Basel enters the diary’s publication history as the later home of Otto Frank and the base of the Anne Frank-Fonds. The city links his postwar life to the preservation and expanded publication of Anne Frank’s manuscripts, carrying the story from the family’s private record toward an enduring public edition.

Otto Frank’s postwar connection

After Auschwitz was liberated, Otto Frank returned to Amsterdam by way of Odessa and Marseille, arriving on June 3, 1945. He remained in Amsterdam until 1953, when he moved to Basel, where his sister and her family lived; his brother later lived there as well. He eventually settled in Birsfelden, outside Basel, and continued until his death on August 19, 1980, to share the message of his daughter’s diary with people around the world.

This connection gives Basel a place in the diary’s history beyond geography. It was part of the setting of Otto Frank’s later life, after his return from the camps and the loss of the other seven people who had hidden in the Secret Annex. The account identifies him as the only one of the eight to survive the concentration camps and presents his public work on Anne Frank’s diary as a continuing commitment.

The foundation and the expanded edition

The Anne Frank-Fonds, based in Basel, inherited the copyrights to Anne Frank’s manuscripts as Otto Frank’s sole heir. It later commissioned a new, expanded edition for general readers, entrusting the work to writer and translator Mirjam Pressler. The edition supplemented Otto Frank’s original selection with passages from Anne Frank’s earlier and revised diary versions, adding approximately 30 percent more material.

The expanded edition was intended to give readers greater insight into Anne Frank’s world. Its publication did not replace or compromise the integrity of Otto Frank’s earlier edition, which had brought the diary and its message to millions. Basel therefore figures in a distinct stage of the work’s transmission: not the first publication, but the institutional and editorial setting for a fuller edition.

A place in the diary’s transmission

The diary reached readers through several successive forms. Anne Frank first wrote for herself, then began revising the diary after hearing Gerrit Bolkestein call for wartime letters and diaries to be collected as eyewitness accounts. Otto Frank later selected material from her original and edited versions for the shorter edition published in 1947. The expanded edition associated with the Basel foundation added passages that had not appeared in that selection.

This history makes Basel significant as a point where personal inheritance, copyright, editorial work, and public memory meet. The city is connected both to Otto Frank’s postwar effort to share his daughter’s writing and to the foundation’s decision to make a more extensive version available to general readers. Its role in the book is thus closely tied to the diary’s continuing life beyond its author and first editor.