Anne Frank Read Free Page B

the essence of the diary, and intuiting what would make the book more appealing to readers. In many cases, that meant reversing Anne’s decisions about what she wanted omitted—for example, the intensely emotional entries from the startof her romance with Peter van Pels, with whom she had become disenchanted during the time she was rewriting her diary.
    The cooling of the love affair and Anne’s focus on the revisions may not be entirely unrelated. Once she had stopped thinking semiobsessively about the boy upstairs, Anne had more time and energy to devote to her writing. She would not have been the first artist to discover that the end of a romance can inspire a return to work with new energy and sharpened concentration.
     
    I N 1986, the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation published The Critical Edition of the Diary of Anne Frank, a huge volume, over eight hundred pages long, that includes all the extant drafts of Anne’s diary; the English edition would appear three years later. Missing from the book were the five pages that Otto Frank and the Frank family chose to leave out, pages that subsequently appeared in the more recent Revised Critical Edition, which was published in Dutch in 2001 and in English in 2003. Both the earlier and later editions contain an account of the methods and conclusions of the forensic experts employed by the institute, who proved that the diaries, except for a few minor editorial corrections, were written entirely by Anne Frank. Their meticulous research demonstrated how the evolution of Anne’s handwriting over the course of the two years in hiding took the exact trajectory that the penmanship of a child—the same child—would be expected to follow between the ages of thirteen and fifteen.
    In The Critical Edition, the original draft of Anne’s diary is referred to as the “a” version. The revisions that she made on the loose sheets constitute the “b” version. And the book that her father produced by combining those first two drafts is reprinted as the “c” version. All three drafts are printed in parallel bands, so that it is possible—painstaking, time-consuming,and at times maddening, but possible—to read all three versions and to determine what Anne originally wrote, what she rewrote, what she intended to appear in Het Achterhuis, and at what points her father respected or reversed her decisions. Judith Thurman observed, “What a comparison of the texts does reveal is both how spontaneously the diarist composed her prose and how finely she then tuned it. In order to make such a comparison, however, one needs a certain amount of motivation. The editors’ instructions on how to read The Critical Edition are more arcane, and harder to follow, than those for a build-it-yourself hang glider.”
    What makes the task of comparing Anne’s original draft with her revisions and with her father’s compilation even more challenging are all the unanswered and unanswerable questions. When Anne said that she had begun writing Het Achterhuis, did she mean that she had just begun? Long gaps in each version must be filled in by consulting the others. Even in the cloth diary, pages are misnumbered and dated out of order. If Anne omitted something from her second draft, did that mean that she intended to excise it completely, or that she felt the first version was sufficient? And finally, for those of us who don’t read Dutch, there is the problem of knowing how much we are missing by reading the work in translation. According to David Barnouw, one of the editors of The Critical Edition, only readers of Dutch can appreciate how much Anne’s style changed over those two years. In the published version, explains Barnouw, Anne’s incorrect word choices and other youthful mistakes were rectified, and the rougher passages were smoothed out. “Otherwise, it would have seemed that the editor made a mistake.”
    One of the most clear-sighted experts on the diary is Laureen