When Otto Frank released the Diary of his daughter Anne for publication in 1947, nobody had the least idea of the significance the book would gain over the coming years. There is almost no other report by victims of the Shoah that is as well-known as the Diary of Anne Frank. For many young people of the post-war generation, their first encounter with the crimes of the Nazi period was through this book.
Reviews of the first edition of 1947 already spoke of a “miracle”, stating that the Diary was “more tragic than any other”, that it was a “moral testament” and a “moving, human document”. In the 1950s, the Diary triggered a first debate on the crimes of National Socialism. Numerous streets, squares, school buildings and children’s homes were named after Anne Frank over the coming years.
Both the play and the film end with a quote from the Diary: «I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.» This sentence has had a lasting effect on the image of Anne Frank, time and again turning her life into a story of hope and of humanity. At the time, the main focus was on Anne’s role as a victim of war. The fact that this was caused by the criminal, anti-Semitic policies of the Nazis and that the Jewish girl Anne Frank died an agonising death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was negligible in this view. Stage and film versions have contributed significantly to this harmonising reception of the Diary.
Miriam Pressler on the success of the diary.
The handling of Anne as a person and her story is characterised by the questions directed at the text. In recent years, various literary scholars have shown increasing interest in the Diary and critically analysed of the text and its literary quality. In the wake of these new questions, Anne Frank has been perceived in a new way. As an author, she is no longer simply a defenceless victim of National Socialism but instead has become an agent, who actively and critically deals with herself and her life as a Jew, a child, and later as a woman in an extremely fragile, dangerous and critical situation.
The growing popularity of the Diary of Anne Frank through translations and in particular through the play from the mid-1950s onwards brings out voices claiming that the Diary is a forgery. Based on a crude mixing up of assumptions, one of these theories states that the author is the writer Meyer Levin.
Otto Frank and the others who edited the Diary did not approach their work on the text with the awareness and care of experienced editors. Their main aim was to convey the content, which is why they were prepared to make adaptations with a view to achieving their goal of publishing the Diary in the first place. This means that, at times, passages were deleted or added depending on the language or the publishing house.
Moreover, the translations were not always based on the same source text: at times Otto Frank’s Version C was used, at other times the first Dutch edition «Het Achterhuis». When certain researchers started to compare the various editions and translations of the diary, they believed to have found inconsistencies and used this as an opportunity to question the authenticity of the Diary in general.
However, an investigation by the German Federal Criminal Police Office in the 1970s confirms that the ink and paper are from the period prior to 1950. The report also mentions that notes written in ballpoint pen were added to some sections at a later point in time. This fact is taken out of context by a journalist and reported incorrectly. The inadequately researched article in the «Der Spiegel» magazine results in a new version of the forgery rumours: the Diary is not authentic as ballpoint pens have only been around since 1951.
Finally, in the 1980s, another critic claims that the text handles the topic of sexuality in a way that cannot be the work of an adolescent girl. That, instead, this is the fantasy of an older man, which again speaks in favour of Meyer Levin being the author.
On the one hand, these claims are made by proponents of National Socialist ideas, but they are also spread by American revisionists and Holocaust deniers. A few individual anti-Zionist intellectuals also contribute to doubts being propagated about the authenticity of the Diary.
To refute the accusations, the Anne Frank Fonds, in cooperation with the «Rijksinstitut voor Orlogsdocumentatie» (Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation), commissions a research study, and the following investigations of the materials and texts and the graphological assessment confirm the authenticity of the Diary on all levels.
This is why the critically annotated edition, which was published in 1986, also contains a summary of the 250-page report of this investigation.
Flying in the face of the facts and irrespective of all evidence, the ideological glossing over of the truth has caused the rumours to be spread time and again.