THOMAS LARSON

(First published Antioch Review Winter 2000, Volume 58, Number 1)

The definitive edition of The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, published in English in 1995, restored her original entries which her father, the diary’s compiler in 1947, had deleted from the first edition. Many of the new edition’s reviewers (Or is it readers? Can one "review" Anne Frank’s diary?) have expressed the standard adoring praise. In fact, one writer noted that even the reborn diary’s 30-percent more material "does not alter our basic sense of Anne Frank." I didn’t know we shared the same "basic sense" about her. What is meant, I suspect, is that despite the additions Anne remains a victim par excellence, whose afterlife must forever gather together—and give thanks to—the penitent rememberers of the Holocaust. But studied carefully, away from Anne’s iconolatry, the new edition disrupts this putative notion of her goodness. This version, in Susan Massotty’s brilliant translation, is an even more incisive and tangled human document in its final form than the text which preceded it. It is true that Anne’s anger with her parents and confusion with her own feelings were in the original diary. But now the definitive edition accumulates and intensifies so much more about her inner life that Anne’s self-scrutiny dissuades us from enshrining her "goodness" and challenges us to love her honesty. (Which is what all teenagers seem to want.) This complete text discloses an author whose artistic subtlety and autobiographical truth-telling alone can command reverence.

Phillip Lopate has written a penetrating essay, "Resistance to the Holocaust," in which he disputes the claim that the slaughter of the Jews must have a "privileged status in the pantheon of genocides." While he concedes that the Holocaust was indeed "dreadful," he takes issue with its commemoration as "uniquely dreadful." "What surprises me," Lopate writes, "is the degree to which such an apocalyptic, religious-mythological reading of historical events has come to be accepted by the culture at large." I find the same has occurred by those who’ve fetishized Anne Frank’s writing. But here the coin’s flipped over. The diary’s privileged status is now fixed as the uniquely hopeful document against Nazi—and all—atrocities. And this portrayal has a long record of boosters. If we recall the expurgated diary’s dissemination for junior high students beginning in the 1950s when Americans first read the book, or the robust optimism of the 1955 Pulitzer-Prize winning play by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich (screenwriters of It’s a Wonderful Life), in which Anne’s references to Jews as victims and Germans as killers were removed, or even the most "beautiful" Anne of all, Millie Perkins, and her maudlin forgiveness in George Stevens’ 1959 film of the play, it is clear we’ve been bequeathed a child star of major proportions.

That was then—fifties’ kitsch lacking the (current) politics of memory. Today, the wheel of Anne’s glory rolls on, though the road is by no means smooth. Most notable is the documentary-rich but hagiographic-intended Anne Frank Remembered, whose director, Jon Blair, won the Oscar for Best Documentary film in 1996. While Blair’s portrait achieved power with the stirring memories of Miep Gies, the courageous secretary who helped the Franks survive, and Janny Brandes-Brilleslijper, who knew Anne at Bergen-Belsen where she died in 1945, some have criticized Blair for evangelizing Anne’s precocity. One writer believed Blair had gone too far in "recreat[ing] and elevat[ing] Anne as some sort of commentator with absolute powers of perception" regarding the course of the war and the barbarity of the camps. In late 1997 a new version of the play opened on Broadway but to a ho-hum reception (it has since closed). The refurbishers folded in the new Anne, drawing out Jewish ethnicity, German culpability and Anne’s quarrels with her mother. But, even with more lines, Anne remained sapped of ego by the play’s simplistic dialogue and saccharine emotion. The chief critic of Anne’s marbled statuary is Cynthia Ozick whose 1997 New Yorker article "Who Owns Anne Frank?" castigated those who’ve exploited the diary in non-Jewish ways, sidestepping German evil as yet another anti-Semitic ploy.

