"Kitty", a character from Anne Frank's "Tales"

It's well known that Anne Frank called her diary "Kitty", although it wasn't necessarily for the friend of the same name (as some have suggested). Less well known is that she made up fictional characters on the side, including one named "Kitty". In addition to her famous journal, Anne described fictional characters, made up fables, told a story of a wandering bear, reminisced about the "good old days" (if you were a teeny-bopper plunged into the wrong side of the battle-lines during WWII, you'd probably do the same), told an adventure story about a girl named Paula, and attempted a novel about a woman named Cady (who feels sorry for her Jewish pal, with the unimaginative name of Mary Anne). (Note: Anne Frank's full name is Anneliese Marie Frank, and that justifies my calling the name of Mary Anne "unimaginative".)

Anyhow, why study Anne Frank's fiction? One reason: most of the rhetoric regarding Anne Frank concerns the fact that she died in a Nazi concentration camp, during the genocide of the European Jews - as well as the fact that she hid from the Nazis in Amsterdam for a couple of years. Thus, most of what folks think of Anne Frank concerns what other people did to her, rather than what she thought of the world around her. The play based on her diary concerns her squirrelling away in the Secret Annexe and her interactions with other residents and visitors to that Annexe; the Diary itself does the same thing. Anne does a pretty good job of describing the going-ons in the Annexe, and - yes - she was starting to pen down opinions and sentiments en masse by the end of the Diary, mostly stuff about herself and her personal life.

Anne Frank's fiction, on the other hand, shows a window into her imagination and something of what went on in her mind, scenes that she remembered from outside the Annexe, stuff she read about (note: she wrote some stuff about her reading in her diary, too), and ideas she had that didn't necessarily concern reality.

The "Tales from the Secret Annexe" begin with a description of a girl named "Kitty". Anne introduces Kitty as "the girl next door", who is Christian and has light blonde hair, freckles, and blue eyes - in other words, just about what the Nazis considered the ideal "race" (the freckles possibly notwithstanding). Yet, when Kitty daydreams about kids, she wants "pretty" kids with curly brown hair and no freckles. (Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, eh?) Kitty also apparently lives in a poor household. Her mom is a widow; her dad died some time ago, and Kitty has lots of brothers and sisters - Mom can't afford any birthday gift for Kitty except for a 25 - cent trip to the zoo (courtesy of the Amsterdam Zoological Society), which luckily for Kitty happens to be in her birth month of September. Kitty's Mom cleans other folks' houses and clothes for a living, and she obviously wants her daughter to follow in her footsteps. Kitty, however, sharing Anne Frank's own love for gossip, wants to become a factory girl, on the somewhat sketchy ground that she sees them chattering happily on their way to work.

Kitty's dream of being a factory girl - and her mom's nagging that "too clever a girl won't get a husband", something Kitty wants - shows the time and place of Kitty's world, a still rather chauvinistic Western world in the middle of the twentieth century. It is still the industrial age, and girls (among other folks) are heading to work in factories rather than offices or cubicles. I do not know if European girls of that time period would be going to work in a factory if it had been peacetime rather than wartime ("Rosie the Riveter" went into factories in America because of the war, although there were factory girls in earlier eras as well - places such as the Lowell mills in New England). Being nice in Kitty's family entails the giving of sweets to the children - and sweets were likely in short supply in the Secret Annexe. The glimpse that Anne gives into the life of her fictional Kitty is all too short, written, perhaps, in the space of a couple of hours. One wonders what she would've done with the character had Anne spent more than a day working on her - but her education and her journal and the daily chores presumably came first.

In other stories, Anne Frank writes of war and of how being able to head outside and into the countryside would be nice, themes which shouldn't be too surprising, given where she was. Anne writes of the importance of being nice to others, probably something else which shouldn't be surprising. I admit to wanting to involve some of Anne Frank's characters in some future story, but I'm not sure how developed her characters are. Furthermore, I might need to pay royalty to the Anne-Frank Fonds for commercially publishing stories based on her characters (which I probably wouldn't mind doing - but I'd probably rather loosely base a character or two on hers, mix in several qualities of my own invention, give them new names, and involve them in my own universe as characters of my own, which is probably kosher under copyright law.)

Update

I'm studying for exams. w00t for m3.