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Digitized Anne Frank manuscripts

Posted: Thu Nov 21, 2024 6:51 am
by Archie
There is a website that has facsimiles of the original pages of the source material for the Anne Frank diary.
https://www.annefrankmanuscripten.org/

See also here:
https://www.annefrank.org/en/about-us/n ... -entirely/

As it explains in the link above, there are copyright issues, so it's not available in all countries (including the United States and UK). It will geo-block you if your IP is from a country where it's still under copyright.

Here's the list of countries where it is available. If you live in one of these places you should be able to access it, no problem.
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How to Get Around the Geo-Blocking

For the rest of us: You need to change your IP to be from a country on the approved list. There are multiple ways to do this.
  • Proxy Server - there's a browser extension called GeoProxy that is free. You can select a country and it will try to connect you. You might have to try a few times and try out different countries.
  • VPN - this usually costs money, but if you already subscribe to a service you can set a location
  • Tor
Possibilities for Research

From looking over the materials, it looks like it would be useful for doing textual criticism and for handwriting analysis.

The "diary" entries are actually from three different books. This is often called the "A" text.
-The Checkered Notebook
-A Dark Notebook
-Another Dark Notebook

Additionally, she supposedly started "rewriting" her own diary on a bunch of loose sheets. This is often called the "B" text.

The published version(s) edit parts of the A and B texts together. And there are numerous textual variations between the published editions.

If anyone wants to do a deep dive on this, you will probably also want to get a hold of the Revised Critical Edition by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (NIOD). Ikuo Suzuki's book was based largely on that. I don't think he had access to these manuscripts at the time he was doing his research.

Most of the diary appears to be in a very mature cursive script. Here's a sample page from one of the dark notebooks.
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The NIOD swore up and down that the handwriting has all been authenticated. Yet we also have some rather juvenile-looking samples that are attributed to her.
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There appears to be a little bit of non-cursive in the diary pages.
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HDOT has a page on this (and some other Anne Frank pages) but they don't really go into any detail. They just say we should trust the NIOD.
https://www.hdot.org/debunking-denial/a ... authentic/