Understanding Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents

Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl is the most widely read text about the Holocaust, yet it reveals only one example of the tragic consequences of the Nazi policy to eliminate the Jews. This casebook enriches Anne Frank's remarkable personal account with a variety of historical documents that illuminate the political and social context of anti-Semitism in Germany and the Holocaust. It includes an account of the Frank family's life in Germany before emigrating to Holland; first-person accounts of Anne's last seven months in deportation and concentration camps; other Holocaust narratives in the form of memoirs, letters, and children's diaries; an excerpt from Zlata's Diary, the story of a young girl caught in the war in Bosnia which has been compared to Anne Frank's; official Nazi pronouncements on The Final Solution to the Jews; and newspaper reports and editorials of the horrific events occurring between 1939 and 1945. All of these materials will help the student to better understand the historical context of Anne's experience, and the teacher to select appropriate materials to sensitize students to this period in history.

Documents and discussion materials are organized into chapters on the Frank family history, including a chronology; the Jews in Holland; children in the Holocaust and their rescuers; a narrative overview and chronology of anti-Semitism in modern Germany; the Holocaust; and other Holocaust stories. Kopf also addresses the psychological issues of adolescent development so dramatically illustrated in Anne's diary and looks at her writing as carefully crafted literature. Each chapter contains study questions, topics for research papers and class discussions, and lists of further reading for exploring the historical as well as the personal issues leading to and culminating in the Holocaust. This is an invaluable source for interdisciplinary, English, and world history classes.