Notes on a Controversy

A curious incident from Virginia involving the Definitive Edition of the diary should serve as a reminder of how much Anne Frank and her story are still able to stir up emotions and spark debate:

Culpeper County public school officials have decided to stop assigning a version of Anne Frank's diary, one of the most enduring symbols of the atrocities of the Nazi regime, after a parent complained that the book includes sexually explicit material and homosexual themes.

"The Diary of a Young Girl: the Definitive Edition," which was published on the 50th anniversary of Frank's death in a concentration camp, will not be used in the future, said James Allen, director of instruction for the 7,600-student system.

The version of the diary in question includes passages previously excluded from the widely read original edition... Some of the extra passages detail her emerging sexual desires; others include unflattering descriptions of her mother and other people living together.

Allen said that the more recent version will remain in the school library and that the earlier version will be used in classes. The 1955 play based on Frank's experiences also has been a part of the eighth-grade curriculum for many years.

(It has since been reported that the Definitive Edition will be reinstated as a classroom text at the above-mentioned school.)

The Definitive Edition has been a lightning rod for controversy since its inception: In her landmark biography of Anne Frank, Melissa Müller called the book "problematic" for "carelessly mixing" Anne's original diary entries (version A) with her later revisions (version B) without identifying them as such; others have attacked the book for reinstating deeply intimate passages that Anne herself had edited out in 1944. And Holocaust scholar Alvin Rosenfeld has taken issue with the title of the book: what right do publishers have to label any version of the Diary "definitive" given that the author "did not live long enough to complete such a book, nor did she authorize others to finalize a version in her name."

Personally speaking, the Definitive Edition has always been my favorite edition of the diary. It was the first version I ever read. I found a mirror of my own ambivalence in the deeply intimate entries where Anne tracks her physical and emotional development, and in the caustic observations of her relationship with her mother I found reassuring evidence that others felt the same way about their parents that I did about mine. And it underscores in the most poignant way the point that, even in hiding for her life from "the cruelest monsters ever to stalk the earth", Anne Frank was still an adolescent girl and totally human. The Anne of the original edition is sanitized, polished, and not nearly as accessible; classroom lessons revolving around that book shortchange students and make it harder for them to identify with her -- and thus harder for them to grasp the personal dimension of the Holocaust.

Still, the decision to remove the Definitive Edition doesn't approach anything close to Holocaust censorship. The diary in general was never banned from the school, and forcing comparisons between this episode and Nazi book burnings cheapens history. The school in question simply chose to rely on the older edition of the diary, which is the one that most schools use to teach kids about Anne Frank -- that is, when they're even using the actual diary at all. (My eighth-grade teacher didn't; instead, she had us read excerpts from the Goodrich-Hackett play, and then she showed us Anne Frank: The Whole Story; seeing both confused nearly everyone in my class.)

And. finally, the Definitive Edition is not "the unabridged edition" -- there is no such thing. Even the Critical Edition, which features both of Anne Frank's diary drafts alongside the published version, is missing a few lines at the request of the Frank family (over privacy concerns).