Reappraising the Anne Frank Diaries
Contexts and Receptions
Firenze, 15–16 April 2015Seventy years after the end of the Second World War our knowledge about the war and the Holocaust is based upon a wide variety of sources and a rich range of historiographies. Amongst the first sources to be published, and quickly acquiring a rather unique status, were the diary notes of Anne Frank. Around the world many children and teenagers have read and are still reading editions of Anne's diaries. But meanwhile Anne Frank's notes have been aligned with a wide range of moral debates, what – from a historian's perspective – is not without problems.
A new research project – installed at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg, the Goettingen Institute for Advanced Study, and the Fritz Bauer Institute in Frankfurt – aims to open up a range of additional and new perspectives, exploring the history of Anne Frank and her diaries within the framework of more comparative European, if not global cultural, intellectual, literary and political history.
In this workshop the referees will discuss the particular political circumstances of the persecution of Jews in the Netherlands, Anne Frank's family history in Germany, her emigration, which she shared with many German Jews, the situation of other teenagers persecuted by the National Socialists – to mention only a few – to open up the historical dimensions.