There’s something very unsettling about the idea of editing someone’s personal and autobiographical journal. Out of respect for the dead, Otto Frank also omitted a number of unflattering passages about his wife and the other residents of the Secret Annex.” In addition, several passages dealing with Anne’s sexuality were omitted at the time of the diary’s initial publication, in 1947, it was not customary to write openly about sex, and certainly not in books for young adults.
#Anne franks diarey series#
“To begin with, the book had to be kept short so that it would fit in with a series put out by the Dutch publisher. She set the scene, described the book’s importance, discussed the war - and then explained that the book had been heavily edited:
The narrator, Helena Bonham Carter, started with the forward of the Penguin edition. I had managed to avoid reading Anne’s diary for most of my life, but not too long ago I decided to give it a go in audiobook form. For me, that knowledge was almost enough to make me boycott the book.
But not everyone realizes that the book published under the title The Diary Of A Young Girl is an abridged, reworked, and redacted version of the diary Anne actually wrote. The diary, originally titled Het Achterhuis, is a national treasure to Jewish women and girls throughout the world, and many Holocaust survivors and historians, such as Primo Levi, have said that it serves as a solid representation of the millions of Jews and other oppressed people who suffered at the hands of the Nazi party.
The edits on Anne’s diary are more than disrespectful to her memory - they seem to be an act of misogyny.Īnne Frank’s diary, published after its author died in a German concentration camp at age 15, is for many people the defining document of the Holocaust.
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