Anne Frank. Her Voice. Her Story.
Most of us know Anne Frank.
Or at least we think we do.
For the Season 3 premiere of The Women’s Current, Ruth Franklin joins us to reconsider Anne Frank—one of the most familiar young women in history, but perhaps not in the way we think we know her.
What Ruth discovered challenges the way many of us were first introduced to Anne Frank.
Anne wasn’t simply a teenage girl keeping a private diary while hiding from the Nazis. She was a young writer who deliberately rewrote her diary with the hope that one day it would reach a larger audience.
Anne Frank, the Writer
Ruth explains how Anne began revising her diary after hearing a Dutch government minister call for people to preserve their personal accounts of the war.
Anne realized that what she had written was more than a private record. She went back to the beginning and rewrote it, adding historical context and shaping it for future readers.
As Ruth tells us, we have often underestimated Anne—not only as a young woman, but as a writer.
The Girl Behind the Symbol
We also talk about the Anne Frank who can disappear behind the icon: a teenager with ambitions, complicated feelings, conflict with her mother, and an interior life that adults did not always fully see.
Ruth takes us beyond the familiar version of Anne and into her relationships with her mother Edith and sister Margot, what happened to the family after their arrest, and the testimony of women who witnessed the bonds between mothers, daughters, sisters and friends in the camps. Ruth also asks us to consider the distance between Anne Frank the person and the cultural symbol she became—and how generations since her death have continually reshaped her story.
“My Words Matter”
One of the most powerful ideas in our conversation is also one of the simplest: writing itself can be an act of taking up space.
Ruth describes Anne searching for whatever paper she could find in the annex—even using her sister’s old chemistry notebooks—to continue writing.
Putting those words on the page was, as Ruth says, an assertion:
“I matter. My words matter.”
And perhaps that is one reason Anne’s voice still reaches us more than eight decades later.
What We Talk About
- Why Anne Frank rewrote her diary for publication
- Why Ruth believes we have underestimated Anne as a writer
- The difference between Anne Frank the person and the symbol she became
- Anne’s complicated relationship with her mother, Edith
- What other women’s testimony reveals about the Frank women after their arrest
- Why girls’ and women’s personal writing has so often been undervalued
- What Anne’s story can teach us about taking up space and telling our own stories
- Why each generation may see Anne Frank differently
A Moment That Stayed With Us
Ruth tells us:
“We as women shouldn’t be afraid to take up space, that we all need to tell our own stories.”
Anne Frank was only fifteen when she died.
But she understood something extraordinary: her words mattered.
More than eighty years later, they still do.
Guest Information
Ruth Franklin is a literary critic, award-winning author, former editor of The New Republic, and adjunct professor at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She is the author of The Many Lives of Anne Frank. Guest link: http://ruthfranklin.net/author/bio/
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