The Diary of Anne Frank
In an effort to be more consistent in my writing, I’ve decided to start doing a regular post highlighting particular instances of book challenges and censorship. I’m shooting for every two weeks. Today is a challenge to The Diary of Anne Frank. Assigned in classrooms across the country, few books are as well-known as the Diary. American schools use it to introduce students to the horrors of the Holocaust through the story of a girl who is roughly their own age. It may surprise some to learn that the Diary is a source of controversy. Much of this is from Holocaust deniers and other antisemites who argue that the Diary was fabricated. These nutcases are easily dismissed but challenges in the U.S. have tended to focus on the sexual content of Anne’s writing. In perhaps the oddest challenge, in 1983, four members of Alabama State Textbook Committee sought to remove the Diary because it was a “real downer” (according to Robert Doyle’s compilation). Really there is nothing to say to that. In the past decade or so, the Diary has returned to controversy and in this post I will discuss a 2016 public library challenge that illustrates this new genre of complaints.
“the writings of Anne Franks journal is being altered and homosexual experimentation has been added”
The challenger asserts that the Diary has been altered to suggest that Anne engaged in homosexual experiences, or at least thoughts. Later in the challenge they demand the “the additions of recent fraud should be removed.” They insist that the book be replaced with “the original text only!!!” This outrage was triggered by the publication of the unedited Diary. Contrary to this challenger’s assertions, the real changes to the Diary were done by Anne’s father and first publisher who removed some material for a variety of reasons. (The Anne Frank House has a number of great pieces on the history of the Diary including its survival and editing.) This new complete version has triggered controversy a few times. Perhaps most famously was a Northville, Michigan, parent who complained that this version was “pretty graphic, and it's pretty pornographic for seventh-grade boys and girls to be reading.” That parent complained that the school did not inform them of the material and it likely did not. After all, who would have thought that using the ubiquitous Diary would offend anyone? But the parent’s real complaint was that the older, less graphic and pornographic version had been replaced without her knowledge.
“The great expressions + inspiration of this girls experience is being tarnished and future readers of this book would be lead to believe she had homosexual tendencies and perverted ideas.”
Where the Michigan mother was complaining about the surprising new content in her daughter’s English class, the 2016 challenger asserted that the new content was fraudulent and, at one point, suggested it was motivated “by some dark agenda.” This agenda is not spelled out but the inference is clear: the Diary was edited to add support to some homosexual cabal that seeks to spread their “perverted ideas” by altering a beloved piece of literature in order to corrupt young and impressionable minds. Thus, the demand is for the return of the original, pure text. This train of thought fits nicely into an anti-gay movement’s attempt to pretend that homosexuality is a product of a modern morally bankrupt world and that it can only exist when spread nefariously. The fact that the content had simply been returned to the book after removal by others never entered into the challenger’s mind, even though this information is easy to find.
While the challenger claimed to have read the whole book, my guess is this meant the first edition text and that it was probably read in junior high. The most likely source for this complaint is some conservative outrage site — as a person who’s Google Alerts trip on them often, I can say there are a lot of these — that published a piece about the horrors of homosexuals tainting the Diary. The library responded with a letter explaining that this was the full unedited text and that is was not fraudulent, complete with nearly fifty pages of additional material to show that the Diary was authentic. Obviously the Diary was retained.
