Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife

For anyone interested in Anne Frank's diary, this book will be a fascinating read. (Note: the term "diary" is an oversimplification, given that she rewrote much of her original diary with a view toward possible publication after the war.) Its primary focus is how the diary came to be published, published in more places, dramatized, and publicized. Along the way, it touches on the lives of Anne, her family, and those who helped them. It spends more time chronicling the strange and sad saga of the man who championed the diary, expected to write the play, became obsessed with writing the play, and ended up in an increasingly intense and bizarre feud with Otto Frank and others. There is also a good deal of discussion and criticism of the ways the diary is often taught in schools, and the extent to which readers and teachers focus on the "uplifting" rather than the tragic and historical aspects of Anne's story.

I didn't think a book about Anne Frank could be just blech, but this one is. It is a little boring, in fact. Even though the subject is somewhat academic, I think it could have been written in a more interesting way. There is some interesting facts about the book here, but when I look at a book I'm reading and think, "Oh, no. Isn't there something more interesting to read?," it's time to put it away. Just can't recommend this one highly.

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank became an instant classic when it was published in the 1950s. The book, and the play, movie, and other dramatizations and adaptations have all made such deep impressions that the identity of the young girl who was Anne Frank herself has been obscured.Francine Prose has done a good job of recovering the real Anne Frank. This book is part biography, part literary critique, and part history of the diary and the reactions to it over the years. I was impressed by how much of the real history of Anne Frank had been recovered, and I found the literary critique of her writing interesting as well. I had not realized, though now that I know it seems obvious, that much of Anne's diary, particularly the first few entries, must have been rewritten and edited. Prose reveals that it was Anne herself who did much of the editing work during her last few months in hiding.I was also intrigued by the stories behind the development of the play and movie. Having seen and loved both the movie and the play, it was a bit of a surprise to me to realize, thanks to Prose's analysis, that some of the most famous lines were actually inserted by others, and are not original to Anne herself (though I think a good argument could be made that she would have agreed with them). I was surprised to read of the bitter arguments over whether the diary was too dark or too Jewish (!) to appeal to a general audience. Perhaps the most interesting, if disturbing, section of the book details the disgusting efforts to discredit the diary as a counterfeit.This book adds immensely to our understanding of the gifted young writer who was Anne Frank, and if it tears away some illusions, it makes her in her newly revealed complexities all the more fascinating.

It appears that when an occurrence or person attains a certain fame, increasingly more is read into it. Author Prose does so perhaps to the utmost. As a Holocaust survivor myself, I would like to bring things down to earth some. Anne Frank was one of the millions of victims of Nazism, and her plight happened to be recorded by her to a reasonable extent, and that recording happened to survive and become known along with attending circumstances.Her story is particularly poignant, because she was a child, representative of the many others eventually brutally murdered. However, Prose portrays her as so exceptional in personal qualities that it diminishes in merit other victims (I hope not to be self-serving, but objective). The author characterizes her as a "literary genius" (p.69), a "prodigy" (p.131), her writing a "masterpiece" (p.69), "that the seeming artlessness of her style is an artistic achievement" (p.264). Could it be that her style was genuinely artless, unpretentious? It seems author Prose only weakens her credibility by such superlatives, when Anne Frank deserves a sober account of her tragic misfortune in order to be appreciated.Author Prose heightens the reader's sense of insufficient reliability by describing young Anne (p.84) as "beautiful", as "photogenic", while readers are themselves enabled to make such a judgment. No doubt many will not see the child as beautiful and photogenic, unless every child can be so described. Rather, little Anne projects (as I see it) sweetness and innocence, which should arouse more sympathy than the preceding descriptions.I don't want to fault author Prose too much, since she informs well in many aspects, as in calling attention to Nazi inhumanity in many forms, like the language they used. For instance, she mentions (p.170) Nazi lists as recording people transported to Auschwitz as "Stücke" (pieces). Incidentally, she left out the "umlaut", the dots over "u" or alternatively a subsequent "e". This is characteristic of a looseness of research in the book. Linguistically, the author often quotes translations; in one case she writes (p.30) "Mutti" as if a name, but which is a German equivalent of "mommy"; elsewhere she writes (e.g. p.142) "Daddy" and "Mummy", with capitals, used for German nouns. She writes (p.40) "Reynhard Heydrich" instead of "Reinhard" for the Nazi monster, and (p.60) "Thieresienstadt" for "Theresienstadt", the concentration camp.On the same page is also an example of what may be a relative naiveté about the Holocaust. She writes of Anne's father as "Down to a hundred and fourteen pounds" before liberation from Auschwitz. I was not in Auschwitz and can't dispute this, but the author seems disturbed by that weight, which is not comparable to the weight of most inmates liberated from concentration camps. Liberated from Gunskirchen, my weight was about 35 kilos, 77 pounds, at height of 5'9½", and I did better than most. The author also quotes (p.58) the demise of Anne's sister in Bergen-Belsen: "Margot had fallen out of bed onto the stone floor..." During my captivity of about a year, beginning with slave labor, a bed was unthinkable. The best we started with was padding with straw. I was not in Bergen-Belsen, but beds for inmates, in quite similarly run camps, appear to me very doubtful.The author also seems to suppose too much knowledge on the part of European Jews. She writes (p.50): "Anne managed to make an insane and horrifying reality - a family was about to spend two years in an attic to avoid being rounded up and killed - seem...merely like an unusual turn in the normal course of events." Anne couldn't know how long she would live in the attic, or that they'd be killed. We were largely ignorant of our future, hoping the madness would soon end. The author thinks Anne knew about the Holocaust because writing: "If it's that bad in Holland, what must it be like in those faraway and uncivilized places where the Germans are sending them? We assume that most of them are being murdered. The English radio says they're being gassed. Perhaps that's the quickest way to die" (p.234). Sadly, it's not the quickest way, and Anne and her family merely assumed things, excepting radio broadcasts that were sketchy, as "quickest way" indicates. On the whole, we knew nothing about the systematic murders, learning about "the final solution" only after liberation.It seems noteworthy that the author keeps referring to those who kept the Franks and cohabitants hidden and provided their life's necessities as "helpers". They deserve much better. They were heroic benefactors, ones we came to call righteous Gentiles. Nevertheless, the author is of historic service by probing into the many details surrounding those events.

