Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory

11. Critical Thinking: Scholars Reread the Diary

291 The publication of De Dagboeken van Anne Frank by the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation in 1986 marks a threshold in how Anne’s diary has been read, taught, and discussed. An English translation , The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition (referred to hereafter as the Critical Edition), appeared in 1989, followed by translations into German, French, and Japanese; a revised edition was issued in Dutch and in English in 2003.1 This new version of the diary initiated a wave of new scholarly scrutiny of the already iconic work long known to American readers as The Diary of a Young Girl. Whereas the diary had long received attention from historians as a document of Jewish resistance to Nazi persecution during World War II, more recent scholarship has read and discussed Frank’swork asan example ofwomen’s or adolescent writing,autobiography,coming-of-agenarrative,orHolocaustliterature. Cultural historian Berteke Waaldijk, for example, argued in 1993 that “Anne Frank’s symbolic value as an innocent victim of fascism should not prevent us from reading her diaries as a literary work. The outrage of her death is in no way diminished by taking her seriously as a writer.”2 More recently, author Francine Prose explains: “Like most of Anne Frank’s readers, I had viewed her book as the innocent and spontaneous outpourings of a teenager. But now, reading it as an adult, I quickly became convinced that I was in the presence of a consciously crafted work of literature.”3 Waaldijk, Prose, and other scholars and writers offer, in effect, new mediations of the diary through a distinctive approach to reading the text made possible in large measure by the publication of the Critical Edition. These new readings also reflect recent developments 11 Critical Thinking: Scholars Reread the Diary Sally Charnow 292 Sally Charnow both in the academy and in public discussion. In particular, more recent scholarship on Anne’s diary draws on historians’ interest in diary writing as social practice, on literary scholars’ attention to diary writing as a form of women’s writing and literature, and on the study of adolescence from a variety of perspectives.4 The Critical Edition was published with more than one end in mind. Ofprimaryimportancewastherefutation,onceandforall,ofallegations that the diary was a forgery, charges that neo-Nazis have made since the late 1950s. To that end, the Critical Edition provides an extensive discussion of the forensics conducted to establish the authenticity of the original diaries as being written by Anne Frank during World War II. Of greater significance for the new wave of scholarship on the diary, the Critical Edition presents on the same page each entry in three different versions: Anne’s original entries (termed “version a”), her own edited version of the text (“version b”), and the posthumously published text, edited primarily by her father, Otto Frank (“version c”). This format enables readers to compare the different versions easily and track the changes from one version to another. Also included in the volume are extensive introductions that detail the Frank family’s history and that of the diary. Thus, the Critical Edition explicates the literary significance of the diary and affirms its historical value as both highly significant and irrefutable. Waaldijk contends that the publication of the unabridged texts goes well beyond demonstrating that they are not forgeries, and she links the effort to authenticate the text with its literary worth: “Although the differences [in the handwriting] may be negligible from the point of view of the political and judicial claims of authenticity, they are extremely significantforreadersinterestedinAnneFrankasawomanwriter.”5 The publisher of the English version of the Critical Edition concurs, explaining on its dust jacket: “In comparing Anne’s two versions, the reader sees how her thinking and ability to write developed during her two years in hiding. Her corrections to both versions demonstrate how she worked; rarely has one had such an opportunity to follow the process of writing so closely.”6 Noting the increased academic interest in Anne’s artistic process, Prose likewise observes that the “various drafts provide evidence of [Anne’s] creative process, of her gifts for revision, of her first Critical Thinking 293 and second thoughts about how she wanted to portray herself and those around her.”7 The Critical Edition enhances this turn to reading the diary as literature by suggesting that, like paintings by Henri Matisse or poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning...