The Diary of Anne Frank

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
For the past two years we have lived in fear. Now we can live in hope.
—Otto Frank
We try and hold on to some kind of ideals, when everything - ideals, hope, everything is being destroyed.
—Anne Frank

The 1955 Pulitzer-Prize winner for Drama, The Diary of Anne Frank was Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett's dramatization of Holocaust victim Anne Frank's diary (usually referred to as The Diary of a Young Girl, which was the title of the first edition). An Academy Award-winning film version, staring Shelley Winters, was released in 1959.

It chronicles Frank's time as a Jewish refugee in Amsterdam hiding from Nazi forces with her family. Throughout her stay in a businessman's house, Frank wrote her observations of the world around her in her diary. That is, until, the Nazis finally find her.

Tropes used in The Diary of Anne Frank include:
  • Adaptation Distillation: The play and The Movie.
  • Adaptation Expansion: Again, the play and The Movie.
  • Artistic License: The play and The Movie take some liberties with the source material. Certain details, such as Dussel's allergy to cats (and the resulting conflict with Peter, who has a greater attachment to the cat than in the diary), the Hanukkah celebration, the fight over food (and threats to evict the Van Daans) immediately before the announcement of D-Day, and the sequence of events documenting precisely how the Annex residents were caught, are nowhere found in the diary itself. Certain scenes, such as the Annex residents' learning about D-Day and Anne's first kiss, play out very differently between the diary and the two adaptations. Also, certain statements from the diary, in both The Movie and the play, are taken out of context, to the extent that the changes alter, even contradict, the statements' original meanings.
  • As the Good Book Says...: At the start of the Chanukah scene, the Frank family and their friends read Psalm 121 from the KJV Bible... which counts as Fridge Brilliance when you discover that its Christian Old Testament is known as and translated from the Hebrew Bible, whose canon is called the Tanakh, a name used in Judaism.
  • Bi the Way: The first several rounds of publishing excluded excerpts from when Anne admits to being excited by the female body, even going so much as to reveal she kissed a friend and asked to feel her breasts. The Squick factor of this being a young girl not even in her teens is a justified explanation. The sections had been Bowdlerised by her father, and weren't discovered until his death.
  • Bookcase Passage
  • Daddy's Girl
  • Foregone Conclusion: The Franks's hiding spot is betrayed to the Nazis.
  • No Ending: Anne's diary ends abruptly, since she obviously couldn't continue it in the camps.
  • Pragmatic Adaptation: Several of the printings of the diary, as well as the play and The Movie. Face it, there was no way some of the material, particularly the sexual discussions, would have made it past the Moral Guardians.
  • Rousseau Was Right: Lampshaded:

Anne Frank: In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.

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