Anne’s glorification continues at 263 Prinsengracht in Amsterdam, the site of the secret annex where she and seven others hid. Now a museum it attracts over a half-million visitors a year. The Anne Frank Center USA promises to "educate the public, especially young people, about the causes, instruments, and dangers of discrimination and violence through the story of Anne Frank." AFCUSA gives out its "Spirit of Anne Frank Awards" each year and, with other groups, sponsors touring exhibitions that teach schoolchildren about the Jewish genocide through the more accessible video, photographic and "hands-on" displays of life in the Franks’ annex.

You can find Anne served up at several sites on the web. For example, the Virtual Anne Frank House. With a screen backdrop of torn sackcloth and ashes, and a "comprehensive" list of Anne Frank links, the Virtual House contains this opening gambit: "If you thoroughly explore this old business building . . . you may then be fortunate enough to stumble upon the hidden entrance to the secret Annex, where the True Anne is hiding; however, DO NOT expect it to be easy, as the portal has been hidden as well as the Franks’ hid theirs! Happy Hunting!" What an odd come-on, as näive as it is distasteful, which asks the site’s visitors to adopt the role of Nazis searching for Jews in hiding! Lest we think this beyond the pale, consider that caricaturing the hunt for Jews at the Frank house may tell us just how untarnishable the "True Anne" is.

The True Anne bears an intolerable burden: Her visage—that clear smiling face amid the facelessness of mass killing—must balance on her own the overtold horror of the Shoah. How distant the diarist is from the icon! It is time to get away from the noble and poisonous appropriation her writing has suffered. It is time to understand how and why the author Anne Frank created, altered, edited, and then re-invented the character Anne Frank long before the euphemizers in theater and film had their say. Anne’s "true" struggle with herself and how others should see her is evident only in the diary, in the written universe of her ego, that coarse contour of an embattled self which permeates the definitive edition.

So be warned: This new Anne is no longer one-dimensional. Her divided and divisive self presses out, especially in the longer entries of 1944 and the final three months of hiding, often with a vituperative tongue a bit like a pet snake. Now, returned to foil her popular cast, Anne is as contrarian as she was wise, enigmatic as she was forgiving. And though lowering her halo will be labeled "revisionist" (as if it were an unkind or dirty thing to do), Anne’s diary I think can withstand any critical wringing. Her peevishness, her vitality, her conscience—cascading from an inspired pen, ages 13, 14 and 15 when she wrote entries approximately twice a week during her two years in a cage—is inexhaustible, much like the endless problems we face with representing the Holocaust itself as messy truth instead of easy exaggeration.

***

The first edition of The Diary of a Young Girl appeared in Holland, in 1947. For that edition Anne’s father, Otto Frank, carefully chose the least offensive parts of his daughter’s diary, in which she wrote from her thirteenth birthday, June 12, 1942, to August 1, 1944. Otto Frank was the sole surviving member of the Frank family: Anne, her older sister Margot and their mother died in concentration camps as did the van Daan family, Petronella, Hermann and young Peter (whom Anne fell in love with) and Albert Dussel, a dentist, the eighth person to hide with the Franks and the van Daans in the Secret Annex. At the time Frank sanitized Anne’s diary for several reasons. One, his Dutch publisher wanted the diary as part of a series of war remembrances, so cuts were necessary. Two, Otto Frank was wary of offending the memory of anyone in the Annex whom Anne had profiled unflatteringly, including himself. (Anne gripes often at her mother, the van Daans and Mr. Dussel, less often at her father.) Third, Frank removed the more impudent and excessive self-indulgence that Anne at times revels in. He emphasized less her selfish desires as a young teenager and more her sacrifice to her family’s needs. This is the book that was published in 1952, in its English edition, and universally cited as the most purchased, read and admired secular book in history. As noted, millions of American teens, in the 1950s and 1960s, read the book in their English classes or else saw film or play versions of the diary. With good reason, the postwar generation wanted this noble, softer, innocent portrait to counter the horror—especially after the dispersal of newsreel footage of the concentration camps’ liberation—of history’s most concentrated genocide.

