Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife

Francine Prose reads The Diary of a Young Girl as what it also is: a piece of writing, revised and shaped by a teenager who knew exactly what she was doing with a narrative voice, with dialogue, with turning the people around her into characters. She then follows what happened to it afterwards. Otto Frank's struggle to get it published, the Broadway and Hollywood versions that softened it into a story about adolescence and hope, the decades of denialist claims and the forensic work that ended them, and the fights over how it should be taught. Both the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and the family's Anne Frank-Fonds in Basel gave it their backing.