The Diary of Anne Frank [antikvár]

Foreword In November 1980 the handwritten entries Anne Fran]< had made in her diary between June 12., 1942, and August i, 1944, were delivered to the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation by a notary public from Basle in Switzerland. Otto Frank, Anne's father, who had died in August of that year, had bequeathed the material to the Institute. The Institute had never interested itself in Anne Frank; for many years the subject had seemed of small academic importance. In his standard work, published by the Institute, Ondergang. De vervolging en verdelging van het Nederlandse Jodendom 1940-194^ {Ashes in the Wind. The Destruction of Dutch jeiury) (London, 1968; New York, 1969, as The Destruction of Dutch fetus). Dr. Jacob Presser mentions Anne Frank's name just three times, including two quotations from her diary. Similarly Dr. Louis de Jong, former director of the Institute, refers to her three times only, in passing, in his monumental work Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog {The Kingdom of the Netherlands in the Second World War-, 12 vols The Hague, 1969-1987). In 1957, incidentally. Dr. de Jong also published an article on Anne Frank in the Reader's Digest on his own authority, after he and her father had made contact. The Institute had simply taken cognizance of the fact that there had been discussions concerning the authenticity of the published version of the diary and its relationship to the original manuscripts, no more. However, once members of the Institute had read the manuscripts, the situation changed. It quickly became obvious that an edition of the complete diaries was needed, for historical reasons (the publication of an important source) as well as on personal and political grounds (the growing number of published slurs, particularly during the second half of the 1970s, on the diary were intended to cast doubt both on the personal integrity of the author and on the relationship between the original manuscript, the published version, and its many translations, not always identical even in content). On being approached, the Minister of Education and Science was quick to approve publication of the present edition. The main aim of this edition has been to offer the reader the chance to compare the extant, original diary entries of Anne Frank with each other, as well as with Het Achterhuis, the original Dutch version of the Diary of Anne Frank. We have not been entirely successful in meeting the first objective: some of the persons mentioned by name in the manuscripts have asked us not to use their names; we have replaced these with initials chosen at random. Moreover, Otto Frank's second wife, Elfriede Frank-Markovits, in her position as authorized representative both of the Frank family and of the anne frank-Fonds, and as one of the persons mentioned by name in the diary, had strong objections to the inclusion of a small number of previously unpublished details. We have heeded these and similar objections by the people concerned, since the historical character