Otto Frank’s 1947 diary (called diary c by Frank scholars) is a shorter version of two other documents that Anne actually wrote. Papa Frank produced his version from Anne’s two diaries—an original unedited version (diary a) and her (not her father’s) edited version (diary b), which she rewrote in 1944 and hoped to have published after the war. This diary b, which Anne developed by rewriting and fictionalizing her own earlier entries, began in early 1944 when she heard on a radio broadcast from the exiled Dutch government in London that a Cabinet Minister wanted to collect and publish "eyewitness accounts" of the war in the form of letters and diaries following Holland’s liberation. According to the Foreword of the Definitive Edition, an excited Anne "began rewriting and editing her diary, improving on the text, omitting passages she didn’t think were interesting enough and adding others from memory."

Using all three—Anne’s unedited diary a, her edited diary b, and diary c which her father had printed in 1947—the 1995 definitive edition restores Anne’s original work without its fictional elements and with all of its intense personal revelations. As noted, 30 percent is new, focusing on Anne’s emerging sexuality, her passion for—and awkwardness with—Peter, and her snapping anger at her fault-finding mother as well as the histrionic Mrs. van Daan. The result is, the more her desires are shown (and the sexual ones are the least emphatic), the more her disarming honesty counters her self-sacrificing "goodness." The definitive diary reads as an act of discovery and of confusion, a journey that inevitably opens her "contradictions." By the end we’re never sure if she’s the author of or a character in the drama. But, despite her postmodern self, we feel her with all the hiss and bite and regret of a Thomas Hardy heroine.

Eventually the diary centers upon the intolerable proximity of confinement, but it begins as a flight, one might say a comfortable flight to safety. The Franks, the van Daans and Mr. Dussel go into hiding with a large cache of money and, although the black market grows during their incarceration, they are able to buy most necessities. They have ample food because at least four people know where they are and regularly supply them. They have access to a toilet, a full kitchen, sleeping quarters (some with private rooms), a breeze and a view through uncurtained windows at night. They listen to the radio every night and have a small library. The three young people take correspondence courses and keep up with their studies as if they were in school. Each person’s birthday is celebrated complete with gifts and a cake. Miep Gies, Otto Frank’s secretary, does whatever she is asked, to keep the eight in essentials and occasional luxuries. On December 24, 1943, Anne writes, "I’m ‘on top of the world’ when I think how fortunate we are and compare myself to other Jewish children."

I realize comfort should not lessen Anne’s integrity. But she is given the time and space to write about herself in cocoon around which a very distant war will rage. It is ironic that the Franks’ confinement feels liberating enough for Anne to lay out her deepest fears and joys in her diary and, at the same time, the proximity of the annex becomes Anne’s main gripe, not the Nazis, not her fear of being discovered, not maintaining goodness in the face of impending evil. Because we get more of Anne’s emotional analysis—especially the lengthier "negative" ones—the 1952 edition feels like a recollected romance of adolescence (how an adult would remember it) instead of a harsh account of a young girl’s desperation in the 1995 edition.

What the added material underscores is how the outer world—the war, anti-Semitism, the internment camps, families being rounded up on the streets of Amsterdam, the nightly bombings, memories of her friends, the radio talk of invasion which arrives on June 6, 1944, two months before they are discovered—is subordinated in the first third of the diary to the claustrophobia of Anne’s social life and is slowly turned inward by Anne, on Anne. She worries about starving children her age on the outside, yet complains about having to eat potatoes. She lectures herself about acting more responsible around the adults, then fulminates at their intrusion on her privacy. She is curious about politics, which the adults usually argue at dinner, yet leaves off the discussion of war to lash out at her parent’s favoritism of her sister. She knows the war hits the streets nightly, she fears betrayal and discovery, yet her venom stings and cuts at the adults in her midst whose neuroses have brought the war on in the first place. She is angry, at one time or another in the diary, at everyone, for they are complicit in ending the devil-may-care attitude of the young, her own in particular.

