Like so many people, I read The Diary Of A Young Girl as a child and was powerfully moved by it. The edition I obtained, published in the 1950s and loaned to me by my grandmother, had an Afterward that noted that some portions of the work “of no interest to the reader” had been excised. I spent a lot of time wondering how anyone could possibly think that Anne Frank had written anything in her diary that wasn’t of interest to readers like me. A 1995 “complete” edition revealed that Otto Frank had edited out passages in which Anne detailed her romantic relationship with Peter, and also negative comments she made about her mother. As owner via inheritance of the copyright in the diary, he certainly had the legal right to do this, but I’ve always thought it was a shame that once he made the decision to publish her diary, he felt he needed to manipulate and distort the way she presented herself through her writings.
As I noted in this article, when ABC decided to develop a miniseries on the life of Anne Frank in 2001, the company was unable to obtain the rights to her diary and received litigation threats that caused ABC to direct the project’s creative team to draft a script that did not use a single word of Anne Frank’s writing. Lines were changed to avoid even coincidental similarity to words from her diary, and a writer was kept on the set during the entire shoot to police last-minute script changes. Even then, the Anne Frank-Fonds, a foundation that holds the copyrights in the diary, denounced perceived”substantial similarity between the two works”and threatened legal action. The miniseries had to be constructed so that it avoided not only the copyrighted words of the diary, but also all of the copyrighted expressions contained in previous books, films, television movies, plays and documentaries about Anne Frank.
Now it seems that part of Otto Frank’s story has also remained untold. He died in 1980, but letters he wrote in 1941 have not yet been released, although hopefully that will happen soon. From Yahoo News:
Desperate letters written by the father of Anne Frank, the teenager whose diary of hiding from Nazis documented the horror of Jews during World War II, have surfaced in the United States and will be released next month.
Otto Frank wrote the letters in 1941 in a despairing effort to get his family out of Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, before finally hiding the family, including Anne, in secret rooms in an Amsterdam office building for two years until they were betrayed, Time magazine said Thursday.
The family was sent to Nazi prison camps where Anne, her sister Margot, and their mother Edith died before the war’s end. But Otto Frank survived and returned to Amsterdam where he recovered his daughter’s diary of their time hiding from the Nazis.
He had it published and eventually, under the title “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl,” it turned into a best-seller in the United States and other countries.
In 1959 a movie was made from the book, “The Diary of Anne Frank.”
The sheaf of Otto Frank’s letters, about 80 documents in total, show him seeking escape routes to Spain, exit visas from Paris and help to get to the United States or Cuba, all in vain.
They were discovered by a researcher at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research two years ago. But concerns over copyright and other legal issues compelled YIVO to keep their existence quiet until now, Time said. The New York Institute will release the letters on February 14, it said.
Like Anne’s diary, Otto Frank’s letters sound like they will offer powerful testimony about the tragedy and human cost of the Holocaust. Copyright laws aren’t what motivated Otto Frank to write them, and seem to have failed miserably at incentivizing their distribution so far.
–Ann Bartow
Pingback: Cyberlaw Central » Blawg Review #93