The Diary of Anne Frank (TV Serial) - Reception

Reception

One reviewer, Michael Fox of jweekly.com, wrote:

Sixty-five years on, and despite her legendary stature, Anne Frank still comes across as a willful, normal teenager with unrealistic — and tragically unrealized — dreams of her future. She attaches supreme importance to her own whims and needs, demands immediate satisfaction and musters barely an iota of tolerance for what she perceives as the stunted, compromised world of adults.

As it unfolds, however, the British television adaptation of “The Diary of Anne Frank” increasingly and irresistibly frames its subject’s willfulness as a determination to establish an identity, and a place of significance, in the soon-to-come postwar world... It is the pitiless snuffing of this potential — the dream destroyed when the Gestapo breached her family’s Amsterdam refuge in 1944 after two long years in hiding — that is, and has always been, the piercing tragedy of Anne Frank’s life.­

Solidly engrossing and vigorously paced, “The Diary of Anne Frank” takes place almost entirely (after the first five minutes) in the secret annex above Otto Frank’s warehouse and office. It confines itself to the events recorded by our unintentional heroine — which is to say that younger viewers unfamiliar with the Nazis’ systematic, continent-spanning implementation of the Final Solution aren’t provided with a great deal of detail.

Anne Frank has long been an icon to Jews and a symbol of the Holocaust to non-Jews, but I suspect mainstream audiences will view this version a bit differently. In the current era, when children die in every corner of the world and “ethnic cleansing” has become part of our vocabulary, Anne’s story provokes associations with racism, persecution and lost promise that go beyond Nazis and Jews.

This production also has a more contemporary feel thanks to a shockingly candid scene where Anne acknowledges the changes in her body and admits her confusion over puberty. This was one of the passages regarding Anne’s sexuality that Otto Frank removed before the diary’s original publication in 1947, and which were restored in an edition published well after his 1980 death.