It's been 75 years since Anne Frank died in a concentration camp. When her father found her diary after the war, he read it and realized he never really knew his daughter. The published version of her notebooks was not the entire diary. When I read it in elementary school, a blurb gave me the idea that some passages were excised because they were about sex. Later, it was revealed that Otto Frank deleted passages that were disrespectful of Anne's mother. But the editing and deletions were varied and changed over time.
Anne herself had begun editing large swathes of her diary with publication in mind after hearing a radio broadcast that called on Dutch people to preserve diaries and other war documents. Otto respected some of those editorial decisions, but overlooked others – for example, he included material about Anne’s crush on annexe dweller Peter van Pels.
Otto made his own cuts, too: he removed passages in which Anne was critical of her parents’ marriage, and expurgated sections about sexuality and her often brutal comments about friends, family members and acquaintances. In an early passage from the diary that Otto eliminated completely from the first editions, Anne describes her classmates as everything from “a detestable, sneaky, stuck-up, two-faced gossip” to “pretty boring.”
The unpublished passages that contained judgmental comments and musings about sex came to light in bits and pieces, and make Anne seem all the more relatable as a young girl trying to grow up in extraordinary circumstances. Read about how the full account is being gradually revealed at History Extra. -via Damn Interesting
