THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK is a phenomenon. More than 35 million copies have been sold in 73 different languages across the world. The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam is visited by more than one million people every year. There are several touring shows, an Anne Frank exhibition in Los Angeles, a replica of her hiding place in Cape Town, an Anne Frank Centre in Berlin, and another in South Carolina.
Look online, and you will find Anne Frank mugs and soft furnishings, posters, and baseball caps. The pandemic has inspired Anne Frank facemasks, emblazoned with uplifting quotations. In the late 1960s, one Japanese company actually launched a range of Anne Frank tampons.
Anne Frank’s legacy, in other words, has been not only immense. It has also been ambiguous. Each reader has the capacity to reinterpret her writing, and each society seems to find something different.
The reason that Japanese sanitary products were named after her was the fact that her diary was one of the few ways in which girls could find out about menstruation. Likewise, in contemporary North Korea, her words are read as a warning not about anti-Semitism, but about the United States. Reading her diary, one class of schoolchildren reported, taught them that “America will have to be destroyed . . . [and] only then will Anne’s wonderful dream of peace come true.”
Lucid and full of interesting details drawn from around the globe, The Diary that Changed the World provides an excellent introduction to this complex story. At its heart is a biography of Anne Frank’s father, Otto, who made it his life’s work to share his daughter’s words. Karen Bartlett shows that, from the first, he sought to reshape Anne’s diary, too. Yet the power of the diary is such that it continually eludes all attempts to limit it.
The Revd Dr William Whyte is Fellow and Tutor of St John’s College, Oxford, and Professor of Social and Architectural History in the University of Oxford.
The Diary that Changed the World: The remarkable story of Otto Frank and the diary of Anne Frank
Karen Bartlett
Biteback Publishing £20
(978-1-78590-615-2)
Church Times Bookshop £18