The Diary of a Young Girl
Anne Frank (1947)
“A thirteen-year-old girl hiding from the Nazis wrote the most read diary in human history — and never knew it.”
Character Analysis
The diary's subject and its maker — which creates an unusual self-consciousness throughout. Anne Frank knows she is writing; she knows she wants to publish; she knows she is constructing a version of herself for an imagined future reader. This awareness makes her not just a witness but a literary artist. She is also a teenager — vain, sometimes cruel, often wrong, always self-correcting. The Anne Frank the world has made into a symbol is real; but the Anne who is petty about van Pels's margarine, who is harsh about her mother, who is girlishly obsessed with her admirers — that Anne is equally real and equally important.
Educated, secular, middle-class German-Dutch assimilated Jewish family. Anne's language is multilingual — she thinks in German, writes in Dutch, studies English and French. Her references are literary and cultured. She writes about Goethe, Dickens, mythology, history.