Anne Frank (2 page)

O
N
March 29, 1944, the residents of the secret annex gathered around their contraband radio to listen to a broadcast of Dutch news from London. In the course of the program, Gerrit Bolkestein, the minister of education, art, and science in the exiled Dutch government, called for the establishment of a national archive to house the “ordinary documents”—diaries, letters, sermons, and so forth—written by Dutch citizens during the war. Such papers, the minister said, would help future generations understand what the people of Holland had suffered and overcome.

As they listened, the eight Jews in the annex focused on the young diarist in their midst. “Of course they all made a rush at my diary immediately.”
Of course.
Anne’s diary was a fact of communal life, like the potatoes they ate, the bathing arrangements they worked out, the alarming break-ins downstairs, and it inspired curiosity and consternation in the people she was writing about. As early as September 1942, Anne describes snapping her little book shut when Mrs. Van Pels comes into the room and asks to see the diary, in which Anne has just been writing about her, unflatteringly. A month later, during a moment of closeness—Margot and Anne have gotten into the same bed—Margot asks if she can read Anne’s diary, and Anne replies, “Yes—at least bits of it.”

For most of her stay in the annex, Anne’s diary had been her friend and her consolation. She wrote it for companionship, for the pleasure of writing, for a way to help fill the long hours during which she and the others were required to keep silent and nearly motionless while business was being transacted in the Opekta office downstairs. She wrote to help make sense of herself and the people around her. As Philip Roth notes in
The Ghost Writer,
the diary “kept her company and it kept her sane.”

But now, at this hopeful juncture, when it had begun to
seem that the war might end and that people might want to read about the lives of its victims and its survivors, the attic residents agreed that Anne’s diary was exactly the sort of thing the exiled Dutch minister meant. Anne took his speech as a personal directive. By the morning after the broadcast, she was envisioning a bright career for her book, a future more glamorous than what Minister Bolkestein proposed: posterity in the archive that would become the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation.

“Just imagine how interesting it would be if I were to publish a romance of the ‘Secret Annex.’ The title alone would be enough to make people think it was a detective story. But, seriously, it would be quite funny ten years after the war if we Jews were to tell how we lived and what we ate and talked about here.” The title Anne had in mind,
Het Achterhuis
—literally, “the house behind” or “the annex”—refers to the fact that the rooms in which she and her family hid were above Otto Frank’s former workplace and concealed from the street by the buildings around it. Many old Dutch houses had annexes of this sort, a maze of extra rooms added onto the back of the house, meant to extend the cramped space dictated by the structure’s narrow facade.

A few days later, Anne lay on the floor and sobbed until the idea of herself as a writer lifted her out of despair. “I must work, so as not to be a fool, to get on to become a journalist, because that’s what I want! I know that I can write, a couple of my stories are good, my descriptions of the ‘Secret Annex’ are humorous, there’s a lot in my diary that speaks, but—whether I have real talent remains to be seen….”

On April 14, she had serious misgivings about her abilities. Even so, she was imagining the Dutch ministers as her potential audience, and her critics: “Everything here is so mixed up, nothing’s connected any more, and sometimes I very much
doubt whether anyone in the future will be interested in all my tosh. “The unbosomings of an ugly duckling’ will be the title of all this nonsense; my diary really won’t be much use to Messrs. Bolkestein or Gerbrandy.”

In May she again wrote that she wished to become a journalist and a famous author—only now she had a sense of the book that might make her reputation. “Whether these leanings towards greatness (insanity!) will ever materialize remains to be seen, but I certainly have the subjects in my mind. In any case, I want to publish a book called
Het Achterhuis
after the war. Whether I shall succeed or not, I cannot say, but my diary will be a great help.”

The most important result of this new sense of vocation was that Anne began to refine and polish her diary into a form that she hoped might someday appear as
Het Achterhuis.
On May 20, she wrote, in a passage her father deleted, “At long last after a great deal of reflection I have started my ‘Achterhuis,’ in my head it is as good as finished, although it won’t go as quickly as that really, if it ever comes off at all.”