Doesn’t Anne know early on that what’s happening outside is more important than her adolescent rumblings? Yes and no. Yes, because she is told about it often: When Mr. Dussel joins the Annex in late 1942, he brings news of the Jews’ deportation to the camps: "The sick, the elderly, children, babies and pregnant women—all are marched to their death." Anne responds to Dussel’s news with compassion. She feels that the Jews’ misery on the outside is far greater than anything she has had to suffer. She feels guilty, "wicked [for] sleeping in a warm bed." She writes, "it’s a disgrace to be so cheerful." After Mr. Dussel arrives, Miep Gies often tells the eight in the Annex of further deaths and deportations of friends. This makes the two mothers cry openly.

And no, because the increasing intensity from the war closing in on them makes Anne more conflicted in herself ; as a consequence, she becomes more honest. Thus, Anne confesses something which, up to now, the first six months of confinement, she has been reluctant to admit. "Added to this misery there’s another, but of a more personal nature, and it pales in comparison to the suffering I’ve just told you about. Still, I can’t help telling you that lately I’ve begun to feel deserted. I’m surrounded by too great a void. I never used to give it much thought, since my mind was filled with my friends and having a good time. Now I think either about unhappy things or about myself. It’s taken a while, but I’ve finally realized that Father, no matter how kind he may be, can’t take the place of my former world. When it comes to my feelings, Mother and Margot ceased to count long ago."

Fear liberates honesty. And Anne records her despair with such impact that its fundamental selfishness is easy to miss. She compares the "unhappy things" she thinks about to "myself," that is, makes self-sorrow equal to the bad that is happening outside. She feels abandoned by her family in the context of both personal and Jewish suffering. From this entry on, for 18 months, Anne’s isolation will torment and counsel her, for she is trapped between being protected and being abandoned by her family. Once that paradox becomes too much to bear, she will be trapped similarly by her surrogate parent, Peter.

***

For me, the great ignominy done to Anne Frank’s diary arises from memory’s oversimplifying those two "noble" sentences which she wrote near the end of their confinement, on July 15, 1944. "It’s a wonder," she notes, "I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart." For years, most diary readers have taken this admission unequivocally, a bald indication that goodness will triumph over evil. Why dispute it? Well, for one, it is not obvious at all who Anne is referring to by "people." Her parents? The Nazis? What are Anne’s "absurd and impractical" ideals? And why does she insert that phrase—in spite of everything (what everything?)—as that which labors against those ideals?

Anne’s "absurd and impractical" ideals are self- and family-related—being a good and loyal daughter, being a team player, thinking about the needs of others over her own. These are the ideals she cannot live up to (nor could anyone, under the circumstances). Anne’s "everything" then is her experience alone, that is, the pressures of confinement which exacerbates the disapproval of those around her. Voiced by her mother and Mrs. van Daan, this disapproval of Anne’s spontaneity is so excessive (i.e. truthful) that Otto Frank felt this was the easiest excision to make for that first edition. But there’s two problems with such editing. One, it gives a false balance between the outer and inner voices of her personality and two, Anne’s exaggeration contains much of the honesty that she may, in other passages, be trying to dress up or squelch. To excise the very honesty that Anne is most embarrassed by is to rob Anne of herself.

Consider this barrage: "Everyone thinks I’m showing off when I talk, ridiculous when I’m silent, insolent when I answer, cunning when I have a good idea, lay when I’m tired, selfish when I eat one bit more than I should, stupid, cowardly, calculating, etc., etc. All day long I hear nothing but what an exasperating child I am, and although I laugh it off and pretend not to mind, I do mind. I wish I could ask God to give me another personality, one that doesn’t antagonize everyone." In this and other invectives, the way Anne should act begins to grate on the Anne who, unseen, is acting as honestly as she can in her diary.

