New Book: Anne Frank - Complete Edition by Fischer

A couple of weeks ago new great book was published by S. Fischer Verlag (Frankfurt.Main/Germany) which may surprise not only ordinary readers but also scholars and Nazi crimes researchers. This is "Anne Frank: Gesamtausgabe / Anne Frank: Complete Edition). Anne Frank's story is well known in the world, but this issue does not only contain the original and complete text of a diary, but also more widely known photos and documents. We have no doubt that this book should be on every shelf of people who are interested in the Holocaust.

Annelies "Anne" Marie Frank (12 June 1929 – early March 1945) is one of the most discussed Jewish victims of the 
Holocaust. Her autobiography The Diary of a Young Girl has been the basis for several plays and films. She was born in Frankfurt am Main in Weimar Germany, and lived most of her life in or near Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. Born a German national, Frank lost her citizenship in 1941. She gained international fame posthumously after her diary was published. It documents her experiences hiding during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II.The Frank family moved from Germany to Amsterdam in 1933, the year the Nazis gained control over Germany. By the beginning of 1940, they were trapped in Amsterdam by the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. As persecutions of the Jewish population increased in July 1942, the family went into hiding in some concealed rooms in the building where Anne's father worked. After two years, the group was betrayed and transported to concentration camps. Anne Frank and her sister, Margot Frank, were eventually transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they died of typhus in March 1945, just several days before camp was liberated by British troops.

Anne Frank's diary were very first published under the title Het Achterhuis. Dagboekbrieven 14 juni 1942 – 1 augustus 1944 (The Annex: Diary Notes from 14 June 1942 – 1 August 1944) by Contact Publishing in Amsterdam in 1947. It was first published in Germany and France in 1950, and after being rejected by several publishers, was first published in the United Kingdom in 1952. The first American edition, published in 1952 under the title Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, was positively reviewed. The book was successful in France, Germany, and the United States, but in the United Kingdom it failed to attract an audience and by 1953 was out of print. Its most noteworthy success was in Japan, where it received critical acclaim and sold more than 100,000 copies in its first edition. In Japan, Anne Frank quickly was identified as an important cultural figure who represented the destruction of youth during the war.

Soon, the secret diary became one of most important voices in world's debate about Holocaust. For first Americans edition of book introduction was written by Eleanor Roosevelt who described it as "one of the wisest and most moving commentaries on war and its impact on human beings that I have ever read." Also John F. Kennedy discussed Anne Frank in a 1961 speech, and said, "Of all the multitudes who throughout history have spoken for human dignity in times of great suffering and loss, no voice is more compelling than that of Anne Frank." In the same year, the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg wrote of her: "One voice speaks for six million—the voice not of a sage or a poet but of an ordinary little girl." Primo Levi suggested Anne Frank is frequently identified as a single representative of the millions of people who suffered and died as she did because "One single Anne Frank moves us more than the countless others who suffered just as she did but whose faces have remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is better that way; if we were capable of taking in all the suffering of all those people, we would not be able to live." In June 1999 Time magazine published a special edition titled "Time 100: The Most Important People of the Century". Anne Frank was selected as one of the "Heroes & Icons".

Today, we have Fischer's edition Anne Frank: Gesamtausgabe which is unique and excellent from all the perspectives: historical, editorial and educational. What we can find inside of this hardcover, massive book: 

a) Full text of Anne Frank's diary

b) Additional notes of Anne Frank

c) Photos and documents

d) four essays by Mirjam Pressler, Gerhard Hirschfeld and Francine Prose

e) extensive appendix includes for example two other versions of diary

This exclusive edition, in which the axis is still, of course, Anne Frank's diary, with a full family history outlined on background of the dramatic events of the war may be a new point for reflections on the history of the human race.

If you would like to buy this book please visit official FISCHER Verlag page