The Diary of A Young Girl - Criticism

Criticism

Anne Frank's story has become symbolic of the scale of Nazi atrocities during the war, a stark example of Jewish persecution under Adolf Hitler, and a dire warning of the consequences of persecution. However, there have been many claims that Anne Frank's diary was fabricated. Holocaust deniers such as Robert Faurisson have claimed that the diary is a forgery, though critical and forensic studies of the text and the original manuscript have supported its authenticity.

Otto Frank had stated that prior to the book's original publication in 1947 he cut many passages from the transcript that his publishers advised would be of little interest to the general reader. He was also advised to assign pseudonyms to protect the identities of those Anne Frank had mentioned by name. Some, such as David Irving, have suggested this was evidence that the published version was not an accurate transcription of the manuscripts, and even that the work had been written wholly or partly by Otto Frank or one of his associates.

In his will, Otto Frank bequeathed his daughter's original manuscripts to the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation. After his death in 1980, the Institute commissioned a forensic study of the manuscripts. The material composition of the original notebooks as well as the ink and handwriting found within them and the loose version were extensively examined. In 1986, the results were published; the handwriting was positively matched with contemporary samples of Anne Frank's handwriting and the paper, ink and glue found in the diaries and loose papers were consistent with materials available in Amsterdam during the period in which the diary was written.

The survey of her manuscripts compared an unabridged transcription of Anne Frank's original notebooks with the entries she expanded and clarified on loose paper in a rewritten form and the final edit as it was prepared for the English translation. The investigation revealed that all of the entries in the published version were accurate transcriptions of manuscript entries in Anne Frank's handwriting, and that they represented approximately a third of the material collected for the initial publication. The magnitude of edits to the text is comparable to other historical diaries such as those of Katherine Mansfield, Anaïs Nin and Leo Tolstoy in that the authors revised their diaries after the initial draft, and the material was posthumously edited into a publishable manuscript by their respective executors, only to be superseded in later decades by unexpurgated editions prepared by scholars.