You could be forgiven for thinking that all that has been said, or needed to be said, about Anne Frank had already been said, given the number of books, articles and even a play that have been written about her. And yet in some ways she has never been more relevant. In her diary she wrote:
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We can never become just Netherlanders or just English or any nation for that matter, we will always remain Jews.
Arthur Miller, describing his experiences of antisemitism despite being, as far as he was concerned, assimilated, said in a speech,
I can’t tell you how strange it felt not to be what I thought I was.
A main strength of this book is that it provides much food for thought. For example, one of the things that Otto Frank, Anne’s father, wanted from the publication of the diary was that it should not be seen as a solely Jewish story. But so many other groups have of people have appropriated Anne to their own cause one wonders whether the ideal of universality might sometimes be taken too far.
Indeed, the second half of the book is concerned with “Anne Frank”, the icon, or even idea, of the person who wrote the diary. It is extremely well-researched, and includes diving into the counter-factual novels that have been written pondering the question of what might have become of Anne had she survived. (I have always declined to read novels I regard as “Holocaust porn”, but Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer, which Franklin looks at in this book, sounds both sympathetic and intriguing.)
The first half of the book deals with the diary itself, and its several versions. For instance, there are the revisions that Anne herself made, revisions her father made, and a “Critical Edition” which contains all the versions, her short stories and unfinished novel, and research into her life.
Rather than simply being a rehash of the diary, the first half of this book contains extracts and gives the context in which they were written. There is a lot about the minutia of daily life in the annexe in which Anne and others were hiding. For example, they did not have to be absolutely silent for the whole day, contrary to what I had always believed. Neither had I realised, though it seems obvious now, that the Franks actually made preparations for their disappearance, and were sustained with food and reading material by non-Jewish friends and Otto’s workers.
Despite the plethora of detail, or even perhaps because of it, The Many Lives of Anne Frank is no dry-as-dust academic tome. Quite the contrary, in fact: it is highly readable. Importantly, Ruth Franklin is at pains to allow Anne to speak for herself as far as possible, or, as she puts it,
I strive to return Anne to herself, restoring her as a human being rather than an icon. Writing alongside Anne rather than over her and allowing her words to punctuate the narrative….
This biography also, I think, provides a cause for optimism, given the interest in, and adaptations of, the Diary by so many people from such disparate cultures. Perhaps, ultimately, Anne was right when she wrote that she believed people were fundamentally good