Anne Frank’s diary

Anne Frank’s diary is both a record of a young writer’s intimate thoughts and an object with a layered history: Anne kept an original diary, revised it toward a future book, and addressed it as the imagined friend Kitty. After Anne’s death, Otto Frank combined material from her two versions into a shorter edition; later scholarly and expanded editions restored further material and documented the manuscripts’ authenticity. The diary’s path from birthday gift to private confidante, intended book, and public historical document makes its authorship and editorial history inseparable from its meaning.

A Gift and an Imagined Confidante

On June 12, 1942, Anne received the diary among her birthday presents. She had been awake since six, waiting until she was allowed out of bed; after greeting Moortje, she went to open presents with her parents. The diary was one of the first things she saw and, she wrote, perhaps one of her nicest gifts. Its personal significance came to exceed its place among the presents: Anne began writing in it because she felt she lacked a true friend with whom she could share more than everyday conversation.

Anne gave the diary a conversational identity by calling it Kitty. Rather than treat it as a place to list facts, she imagined it as a friend whose presence might make complete confidence possible. Her opening hope was that she could confide everything and find comfort and support in the diary. In a comment added on September 28, 1942, she described Kitty as a source of comfort and said that she could hardly wait for the moments when she was able to write. The changing address—from the diary as gift to Kitty as confidante—turns writing into a recurring act of seeking company.

The diary’s intimate address also shapes what kind of record it is. Anne wrote from her own immediate perspective, recording her feelings and judgments rather than presenting a detached account of events. Later, she recognized that this candor could preserve anger and one-sidedness alongside insight. The diary’s force rests partly in that unevenness: it records not a settled public portrait, but a mind speaking to a chosen listener and returning to what it had said.

A Record Made Under Restriction

The diary began just as the restrictions imposed on Jews had narrowed daily life. Anne recalled rules requiring Jews to wear a yellow star, give up bicycles, avoid public transportation and many forms of entertainment, shop only at specified hours, and attend Jewish schools. The rules determined where people could go and what they could do, while the diary supplied a private space in which Anne could record how life continued under those constraints.

When Margot’s call-up notice changed the family’s plans, Anne and Margot packed their most important belongings into a schoolbag. Anne put the diary in first, along with curlers, handkerchiefs, schoolbooks, a comb, and old letters. The sequence gives the diary a practical as well as emotional place among the things she chose to carry: in an urgent departure, she made room for a written record and for the memories attached to it.

The family had planned to go into hiding on July 16, but Margot’s call-up brought the date forward by ten days. On the walk to the hiding place, Anne’s parents gradually explained the plan; the destination was her father’s office building. Later, the diary also recorded how danger there altered ordinary routines. After Peter found the warehouse and street doors open, the residents followed instructions to stay quiet, avoid washing or running water, dress by eight, and not use the bathroom. A burglary had taken two cashboxes, blank checkbooks, and coupons for 330 pounds of sugar. The diary thus holds together private reflection and specific evidence of how the threat of discovery shaped daily conduct in hiding.

Self-Revision and Intended Publication

The diary was not only a record Anne kept; in 1944 she began reshaping it for readers she hoped would encounter it after the war. A radio broadcast by Gerrit Bolkestein, a member of the Dutch government in exile, called for eyewitness accounts of life under German occupation, including letters and diaries. Impressed by the broadcast, Anne decided to make a book based on her diary. She revised and edited the writing, improved passages, removed material she considered insufficiently interesting, and added recollections from memory, while continuing to keep the original diary.

The distinction between these two forms of her writing became central to the diary’s editorial history. The first, unedited diary is known as version a; Anne’s rewritten version is version b. The two versions are not simply duplicates: one preserves the original diary as she wrote it, while the other records her active decision to shape that material as a book. Her project gives the diary a double temporality: it looks back at lived experience while also anticipating a future reader.

Anne’s self-understanding changed within the diary as well. Revisiting earlier pages about her mother, she was shocked by the force of her own anger and tried to understand the perspective from which she had written. She acknowledged that, in distressed moods, she had seen matters only from her own point of view and had not calmly considered what others had said or how her words affected them. She still described her anger as real, but also recognized that her mother’s affection existed alongside nervousness and irritability in difficult circumstances. The diary became a memory book in which earlier judgments could be preserved, reconsidered, and sometimes marked as finished.

Editorial Choices and Public Versions

After the arrest of the people hiding in the Secret Annex, Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl found Anne’s diaries scattered on the floor. Miep put them away in a desk drawer and, after the war, gave them unread to Otto Frank when it became clear that Anne had died. Faced with his daughter’s wish to publish, Otto deliberated and assembled a shorter version from Anne’s versions a and b. This version c became the edition known to readers around the world.

Otto’s selection reflected the conditions of the book’s first publication in 1947. The Dutch publisher’s series required a short book; passages about Anne’s sexuality were omitted because the subject was not then customary in books for young adults; and, out of respect for the dead, Otto removed unflattering passages about his wife and the other residents of the Secret Annex. Those decisions shaped the first public version without making it equivalent to Anne’s own edited manuscript: the published book was a further selection, made by her father from two distinct bodies of writing.

After Otto Frank died in 1980, he willed Anne’s manuscripts to the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation in Amsterdam. Because the diary’s authenticity had been challenged, the Institute commissioned a thorough investigation. Once the diary was established as genuine, the complete texts were published alongside the results of an extensive study. The Critical Edition includes versions a, b, and c, as well as material on the Frank family, the circumstances of the arrest and deportation, Anne’s handwriting, and the document and materials used to produce the diary. The work thereby presents not only Anne’s writing but also the evidence and investigation supporting its authenticity.

The Expanded Edition and the Diary’s Legacy

The Anne Frank-Fonds in Basel, Otto Frank’s sole heir and the holder of Anne’s copyrights, commissioned a new expanded edition for general readers. Mirjam Pressler, a writer and translator, compiled it with the foundation’s approval. The edition supplements Otto Frank’s original selection with passages from versions a and b and contains approximately 30 percent more material, offering readers a broader view of Anne’s writing. It does not replace or undermine the earlier edition; the two editions represent different editorial arrangements of material Anne left behind.

The choices of names also reveal the changing boundary between privacy and public record. In version b, Anne invented pseudonyms for people who would appear in her planned book, initially considering Anne Aulis and later Anne Robin for herself. Otto chose to use his family’s real names while respecting Anne’s pseudonyms for others. As the identities of the people who helped the family became common knowledge, the expanded edition used their real names, while other people continued to be identified according to the pseudonyms in The Critical Edition. For people wishing to remain anonymous, the Institute assigned initials.

The diary’s publication history therefore preserves several kinds of authorship and remembrance: Anne’s first record, her intended literary revision, Otto’s postwar selection, scholarly authentication, and a later expanded edition. Its intimate form remains central even as the surrounding editions make it a public historical document. The diary began with Anne’s wish to confide in a friend; its successive versions show how that private address became a book read by others, without erasing the revisions, omissions, and decisions through which it reached them.