translation decisions (see Schroth 241). Lost, too, is the particular
timbre of a key aspect of the young writer’s coming of age: not
simply her growing political awareness but her politics of thinking.
Re-Thinking Girlhood: Coming of Age, Dislocations, and
“Frankness”
Recognizing the ways in which the Diary’s meaning has been shaped
by adaptation, editing, and translation helps one understand how
changes to the text (or stand-ins for it) can not only significantly
affect readers’ reception, but also mirror larger cultural investments
in particular understandings of gender, sex, sexuality, race, nation,
and politics. When we read diaries, journals, and memoirs, we are
obviously encountering records and memories. What the Diary’s
publication history teaches us is that we are also encountering
censorship and forgetting. Even a slight awareness of that history
can help us become more sensitive to the ideological features of the
particular textual version available to us and invite us to become
more attentive to the particularities of its language. In the process,
we will hopefully become more thoughtful and subtle readers.
The readily available definitive edition of the Diary does not
blunt Anne’s pointed characterizations of the Nazi Germans, as
Schütz’s 1950 translation does; nor does it omit various passages
regarding gender, sex, and sexuality, as the 1947 Dutch edition
does. It, however, also has its limitations. Perhaps the most obvious
example thereof is that even though it provides passages and entries
omitted from the Dutch version, the English definitive edition
does not properly indicate which passages were in Anne’s original
manuscript, which were part of her revision project, and which were
part of the first published version. There is, moreover, a larger lesson
to be learned here. By considering the definitive edition as part
of a larger cultural project to disseminate Anne’s story and make
the Diary accessible to a linguistically diverse range of people,
one comes to recognize that an edition marketed to an American
audience cannot, on principle, be so definitive, after all.
From the perspective of the publication history, one of the first
things that may strike readers of the English version is the title itself.
Coming of Age within the Secret Annex
51
First published as Het Achterhuis (The Annex) in Dutch (a title that
honors Anne’s plan to name her work after her hiding place), the
Diary was released with the straightforward title Das Tagebuch der
Anne Frank (The Diary of Anne Frank) in German. What, then,
are we to make of the English title, with its substitution of “young
girl” for “Anne Frank”? A comparison with the Dutch and German
titles allows us to recognize the strangeness of the English one.
What, we might well ask, is meant by “young girl”? While a quick
dictionary scan tells us that the term is a synonym of “adolescent”
(even as “adolescence” typically refers to that period of becoming
that begins with puberty and ends with maturity), a comparative
approach exposes the term’s redundancy and illogic. After all, if
“girl” generally signifies a female who is not yet a woman, then
wouldn’t a “young girl” be someone who is no longer a baby and
not yet a teenager (or even, perhaps, a tween)? Why, then, not write
“girl” instead of “young girl”—or “teenager” or “adolescent,”
for that matter? (It is worth noting that a similar overlap between
“boy” and “young boy” does not occur. In fact, male adolescents are
typically referred to as “young men.”) What, then, is the ideological
function of “young girl,” particularly with regard to gender? Doesn’t
the term work to define Anne up front as a figure of innocence
and helplessness because of her gender rather than her status as a
Jew living in Nazi-occupied Holland? And doesn’t the term then
anticipate the very (mis)reading of Anne Frank’s story that has been
popularized in the United States?
The gender problematics of the Diary’s English title generate
other issues as well. “Young girl” deters reception of the Diary as
a coming-of-age text. “All I want to be is an honest-to-goodness
teenager!” (167), writes Anne in her January 15, 1944 entry. The
sentence follows a line that expresses her fear that if she has to stay
in hiding much longer and be subject to the “harsh words, spiteful
conversations and tears” that come from living in hiding and in close
quarters, she will turn into “a dried-up old beanstalk” (167). These
are not the words of a “young girl.” They reflect a powerlessness
indicative not of youth but of political circumstances. She recognizes
that hiding in the Annex carries with it a psychological cost. She is
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Critical Insights
conscious that her coming of age is in question not because she is a
“young girl” but rather because life in hiding may well force her to
bypass the coming-of-age process. She fears not that she is “young”
but, instead, that the means of survival is making her old before her
time.
Despite the English title, Anne Frank very much saw herself as
an adolescent, specifically, a Jewish teenager coming of age during
the Holocaust. Readers may recognize this viewpoint from her
choice of addressee, Kitty (sometimes called Kit). German translator
Mirjam Pressler was the first to notice that Dutch writer Cissy van
Marxveldt’s popular four-book Joop ter Heul series, with its character
Kit (also called Kitty) Franken, was a likely source for Frank’s
Kitty (O’Donnell 65; Waaldijk 116). Waaldijk explains, “. . . it is no
exaggeration to say that almost all women raised in the Netherlands
since the 1920s are familiar with her books for girls” (115). She
continues: Frank’s September 22, 1942 entry explicitly mentions
Joop ter Heul; van Marxveldt’s writing style may well have served
as a model for Frank’s own (116). It is worth speculating that Anne
would have seen the superficial connections between herself and the
series’ characters. Joop comes from “an upper-middle-class family
in Amsterdam” (Waaldijk 115); Kit’s surname so nearly resembles
Anne’s own. Importantly, Joop and Kit and their friends belong to a
world removed from the traumas of the Holocaust and the war. So,
too, does Anne’s Kitty, whom, in her June 20, 1942 entry, Anne calls
her “long-awaited friend” (6). In the March 29, 1944 entry, in which
she records hearing about the planned postwar collection of diaries
written during the war, Anne tells Kitty,
. . . ten years after the war people would find it very amusing to read
how we lived . . . as Jews in hiding. Although I tell you a great deal
about our lives, you still know very little about us. How frightened
the women are during the air raids . . .