The problem with "everything" referring to the "ideals" of a benevolent humanity is that, as Anne indicates many times, though she may believe in the goodness of others, she certainly does not believe it about herself. After eighteen months of diary writing, Anne re-reads her entire work, and she is "shocked" at the force of her "anger and hate" at her mother. "Anne, is that really you talking about hate?" she writes on January 2, 1944. "Oh, Anne, how could you?" This entry, six months before discovery, opens her up more than at any time to a writer’s mystery of self, the reason her memoirist’s pen is such a "friend." She discovers that there are (at least) twin "Anne"s in the diary. Anne’s bad self and Anne’s reasonable being. She is apologetic, telling Kitty, her diary’s other persona—as if taking it back will resolve it—that the Anne of the diary’s first half was merely overcome by the pressures of hiding and whose disregard is extreme, false. "I was furious at Mother (and still am a lot of the time). It’s true, she didn’t understand me, but I didn’t understand her either." Anne actually believes that it is her own "insolent and beastly" attitude toward her mother that caused her mother’s unhappiness! And this: "Those violent outbursts on paper are simply expressions of anger that, in normal life, I could have worked off by locking myself in my room and stamping my foot a few times or calling Mother names behind her back." In other words, freedom and a normal adolescence would have produced an outlet for her anger to be directed—in the comfort of her own room—away from her mother. But in the annex, the hiding from the world has produced a surfeit of honest responses in Anne which she now feels shame for. "I soothe my conscience," she ends the entry, "with the thought that it’s better for unkind words to be down on paper than for Mother to have to carry them around in her heart."

Anne’s self-psychologizing and her dislike of what she finds internally is perhaps her greatest revelation. Her guilt and shame that she has been too unforgiving with her mother are important. But what’s crucial for knowing her totality are these emotional flip-flops. She is the sort of diarist who one minute writes, "Because she [her mother] loved me, she was tender and affectionate, but because of the difficult situation I put her in, and the sad circumstances in which she found herself, she was nervous and irritable" and, the next minute, "But there’s one thing I can’t do, and that’s to love Mother with the devotion of a child." It’s this agonizing complexity of a daughter’s being that once it was born in the diary no doubt signaled Anne’s father to de-emphasize it. Cutting out that overintense self gives rise to Anne’s "universality," her one-dimensionality. But I like the feisty liberator of self—the more Anne says she’ll be more tolerant with Mom, the more such an admission only makes the stakes greater, the conflict sharper between who she is and what she "should be." Being the good Anne over the selfish Anne, perhaps her main ideal, is impossible to achieve. And, sure enough, the remainder of the diary belies her self-nobility, a fact she knows and reveals.

Peter, two years her senior, also meets the twin Anne’s and, I suspect, had he lived, he would still be reeling from the encounter. Anne seeks Peter out because he is easy to confide in; a few such meetings between them assures her Peter can give Anne the uncritical support which her mother cannot and which her father seems to be increasingly withdrawing. Heightening Peter’s accessibility are her dreamy memories of another Peter, a boy she knew during sixth grade whom she describes as "my one true love." She recalls how handsome he was, how much she pined for him when he moved away. She admits that the recollection of this boy has kindled her understanding of sexual desire.

Enter Peter van Daan who replicates in the Annex this other Peter—he too is handsome and soft and, best of all, present. Fantasizing about never seeing the old Peter again, she pursues the soft, kind, shy, unforward Peter in her midst. The "Peter"s exchange places. As the diary transports the old Peter into the new one, so too does it tear the selfish, honest Anne from the diplomatic, considerate young girl. The split occurs in desiring Peter, and Anne delineates for the first time her internal break. "Suddenly," she writes, "the everyday Anne slipped away and the second Anne took her place. The second Anne, who’s never overconfident or amusing, but wants only to love and be gentle." Anne sees, for now, her "true" self as the less honest being, the dutiful daughter to a mother she hates, the girl who must always be strong and never waver. For me, Anne’s "true" self—which she will eventually recognize—is the teenager in love, breaking apart, repairing, breaking apart, truth-telling and fabricating.

