My daughter has a oral book report due next month about a person who had a significant impact on the world. Based on my daughters age and also her interests, she chose to complete her presentation about Anne Frank.
I read a version of the Diary of Anne Frank several times when I was her age, however since then, there have been different variations released due to additional pages/documents being found including the pages found after her father Otto died.
From what I can find, it appears there is an A Version, B Version, and C Version, however on Amazon, they are not listed this way. I do understand that there is a version that some parents feel is inappropriate for preteens to read, however I disagree with the parents who sought to censor this particular version. I appears this version is titled “The Diary of a Young Girl: the Definitive Edition”, which was published on the 50th anniversary of Frank’s death, however I'm not sure if another version has been released since then.
Does anyone know the title of the most complete/ historically accurate version of Anne Frank's diaries? I do realize that a portion of her diaries have never been found, however I would like to purchase the most complete and uncensored version.
OK, there is a lot here that needs to be addressed.
The three versions you discuss are the A, B, and C versions. The A version was the original diary that Anne wrote during hiding. The B version is a rewrite, also by Anne, of the first entries from the A version (interestingly, in the diary itself, Anne discusses this, when she mentions wanting to be a writer and wanting to send her diary off as a record of the war, as she had heard was requested by Education Minister Gerrit Bolkestein on Radio Oranje). The C version is the version compiled by Otto Frank after the war from the papers that were saved by Miep Gies after the Frank family was betrayed, arrested, and deported. Almost until his death, Otto Frank maintained that he had only lightly edited the diary, removing only some parts about Anne's physical development (this is the part that some folks get fussy about) and some especially nasty remarks about Anne's mother. In fact, Otto did much more than simple light editing, since he had duplicates of many of the entries (because B entries were rewrites of A entries, both by Anne) but he only included one or the other in the original published version (Het Achterhuis/The Diary of a Young Girl) - he can certainly be credited as an editor of the book, if not a co-author.
All of this is confused by the fact that five additional pages of the diary were discovered in 1998, after the publication by the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocides Studies of the complete Critical Edition in 1986 (in Dutch). The English translation of this original critical edition was only published in 2001, so after the discovery of the additional five pages, which meant that the English language critical edition was out of date before it was even published. A revised critical edition, which contains all of the texts, side by side for comparative reading, was published in 2003, in English (2001 in Dutch). You can find that edition on Amazon here.