I found this book very interesting and informative. I don't remember when or if I read The Diary of Anne Frank. I seem to recall seeing it on TV. This book gave me a better insight about Anne and Otto. I didn't realize Otto's difficult time and process to get the diary published, much less the play and the movie. Now I need to go back and read all 3 versions as well as watch the movie. That is how this book affected me.

Like most people, I came across "The Diary of a Young Girl" while still at school and became acquainted with Anne. Later, I came to appreciate Anne Frank as the gifted writer that she was, and this book helped to explain the diary and the life it has taken on in the media and in education. I read the diary as just that - a diary written in the moment, but it was interesting to read that Anne had written, re-written and revised her diary, expecting and hoping it would be published. The diary was, therefore, more a memoir and, as Anne became more reflective and aware, she refined sections.The book is split into three sections: the Book, the Life, the Afterlife. The first part looks at the diary itself, how Anne re-worked it and how her father later edited it, removing parts he felt might be hurtful or too explicit. This is the version that most people still think of as 'the diary'. The author then examines Anne's life, how it ended and what happened during the arrest and to all the principal characters in the diary. Lastly, she looks at how Anne's diary has evolved. The saga of the play, along with lawsuits and the problems with finding someone to produce the script; the later film adaptation, the museum and how the diary is taught in schools.This is a very informative account of everything to do with the Diary and the life of Anne Frank. For anyone interested in how the diary has been interpreted, how it has inspired and how it still survives as such an important document, this book is a must.

Anne Frank's Diary is one of the most popular books ever printed. Francine Prose shows that few appreciate the manner of its writing or the mode of its construction. Most assume it consists of the spontaneous day to day thoughts and observations of Anne in her attic hideaway. In fact from 1944 Anne began to revise her earliest entries significantly, as she intended or hoped for her work to be published. The title she proposed was Het Achterhuis. When her father, Otto, rediscovered the diary after the war he edited a script composed of elements of both of Anne's versions as well as excerpts from her other writings. Finally, further amendations were insisted on by publishers.However, all of the text is emphatically Anne's. More importantly, the second version with only her revisions shows a rarely talented writer, whose life and promise were brutally ended in Belsen. This is the Anne Francine tries to rescue.The Broadway play of 1955 and subsequent film took the dilution further and gave currency to an entirely different image. She became a typical American teenager. This portrayal guaranteed huge commercial success and a vast international audience. But clearly a great deal was lost. This book charts the partial recovery of the historical Anne Frank. No longer just a guide through the angst of puberty, a perky optimist with a wry sense of humour. The work of the Anne Frank Foundation has driven the fight against racism and intolerance in all societies. For many young people the diary is a way into an understanding of the Holocaust. The author recognizes that the power of the diary is precisely that it can mean so many things, and indeed that it was crafted by so many editors and publishers and publicists to be just that - "universalistic".. She also agrees that ultimately every reader will come to find Anne's soul in the end, and the more readers the book gets so in the end the better.A question considered only briefly is what would have happened to Het Achterhuis if Anne had survived. Would it have been confined to college reading lists?Francine Prose makes much of the place of the Diary on the school curriculum. She makes several suggestions as to how it should be tackled. However, she is not a teacher and the only class she describes is with a group of very bright 20 year olds in a university seminar on literary criticism. I would lie to know how middle and high school teachers do use the text.There is much else in this book about the history or afterlife of the diary, as well as depressing sections on those who find it pornographic and those who deny the Holocaust completely. Such people are few if vocal.This really is an essential book for anyone who has ever read about the annex until the light fades, the door is broken and Anne goes to her death.