Frankfurt am Main is Anne Frank’s birthplace and the setting of her earliest childhood, remembered in her diary as the home the family left when Nazi persecution made life in Germany unsafe. The city’s significance reaches beyond biography: it marks the beginning of a history of displacement that later sharpened Anne’s sense of Jewish identity and her longing to belong in the Netherlands.

Birth and Early Childhood

Anne was born in Frankfurt am Main on June 12, 1929, the younger daughter of Otto Frank and Edith Frank. Her sister Margot had been born there in 1926. Anne lived in the city until she was four, when the family’s life in Germany ended amid rising danger for Jews.

The move was gradual across the family rather than a single departure. In 1933 Otto immigrated to the Netherlands to become managing director of the Dutch Opekta Company. Edith followed in September, while Anne and Margot were sent to Aachen to stay with their grandmother. Margot went to the Netherlands in December; Anne followed in February. In the diary’s childlike image, she was then placed on a table as a birthday present for Margot.

Family Flight and Exile

The family’s departure from Frankfurt belonged to a wider history of persecution. Anne recalls that relatives still in Germany suffered under Hitler’s anti-Jewish laws. After the 1938 pogroms, her two maternal uncles fled Germany and found refuge in North America. Her elderly grandmother, then seventy-three, came to live with the family in the Netherlands.

Frankfurt therefore remains present in the diary not as a described cityscape but as the origin of separation and flight. Anne’s childhood geography is recounted through family movements—her parents leaving first, the sisters staying with their grandmother, and each child eventually joining the household in the Netherlands. The compressed sequence gives the city a biographical importance defined by departure rather than by scenes of daily life there.

Memory, Belonging, and Identity

Years later, while in hiding in Amsterdam, Anne wrote of the Netherlands as a country she had hoped would become her fatherland because she had lost her own. She still hoped it would. That reflection makes Frankfurt more than a birthplace: it stands behind her sense of a lost home and her effort to claim a new one, even as antisemitism and persecution continued to threaten Jewish lives in the Netherlands.

Her diary also records how persecution made Jewish identity an imposed legal and social condition. Under German occupation, restrictions required Jews to wear a yellow star and barred them from ordinary places and activities, including public transport, theaters, and non-Jewish schools. Later, Anne responded to talk that German Jews who had immigrated to the Netherlands and been sent to Poland should not be allowed to return. Her attachment to the Netherlands persisted alongside her awareness that refuge could be withdrawn; Frankfurt’s place in her story is thus bound to the unstable meaning of home, exile, and belonging.