Anne Frank's novel fragment "Dear Kitty" | Books | '
With a little more luck and less human badness, she might have experienced that day. It would have been 90 years old on this 12th of June. Perhaps she would have celebrated in the circle of her descendants, in Amsterdam, Frankfurt or somewhere in the US, and it would not have been impossible that even "Peter" would have been one of the well-wishers. That Peter, who shared the hiding place in the Amsterdam back house with Anne Frank and with whom she exchanged the first kiss. But it is not unlikely that we readers would never have heard of this anniversary.
Young dead people are always young, and so is Anne Frank. She will forever be the 15-year-old girl who was looking for a replacement for a friend and conversation partner in her diary. And that had one great wish: She wanted to live as a writer. "After the war, I would like to bring out a book called 'The Secret Annex'," Anne wrote in her diary on May 11, 1944. Less than three months later, she was deported along with the other seven Hidden Persons. She died in February 1945 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, typhus, exhaustion and malnutrition.
Anne Frank kept her diary in Dutch
"The Secret Annex" – first version of a world class
Her diary, however, was preserved and became one of the most well-known and widely read books in the world. Otto Frank, Anne's beloved father, the only member of the family to leave the concentration camp alive, fulfilled her legacy and edited the fully written red-and-beige diary and many loose sheets, notes on the back of bills or account books. Two years after the end of the war, on June 25, 1947, "Het Achterhuis – Das Hinterhaus" was published. The first edition of 1500 books was quickly sold out.
Only in 1986 in Dutch, in German 1988, appeared the complete, historically critical edited text. Mirjam Pressler, the great translator and author who died in January 2019, edited this version together with other scientists on the basis of the precursor versions edited by Otto Frank. Without the omissions made by Anne Frank's father in his first discretionary section, sections relating to Anne Frank's mother and Anne's thoughts on sexuality.
Since "The Journal of Anne Frank" after a Hollywood film adaptation in the 1950s, other films and plays in many languages has long since become a world classic. In the meantime "Anne Frank Tagebuch" is an essential school reading in Germany. The well-known paperback edition of the Fischer publishing house can be found in many German households.
"Dear Kitty" is becoming a bestseller
Currently, Anne Frank's notes on her backyard hiding life are at the top of the independent bestseller list, which includes publications from 160 independent publishers. It is, apart from a few notes on two glued together sheets, already 20 years ago, that the last five previously unknown pages were discovered and added to the book. So what could be new and justify this current success of the classic?
In March 1944, the Dutch Minister of Education Gerrit Bolkestein called on the illegal BBC station "Radio Oranje" the population in the occupied country to pick up letters and diaries. "Imagine how interesting it would be if I could get a novel out about the back house," Anne tells her imaginary diary friend Kitty. After that she must have written as if possessed. By that fateful day of August 4, 1944, when the police action in the Prinsengracht 263 put an end to life in hiding, she had written 215 pages in order to create a first novel version for publication on the basis of her diary entries.
The result was not a copy, but a rigorous and self-critical revision of her letter-formulated observations and thoughts as a submerged one. This manuscript, together with the other original documents, the diary and the loose-leaf collection, formed the basis for all subsequent editions.
The movable bookshelf was the entrance to the hideout in the back house
Novel fragment with depth
The fact that it was published for the first time as an independent novel fragment and in a new translation, shortly before the 90th anniversary, acknowledges Anne Frank's promising literary talent. "I did not know that my little Anne was so deep," said Otto Frank years after her death. Her diary records include 779 days of life, 753 of them in the hiding room behind a file cabinet in her father's office building. "Dear Kitty", the title of this novel edition, covers the period from 12 June 1942 to 29 March 1944, further Anne Frank did not come with their new version.
If one compares them with the original diary-version, as far as this is preserved, shows the literary expertise of just 15-year-olds. "She left some entries altogether, reworked others, added new descriptions, insights, and connecting thoughts, creating an interesting, highly readable text," writes literary scholar Laureen Nussbaum in her epilogue. As a friend of the family and an Anne Frank researcher in Seattle, she has been waiting, as she says, for 25 years for such an edition.
Laureen Nussbaum: literary scholar and Anne Frank researcher
Appreciation as a writer
"That's the big question, will I ever be able to write something big, will I ever become a journalist and a writer? I hope so, I hope so much!" Anne Frank's request, which she entrusted to her diary on April 5, 1944, has finally come true with this new edition, which gives her credit as a young writer.
Anne Frank: "Dear Kitty, Your novel draft in letters", translated by Waltraud Hüsmert, Secession Verlag für Literatur, Zurich 2019, 208 pages
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