The Diary of Anne Frank/Talk

Please add more to this if you can - there is much more to tell about Anne Frank.

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What is the copyright situation of Anne Frank's diary? She died 1945, so the work should be in the PD in 2015, but is it currently already available on the Net, or is copying prosecuted? What about the translations? I did not find a copy on the Anne Frank homepage.

I remember a controversy about the authenticity of the diary. Not that I think the claims have any merit, but I think they should be covered here in sufficient detail, if only to dispel the myths. -- Eloq.

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Don't understand the redirect??

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Don't understand it either and would suggest switching it. -- Eloq.

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I agree. The biographical article should be separate from the articles regarding the author's individual works. - HWR

There was never any serious controversy regarding the authenticity of the diary, BTW.

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No, there was never serious controversy. In fact, there was a "definitive" version published (I'll look up the information tonight at home; it's mentioned in the introduction to mine) that included a comparison of the published version with the original manuscript. It was just edited by her father before it was published. He was the only family member to survive the camps. Most likely it just has some information he thought was too personal of something. ;-) --Dmerrill

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If I remember well, the 'missing pages' of the diary suddenly popped up sometime during the mid-nineties. Someone had kept them and, I think, asked money for it, which aroused some public indignation. Otto Frank had supposedly taken out passages which were too painful for him; they included very harsh criticism by Anne of her parents. I haven't added this to the article because I am not completely sure how accurate this is.--TK

It is inaccurate. There were no missing pages and there was no money involved. The full story can be found in the reference cited in the article. Otto edited out a lot of stuff, both criticism of his wife and sexual content (for american readers). The original was always in the possession of the Anne Frank foundation, and it was published as part of the critical edition, with photographs of some selected pages. --AxelBoldt

Thanks Axel. I must have confused it with something else. --TK

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Here's the story as I understand it: -HWR

In 1980, two German neo-Nazis, Ernst Romer and Edgar Gaiss, were tried in Hamburg for claiming the diary was a forgery. They were convicted. On appeal, an investigation of the authenticity of the diary was ordered by the court. The investigation was conducted by the federal Office of Criminal Investigation in Wiesbaden, which requested that Otto Frank provide the investigators with all the manuscript documents in his possession.

Before doing so, Otto removed 5 pages (on three sheets) which he wished to remain private, and gave them to a friend, Cornelius Suijk, so that he could assert truthfully to the investigators that he was turning over all the documents in his possession.

Otto died about six months later, and in his will bequeathed all of Anne's manuscripts to the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation (RIOD) in Amsterdam. However, Suijk remained silent about the material in his possession. The existence of this material was unknown to the institute and was therefore not included in the critical editon of the diary published by the RIOD in 1986.

In the summer of 1998 the existence of the missing pages was reported in the press. Suijk indicated he would turn them over to the RIOD, but did not indicate when he would do so. The pages were published by an Amsterdam newspaper in 1999, but it was sued for copyright violation and forced to print an apology. In March 2000 it was announced that Suijk would turn the pages over to the RIOD in exchange for a substantial donation to his personal Holocaust education campaign. The pages were finally published by the RIOD in a new critical edition of the diary in March 2001. I am unsure whether they have yet been published in English translation.

Biographer Carol Ann Lee, who had read the missing pages, indicated that they contain nothing not found in one form or another elsewhere in the diary. Essentially, they concerned Anne's critcal analysis of her parent's marriage.