The first Anne releases the second Anne and the latter falls for Peter, is enraptured by their sitting "in each other’s arms" every night until Peter kisses her, awkwardly on the ear, which she prizes. But now, with Anne lost in love, the diary scuttles back and forth, sometimes within the same paragraph, between author and character, between the everyday Anne and the Anne who wants only to love. The character Anne writes, "Peter’s reached a part of me that no one has ever reached before, except in my dream!" Which is followed by the author, thinking aloud about marriage. "What would my answer be? Anne, be honest! . . . Peter still has too little character, too little willpower . . . . He’s still a child, emotionally no older than I am. . . . Am I really only fourteen? Am I really just a silly schoolgirl? . . . I’m afraid of myself, afraid my longing is making me yield too soon."

When the adults see the pair getting too close, they first warn then forbid them from swooning on the divan in the attic. At this point, Anne reaches her lowest point. Persisting every evening to "neck" with Peter upstairs, she writes her father a letter that tests his forbearance. The letter is a passionate claim for her independence; cooped up in the Annex for nearly two years, she’s entitled to make her own decisions. She writes that, of course, "you [want me] to act the way a fourteen-year-old is supposed to. But that’s where you’re wrong!" She tells him "there’s only one person I’m accountable to, and that’s me." She says that she’s been "putting on an act" for two years, having never revealed her true feelings: "I was overconfident to keep from having to listen to the voice inside me." To cap it off, Anne doesn’t destroy the letter (as she later says she should have) but gives it to him!

His reply is a swift beheading of her independence. "I’ve received many letters in my lifetime," he says to her, in tears, "but none as hurtful as this. . . . No, Anne, you’ve done us a great injustice!" Her father’s pain is her worst moment in the Annex: "What I’m most ashamed of is the way Father has forgiven me." To be independent of her parents when they have given her so much now becomes anathema for Anne, and it’s all because her ideals over loving Peter got in the way of her duty.

Once Anne’s dalliance with Peter and her attack on her father causes everyone pain, Anne discovers to her fear that she herself is more interesting and more split than anyone in the annex. Even at 14, she realizes the import of her doppelgänger nature. She wakes up to her paradoxical character largely because she has documented its growth. This conflict between author and character, first and second "Anne"s, is in the nature of diary-writing. The shadow-play of self-disclosure when recording experiences always inhibits and releases honesty. The indefiniteness occurs as the writer stumbles to get down what has happened and how she feels about it. We err to think Anne Frank’s diary is merely "what happened" to her, mere events that contextualize the Holocaust. Her diary—any good diary— is primarily the deepest, most uncensored self-wringing through which any event or context comes to be recorded in the first place.

The possibility of the diary, to reveal Anne completely to herself, now seems like an abyss for her, and she pulls back after the incident with her father. She drops Peter and the Anne who loved him. She hastens back to dutifully recording the family’s struggles in the Annex. It is now May, 1944, and the talk of the allied invasion as well as noticeably fewer supplies take over the diary’s content. In the lacunae, Anne’s fear of fulfilling herself with Peter or with her own desires to be independent are swept under the surface of these practical entries. It’s good, she seems to say, to be back in the comfort of family and worldly matters.

Another factor bringing her back is her decision in April, 1944, to make her diary publishable per the radio request of the Dutch Cabinet Minister. This means fictionalizing, editing, shaping—perhaps exaggerating?—what she has written so that the diary reveals more than just the record of their enclosure. In the last months Anne keeps both a diary and rewrites her diary. Whether writing or editing, Anne senses that revealing her inner conflicts will make her document live and be published, preserved, known. Now it seems the first Anne, that "difficult" author-genie, will not go back in her bottle. And so, the entries of the last three weeks in hiding grow more mature, complex and daring. She can’t get her "contradictions" onto paper fast enough once she sees that her inner life—not the latter-day purported cause of a degraded and ennobled humanity—is the diary’s subject.

