Bookmarks: Orwell that ends well, or perhaps not
A fortnightly look at books, writers and reviews
Next month, June 12, is the 90th anniversary of Anne Frank’s birth. The German-born Jewish teenager became a
Bookmarks: Orwell that ends well, or perhaps not
A fortnightly look at books, writers and reviews
Next month, June 12, is the 90th anniversary of Anne Frank’s birth. The German-born Jewish teenager became a renowned victim of the Holocaust following the posthumous publication in 1947 of The Diary of a Young Girl (or Het Achterhuis in the original Dutch). It details her life in hiding in Amsterdam from 1942 to 1944 during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.
As the book’s acclaim spread in the 1950s – it would go on to be translated into more than 60 languages, sell more than 30 million copies, and inspire numerous theatrical and film adaptations – there came, inevitably, allegations from notable antisemites about the veracity of the diary. Throughout his life, Otto Frank, Anne’s father and the family’s sole survivor, mounted successful libel actions against those who claimed the book was a forgery.
After his death in 1980, his daughter’s original diary, including letters and loose sheets, was handed over to the Dutch Institute for War Documentation, which commissioned a forensic study of the diary in 1986. They examined Anne’s handwriting against known samples and found that they matched. They determined that the paper, glue, and ink were readily available during the time the diary was said to have been written. They concluded that the diary is authentic, and their findings were included in 1989 in The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition (Viking), edited by David Barnouw and Gerrold van der Stroom.
Authoritative as that volume was, it is now about to be surpassed by a more impressive edition; this week Bloomsbury publishes the magisterial Anne Frank: The Collected Works, which presents three different versions of The Diary. The first, or version A, is the one that Anne actually wrote on the days themselves: the text is messy, with entries out of date order and filled with digressions.
Version B is Anne’s own revision of her first diary. She started this project early in 1944 after hearing a radio broadcast from the exiled Dutch government urging citizens to keep a record of the occupation. It is a far more serious work, with a careful chronology charting the progress of the war.
The third version is the one prepared by Otto Frank for publication in 1947. Writing in the Guardian, the Oxford English professor Bart van Es states that Frank cut the sexual material from his daughter’s writings and removed much of her criticism of her fellow hideaways, before editing a work that would capture the world’s imagination: “He blended and reordered Versions A and B to give the book a more coherent and literary character.”
One of the strengths of The Collected Works, Van Es writes, is that it allows the reader to track the evolution of The Diary across its various incarnations. The diaries’ new translation by author Mirjam Pressler has also drawn praise for bringing more character to Anne’s writing.
The new collection, however, contains much more than the diary. Anne’s other writings, including 14 short stories, an uncompleted novel, essays and reminiscences and previously unpublished letters, also appear alongside a wealth of contextual material. There’s a family history, background essays and a remarkable account of the diary’s printing and reception, which ends with the publication of Philip Roth’s 2007 novel Exit Ghost.
Van Es, incidentally, is the author of last year’s Costa Book of the Year and the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize for his own Holocaust book, The Cut Out Girl: A Story of War and Family, Lost and Found (Penguin). It tells the heartbreaking story of Lien de Jong-Spiero, a girl from the Hague who came to live with Van Es’s grandparents in Amsterdam when her parents were arrested and murdered after transportation to Auschwitz.
However, just as Lien began to feel at home in the care of Jans and Henk van Es, the authorities began to ask questions about her. She was then sent to live in the care of a Protestant family in a distant village. There she was treated as a servant, and not one of the family, and raped by a family member. She kept silent about this terrible abuse for years. “The rapes are a secret,” Van Es writes, “hard and poisonous, that she swaddles within.”
Some 4,000 Jewish children survived the war in hiding in Holland. Lien, however, was one of just 358 who would stay on with a non-Jewish family after 1945: she asked to return to the Van Eses. Their grandson makes the point that, although they were married at a synagogue, Lien’s parents were not observant: “It is really Hitler who makes Lien Jewish,” he states.
Van Es also notes that the Franks had moved to Amsterdam in 1933, when Anne was four, to escape persecution in Germany. Not for nothing, then, did Anne Frank regard the Dutch as “brave protectors”. Yet the death rate of the Dutch Jews, more than double that of any other country in Western Europe, suggests a deeply collaborative society. Most arresting o