Fragmenten uit haar dagboek… in De Nieuwe Stem (Diary of…)
The Diary Of Anne Frank:
Its First Appearance
Frank, Anne. Fragmenten uit haar dagboek van Anne Frank. In De Nieuwe Stem. Amsterdam: Van Loghum Slaterus’, I.6 ([June]1946), pp. 432-42.
8vo.; largely unopened; printed wrappers; light edgewear, else bright and fresh. In a specially made quarter-morocco slipcase.
First appearance of any of the Diary of Anne Frank; precedes the book-length publication by at least half a year. These five entries to “Kitty” begin on July 11, 1942, and conclude on April 11, 1944. De Nieuwe Stem was a left-wing intellectual Dutch journal published from 1946 until 1967—this is the sixth issue that came out during it’s inaugural year. One of its publishers, Jan Romein, wrote an influential article for the national Dutch newspaper Het Parool on April 3, 1946, that indirectly led to the publication of the complete diary in book form (minus those passages expunged, temporarily, by Otto Frank) as Het Achterhuis: Dagboekbrieven (The House Behind) in 1947, with a foreword by Romein’s wife Anne Romein-Verschoor. The editing of these excerpts is uncredited, but was likely performed by either or both of the Romeins.
Anne Frank began her diary, which spans the two years she spent cloistered in hidden quarters in Amsterdam with her German-Jewish family and a handful of Jewish friends, on June 12, 1942, just after her thirteenth birthday—just before she went into hiding. Isolated physically by Hitler’s oppression and emotionally by a hypercritical mother, nosey co-habitants, and a favored older sister, she felt in desperate need of a friend. She wrote during her second week:
It’s an odd idea for someone like me to keep a diary; not only because I have never done so before, but because it seems to me that neither I—nor for that matter anyone else—will be interested in the unbosomings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl. …I don’t want to set down a series of bald facts in a diary as most people do, but I want this diary itself to be my friend, and I shall call my friend Kitty.
L. De Jong wrote in A Tribute to Anne Frank that “[s]he described life in the ‘Annex’ with all its inevitable tensions and quarrels,… But she created first and foremost a wonderfully delicate record of adolescence, sketching with complete honesty a young girl’s feelings, her longings and loneliness.” One historian notes that the diary “traces her development from an outgoing, popular child to an introspective, idealistic young woman” (Contemporary Authors Online) and another writes that “in her last entry, Anne analyzes herself and her situation and shows that she has grown tremendously during her two years in hiding, from a spoiled, immature girl to a thoughtful, introspective young woman” (Literature and Its Times…, Moss and Wilson, eds., 1997). In addition, Frank “immediately recounts her own history, telling how her family left Germany when she was three because of Hitler’s rise to power and his persecution of the Jews there.” She “describes the German invasion and occupation of Holland, and outlines the new restrictions on Jews” (ibid.).
When a Dutch radio broadcast “voic[ed] the hope that after the war people of the land would make public accounts of their suffering under German Occupation,” Frank resolved to ready for publication the private thoughts she originally intended for an intimate companion. On August 4, 1944, three days after Frank’s final journal entry, the Annex was raided. Anne’s mother died at Auschwitz in early 1945; Anne and her sister Margot died of typhoid fever at Bergen-Belsen, where survivors later recalled Anne’s leadership and strength of spirit. Otto Frank, also interred at Auschwitz, returned to Amsterdam after the camp was liberated by Russian troops in 1945, and was met by friends who had discovered Anne’s writings. He undertook the publication of a version he edited together from the early diary kept in 1942 and ’43 as well as revisions made in 1944. (Material of an especia
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