In
The Ghost Writer,
Roth’s hero, Nathan Zuckerman, remarks that the diary’s dramatic scenes seemed to have gone through a dozen drafts. The truth is that many of them
did
go through at least two.

Returning to the earliest pages, Anne cut, clarified, expanded her original entries, and added new ones which in some cases she predated, sometimes by years. Thus the book is not, strictly speaking, what we think of as a diary—a journal in which events are recorded as they occur, day by day—but rather a memoir in the form of diary entries. The translator of the
Definitive Edition,
Mirjam Pressler, has written one of the few books that acknowledges the importance of Anne’s revisions. Published in English as
Anne Frank: A Hidden Life,
and, oddly, targeted at a young-adult readership, Pressler’s book
mixes biographical information, a meditation about Anne and the others in the annex, and illuminating comparisons between the original diary and the version Anne rewrote.
“The Diary of a Young Girl
is not a diary kept in chronological order from beginning to end as one might expect. The main part of the book consists of the second version of Anne’s original diary, revised with additions by Anne herself, with some stories from the account book in which she also wrote.”

Judith Thurman got it right, as few have, when she questioned even calling the book, as Anne’s American publishers did,
The Diary of a Young Girl.
“That ingenuous title corresponds to what is in fact an epistolary autobiography of exceptional caliber. It takes the full measure of a complex, evolving character. It has the shape and drama of literature. It was scrupulously revised by its author, who intended it to be read. It is certainly not a piece of ‘found art,’ as one Dutch critic has suggested.”

One can understand Doubleday’s belief that
The Diary of a Young Girl
was a catchier title than
The House Behind.
Though Anne Frank imagined
Het Achterhuis
as a novel in the form of a journal, it has come down to us as a diary. In
The Ghost Writer,
Philip Roth—who, as a fellow novelist, would be naturally sensitive to a writer’s prerogative to call her book what she wants—refers to Anne’s book only as
Het Achterhuis,
and to the Broadway play by
its
name,
The Diary of Anne Frank.

D
ESPITE
Anne’s initial misgivings, the revision of Het Achterhuis went very quickly. Correlating the penmanship of the loose sheets against that of the notebooks, the forensic handwriting analysts later employed by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation concluded that “if we take May 20, 1944, as the starting date (on the basis of the comment in part 3) and August 1, 1944, as the date of the last entry, then the average daily
entry would run to from 4 to 5 pages a day. These must have been written in addition to the entries in the diary, part 3…. It appears that the writer worked more intensely on the loose sheets, particularly in the period between July 15 and August 1, 1944. During that period, 162 pages were completed, or about 11 pages a day.”

Working at this astonishing rate, Anne rewrote her early draft in the weeks before her arrest, making major and minor changes. Like any memoirist fearing hurt feelings, or accusations of misrepresentation, she made a list of pseudonyms for the Jews and their helpers. The Frank family would become the Robins, the Van Pelses would be called the Van Daans, while the dentist, Fritz Pfeffer, would appear in the book as Albert Dussel. Perhaps for fluency, she continued to use the real names when she wrote her second draft.

“I am the best and sharpest critic of my own work. I know myself what is and what is not well written. Anyone who doesn’t write doesn’t know how wonderful it is.” By the time she made her final entry, on August 1, 1944, she had revised the passages that preceded the March radio broadcast and kept the diary up to date in an unrevised first draft.

After the war, when Otto Frank read over his daughter’s work and became convinced that she’d meant it to be published, he prepared a version of the book that combined passages from Anne’s first draft and from her revisions, in some cases using earlier versions of passages that she had subsequently revised. All in all, Otto Frank did an admirable job of editing—omitting needless details, choosing between alternate versions of events, preserving the essence of the diary, and intuiting what would make the book more appealing to readers. In many cases, that meant reversing Anne’s decisions about what she wanted omitted—for example, the intensely emotional entries from the start
of her romance with Peter van Pels, with whom she had become disenchanted during the time she was rewriting her diary.

