(Paris) It took trial and error to establish the text of the Diary of Anne Frank, famous testimony to the hunt for the Jews of Europe during the Second World War. But 75 years after its first publication, this work seems complete.
Posted at 9:55 a.m.
The first version of the writings of this young girl from Amsterdam, who died in a concentration camp, was published on June 25, 1947. It was entitled Het Achterhuis (“The Annex” in Dutch), the nickname of the apartment behind a fake library where the Frank family was hiding.
The original print run is 3000 copies. In three quarters of a century, sales have exceeded 30 million copies, according to the Anne-Frank Foundation.
In French, two publishers hold the rights to this world-famous book: Calmann-Lévy, who first published it in 1950, and the Livre de poche (part of the same group, Hachette), since 1958.
The Pocketbook released its “updated edition” on May 25. And Calmann-Lévy is republishing this flagship book from its catalog in large format on Wednesday. Same translation, but two different presentations.
“The French edition has done a lot for the distribution of the Log “, told AFP Philippe Robinet, the general manager of Calmann-Lévy, who had been the first foreign publisher of Anne Frank.
draft novel
“It was a Dutch friend who gave the book to Manès Sperber, a philosopher who was an editor at Calmann-Lévy, and who read Dutch. He reads the Diary of Anne Frank and he falls stiff. He said right away: ‘We’re going to edit it’”, he says.
The German edition follows the same year, and the American in 1952, thanks to a writer who read the French translation, Meyer Levin.
It is a composite book. In her hiding place where she would remain from July 1942 until her arrest in August 1944, Anne Frank wrote two versions, traditionally called A and B.
The first is a children’s and teenager’s diary in the classic form. The second, the outline of a well-structured epistolary novel, conceived in a few months by the woman who dreams of becoming a journalist and writer, and who at 14 and 15 is beginning to master writing very well.
Anne Frank’s father, Otto, a survivor of the camps, post-war combines elements of both in a C version.
On his work, opinions are divided.
In an article in 1993, a French academic specializing in diaries, Philippe Lejeune, praised the result: “Otto Frank was able to do, both literally and humanely, an admirable job in bringing to completion the rewriting and editing that Anne had undertaken “.
” Definitive version ”
On the other hand, a childhood friend of Anne Frank, Laureen Nussbaum, 94, a Holocaust survivor turned specialist in the writings of Anne Frank, does not like this first edition. She describes it as “junk” in The Independent in 1995, and he prefers version B.
Only a German publisher made the bet to limit itself to this one, with Liebe Kitty (208 pages, 2019).
Today’s readers can form an opinion for themselves, since the so-called “critical” edition of 1986, which shows versions A, B and C. This version D was titled in French The Diaries of Anne Frank (765 pages, 1989).
Surprisingly, we still didn’t have the full text at that time. In 1991, the German publisher Mirjam Pressler revealed unpublished excerpts, in what she called the “definitive version”, longer by almost a third.
Not so “definitive” as that: a final unreleased extract, discovered in 1998, enters the latest version, sometimes called D2, the one that reappears today. Supplemented by other writings and documents, it was retained in Anne Frank the complete (816 pages, 2013).
Calmann-Lévy accompanied all this development. “This is part of our mission as a publisher, all the more so with such a book, which is part of the intangible heritage of humanity”, explains Philippe Robinet.