First Anne discovers that her own "self-reproaches" are where her wisdom lies. She now analyzes herself with the skill of a Viennese shrink. "What’s so difficult about my personality is that I scold and curse myself much more than anyone else does." She hates it that others, her Mother in particular, meets Anne’s self-criticism with criticism, isolating Anne even more. "Then I talk back and start contradicting everyone until the old familiar Anne refrain inevitably crops up again: ‘No one understands me.’" In one of her only post-romantic entries about Peter, she writes that his comfort used to help her with her trials of self but she admits that "he’s disappointed me in many ways." He hides his "innermost self" from her and won’t let her in. "He’s much more closed than I am, but I know from experience . . . that in time, even the most uncommunicative types will long as much, or even more, for someone to confide in." With sudden maturity, Anne recognizes her personality conflicts as well as how they affect her and others. Seasoned diarist that she is, she is realizing that self-disclosure is her life.

Anne next trumpets the cause of women’s liberation! She labels women who keep silent and go along with men’s dominance, "stupid." "Fortunately, education, work and progress have opened women’s eyes. . . . Modern women want the right to be completely independent!" She is also clear that women need not change into menlike beings—stop having children, fight wars, etc. She sees the historical problem, male ignorance, as key. "What I condemn are our system of values and the men who don’t acknowledge how great, difficult, but ultimately beautiful women’s share in society is." What has occasioned these remarks is the book Men Against Death which argued that women "suffer more pain, illness and misery than any war hero ever does." A reader senses with this entry in particular that the honest and complaining Anne, whom others and Anne herself have tried to censure, is now fearlessly saying what she believes.

Her final bloom, which for me solidifies what John Berryman called Anne’s "conversion of a child into a person," at first seems to do her nascent self-analysis and feminism one better. She announces her "most outstanding character trait": "I have a great deal of self-knowledge. In everything I do, I can watch myself as if I were a stranger. I can stand across from the everyday Anne and, without being biased or making excuses, watch what she’s doing, both the good and the bad. This self-awareness never leaves me." Anne is so sure of herself that she declares, "Ultimately, people shape their own characters." A remarkable statement this is, in the context of Nazi occupation! Indeed, in the Annex cage, how else but through self-examination and willfulness would Anne’s character have been shaped and discovered?

Anne’s final power comes in realizing not her goodness but her regret. She regrets that her father "failed to see that this struggle to triumph over my difficulties was more important to me than anything else." She wanted what he couldn’t give her: "To be treated . . . as Anne-in-her-own-right." She regrets that he has forced her to be someone she wasn’t. "I’ve hid anything having to do with me from Father, never shared my ideals with him, deliberately alienated myself from him." Anne regrets leading Peter on for doing so has been her "greatest disappointment." "I made one mistake," she writes. "I used intimacy to get closer to him, and in doing so, I ruled out other forms of friendship. . . . Our time together leaves him feeling satisfied, but just makes me want to start all over again."

With herself, finally, her regret sloughs through despair and confusion in the final diary entry. She blisters herself one last time by staying in her "contradictions," talking about how "I’m split in two." The one unpleasant Anne is the one she’s known for while the truer Anne "is my own secret," her "better side," which no one knows. As for her flippant side, the "exuberant cheerfulness," she writes, "You can’t imagine how often I’ve tried to push away this Anne, which is only half of what is known as Anne—to beat her down, hide her." The reason, she says, is that others will ridicule her serious side, which is an incredible irony for it is this serious side that the diary exposes and for which she is beloved! And here, the great dilemma that all people face, aside from what their lives must represent, "I know exactly how I’d like to be, how I am . . . on the inside. But unfortunately I’m only like that with myself. And perhaps that’s why—no, I’m sure that’s the reason why—I think of myself as happy on the inside and other people think I’m happy on the outside. I’m guided by the pure Anne within."

