Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl
When in Amsterdam, I visited Anne Frank House as one does, and while I was there I picked up a copy of the book. Astonishingly, I'd never actually read the book, though I knew the story and have seen the play. It seemed like it was time. What I picked up was "Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl--The Definitive Edition," so called because up until the late 1980s, the diary had never been published in its entirety. (In 1989, an authoritative and scholarly edition called "The Critical Edition" was published by Bantam in the U.S.--a large volume in hardcover that compared Anne's two versions along with Otto Frank's edited version, footnoted and including a variety of related studies and reports.) Otto, with the discretion of a father and the scruples of an earlier era, chose to edit out some of the more intimate or sexually explicit content for a general audience. This volume is a version that Frank and a translator/editor put together that contains the complete contents of the diary based on everything that Anne left.
It most definitely is the diary of a teenaged girl, with all the emotional upheaval one would expect: dramatic statements of independence from her parents, stark declarations of hatred of her mother, heartfelt longings for boys. But it also contains impressively mature observations about the people with whom she was in hiding: perceptive dissections of the characters of each, thoughts about the world, notes about the helpers who got her and her family through their two years of hiding. And then there are the day-to-day details of what it was like hiding from the Nazis with both its joys and privations: days and days with nothing but potatoes and lettuce, oftentimes rotten, oftentimes without even any spice to make it more palatable; growing out of clothes and shoes; the inability to get away from anyone else even for a moment; and, of course, the terror of being discovered. It's clear that Anne was smart and that she matured quickly in such a situation. Obviously, the book's a testament to courage in adversity.
I think it's also a prime example of the difference between our internal and external lives as we grow up. Anne was who she was long before she got to what we typically think of as adulthood; I suspect this is true of most of us, though few people have the capacity to express it the way she did (though I suspect my hyperliterary and hyperliterate social circle is an obvious exception to this observation). Otto Frank himself said that reading the diary was a revelation, that he felt as though he was discovering a whole different Anne than the one he knew. When kids insist that their parents don't really know them, it's probably a far truer thing than adults credit it with being.
Overall the book is a quick read. Anne's style (or at least, her translator's style) is breezy and accessible. I did have moments of an adult's impatience with a teenager's perspective, yet tempered with the knowledge that she was living in an extraordinary situation. It's one thing for a privileged middle-class kid in the US to whine about not being able to go out; it's another thing entirely for a girl hiding for her life in NAZI-occupied Holland to complain in the same words about the same thing--very, very different. So the book turns all those things we think of as typically teenage on its head. It shakes you up and makes you pay attention--and I think that's an important part of Anne's message.
It most definitely is the diary of a teenaged girl, with all the emotional upheaval one would expect: dramatic statements of independence from her parents, stark declarations of hatred of her mother, heartfelt longings for boys. But it also contains impressively mature observations about the people with whom she was in hiding: perceptive dissections of the characters of each, thoughts about the world, notes about the helpers who got her and her family through their two years of hiding. And then there are the day-to-day details of what it was like hiding from the Nazis with both its joys and privations: days and days with nothing but potatoes and lettuce, oftentimes rotten, oftentimes without even any spice to make it more palatable; growing out of clothes and shoes; the inability to get away from anyone else even for a moment; and, of course, the terror of being discovered. It's clear that Anne was smart and that she matured quickly in such a situation. Obviously, the book's a testament to courage in adversity.
I think it's also a prime example of the difference between our internal and external lives as we grow up. Anne was who she was long before she got to what we typically think of as adulthood; I suspect this is true of most of us, though few people have the capacity to express it the way she did (though I suspect my hyperliterary and hyperliterate social circle is an obvious exception to this observation). Otto Frank himself said that reading the diary was a revelation, that he felt as though he was discovering a whole different Anne than the one he knew. When kids insist that their parents don't really know them, it's probably a far truer thing than adults credit it with being.
Overall the book is a quick read. Anne's style (or at least, her translator's style) is breezy and accessible. I did have moments of an adult's impatience with a teenager's perspective, yet tempered with the knowledge that she was living in an extraordinary situation. It's one thing for a privileged middle-class kid in the US to whine about not being able to go out; it's another thing entirely for a girl hiding for her life in NAZI-occupied Holland to complain in the same words about the same thing--very, very different. So the book turns all those things we think of as typically teenage on its head. It shakes you up and makes you pay attention--and I think that's an important part of Anne's message.