Anne Frank, 'The Diary of a Young Girl'

Barely two years after Anne Frank's death, her diary was published; the wounds of the Second World War had not yet healed. Over the years, numerous editions of the diary have been published, but this first edition naturally has a special place in the collection of the KB.

Anne Frank went into hiding with her family in July 1942. They hid in the back of her father Otto Frank's company: Opekta. Shortly before that, Anne had been given a poetry album as a gift on her thirteenth birthday, 12 June 1942. In this album, she recorded thoughts, events and stories from the back of the house. When the album was full, she received a few more school notebooks, in which she continued her notes and diary entries. Anne called her diary ‘Kitty’, as if she had a real friend with whom she could share everything.

Miep Gies

On 28 January 1944, the Frank family hears an appeal on Radio Oranje from Minister Gerrit Bolkestein to keep all the diaries from the war period for research and documentation after the war. Anne decides to rework her previous diary. In May 1944, she starts what will later be called The Diary of a Young Girl, rewriting her first diaries on sheets of carbon paper. Unfortunately, many of these loose sheets have been lost. On 4 August 1944, the people in hiding are discovered in the secret annex. The family is taken to Westerbork and from there later to the extermination camps in Poland. Family friend Miep Gies later finds Anne's diaries and loose sheets in the secret annex and stores them in her desk in the office. Weeks later, when the secret annex is emptied, some of the written sheets end up with Miep. When Otto Frank returns to Amsterdam in June 1945 as the only survivor of the family, he goes to live with Miep and Jan Gies. In August of that year it becomes clear that Anne and sister Margot will not return and Miep then gives Anne's writings to her father. Otto Frank gets his daughter's poetry album, school notebooks, a cash book and loose sheets. On his typewriter Otto Frank composes a copy by omitting parts and adding pieces from the later parts. After that the texts were also changed and improved by others, including an old friend of the family, Albert Cauvern. With the help of friends and acquaintances a copy of this second typescript was offered to several publishers, but no publisher showed any interest in a publication.

But then the second typescript comes to the attention of the historian couple Jan and Annie Romein. Jan Romein wrote an article about the diary in Het Parool on 3 April 1946: ‘Kinderstem’ ('A child's voice'). Various publishers contacted him, including Uitgeverij Contact in Amsterdam. After reading the diary, the staff at Contact were very impressed with it and were prepared to publish it, provided that certain parts would be omitted. This mainly concerned certain passages with ‘sexual content’ (about menstruation and touching each other’s breasts) and negative remarks about Anne’s mother. Otto Frank agreed to this, as is evident from a statement he made in 1959. Changes were made in the choice of words, lines were omitted, sometimes the text was expanded, and certain parts were deleted. Gerrold van der Stroom stated in the scientific edition that was published in 1986 under the auspices of the Riod (later Niod) that 'with the final result ... one would rather have a literary work by Anne Frank in one's hands than a historical (ego) document in the scientific sense of the word'.

And so, in the summer of 1947, Anne Frank, Het Achterhuis: dagboekbrieven van 12 juni 1942-1 augustus 1944, with a foreword by Annie Romein-Verschoor, was published in 1,500 copies. The flap includes part of Jan Romein's article from Het Parool of 3 April 1946.

Translations

In 1946, a German translation had already been made, intended for Anne's grandmother in Basel. The translation was done by the journalist Anneliese Schütz, an acquaintance of Frank. Her choice of words is somewhat old-fashioned, but she had the complete typescript at her disposal, which makes her translation more comprehensive than the Dutch edition. However, references to Germans and Germany in the negative sense had been changed or omitted. In 1950, the new edition of Das Tagebuch der Anne Frank was published by Verlag Lambert Schneider in Heidelberg.

The English translation did not appear until 1952 with the title The Diary of a Young Girl. The same year it was published in the United States. After the Netherlands, England, Germany and the United States, other countries around the world followed. It has been translated into more than 60 different languages. The KB collection includes translations of Anne Frank's diary into French, German, English, Russian, Romanian, Hungarian, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. There is even a translation into Amharic.