Holocaust yes, genital exploration no. Last week, an association of families linked to the US far-right calling itself Moms for Liberty banned and removed from the library of the Vero Beach High School in Florida a comic version of The Diary of Anne Frank. “We certainly believe that true history has to be taught, the Holocaust and the newspaper.
But this book includes a graphic scene that does not contribute to the educational themes,” spokeswoman Jennifer Pippin said. The group, closely linked to the Republican Party, has gained notoriety in the United States in recent months for its crusade against titles being purged from school libraries. On his list of prohibited books there are many contemporary texts, some that reflect LGTBQ relationships, books with an anti-racist message and also classics such as Slaughterhouse Five and successful novels such as Normal People, by Sally Rooney.
Even so, and despite the concern that these actions have aroused among educators and those who want to preserve students’ access to reading, over and above the supposed “parental rights” claimed by the group, it was the prohibition of the Diario that That took the discussion to another level.
The scene in the comic, illustrated and adapted by a son of two concentration camp survivors, that irritated these self-styled “freedom mothers” is one in which Frank writes about the time he wanted to kiss a friend of his and told her she asked if they could show each other their naked bodies. Furthermore, he tells how he felt desire when he saw nude statues in his Art History book.
Florida mothers would have felt more comfortable with the censored version of the Diary, which was the most widely circulated in almost all languages ​​until 1986 when a Dutch institution dedicated to the preservation of World War II documents took it upon itself to publish a restored critical edition of the original manuscript, reinserting all the parts that Otto Frank, Anne’s father and sole survivor of the nine people who hid for two years in the annex to his Amsterdam office, discarded and censored because he thought they gave a distorted image of his daughter.
The other sexually significant scene, which millions of readers of different generations did not get to see because it was hidden from them, is one in which Anne explores her own genitalia and tells it in a very transparent and natural way. In addition, the father eliminated other fragments, which did not surface until 1999 when a former director of the Anne Frank Foundation showed them and assured that Frank had bequeathed them to him before he died in 1980, which have to do with the sometimes tense relationship that the parents had. parents and with the criticism that the girl makes of her mother. Otto Frank did not think it fair that his wife, gassed in Auschwitz, go down to posterity as an irritated and impatient mother and decided on her behalf to mutilate her daughter’s work.
It is important to point out that since March 1944, two years after starting a diary that was given to her for her twelfth birthday, Anne Frank already writes thinking that her work can (and should) be published or at least read one day, and not just as an exercise in personal reflection. That month, Anne and the rest of those hiding in the annex heard on the radio how the Dutch Minister of Education, Arts and Science, Gerrit Bolkelstein, who was in exile in London, asked his compatriots to preserve documents, diaries and letters to create an archive of the Nazi occupation.
From that moment, the 14-year-old adolescent begins to conceive her diary as a literary work. On May 20, 1944 she wrote that she had begun to rewrite with future readers in mind, she expanded some entries and standardized the format, so that all passages are headed by the famous “dear Kitty.” There has been speculation as to whether Kitty was a friend of hers named Kitty Egyedi (that was Otto Frank’s theory) or whether, as most scholars claim, Kitty was a fictitious character and an ingenious narrative device for ordering a story. manuscript that has a great literary value as well as testimonial.
“If Anne Frank had not died in the criminal treachery of Berger-Belsen at the beginning of 1945 (…) it is likely that we would count her among other famous names of the 20th century, although perhaps not with such a dramatic aspect as now”, argues the writer Cynthia Ozick in an article that appeared in The New Yorker in 1997 that Alpha Decay has just published in Spain in mini-book format, translated by Eugenia Vázquez Nacarino. Ozick has no doubt that, had she survived, Frank would have established herself as what she already was as a teenager, a solid author. She “She was born to be a writer. At thirteen she felt the power of it. At fifteen, she was in full possession of her talent.”
In addition to the controversy in the United States, it is especially opportune to read this text by Ozick now, when we are immersed in the debate on the integrity of literary texts, following the attempts to adapt and modify the work of Roald Dahl and Agatha Christie. . Because few classics have been as well-used as The Diary of Anne Frank. “Her history has been expurgated, distorted, doctored, translated, reduced, infantilized until it ended up falsified, corny and arrogantly denied,” writes, not without fury, Cynthia Ozick, who is greatly irritated that what should be read, in her opinion , as a gloomy testimony of a monumental crime (and very concrete, committed against the Jews) has often been diluted in a good message, a “song to life” -Ozick is outraged-, property of “the children of the world” .
In a detailed review of the vicissitudes that the manuscript has gone through since it was found in 1945 by Miep Gies, the woman who kept the nine people hidden in the annex alive for more than two years, Ozick takes it upon himself to point out the culprits of that misrepresentation. The first one she points to is Otto Frank himself, a German bourgeois exiled in the Netherlands who, according to the author, “grew up with a social need to please those around him without offending anyone”, and who, after the war, insisted on wrap her daughter’s diary in a message about the goodness of human beings.
In fact, that is the most quoted phrase in the book, a phrase that has been embodied in medals, T-shirts and notebooks. “I still believe, despite everything, in the goodness of the human being.” Two lines below, she wrote something much darker: “I see the world slowly transformed into a wasteland, I hear the thunder that one day will destroy us too.” She was not wrong. Barely three weeks later, Nazi officials discovered the two Jewish families in hiding – for years it was thought to be a tip-off, but it could have been something more accidental – and Anne was sent to the Westerbork concentration camp.
But not only Otto Frank misrepresented the prodigious work of his daughter. The German translator substituted “Germans” for “Nazis” every time Anne Frank cries out against the occupying people and she delivered a completely distorted version that circulated for decades in that language. And the final resignification of the diary came with the adaptation to Broadway in 1952, which was also the one that was later taken to the cinema and finished popularizing the work. As liquefied as it got in 2023 (Ozick goes so far as to wish Miep Gies had burned it), Anne Frank’s book still retains enough subversiveness to be censored in Florida, a far cry from the Amsterdam hideout where it was written.
