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Schule > Englisch > Anne Frank - Diary Of A Young Girl (Analysis)

Anne Frank

- Diary Of A Young Girl -
English 11 – World Literature
Book report – Analysis
Anne Frank
Anne Franks two faces in her famous diary.
In the diary of Anne Frank, “The Diary Of A Young Girl”, translated from the Dutch by B. M. Mooyaart-Doubleday, the 13-year old girl writes in form from letters to an imaginary friend about her life in hiding as a Jew in Amsterdam, 1942 when the Netherlands were occupied by Nazi-Germany in World War II. She describes not only the fear of being discovered, but the circumstances of living together with two families in a secret office room for two years and how she deals with teenager problems and her own character during that time.
Since the diary is pretty much the only “friend” she can open herself up to in the time of isolation, she develops more and more self criticism and tells more details about her feelings, thoughts and hopes. Finally she discovers two different sides of her, two faces that will not allow each other to combine and make Anne how she initially wants to be. One of these faces is Anne on the outside: A chatterish, boys loving, math hating, vivid and superficial teenage girl that is never quiet and likes to confront everybody. On the other hand, her inside is a much more quiet loving, romantic soul who feels deserted even by her parents, and who is self critical and pessimistic but wants to change her outside to be her real self.
From the beginning of the book to its ending her character undergoes a metamorphosis from her outer superficiality to her quiet, self critic inner self. When she is not in hiding yet she is way more chatterish and likes to charm boys.
“As soon as a boy asks if he may bicycle home with me and we get into conversation, nine out of ten times I can be sure that he will fall head over heels in love immediately and simply won’t allow me out of sight.” (5)
She certainly thinks very high of herself and describes herself to her new diary, she is not familiar with yet, as a flirtish beloved girl, which can have whatever she wants. This is probably also the case when she brags in front of her other shallow friends. She is living a life of a careless, successful teenager and has only teenage problems. This kind of life ends immediately as soon as she and her family have to go into hiding. Now she has to prove how to go on like that in a situation where she is together night and day with people she cannot simply avoid or go find someone else. Just when the Van Daans, the other family living with the Franks in their hiding place, arrive she mentions Peter Van Daan, a boy of her own age.
“I still don’t like Peter any more, he is so boring; he flops lazily on his bed half the time, does a bit of carpentry, and then goes back for another snooze. What a fool!” (36)
In the beginning, she does not like him at all since he is completely different from her because he is not so hyperactive, not talkative at all and is not about the superficial outside.
“Don’t think I’m in love, because I’m not, …” (156)
She writes this after she had unintentionally several long conversations with Peter and now feeds her longing for friendship with a boy. They both open up to each other a little more and the following month, Peter is mentioned in every entry. She makes him her quiet, mistreated and misunderstood hero in her heart and waits for him to pull out his strength to love her openly.
“Poor Peter, he needs love very much!” (167)
“There must be something he has guessed about me, because he certainly can’t love the outer Anne, which is the one he knows so far.” (177)
Peter, who, as Anne hopes so much, will love her, is drawing her to her inner sentimental side and makes her want to change without doing anything on his side. He himself is very passive in this relation and just the longing in Anne makes her change to what she feels is her true inner self, which she finds reflected in Peter's character. Though she is starting to love him madly, Peter does not respond to her attempts and makes no effort to get closer to her, which makes her want him even more. Peter himself though does not change at all during all these attempts. He stays shy and turned inward, not respected by his parents and lonely. Even when she is starting to have a relation with him and they kiss each other, he does not turn out to be her prince like she had imagined so badly.
Despite her change through isolation from other children and her love to Peter, Anne goes through an absolute normal teenage phase of confusion, nosiness and sudden change of emotions.
“…, I fell utterly confused, don’t know what to read, what to write, what to do, I only know that I am longing…!” (151)
“I didn’t want to hear about ‘symptoms of your age,’ or ‘other girls,’ or ‘it wears off by itself’; I didn’t want to be treated as a girl-like-all-others, but as Anne-on-her-own-merits.” (261)
She knows herself what is her fault, and she knows that she is confused but she does not want to accept the fact that those are problems of many teenagers. Like all the others in her age, she does not want to be only one of them. Because of her ability to analyze characters, most of all her own, she can see what is wrong but she is hardly able to fix it. This makes her even more frustrated.
At the end we find a different Anne with the same abilities but with a changed self; calmer, thoughtful and reflective. She came close to an outer metamorphosis but then the police found her and her family and she died in a concentration camp. What she left behind was not only the diary of a young girl, writing under extraordinary circumstances, but a piece that was accused to be a fraud because of the developed and unbelievable style, which made her famous.

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