The diary as confidante

The diary as confidante is the role Anne Frank gives her writing when she finds that having a family, friends, and admirers does not mean having someone with whom she can speak honestly. She addresses the diary as Kitty, an imagined friend who can receive thoughts she cannot share elsewhere. The relationship offers comfort in the immediate act of writing, but its significance grows beyond private consolation: the diary becomes both a means of self-expression during hiding and, through successive acts of revision and publication, a lasting public testimony.

A private answer to loneliness

In June 1942, Anne describes writing as an unfamiliar undertaking: she has never written anything before, doubts that anyone will care about the thoughts of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl, and nevertheless feels a strong need to get things off her chest. The hesitation does not stop the writing. Rather, the notebook gives her a place to speak without having to prove in advance that her thoughts are important.

Anne distinguishes being surrounded by people from being able to confide in them. She has loving parents, a sister, a home, and roughly thirty people she can call friends, as well as admirers at school. With friends, however, she says that conversation stays with ordinary everyday matters and does not bring them closer. Her sense of having no true friend is therefore not a denial that she is cared for; it names the absence of the particular intimacy she longs for. The diary begins in that gap between visible companionship and private isolation.

She makes the notebook more than a record of events. To give shape to the long-awaited friend in her imagination, she decides not to write it as most people would keep a diary, simply jotting down facts. Instead she will treat it as a friend and call that friend Kitty. The name makes the diary a recipient, not merely a surface: Anne can direct thoughts toward someone even when no confidante is available in her daily life.

Kitty as listener and support

Anne’s opening hope is that she will be able to confide everything in the diary, something she says she has never been able to do with anyone, and that it will provide comfort and support. By September 28, 1942, she records that this hope has already become experience. She writes that Kitty has truly been a source of comfort, says she now writes to Kitty regularly, and looks forward to the moments when she can write. The diary’s changing meaning is visible in that shift: what began as an experiment becomes a recurring relationship and a valued part of her day.

The confidante also changes how the notebook is understood. Anne reflects that paper has more patience than people, an idea prompted by a lonely, listless day when she sits at home wondering whether to stay in or go out. She first expects that no one else will read the stiff-backed notebook; unless she finds a real friend, its contents will remain private. Yet the thought that paper can patiently receive what people do not is already a reason to continue. Kitty gives that receptive page a personal form, making private writing feel like communication rather than a monologue.

Anne’s return to the diary is recurrent rather than confined to its opening pages. When she feels weak, worries that she has failed to meet expectations, or believes people misinterpret her intentions, she says she winds up coming back to it. She begins and ends there because Kitty is always patient. The diary does not resolve the misunderstandings around her, but it allows her to state what those misunderstandings feel like and to make a fresh promise to keep going, find her own way, and hold back her tears. She wishes for encouragement from someone who loves her, while continuing to use the diary in its absence.

Writing under persecution

The diary’s inward role develops amid the pressure of life in hiding. News brought to the residents by Mr. Dussel describes friends and acquaintances taken away, searches for Jews, and families removed from their homes. Anne writes of the contrast between the relative safety of the hiding place and the suffering of people outside, including her guilt at sleeping in a warm bed while friends are in danger. Her diary gives her a place to register both sides of that contrast: relief at being sheltered and distress at being unable to help those she cares about.

Elsewhere she describes people being dragged from their homes, families separated, and Dutch Christians also afraid because their sons are being sent to Germany. She recognizes that the residents are fortunate in having quiet and safety and being able to use their money to buy food, yet notices how readily they talk about life after the war and the new clothes and shoes they hope to have. In the diary, awareness of their relative safety does not erase private hopes; instead, the two thoughts remain together, as do the wish for a future and unease about the suffering beyond their hiding place.

In this context, Kitty’s patience has more than a social meaning. The diary is an ongoing place to put feelings that cannot be settled by the circumstances around Anne: loneliness, fear for others, self-reproach, and determination. It cannot change the persecution or restore contact with those outside, but it enables her to keep articulating an inner life under conditions that sharply limit ordinary life and communication.

From personal diary to public record

The confidante role is not the diary’s only form. At first Anne writes strictly for herself. In 1944, after Gerrit Bolkestein of the Dutch government in exile speaks on the radio about collecting eyewitness accounts of suffering under German occupation, including letters and diaries, Anne decides that she would like to publish a book after the war. She begins rewriting and editing her diary, improving the text, omitting passages she considers uninteresting, and adding material from memory, while continuing to keep the original diary. The private practice of telling Kitty thus becomes also a deliberate effort to shape an account for future readers.

The two strands of writing are distinguished as version a, Anne’s first, unedited diary, and version b, her revised diary. In version b, she invents pseudonyms for people who would appear in her intended book, and initially considers writing under the name Anne Aulis, later Anne Robin. This work of revision does not cancel the diary’s intimate origin; it shows Anne adapting her personal record for an audience beyond the imagined friend who first made such candor possible.

After Anne’s arrest, her diaries are found on the floor by Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl and kept safe by Miep. After the war, when Anne is known to be dead, Miep gives them unread to Otto Frank. Otto decides, after long deliberation, to honor his daughter’s wish to publish. He selects material from versions a and b to make a shorter version, later called version c. The publication therefore carries the writing from the private relationship between Anne and Kitty into a form chosen for readers, while retaining material from both the original diary and Anne’s own revision.

Editing, transmission, and significance

The first published version appears in 1947. Its length is shaped to fit a Dutch publisher’s series; passages about Anne’s sexuality are omitted in keeping with the conventions of the time, and Otto also leaves out some unflattering passages about his wife and the other residents of the hiding place out of respect for the dead. Anne, who began her diary at thirteen and was forced to stop at fifteen, had written freely about her likes and dislikes. The published text is thus not identical to the unedited writing she addressed to Kitty: it is the result of choices about length, contemporary expectations, and family privacy.

When Otto dies in 1980, he leaves Anne’s manuscripts to the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation in Amsterdam. Because the diary’s authenticity has been challenged, the Institute commissions a thorough investigation. Once the diary is established as genuine, it is published in its entirety with the findings of the investigation. The Critical Edition includes versions a, b, and c, alongside material on the Frank family, the circumstances of arrest and deportation, and examinations of Anne’s handwriting, the document, and its materials. The diary’s public authority therefore rests not only on its intimate voice but also on the preservation and study of the manuscripts.

A later expanded edition, commissioned by the Anne Frank-Fonds and compiled by Mirjam Pressler, supplements Otto’s selection with passages from Anne’s versions a and b. It contains approximately thirty percent more material and is intended to offer readers greater insight into Anne’s world; it does not displace the integrity of the earlier edition. The passage from private notebook to several published forms makes the diary’s history part of the concept itself: a confidante first imagined for personal use becomes a text revised by its young writer, selected by her father, and later presented more fully to the public. Kitty remains the name of the relationship that made the writing possible, even as the diary’s readers multiply.