Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Franck

As a reminder, you need to use 3-5 sources (from a library database and NOT including the novel) in a 6-10 page research paper which has a clear thesis and explicates the meaning of your novel. This is NOT a report. You are a literary
scholar and you are making an argument about the meaning of the novel or a part of the novel

The submission must follow all MLA style guidelines, including formatting, in-text citations, and works-cited entries.

ANSWER

The Motif of Freedom in Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

Wars and Revolutions are humongous monsters going about their business too big to notice how much they trample on the basic freedoms of living creatures. Examples are scattered all over in history beginning with the American Manifest Destiny notion that saw to the annihilation of native tribes, wild animals and entire ecosystems for the purposes of civilisation. The Mexican revolution is another example, which forced women into servitude to the men in war often used as sex objects and facilitators to the men who waged war on each other for years. The Second World War was not any different. Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank makes constant inference to the idea of freedom and lack of it to the characters in the book.

The diary is written during the highlight of the Second World War when Nazi Germany is invading nations both to the West and to the East. From Anne’s words and experiences, we learn what this war that is often discussed in terms of politics, strategy and warfare meant to the poor victims left behind without sources of income or any resources to develop themselves. Anne barely draws attention to the changing political atmosphere and the suppression of human rights happening to the world during the war, but using her words and the events she describes, we learn what the war meant to the freedoms and rights of Jews in Europe during the Second World War. This essay identifies the meaning of the diary by Anne Frank and argues that the most important message of the story is that every person regardless of the age, ethnicity, race or gender has a right to live in freedom.

At the beginning of the diary, the main character and narrator identifies herself as a sociable young girl ready to discover the world and explore her potential. Anne is not any different from the many teenagers in today’s world who look up to the world as this big puzzle that has to be solved. In the novel, we identify her desire to be a writer or a journalist and from her penmanship, her aspiration seems achievable. For instance, on December 24, 1943, Anne notes in her diary, “I long to ride a bike, dance, whistle, look at the world, feel young and know that I am free” (Frank 1958). Such entries describe her optimistic nature despite the fact that she and seven other individuals have to live in constant fee for two years in a tiny house wary not to be discovered and moved to concentration camps where life was much worse.

The reader is also capable of noting the difference in her tone as the situation gets dire each day and tens of kinsmen are murdered during the holocaust. Anne could not have known it then but as scholars of the history of the Second World War, we understand how bleak her chances were to achieve anything. She was thirteen and already a prisoner forced to share a bed with an adult male while she was on the premise of the discovery of her own sexuality. Unfortunately, her freedom is taken away from her and beyond her diary, we get to learn that her dreams all hit a dead end when she, her sister and mother are captured and moved to a concentration camp where her mother succumbs to starvation and the two sisters to typhus fever just three days apart in March 1945 (Muller 2013).

Other characters in the diary also demonstrate the freedom or lack of it. For instance, we learn that Otto Frank was a wealthy man who came from a wealthy family that ran an international banking business which collapsed with the economic depression that followed the First World War. Even after the Nazis rise to power, Otto is industrious and foresighted enough to move his family from Germany, abandon his birthplace and move to Amsterdam, the Netherlands where again he is resourceful enough to start a business to sustain his family. With every hurdle, he comes up with a solution as a father does for his family. We even see him try to provide psychological needs for Anne even when her teenage problems are incredibly out of his forte.

Eventually, all his options are cut down and he has no income and his family are forced into the underground dependant on the goodwill of others. A capable, innovative and intelligent man spends his days in shared space with seven other people including his daughters and wife without any freedom to or choice. Anne is too young to understand the psychology in her diary of such a man in hiding for two years but Bankirer (2018) expounds on the implication to fatherhood and masculinity. The most oppressive thing about an inhumane regime is that it does not just take away the freedoms of people but also their choices and their psychological tranquillity. To Otto, that is hiding and watching the demise of his entire family one by one in the concentration camp at Auschwitz and then learning of her daughter’s dreams and aspirations after she had died and from her own words in her diary (Muller 2013).

