, she details her anatomy*: “When I asked Mom what this growth (the clitoris) was for, she told me she didn’t know. No wonder, she always has these stupid reactions!” We can imagine that the teenager found these lines too embarrassing to include them in the final version of her text… Her father followed the same course of action, thinking that the power of his testimony would only be reinforced.
Revisions and revisionism
Since the publication of Het Achterhuis and its English translation in 1952, several versions of the Diary of Anne Frank were reconstituted. One of them, completed in 1991 by the famous German translator Mirjam Pressler, is considered a reference text. Unfortunately, these “final” versions were not to everyone’s taste. In the United States, the (rare) passages evoking adolescent sexuality have sometimes been the subject of attempts to ban the book in schools.
The differences between successive editions of the Diary of Anne Frank caused other controversies. Even today, they serve as an argument for Holocaust deniers who strive to prove that the document is a fabrication (even if its authenticity has been proven numerous times). Others, on the contrary, welcomed the revelations about Anne’s sexuality with pride, transforming her into a martyr of the LGBT+ community. However, it should be remembered that she was first and foremost a victim of the anti-Semitism of the Third Reich and that her sexual orientation cannot be established with certainty.
More generally, many were surprised to discover – in light of the updated versions of its Newspaper– a teenage girl feeling bad about herself, impertinent, sometimes rude or bitter. But who hasn’t gone through the same emotions at 13, 14 or 15 years old? Perhaps the global impact of her testimony obscured the simple fact that she was experiencing the anxieties and tensions that everyone goes through when transitioning to adulthood. What if that was precisely what we had to remember, the fact that Anne Frank was a teenager like any other? Doesn’t that give even more weight to his testimony?
The person concerned, in any case, did not seem to deny it. “It’s a very strange feeling, for someone like me, to write a diaryshe wrote in her still brand new notebook on June 20, 1942*. Not only have I never written, but it seems to me that later, neither I nor anyone will be interested in the secrets of a 13-year-old schoolgirl.” Today his Newspaper has been translated into more than seventy-five languages around the world.
