“To Whom Does Anne Frank Belong?” Anne Frank’s Edits and the Interpretation of Holocaust Memory

Abstract

This paper examines how Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl became legible as a universal, secular, and particularly Dutch moral text, and how that legibility underwrites contemporary invocations of Anne Frank in political discourse. Rather than locating the “misuse” of Anne Frank solely in later reception, I argue that key features of her posthumous iconography are grounded in the diary’s editorial history. Drawing on James E. Young’s claim that we must “know what happened in how it is represented,” the paper treats Anne Frank’s and Otto Frank’s edits as constitutive of Holocaust memory rather than as mere distortions or transparent windows onto an original truth. This paper engages in close textual analysis of three dimensions of revision: religious particularity, the balance between childhood innocence and moral maturity, and the framing of Anne’s girlhood and emerging sexuality. Through these themes, I show how the edited diary downplays Jewish ritual life while aligning Anne’s voice with a historically Christian but self-described secular Dutch moral culture. These revisions render Anne a portable symbol of innocent victimhood and liberal humanistic virtue, facilitating her “universalization” as an emblem of tolerance that can be mobilized across causes, even at the risk of trivializing the Holocaust. The paper concludes by probing what has been gained and lost in translating Anne Frank from a situated Jewish victim into a global secular martyr.