Anne Frankishness

A confession: before going to sleep for the past few nights, I have been enjoying my newly purchased copy of Anne Frank's diary. I've been really enjoying it. The blurb on the dustjacket says it all when it champions Anne as a humanist of the first order, and it accurately describes her as fully displaying both an innocence and an uncanny perspicuity in her descriptions of human relationships. I haven't got to the end of the diary yet, but I know what's coming. A picture of the grave of Anne and her sister on the back of the book says it all. In spite of this the book has been an uplifting read: I am amazed that Anne was happy to expose some of her most intimate thoughts and feelings to a wide audience of readers. (She planned to submit the diary to a publishing company who had advertised an interest in disseminating memoirs of the war). In our age of 'reality' entertainment and 'confessional' TV and radio broadcasting, I've yet to encounter anything approaching the sensitivity, honesty and genuineness of Anne in her diary. People of her time period may have been 'repressed' in ways we now aren't (for better or worse), but I feel certain that our culture promotes new and different kinds of 'repression', which come with their own drawbacks and frustrations. Which means there's all the more reason to read Anne's diary.