The Diary of Anne Frank: A classic and yet not literature (#7)

Sex, drugs, tulips and Rembrandt: Those are the words I had always associated with Amsterdam, and not being much into prostitution, pot or the art of the Dutch Golden Age, I had never had the urge to visit. But then I had a very straight-laced friend who went there and absolutely loved it, and I began to reassess my position. I resolved to go, one day -- but it never came near the top 5 on my travel list, so there Amsterdam stayed, as a one-day-I'll-go trip, joining locales like India and China, places I seriously intend to get to, but someday. (And cue the Black Eyed Peas...)

Fast-forward about a decade: One day, someday, arrived. This past spring, during tulip season, we took a long weekend and journeyed to Amsterdam. Our goal was to see all the major sights, which included, of course, the Anne Frank House.

Like all good American schoolchildren, I read The Diary of Anne Frank when I was a kid, though I don't remember anything specific about the experience, just a generally favorable impression. So, I decided to read the book again. Now I realize why you should read it when you're a kid, and only when you're a kid: You can appreciate her experience without question. Because as an adult and a more critical reader, the diary presents some icky issues.

Anne Frank was German, but her family had moved to Holland when she was quite young to escape the Nazis' growing influence. Her father gifted her with the famous diary on her 13th birthday, in June 1942, shortly before the family went into hiding. She decides to call her diary Kitty -- she declares that it will be her one true friend, which she feels she doesn’t have. But for that, she seems to be a pretty carefree kid, and she doesn't hold much back in her writing. The family went into hiding in early July; they were shortly joined by another family, the van Pels (van Daan in the diary), and a dentist friend, Fritz Pfeffer (Albert Dussel). Anne spent the next two years chronicling their time in the Secret Annex. Her last diary entry comes on Aug. 1, 1944; the police came to arrest them three days later.

That description sounds very serious, and the situation  of course was very serious, but the truth is, the diary for the most part is not. In fact, as I was reading The Diary of Anne Frank, I couldn't help but think of the opening moments of the film Eat, Pray, Love. In voiceover, the character Elizabeth (Julia Roberts) says: "I have a friend, Deborah, a psychologist, who was asked by the city of Philadelphia if she could offer psychological counseling to a group of Cambodian refugees, boat people, who had recently arrived in the city. Deborah was daunted by the task. These Cambodians had suffered genocide, starvation, relatives murdered before their eyes, years in refugee camps, harrowing boat trips to the West…how could she relate to their suffering, how could she help these people? So guess what all these people wanted to talk about with my friend Deborah, the psychologist. It was all, I met this guy in the refugee camp, I thought he really loved me but when we got separated on the boat, he took up with my cousin, but now he says he really me, he keeps calling me, they’re married now – what should I do? I still love him. This is how we are."

And this is how the diary is.

As a piece of history and a record of what a certain group of people went through during World War II, Anne Frank's diary is irreplaceable. And yet, the diary is hardly at all about the war or the Secret Annex. Rather, it captures this unique moment in time of this young life. While it's well-written, as a piece of literature, it's not great -- it's childish. Which is not surprising as it's the innermost thoughts of a burgeoning teenager. In truth, Anne has a bit of an attitude, and I didn't find her to be terribly likeable. She's constantly complaining about being reprimanded, and she goes on and on about how she doesn't love her mother and how much she dislikes the van Daans and Dussel. The diary eventually shifts to her sexual awakening, which, being without any options, manifests as a growing attraction for Peter van Daan, who was a couple of years older than she was. As a teenger's diary, it's all fine, but it's hardly War and Peace.

But the thing is, Anne Frank's diary was never supposed to be literature -- and this is where it starts to get icky. Anne Frank wrote her diary for herself,  and it was obviously VERY personal; while she intended to publish something after the war, it wasn’t this. But she didn't survive the war to write the novel she intended; in the end, her father, the only survivor of the group, decided to publish her recovered diary. And it begs the question: Should we be reading it?

I don't know what the answer is.