When reading diaries we peek into pages supposedly not meant for our eyes. And we feel sadly her impotence and ours to prevent the inevitable, even as we admire her courage and vitality. Our knowledge of not only what awaits Anne, but in what, in fact, awaited her. The words struggle against the inevitability of history. Thus, the writing and rewriting has a strong effect of pathos on the reader. For the historical circumstances are always there, a pentimento peeking through. But so do most first readers.įinally, every page of the Diary of Anne Frank is historically framed by the Holocaust. Yet, not only does the re-reader know the outcome, her capture, deportation, her death.
What is different from a retrospective memoir is that, like a serial novel that would be published in tiny episodes and numbers, we're aware of the continuing possibility of unwriting and rewriting. Entries become tentative formulations, discursive hypotheses, which are modified, undermined, and reformulated. Thus, each subsequent entry modifies the prior one. What is striking about The Diary Of Anne Frank is that it is like most diaries, writing at a brief retrospective interval, and that it affords a record of the evolution of the writer's mind. It his 1841 notebook, Henry David Thoreau wrote, quote, "My journal is that of me which would else spill over and run to waste," unquote. And I shall call my friend Kitty," unquote. But I want this diary itself to be my friend.
In order to enhance in my mind's eye the picture of the friend for whom I have waited so long, I don't want to set down a series of bald facts in a diary like most people do. And now I come to the root of the matter, the reason for my starting a diary. But more than that, I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in my heart. As she matures, she imagines an increasingly sophisticated listener or reader in Kitty, a narratee who becomes a poly-auditory listener, responding to a tale of racial persecution, family deprivation, and adolescence. The entries are in the form of epistles to quote, "Dear Kitty," unquote, and signed, quote, "Yours, Anne," unquote.Ī goal is to express what she calls her real feelings. Thus, she gives the diary the name of a pet, called "Kitty," unquote. The diary opens with Anne's wishes that she will have an empathetic other in whom to confide. Otto Frank typed the diaries and made some additions and corrections. It is worth noting that Anne rewrote most of her diary before capture. After Otto Frank, Anne's father, and the lone survivor from his family, returned from the camps, he was given the diaries by Miep Gies, who had taken care of the family in hiding and who found and hid the diaries after the Nazis arrested the eight Jews who were hiding. How many assimilated Jews reading this book in the 1950s, as a child or young adolescent as I did, became more conscious of their own Jewish identity? The Frank family fled German persecution for Holland, only to find themselves caught up in the maelstrom after Germany invaded Holland. We can never become just Netherlanders or just English or representatives of any country for that matter. But it will be God, too, who will raise us up again.
Quote, "Who has inflicted this upon us? Who has made us Jews different from all other people? Who has allowed us to suffer so terribly up till now? It is God that has made us as we are. The Diary of Anne Frank is a story of how Anne increasingly sees herself as a marginalized Jew, as other, as belonging to a group singled out for persecution and deprived of her complete personal and cultural identity, and given another identity.Īt times we hear the voice of political and spiritual eloquence. It is a dialogic text that speaks in many, and at times, contradictory voices. How we read this text tells us something about ourselves. SCHWARTZ: The Diary of Anne Frank, published in 1947, in Holland, as a title that would translate in English as, quote, "The House Behind," unquote, and later in the United States in 1952, under the title The Diary of Anne Frank, is probably the best known and most widely read Holocaust diary memoir.