Anne's diary

Anne’s diary is a personal record that became a work for publication and, through several distinct editorial stages, a widely read account of life under Nazi persecution. Its history is inseparable from Anne’s own revision, Otto Frank’s postwar choices, and the later recovery and authentication of the manuscripts. In the Secret Annex, the diary was more than a record: when discovery seemed imminent, Anne insisted that losing it would mean losing part of herself.

From private record to intended book

Anne kept a diary from June 12, 1942, to August 1, 1944, initially writing only for herself. In 1944, a radio address by Gerrit Bolkestein, a member of the Dutch government in exile, called for the collection of wartime eyewitness accounts, including letters and diaries. The address changed Anne’s purpose: she decided that after the war she would publish a book based on her diary.

She began revising her entries, improving the text, removing passages she judged uninteresting, and adding material from memory, while continuing to write the original diary. The first, unrevised manuscript is designated version a; Anne’s rewritten and edited manuscript is version b. The surviving account therefore preserves not just what Anne recorded as events unfolded, but also her deliberate effort to shape those experiences into a book.

Anne’s literary ambition appears explicitly in her later writing. She hoped to become a journalist and then a famous writer, and imagined publishing a book called The Secret Annex after the war, with her diary as its basis. That plan gives her revisions a particular weight: she was not merely keeping a private chronicle but beginning to fashion a public work, even as the outcome remained uncertain to her.

The diary in hiding

The diary took shape amid the restrictions imposed on Jews after the German occupation of the Netherlands. Anne records rules requiring Jews to wear a yellow star, surrender bicycles, use limited shopping hours, and avoid public transport, entertainment, sports facilities, and visits to Christian homes. These constraints form the everyday setting against which the diary’s private observations and future plans developed.

When the Frank family went into hiding, the diary became part of the life they were trying to protect. The plan had been to enter hiding on July 16, but Margot’s call-up notice advanced the departure by ten days. The hiding place was in Otto Frank’s office building, whose warehouse and workrooms included areas where spices were processed. The diary’s record of life in this concealed setting makes its later role as a document of persecution inseparable from the particular circumstances in which it was written.

Its importance became most immediate during a security scare. After police rattled at the bookcase concealing the entrance, the residents discussed whether to hide the radio and what might happen if they were discovered. Otto Frank noted that the police might also find Anne’s diary, and someone proposed burning it. Anne later described that moment as one of her greatest fears, declaring that if the diary went, she went with it. The object had become bound to her sense of self as well as to the future book she hoped to write.

Arrest and custody of the manuscripts

The last diary entry is dated August 1, 1944. On August 4, the eight people hiding in the Secret Annex were arrested. Afterward, Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl found Anne’s diaries scattered across the floor. Miep gathered them and put them unread in a desk drawer for safekeeping.

After the war, when it became clear that Anne had died, Miep gave the manuscripts to Anne’s father, Otto Frank. Their passage from the abandoned hiding place to the desk drawer and then to Otto preserved writings that Anne had expected to revise and publish herself. Otto’s decision to publish fulfilled that expressed wish, but the resulting book was an editorial construction rather than a reproduction of any single manuscript.

Editing, authentication, and later editions

Otto combined selections from versions a and b into a shorter text, version c, which became the edition familiar to readers around the world. The selection reflected practical and social considerations. The book had to fit a Dutch publisher’s series; passages concerning Anne’s sexuality were omitted because open discussion of sex, especially in books for young adults, was not customary at the time of the first publication in 1947. Otto also removed unflattering passages about his wife and other residents of the Secret Annex, out of respect for the dead.

After Otto died in 1980, he bequeathed Anne’s manuscripts to the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation in Amsterdam. Because the diary’s authenticity had been challenged since publication, the Institute commissioned a thorough investigation. Once the diary was established as genuine, it published the manuscripts in their entirety alongside the results of an exhaustive examination. The Critical Edition includes versions a, b, and c, as well as studies of the Frank family’s background, the circumstances of arrest and deportation, Anne’s handwriting, and the documents and materials used.

A later expanded edition was commissioned by the Anne Frank-Fonds, which inherited the copyrights as Otto’s sole heir. Writer and translator Mirjam Pressler supplemented Otto’s selection with passages from versions a and b. Approved by the foundation, this definitive edition contains approximately 30 percent more material than the earlier selection. It does not displace the integrity or historical importance of Otto’s edition; instead, it gives general readers access to more of the writing and a fuller view of Anne’s world.

Names and the shaping of a public text

While preparing version b, Anne devised pseudonyms for people who would appear in her planned book. She initially considered Anne Aulis for herself and later Anne Robin. Otto chose to publish his own family under their real names, while following Anne’s wishes for the other people represented. The helpers’ identities eventually became widely known, and this edition names them by their real names; other people are identified according to the pseudonyms used in The Critical Edition. For people who wished to remain anonymous, the Institute assigned initials.

The diary’s publication history thus records a continuing negotiation between private writing and public memory. Anne revised her own account with a future audience in mind; Otto made selections shaped by the publishing circumstances and conventions of 1947; investigators later established the manuscripts’ authenticity; and an expanded edition restored further material. The successive texts preserve different stages of the work without erasing the central fact that Anne had wanted her diary to become a book.