Diary
Adaptations

In 1952, Meyer Levin, who had campaigned for the publication of the Diary and for its circulation in the English-speaking world, started to work on a stage adaptation of the Anne Frank material. However, his version did not find favour with theatre producers, and the ensuing legal battle lasted for many years.
 

In late 1953, the successful screen writers Albert Hackett and Francis Goodrich-Hackett were commissioned to write a stage adaptation. Their play opened on Broadway in New York on 5 October 1955 and was a great success with the public. The company performed 717 times to about one million spectators over two years. Hackett and Goodrich were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for their dramatisation of the diary.

Their play was a fairly free interpretation of the Diary in parts, with some character traits being exaggerated and certain scenes being invented. The fact that Anne Frank was a Jewish girl who had been persecuted and ultimately died an agonising death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, was negligible in their version. They turned the Diary of Anne Frank into a testimony of «a pure heart in a time of horror», in the words of a review. As the stage version was, at times, better known than the book edition, this became the prevailing image of Anne Frank: the girl who «despite everything [...] believes in the good in people», as the character of Otto Frank says at the end of the play.

In 1997, on behalf of the Anne Frank Fonds, Wendy Kesselman reworked the play from the 1950s. Her version was, once again, closer to the original text of the Diary. In addition, she added some recently published parts of the Diary to the play. Kesselman’s version made the historical context clearer and put the figure of Anne into the foreground.

Finally, in 2014, almost 60 years after the first dramatisation, «Anne» by Leon de Winter and Jessica Durlacher brought a completely new play to the stage. The play is embedded in a framework plot: after the war, Anne Frank tells a publisher about her Diary and takes the audience back to the year 1942 when she is given the notebook for her 13th birthday. While the role of Otto is shifted slightly into the background, the complexity of the relationship between mother and daughter is given more emphasis in the version by de Winter and Durlacher. The story also goes beyond the Diary. The audience is witness to the raid on the secret annex and watches as the eight people in hiding are led away. The story of Anne and Margot Frank’s suffering ends with their death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

In 1959, Twentieth Century Fox decided to make a film of the Diary. The screenplay was once again in the hands of Goodrich and Hackett, the director was George Stevens. The 19-year-old model Millie Perkins was chosen for the main role, while Joseph Schildkraut played the part of the father. In a first, unreleased version, Anne Frank can be seen in a concentration camp. This scene was cut from the final version as it was considered too shocking for the audience. The film was nominated for eight Oscars and actually won three, but was only moderately successful.

Anne Frank’s life has been regularly made into a film in various countries and with various intentions.
 

Most recently, two films were made in cooperation with the Anne Frank Fonds:
 

The award-wining docudrama «Meine Tochter Anne Frank» (My daughter Anne Frank) tells the story from the point of view of Otto Frank. The film combines narrative elements with documentary fragments, with friends of Anne Frank as well as Otto Frank, Hannah Goslar and Buddy Elias speaking. The film was co-produced by Hessian, West German and Berlin-Brandenburg Broadcasting Companies.

A year later, on 16 February 2016, the literary film of «The Diary of Anne Frank» had its première at the 66th Berlinale film festival. Directed by Hans Steinbichler, the film focuses on the personal development of Anne, who experiences puberty in critical and dangerous conditions in the secret annex. In this film, Anne’s texts are turned into scenes. The Diary entries are often spoken literally, with Anne looking directly at the viewers. The film aims to use this modern version of the story of Anne Frank in order to make it accessible to a new generation of young people.

In 2017, the Anne Frank Fonds published the Diary as a graphic diary, which is based on Anne’s original text and on selected dialogues from the Diary.

The adaptation by screenwriter and film-maker Ari Folman and illustrator David Polonsky uses illustrations to make the Diary understandable, while also conveying the historical and social context in which it was written.
 

«The graphic diary» has so far been published in more than 20 languages. With it, the Anne Frank Fonds has complemented the existing valid reader’s edition and the complete edition.