Surfeiters in Jaded Cynicism,

Inspired by In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel, I took on Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. Behind every news headline, there are millions of personal tales – this is the greatest event of the century and perhaps its most famous individual story.

My feeling is that World War II is really only a backdrop to an examination of family life in an extremely condensed environment. Of course, the diary is a unique insight into the hardships a family in hiding would have to face, the food they had, the deterioration of their clothes, the lack of warmth, their relationship with their hiders and the precautions they had to take but it is far more. To trivialise the situation and verge upon being insensitive, modern Western comparisons could be drawn with Big Brendan-type reality shows, where people are made to live in close quarters on top of each other, with mounting frustrations, their relationships can be observed. This comparison is gross and does not take into account the grave outcome of failure or the conditions which forced the families into hiding.

I always try to compare situations in books to modern life or identify characters with those I cross. With two families and a dentist in hiding, it’s fairly easy to match up characters perhaps with another family, even if they don’t correspond entirely closely, and better understand how they might feel about those around them using Anne’s evaluations of the people in the Secret Annexe. I haven’t visited many Booboo, Bacefook or MyArse pages featuring the questionnaire entitled ‘Which hiding person in the Secret Annexe, Holland, 1945 are you?’

Initially, Anne appears as someone who is a pain, who riles everyone, who seems selfish and arrogant, but Anne is at least smart enough to know this and confess this in her writings. I admit that I didn’t find Anne entirely likeable, I aligned myself with Margot, but that possibly relates to my position in the birth order of my own family. The diary conveys feelings that might be familiar to many younger siblings in a family; Anne sometimes feels that Margot has set standards that are exceptional and that her parents should not expect her to meet, Anne feels under pressure by the comparison she believes her parents are making.

I think towards the end, and this is easier realised in hindsight, the diary serves as a record of some of the errors and lost gambles the hiders made, however, at the time of reading, the hiders seem to become invincible as these incidents (break-ins, doors left unlocked etc) and a sense of hope begins to grow as 1944 goes on. Although I knew the outcome and when the war ended, I found myself thinking that they’ve made it to 1944, they’re in reasonably good spirits to survive into 1945, which is crazy, but that is down to Anne’s optimism and perhaps distraction in Peter van Daan.

Anne Frank’s diary doesn’t give definitive facts that to educate people about all of World War II or the Holocaust, it’s a diary, a personal account of a life endured during that time. I have never read another person’s diary before but my own opinion is that the diary serves as a historical document which details the conditions of hiders, these are the facts (what they did to survive etc) but the rest of it, whilst not of use to historians, serves as a lesson on the dynamics of two families and a stranger living in very close quarters under gravely testing circumstances.