This is the first of two war diaries I am reading. I was interested to re-read (or actually read, I remember encountering this book as a child, I remember reading it, although this cannot be true. This is certainly the first time I have read the book) The Diary of a Young Girl based on Langer’s ideas about autobiography. Langer defines ‘true art’ using an idea from Erich Kahler, experience, consciousness, the creation of new forms of reality. By its nature nonfiction, historical reality is normally excluded from this. Langer argues for Kahler’s terms, and their application because the Holocaust experience was so unique. Langer explains for care in this approach, to avoid complete disorientation, the reader “wandering in a wilderness of evil totally divorced from any time and place he has ever known” (p. 75) and points to work by Elie Wiesel – Night (1960).
Langer also makes particular reference to Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl first published in English in 1952. For Langer, Frank’s work shows how unprepared we are, as human beings to deal with the realities of the Holocaust. For the author, the success of Frank’s book shows an inability of audiences to confront the realities beyond the attic. A book which insulates the reader, as Frank herself was protected. One striking feature of the book (the copy I read is from 2001, the definitive edition including original diary entries and parts re-written by Anne herself, with editing from her father, Otto Frank and Mirjam Pressler) is the quality of the writing. And Anne’s literary knowledge in general.
The combination of the real and the imagination (and access to the real, through the imagination) is what Langer is concerned with. He writes about “fragments of atrocity”, work, and art a central core “for creating a magnetic field”, to collect memory, truth, nostalgia, horror, with the tension and polarity contained within (p. 77). It is true the ‘reading’ of Frank’s diary was impossible for me without the dual ‘reading’ of her history. For Langer, the Frank family’s “real story” began where the diary ends, as my reading of her history included materials available many years after her death, alongside her interior world.
Frank, A. (2001) The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition. Edited by Otto H. Frank and Mirjim Pressler. Translated by Susan Massotty. London: Penguin Books.
