We will never have finished talking about Anne Frank, this young German, refugee in Amsterdam, who began her diary on June 12, 1942, her 13th birthday, was arrested on August 4, 1944 and died of typhus at the end of February-beginning March 1945 in the Bergen-Belsen camp. At the start of 2022, the case of Anne Frank and her family even triggered a global storm. With Who betrayed Anne Frank?, published on January 19, the Canadian historian Rosemary Sullivan intended to lift the veil on the mystery of the denunciation of the Franks, hidden for more than two years in an annex of the family business Opekta, at 263 , Prinsengracht. Aided by a former FBI agent, she affirmed, “with a degree of probability of 85%”, that the informant was the Jewish notary Van den Bergh. Shield of the researchers, and suspension of the printing of the Dutch version of the work at the end of January – the French version, published by HarperCollins remaining, it, available.
It is a great calm, on the other hand, which presides over the simultaneous release operated by Calmann-Lévy, this June 1, of three reissues: the famous Diary of Anne Frank, Her name was Anne Frank, the story of the woman who helped Anne Frank to hide, by Miep Gies, and that of her family, “We imagined life differently”, by the German writer and translator Mirjam Pressler. Why such a group shot? “We are celebrating the 75th anniversary of the first publication in the Netherlands of the Diary of Anne Frank (under the title Het Acterbuis, The Secret Annex), explains Philippe Robinet, the general manager of Calmann-Lévy, “the historic publisher ” of the teenager – one of the first in the world to publish Le Journal, in 1950, under the editorial direction of the intellectual and writer Manès Sperber. These three books form a coherent whole to understand the terrible destiny of the Franks, it resonates particularly at a time when the temptation to withdraw into identity is strong and when martyred childhoods are multiplying across the planet.”
Translated into 78 languages, published in 192 countries, adapted into comics, manga, film, plays, podcasts, sold in France in more than 4 million copies by Le Livre de poche, Le Journal d’Anne Frank has since publication an exceptional success. Still, this new edition with its elegant blue fabric cover and its appendices (map, glossary of the eight occupants of the Annex, chronology, history of the publication) should arouse new emulators. There is mention of Miep Gies, one of the employees of the Opekta company, “protector” of the Franks (recognized Righteous Among the Nations in 1977), who recovered the notebook of the youngest on the day of the arrest of the family and returned it to his father, Otto, deported to Auschwitz and the only survivor of the occupants of the Annex. Her precious testimony, published in 1987 and whose translation has been reviewed here, adds a stone to the edifice of memory, as does Mirjam Pressler’s investigation of Anne’s ancestors, all from the German upper middle class.
