Anne Frank and Petronella van Daan

Anne Frank and Petronella van Daan, whom Anne usually calls Mrs. van Daan, are joined in the diary by a relationship that moves from scorching caricature toward self-questioning and attempted reconciliation. The change is significant not because their conflicts disappear, but because Anne begins to examine her own family’s part in them and to form an independent judgment of the woman she had once treated as the chief antagonist.

A portrait made in anger

Anne’s early account is a prosecutorial portrait. She calls Mrs. van Daan pushy, egotistical, cunning, calculating, perpetually dissatisfied, vain, and coquettish, then declares her thoroughly despicable. The breadth of the list is itself revealing: Anne says she could write a whole book about Mrs. van Daan, and refuses to single out just one fault because she sees so many. Yet the attack comes with a qualification about appearances. Mrs. van Daan, Anne writes, can be charming and friendly to strangers, especially men, making it easy to misjudge her when first acquainted.

Anne also frames her judgment through the household’s competing opinions. Edith thinks Mrs. van Daan stupid, Margot considers her unimportant, and Otto regards her as ugly both literally and figuratively. Anne says she has reached her own conclusion only after long observation and insists that she is not prejudiced at the outset. The claim of impartiality sits uneasily beside the accumulated insults: the entry records not a settled, neutral assessment, but a moment when Anne’s anger has taken command of her description.

That anger is made explicit in the postscript. Anne asks the reader to remember that the account was written before her fury had cooled. This retrospective warning complicates the denunciation: the diary preserves the force of the feeling while also marking it as a temporary, emotionally charged judgment. Mrs. van Daan appears through Anne’s eyes, but Anne’s own state of mind becomes part of the evidence.

Reconsidering the quarrels

Later, Anne reports that her attitude toward the van Daans has changed. She no longer wants to interpret every argument through what she calls her family’s biased point of view. The reconsideration begins with a counterfactual: if Edith had been different—if she had been a real mother, in Anne’s phrasing—their relationship would have been very different, and many disputes with Mrs. van Daan might have been avoided. Anne does not suddenly idealize Mrs. van Daan; she still calls her less than wonderful and describes her as selfish, stingy, and underhanded. Instead, she distinguishes those faults from the possibility of talking with her.

Anne observes that Mrs. van Daan will readily back down when she is not provoked or made unreasonable, although patience does not guarantee success. Anne’s proposed approach is therefore practical as well as moral: keep trying, avoid needlessly inflaming a dispute, and see how far a conversation can go. The diary’s change in perspective is not a claim that the older woman has become easy to deal with. It is a recognition that the manner of dealing with her can affect what happens next.

Anne extends this reconsideration beyond any single disagreement. Arguments about child-rearing, whether children should be pampered, food, and “everything, absolutely everything” might have taken another course if the families had remained open and on friendly terms instead of continually looking for the worst in one another. Her account locates the conflict not only in contrasting opinions, but in the habits of suspicion and defensiveness through which those opinions are expressed.

From inherited loyalty to independent judgment

Anne anticipates an objection: how can this reassessment come from someone who has endured so many unkind words from upstairs and knows the injustices at first hand? Her answer is not to deny what happened, but to claim the right to reconsider it. She wants to form her own opinion rather than simply repeat her parents’ views, invoking the proverb about the apple not falling far from the tree as a pattern she wants to resist.

The new stance has limits. Anne says that if her renewed assessment disappoints her, she can side with Otto and Edith; if it does not, she can try to change their attitude toward the van Daans. If that effort fails, she will have to stand by her own opinions and judgment. She plans to take opportunities to speak openly with Mrs. van Daan about their differences, despite her reputation as a smart aleck. At the same time, she draws a boundary around family loyalty: she will not speak negatively about her own family, though she will defend them if someone else does.

The most consequential admission is Anne’s reversal of blame. Until then, she had been absolutely convinced that the van Daans were entirely responsible for the quarrels. She now believes that the fault was largely her own family’s. She still maintains that her side was right about the substance of the disputes, but adds that intelligent people should understand better how to deal with others. The distinction allows her to preserve her convictions while conceding that being right on an issue does not excuse a damaging way of treating people.

A relationship that becomes a test of discernment

The diary does not show the promised conversations resolving the relationship, nor does it establish that Mrs. van Daan’s character has changed. What it records is Anne’s intention to test her new understanding in practice: to speak openly, keep trying with patience, and stop gossiping. The movement is therefore from certainty about the other person’s faults toward a more difficult kind of agency—judging for herself, accounting for her own side, and accepting that an effort at repair may not succeed.

This shift also changes how the earlier portrait can be read. The angry inventory remains part of the record; it is not retracted or replaced by praise. But Anne’s later recognition of bias makes the relationship more than a catalogue of antagonism. Mrs. van Daan remains difficult in Anne’s account, while Anne becomes more alert to the difference between observing a flaw and making someone wholly answerable for a shared conflict. Their relationship thus traces a movement from accusation toward self-examination, without pretending that understanding has already become harmony.