The final two paragraphs of the diary end, perhaps arbitrarily, in this "who is Anne?" puzzlement. When things go bad or wrong, she ends up "turning my heart inside out, the bad part on the outside and the good part on the inside," even though she is "trying very had to change myself, but that I’m always up against a more powerful enemy." That enemy is the public persona which for Anne is so misunderstood, which stands in her way of "what I’d like to be and what I could be if . . . if only there were no other people in the world."

Martyr to the Jews, so be it. But martyr to the unbridled adolescent self—this is undeniable. In fact, that last sentence contains a frightening admission—"no people" sounds genocidal, maybe suicidal. What has caused Anne the most pain is people, her coterie in the Annex who, she says, have never known her and have never, through their and Anne’s fault alike, allowed the "pure Anne" out. People stifle us, the expectations of our parents, the unrequited love for another’s hidden self that will not show itself. And yet, to be rid of people physically is not a literal idea. It is, instead, a metaphor for what the diary accomplishes: The removal of people so that her self, true and false and in-between, is allowed its freedom.

I don’t think Anne ends in hatred of kin and romance; nor do I see her praising humankind, chattering on Churchill-like for decency and courage. I think the diary does what no film, play, traveling memorial exhibition or preservation of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam can ever accomplish—show us the intractable self, intractable from the beginning, all the way to the end, becoming even more intractable.

Those final entries I have come to love—the rough, irreverent, stormy, disputatious Anne Frank, adulthood birthing itself in girlhood faster than girlhood can bear. The tragedy is that this voice, this emerging patchwork self—perhaps, had she lived, another witness of self-turmoil inside the Jewish nightmare, as honest as Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi—is silenced. Too suddenly the diary ends when the two families and Mr. Dussel are discovered and taken first to Westerhof to be sorted and transferred, and then shipped to concentration camps which, by the end of 1944, were actually shutting down, obliterating the evidence of the crematoria during the war’s end-game. Anne with her older sister Margot dies of typhus in Bergen-Belsen in late February or early March, 1945, six weeks before the camp is liberated by the Allies.

When Otto Frank read Anne’s diary after the war, he said he was "surprised" by Anne’s "self-criticism. It was quite a different girl than I had known as my daughter. She never showed these kind of inner feelings." This one statement, for me, almost wipes away the distortion of the first edition. His admission says that he understood the honesty and complexity of her writing; he didn’t want the world to see and understand it as well. So, we need not blame the father for missing his daughter’s inner life. But, rather, we are reminded of just how private we are, despite the openness that self-disclosure seems to make of us when others read our thoughts and feelings. It is a fact of the best diaries: They convince us that our hidden selves are our truest selves but, like Mr. Frank, we didn’t notice it in the other so busy were we hiding in our own privacy.

To date, history has asked that we contextualize Anne Frank in her time—Jewish victim, recorder of one family’s ultimately futile attempt to hide from the Nazis, precocious girl whose insights about prejudice and hatred we still learn from. And yet, it seems the more we contextualize Anne in her historical condition, the purer she becomes. Or, put differently, the result of the world’s remembering her seems only to have purified her of herself.

No one can recast with new limbs and troubled heart the Holocaust’s child; it may seem treasonous even to suggest it. But, by emphasizing this unknown, complicating, courageously individualizing person, who does emerge with arguably more horns than hopes in the definitive edition, we begin to acknowledge her multiplicity, begin to juggle and judge several "Anne"s: The pure and forgiving Anne of remembrance; the mother-conflicted feminist Anne; the writerly self-editing Anne; the self-reproachful and self-loathing Anne (easily the most unpopular one); the philosophical, contradictory, at times repressed, at times vindictive Anne; and Anne the Not So Innocent, who differs with us, I believe, about her further canonization, the Anne who is—perhaps—most like us.