You know nothing of these matters, and it would take me all day to
describe everything down to the last detail. . . . (241, emphasis added)
Given the entry’s description of hardships and terrors, Anne’s
choice of “amusing” here seems oddly off-key. Perhaps it is
Coming of Age within the Secret Annex
53
deliberately so, indicative of a desire to keep her imaginary friend
far and safely away from the realities of Jewish persecution and the
war’s destructiveness.
Coming of Age: Dislocations and Frankness
To a limited extent, the act of writing grants Anne a space to define
herself apart from those realities. Still, even when Anne is not
explicitly talking about the necessity of living in hiding, that hard
and terrifying fact informs her entries. Her accounts reveal that the
pleasure she takes in books (those she reads; the one she is herself
writing) remains inextricable from her location in a hiding place
obscured by a bookcase. In this sense, writing signals two very
different experiences that life in the Secret Annex collapses together:
creative and intellectual delight and physical and social confinement.
Stated in slightly different terms, not only her candor but also her
silences regarding the hardships of life in the Annex inform our
understanding of the Diary as a coming-of-age narrative. Together,
these features of her writing—her outspokenness and her reserve—
what we might call her “Frankness”—shape her development into
young womanhood as a series of dislocations at once spatial and
linguistic.
So, for example, the July 9, 1942 entry provides a description
of the Annex. There, on the first level, Mr. and Mrs. Frank share a
bedroom, as do Anne and Margot. On the next level, there is a small
room for Peter van Daan and a larger room for his parents. Above
this level are the attic and a loft (23-4). The November 10, 1942 entry
in turn notes that once Mr. Dussel arrives, he will share the room
with Anne, and Margot will move into her parents’ room (62-3). The
November 19, 1942 entry includes the following acknowledgement:
“. . . I’m not exactly delighted at having a stranger use my things,
but you have to make sacrifices for a good cause, and I’m glad to
make this small one. ‘If we can save even one of our friends, the rest
doesn’t matter,’ said Father, and he’s absolutely right” (67). Within
ten days of that entry, she takes Mr. Dussel to task: he is “an oldfashioned disciplinarian and preacher of unbearably long sermons
on manners” (70). From then on, her references to him are typically
54
Critical Insights
critical, humorous, or both. He will not share food; he does not share
the bathroom; and he does not want to give her time to work at the
desk in their room. The references suggest a person who is selfcentered, rigid, and smug, and so rife for her lampooning. What is
striking here, though, is Anne’s silence on the inconvenience and
awkwardness of having to share a small room with this middle-aged
man. She may assert her right to have space for study, but she never
claims a right to privacy because of, say, her period. Any mention of
the gender-specific difficulties of a forced spatial intimacy between a
teenage girl and an older male stranger is foreclosed. She recognizes
that, within the life-and-death struggle that Jews are facing, as her
father says, “the rest doesn’t matter.” Anne restricts her critiques of
Mr. Dussel to his character.
That hiding serves as the condition for Anne’s coming of age
also carries with it other consequences. Early Diary entries from July,
1942 include mention of two boys, Hello Silberberg (who seems
more interested in her than she in him) and Peter Schiff (whom she
says she loves “as I’ve never loved anyone” (16). On January 6,
1944, Anne recalls how she once wanted to touch her best friend
Jacque’s breasts and how she had had “a terrible desire to kiss her”
(159). (It’s with Jacque, Anne later reveals, that she first reads a book
on sex education [220].) The entry closes with the wish, “If only I
had a girlfriend!” (159). (Some two months later, Anne expresses
her longing “not for a girlfriend, but for a boyfriend” [207].) A
second entry from the same January date begins with the sentence
“My longing for someone to talk to has become so unbearable that I
somehow took it into my head to select Peter [van Daan] for this role”
(159). This admission is hardly a ringing endorsement, and the step
to develop her relationship with the young man is overdetermined
by their shared circumstances. He is, in effect, her only choice, a
fact underscored by her description in the same entry of her dream
of the other Peter—Peter Schiff—who rests his cheek against hers.
“. . . [T]hat Peter is still the only one for me,” she confides (161,
emphasis added). By February 28, 1944, Anne writes, “Peter Schiff
and Peter van Daan have melted into one” (196). Taken together,
these entries suggest that Anne’s sexual curiosity and awakening are
Coming of Age within the Secret Annex
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