About book Anne Frank LP: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife (2009)
Probably most of us have read “The Diary of a Young Girl” by Anne Frank in our teen years. All of my children also read it in their 7th grade Calvert curriculum some 10-20 years ago. I saw the high school play while a teen (at Central Christian, Julia!) and my children’s home school academy also performed the play one year. What I did not know is that Anne herself went back and revised and rewrote her original diary after she and her family listened to a broadcast of Dutch news from the government in exile in London in March 1944 while in hiding. The minister of education encouraged the writing of diaries, letters, etc. by Dutch citizens so that future generations would understand what their people had suffered during the war. This directive propelled her to edit and revise the diary she had been writing for two years with an eye to having her book eventually published under the title of Het Achterhuis - The House Behind. All this rewriting was done diligently in the weeks before her arrest and she made major and minor changes. Her dreams of being an author were big.After the war, her father Otto, the only family survivor, essentially played editor and put together a version of his daughter’s work by combining passages from Anne’s first draft and from her revisions. He decided what details would be omitted and what would make the story flow better. What exists now are three versions: the “a” version is Anne’s original draft, the “b” version is her revisions, and the “c” version is the book her father put together by combining those first two drafts. All these versions can be found in “The Critical Edition” of The Diary of a Young Girl. I also had not know how desperately Frank Otto had tried to find asylum for his family in either the U.S. or Cuba as early as 1938 and as late as 1941. (He had already moved his family out of Germany into Holland in 1933.) He had even worked in NYC before the war and had some connections and willing sponsors (his wife’s two brothers), but U.S. immigration policy was so tight by this point that no visa was ever granted - a terrible pity.This interesting book explains how the publication of the book unfolded, how the Broadway play version evolved, how the movie version appeared, and much more. None of this effort was problem-free. In particular, the Jewish author Meyer Levin ended up in a lawsuit relationship with Otto Frank over his option to write the “play” version. Anne’s ending quote in the play and movie has always made me cringe - the “I still believe people are good at heart" line - because I believe that it is actually the opposite: man is basically a selfish animal and it is the civilizing forces of society and a belief in God that keep him from wreaking total havoc. This has bothered other readers as well and in a Wall Street Journal interview, Francine Prose says this: “ In the same passage as the famous quote that ended the movie, "…I still believe people are good at heart," she had a vision of the world completely destroyed. She was veering between hope and despair. She was constantly talking about the dark side of human nature. She wasn't a perky little messenger of good cheer. But she was a kid, and kids think they're going to survive.” I think we all know how easy it is to manipulate someone’s words to make it say what we want it to say. In drafting the play and movie script, there was always concern that it not just be a Jewish story, that it have a “univeralist" theme- the inherent problem with this approach being that the horror of the REAL story is downplayed in order to make it more palatable for the general public. This book made me want to reread “Diary of a Young Girl” with an eye toward appreciating the remarkable artist/author that young Anne Frank was. This is an extraordinary book. I may be biased, having had a father who came through Amsterdam on his way to the U.S. to escape Nazi oppression and deportation. Francine Prose puts the diary within the context of Anne Frank's whole life. It starts with the before, when she was growing up in the Merwerdplein district of Amsterdam and progresses through the years in hiding at 263 Prinsengracht, ending with her tragic demise at Bergen-Belsen. But it goes beyond, to tell the stories involved in the publication of the diary, the struggles to make an ill-advised play and movie. And how her father, Otto, worked to save the hiding place for the benefit of us all to actually see it, and how he established the Anne Frank Fonds to be an advocate for human rights.
Do You like book Anne Frank LP: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife (2009)?
I didn't finish reading this book - I found it to be boring.
—michelle
Amazing examination of her life and the aftermath.
—Kate