Prior to hiding, Anne describes a world that was experiencing the last dying gasps of freedom. In Amsterdam in 1940, Jews had to identify themselves in public by pinning a yellow star on their apparel. Jews were not allowed to own or drive private means of transport including bicycles, streetcars or private automobiles. They had a scheduled time for shopping that was between 3 and 5 O’clock and were not allowed outside between 8 and 6 O’clock. Jews were similarly not allowed in public entertainment centres including movie theatres and sports stadiums. Children of Jewish descent had to attend Jewish schools that were poorer and less equipped in comparison to other schools (Frank 1958). Already the growing Nazi powers were making it difficult for a Jew to excel in and out of Germany. Anne expressed fear towards the relatives who had been left in Germany and she expressed her deep fear for the narrations of mass industrial scale murders of Jews by Nazis. She says that she has heard that the soldiers went out killing people and looking for Jews to murder for sport (Frank 1958).

What makes it even more difficult for her to conceive is how they were any different from the other millions of people living in Europe. She did not even consider herself too religious and constantly expresses her inadequate faith which she thought was the reason she was always in trouble. Her rant about the evils against the Jews expressed her inability to understand the purposeless animosity towards Jews which researchers to date try to explain. No one knew why the Germans were against their own countrymen and women on the basis of their religion. Scholars like Prager (2003) in Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism try to logically explain the hate as a decades’ long conflict from the frustrated Germany that had lost the First World War but even such scholars end up with inconclusive results.

Freedom was not only suppressed by the Germans but also the residents of the hiding house as well. Anne describes her first feelings for Peter in extreme detail where she felt sexual urges and longing that is expected to come with young adults. Peter becomes the first boy Anne kisses and from her tone, she aspires to have more kisses in future. With Peter, they share intimate details of their lives as well as the loneliness that engulfed them in hiding. He provides Anne with both affection and attention that she greatly desires.

However, in a stern opinion, Anne’s father expresses displeasure in such a relationship. Anne also mentions that her sister gets jealous of the relationship. The two, especially the discouragement from her father makes the relationship dwindle and eventually die because Anne can never conceive going against her beloved father. With this simple move, the freedom to discover her own love and sex story is abruptly stopped and Anne only dreams of affection then onwards. Between the years 1944 and 1945 there are no further indications that Anne gets someone else to love before her death. Therefore, she dies only a bit aware of the feelings of affection for the opposite gender.

She is curious, especially about her sexuality from the beginning where she thinks of herself as not too pretty but making up for that with confidence and sociability. Her love story expresses the inhibitions to freedom that all humans crave – to love and to be loved. She dies without knowing what that feels like which makes it most unfortunate of circumstances just as she dies when she has not explored her desire to write books and report stories.

In conclusion, this paper has identified the meaning of the diary by Anne Frank and argued that the most important message of the story is that every person regardless of the age, ethnicity, race or gender has a right to live in freedom. The characters in Anne’s diary were most unfortunate to live in a world that did not recognise their freedoms including their freedom of religion, movement, life, liberty, opinion, expression, work, equality, discrimination, happiness and education. The paper has demonstrated how the loss of these freedoms changed the characters throughout the two years in hiding and for most, killing their dreams and aspirations as well as them. The Second World War greatest tragedy was not the war that ultimately led to the use of nuclear weapons, the greatest tragedy was the loss of human rights and the desire that lies innately in every human compelling them to do right by their fellow human beings. Anne’s story is not a historic account but rather a call to reflect on the nature of humankind as well as ensure that the events of the holocaust during the Second World War never happens again to harm little funny, creative, ambitious, curious and beautiful innocence that was Anne Frank.

References

Bankirer, Y. P. (2018). The Posterity of Hiding: A Psychoanalytic Reading of The Diary of Anne Frank. Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism, 25, 30-44.

Frank, Anne. The diary of a young girl 1958. No. 333. Everyman’s Library, 2010.

Müller, Melissa. Anne Frank: The Biography. A&C Black, 2013.

Prager, Dennis, and Joseph Telushkin. Why the Jews?: the reason for antisemitism. Simon and Schuster, 2003.