A New Book Attempts To Restore The Girl Behind The ‘Many Lives’ Of Anne Frank
(REVIEW) In time for the 80th anniversary of her death, author Ruth Franklin wants to rescue Anne Frank from being thought of only as a Holocaust saint or icon and restore her Jewish roots. But in that revision, Franklin upends everything we thought we knew about Frank through a splendid incorporation of biography, literary analysis, and cultural criticism in her new book, “The Many Lives of Anne Frank.”
In the book, Franklin observes: “The more symbolic she becomes, the less aware we are of her as a person… Anne Frank herself has become not just a person who once lived, breathed, and wrote but a symbol: a secret door that opens into a kaleidoscope of meanings, most of which her legions of fans understood incompletely, if at all.”
“The Many Lives of Anne Frank” is trenchant, elegant and relevant — beautifully written, almost like a novel. Franklin achieves the seemingly impossible: Allowing the reader to see the flesh-and-blood Anne — complex, rambunctious, talkative, critical, acerbic, funny and vivacious — rather than the homogenized and sentimentalized figure enshrined in pop culture. In a time of growing anxiety under the Trump administration, Frank’s story and diary feel especially urgent, offering insight into how we might combat prejudice and prevent the persecution of innocent people.
The first half of the book chronicles Frank’s brief, brave and complex life — both before and during her time hiding in the Secret Annex. The second half tells the story of the diary’s afterlife — how it was found, published and eventually adapted into a stage play and film (later much criticized and revised).
Franklin explores how Frank has been both understood and misinterpreted as a person and an idea, unpacking these various meanings, In the process, it allows Frank to be herself and to see the world through her own eyes. The biography is part of Yale University Press’s distinguished “Jewish Lives” series.
The details of Frank’s life are well known. Born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1929, her family emigrated to Amsterdam to escape Nazi persecution of the Jews. When the Nazis conquered the Netherlands, the Frank family tried to escape to America, but had waited too long.
In July 1942, after Frank’s sister was threatened with arrest, the family went into hiding in concealed rooms behind a bookcase in the building where Frank’s father Otto worked. Another family and eventually a dentist friend joined them. Two employees of Otto’s pectin business provided food and supplies. During their two-year stay, Anne kept a diary of her experiences. Betrayed by a still-unknown person, the Gestapo raided the Annex in July 1944 and arrested them. They were transported to the Westerbork transit camp, then to Auschwitz and finally to Bergen-Belsen, where Frank died in February or March 1945 of typhus.
The two employees gathered Frank’s diary from the floor of the Secret Annex following the arrest and returned it to Otto, the sole survivor, after the war ended. It was first published in the Netherlands in 1947, and then in English in 1952. Her book is considered the greatest literary work to emerge out of the Holocaust, making her Hitler’s most famous victim.
Readers might wonder: How religious was Frank? Her family were totally assimilated Germans. Her mother came from an Orthodox background, but Anne had little interest in traditional religion. She does write about being close to God, but her conception of Him is more pantheistic, experiencing God’s comforting presence in nature, though she recited her prayers nightly.
“I am grateful to God for giving me this gift, this possibility of developing myself, and of writing, of expressing all that is in me,” she wrote.
However, the longer she spent in hiding — especially while revising her diary — Anne increasingly embraced her ethnic and cultural Judaism, expressing both solidarity with and rage over how Jews were being attacked by the Germans. She was not a political person and didn’t view herself as a Zionist.
Franklin addresses the so-called bisexuality of Frank, who in one entry referenced a previous sleepover with a female friend (named Jacqueline), being curious about her body and asking if they could feel each other’s breasts, which Jacqueline refused. She also wrote, “I go into ecstasies every time I see the naked figure of a woman, such as Venus in the Springer History of Art.”
Book cover courtesy of Yale University Press
Franklin notes that “there is no way to know what the adult Anne’s sexual orientation would have been. But once she settled on Peter van Pels as her love interest, she doesn’t seem to have been distracted by thoughts of Jacqueline or any other girl,” though “she doesn’t seem to have been as physically attracted to Peter as she expected to be — another possible sign of interest in girls.”
Franklin also argues there is simply too little information to draw any conclusions and is appalled at conservative activists who want the diary removed from school libraries and curricula because of its “explicit” sexuality and queer content.