The cooling of the love affair and Anne’s focus on the revisions may not be entirely unrelated. Once she had stopped thinking semiobsessively about the boy upstairs, Anne had more time and energy to devote to her writing. She would not have been the first artist to discover that the end of a romance can inspire a return to work with new energy and sharpened concentration.

I
N
1986, the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation published
The Critical Edition of the Diary of Anne Frank,
a huge volume, over eight hundred pages long, that includes all the extant drafts of Anne’s diary; the English edition would appear three years later. Missing from the book were the five pages that Otto Frank and the Frank family chose to leave out, pages that subsequently appeared in the more recent
Revised Critical Edition,
which was published in Dutch in 2001 and in English in 2003. Both the earlier and later editions contain an account of the methods and conclusions of the forensic experts employed by the institute, who proved that the diaries, except for a few minor editorial corrections, were written entirely by Anne Frank. Their meticulous research demonstrated how the evolution of Anne’s handwriting over the course of the two years in hiding took the exact trajectory that the penmanship of a child—the same child—would be expected to follow between the ages of thirteen and fifteen.

In
The Critical Edition,
the original draft of Anne’s diary is referred to as the “a” version. The revisions that she made on the loose sheets constitute the “b” version. And the book that her father produced by combining those first two drafts is reprinted as the “c” version. All three drafts are printed in parallel bands, so that it is possible—painstaking, time-consuming,
and at times maddening, but possible—to read all three versions and to determine what Anne originally wrote, what she rewrote, what she intended to appear in
Het Achterhuis,
and at what points her father respected or reversed her decisions. Judith Thurman observed, “What a comparison of the texts does reveal is both how spontaneously the diarist composed her prose and how finely she then tuned it. In order to make such a comparison, however, one needs a certain amount of motivation. The editors’ instructions on how to read
The Critical Edition
are more arcane, and harder to follow, than those for a build-it-yourself hang glider.”

What makes the task of comparing Anne’s original draft with her revisions and with her father’s compilation even more challenging are all the unanswered and unanswerable questions. When Anne said that she had begun writing
Het Achterhuis,
did she mean that she had
just
begun? Long gaps in each version must be filled in by consulting the others. Even in the cloth diary, pages are misnumbered and dated out of order. If Anne omitted something from her second draft, did that mean that she intended to excise it completely, or that she felt the first version was sufficient? And finally, for those of us who don’t read Dutch, there is the problem of knowing how much we are missing by reading the work in translation. According to David Barnouw, one of the editors of
The Critical Edition,
only readers of Dutch can appreciate how much Anne’s style changed over those two years. In the published version, explains Barnouw, Anne’s incorrect word choices and other youthful mistakes were rectified, and the rougher passages were smoothed out. “Otherwise, it would have seemed that the editor made a mistake.”

One of the most clear-sighted experts on the diary is Laureen Nussbaum, a childhood acquaintance of the Frank family (after the war, Otto would be the best man at her wedding) who
went on to become a professor at the University of Oregon. She was the first to note that the revised, or “b,” draft—Anne’s own version of the text—has never been published as a stand-alone volume. The 1995
Definitive Edition,
commented Nussbaum, only further muddied the waters since many of the cuts it restored (Anne’s reflections on her sexuality and outbursts of rage at her mother) were sections that Anne herself had removed from the book she hoped to publish.

A
S SOON
as I had taken the time to understand what
The Critical Edition
contained, and the implications of the alternative versions, I realized that to write about Anne Frank as an artist would be more involved than a straightforward close reading of
The Diary of a Young Girl.
Suddenly, it was as if Anne had written two books—at least two books—that needed to be considered.