What Franklin wants readers to take away after finishing her book is contrary to what most people believe. Frank’s diary is not a found red-checked, cloth-covered object that was published as is. Inspired by a March 1944 Dutch radio appeal from the minister of education for historical material and personal documents (for example, diaries and letters) as a record of the German occupation, Frank rewrote her diary with an eye toward publication. It became a whole new version in which many personal elements were removed.
Frank provides context for her predicament and struggles with the meaning of hiding. The revised diary was carefully constructed as a Holocaust testimony — more a memoir about how Jews were mistreated in that era. The first publication was Otto’s edited version, which restored entries about her romance with Peter van Pels and toned down her criticism of her mother. The later “definitive version” included material that had been cut. Who the real Anne Frank is depends on which version a reader encounters.
Because Frank had so many different identities, Franklin presents 13 different ways of looking at her — each chapter title capturing a facet: child, refugee, witness, lover, artist, prisoner, corpse, celebrity, survivor, pawn, among others.
Each chapter includes generous quotes from the diary, so we are constantly hearing Frank’s thoughts and opinions. The book also features short interludes exploring cultural adaptations of the diary, showing how her story has resonated across societies. For example, with an Eritrean refugee in Ethiopia, as inspiration for the indie-rock album “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” by Elephant 6, a mural by an anonymous street artist, the one-man play “Otto Frank” by Roger Guenveur Smith, Israeli writer Judith Katzer’s novel “Dearest Anne: A Tale of Impossible Love” about a teenage girl’s affair with a female teacher and Philip Roth’s “The Ghost Writer,” where the narrator suspects Anne survived the Holocaust and is living anonymously in the U.S.
Franklin is critical of some of these interpretations. Since her death, Frank has often been transformed into a universal icon, with her Jewish identity downplayed or erased to appeal to a wider audience. Franklin argues that assuming someone Jewish isn’t universally relatable inadvertently feeds an antisemitic trope, especially at a time when antisemitism is rising globally.
Otto began this universalizing process during discussions about adapting the diary for the stage. He wanted its message to be one of international peace and tolerance, so lines were changed from “it’s the Jews who’ve always had to suffer” to “throughout history, all people have had to suffer, sometimes one people, other times another.”
Franklin observes that those who invoke Frank as a symbol for a particular cause — such as Nelson Mandela, who found inspiration in the diary during apartheid and said it “kept our spirits high and reinforced our confidence in the invincibility of the cause of freedom and justice” — are often less interested in Anne’s historical reality and more in the symbolic weight she lends their message.
Franklin does not object to these resonances, as long as they don’t imply equivalency without context: “An Anne Frank who is everywhere will ultimately be nowhere (draped in a keffiyeh last year on a mural in Norway).”
Franklin praises Frank as one of the few written female perspectives we have on the Holocaust. Most well-known Jewish testimonies are male (Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi are famous). Franklin said she is writing “alongside” Anne, not over her. She rejects the view of Anne as an archetypal victim, instead portraying her as a figure of resilience and strength, “a brilliant young woman who seized control of her own narrative.”
Frank’s most famous line — “I still believe people are really good at heart” — is often cited without the darker passage that follows: “I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too.”
So no reader can accuse Frank of being a Pollyanna or naïve about human nature. Franklin even wonders what Anne might have written about Auschwitz had she survived.
Frank seems to be having a moment, not only with the publication of this book, but also with a new exhibit at the Center for Jewish History in New York City. The exhibition immerses visitors in a full-scale, furnished replica of the actual Annex and includes more than 100 original items, some never before exhibited, from the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. The show has been so popular it has been extended through to Oct. 31.
Franklin presents Frank as an opportunity to reconsider how we define heroism —especially relevant to those contemplating resistance to Trump’s agenda. Yes, Anne’s life was ended by the Nazis, but her voice endures — and speaks most powerfully when injustice rises.
We’re fortunate Ruth Franklin has reminded us that, through Anne’s diary, she remains vividly alive to millions of readers. Her courageous witness feels more essential than ever. This book is likely to become the definitive examination of Anne Frank — both during her short life and in the decades that followed.
Brian Bromberger is a freelance writer/journalist who works as a staff reporter and arts critic for The Bay Area Reporter weekly newspaper in San Francisco.