Image copyright Ann Frank Museum Image caption Anne Frank's diary, written in hiding from the Nazis, is widely read more than 70 years after her death
Two new pages from Anne Frank's diary have been published, containing a handful of dirty jokes and her thoughts on sex.
The young Jewish teen's diary, written in hiding from the Nazis, became world-famous when published after her death and at the end of the war.
The hidden pages had been covered with gummed brown paper - apparently to hide her risqué writing from her family.
New imaging techniques have finally allowed researchers to read them.
The entries were written on 28 September 1942, not long after the 13-year-old Anne went into hiding.
"I'll use this spoiled page to write down 'dirty' jokes", she wrote on a page with a handful of crossed-out phrases - and jotted down four dirty jokes she knew.
She added a few dozen lines about sex education, imagining she has to give "the talk" to someone else, and mentioning prostitutes - who she wrote elsewhere that her father had told her about.
"Anne Frank writes about sexuality in a disarming way," said Ronald Leopold of the Anne Frank House museum in Amsterdam. "Like every adolescent she is curious about this subject."
The sentiment was echoed by Frank van Vree, director of the Niod institute, which helped decipher the pages from new photographs taken in 2016.
"Anyone who reads the passages that have now been discovered will be unable to suppress a smile," he said.
"The 'dirty' jokes are classics among growing children. They make it clear that Anne, with all her gifts, was above all also an ordinary girl."
One of the jokes reads: "Do you know why the German Wehrmacht girls are in the Netherlands? As mattresses for the soldiers."
The Anne Frank Museum said this was not the only time the teenage girl wrote about sex - mentioning other jokes she had heard the people in her hidden home tell, or the passages about her periods and sexuality.
Writing about the decision to publish pages that Anne clearly wanted to keep hidden, the museum said that her diary - a Unesco-registered world heritage document - held significant academic interest.
But it also said that the pages "do not alter our image of Anne".
"Over the decades Anne has grown to become the worldwide symbol of the Holocaust, and Anne the girl has increasingly faded into the background," it said in a statement.
"These - literally - uncovered texts bring the inquisitive and in many respects precocious teenager back into the foreground."
Anne Frank went into hiding in a secret annexe of her father's business on 5 July 1942 - about a month after she received a diary for her 13th birthday.
She lived there with her family and their friends, the Van Pels, until their discovery two years later. How they were found after so long in successful hiding remains a mystery.
Anne Frank died of disease in a Nazi death camp in 1945, the year the war ended. Her father, the only family member to survive, published her diary in 1947.
envatted_love on May 17th, 2018 at 08:50 UTC »
"All men, if they are normal, go with women... Uncle Walter is not normal."
Is Uncle Walter gay?
Edit: Googling says a lot of people think so.
bartification on May 17th, 2018 at 07:49 UTC »
Link to the transcript of the pages:
http://www.annefrank.org/ImageVaultFiles/id_19220/cf_21/AfgeplaktePaginas_AFS_TranscriptieBeschrijvingDisc.PDF
Edit: some have trouble loading the pdf so I’ll add the 4 jokes
DO YOU KNOW WHY THE GERMAN WEHRMACHT GIRLS ARE IN HOLLAND? AS MATTRESS FOR THE SOLDIERS.
MAN COMES HOME IN THE EVENING AND NOTICES THAT ANOTHER MAN HAS BEEN IN BED WITH HIS WIFE THAT EVENING. HE SEARCHES THE WHOLE HOUSE AND FINALLY LOOKS IN THE BEDROOM CLOSET TOO, THERE’S A COMPLETELY NAKED MAN STANDING THERE, AND WHEN THE ONE MAN ASKED THE OTHER MAN WHAT HE WAS DOING THERE, THE MAN IN THE CLOSET SAID: BELIEVE IT OR NOT, I’M WAITING FOR THE TRAM.
A MAN HAD A VERY UGLY WIFE AND HE DIDN’T WANT TO HAVE RELATIONS WITH HER. ONE EVENING HE CAME HOME AND THEN HE SAW HIS FRIEND IN BED WITH HIS WIFE, THEN TE MAN SAID: HE GETS TO AND I HAVE TO!!!!
A MAN AND A WOMAN HAD HAD RELATIONS TOGETHER, AND AFTER A FEW MONTHS THE WOMAN’S BELLY BECAME ALARMINGLY FAT, THEN THE MAN CALLED IN A DOCTOR WHO SAID: IT’S ALL AIR, MA’AM, ALL AIR!!!! TO WHICH THE MAN ANSWERED: “I DON’T PUMP AIR, DO I?
Cozret on May 17th, 2018 at 07:02 UTC »
So, the first question is, "How can you find new pages in a manuscript?" Well, this happens more often than you might think. When paper is valuable, either through the cost of production or scarcity, people seek to recycle it, removing or covering the previous text so the page can be reused. Modern imaging techniques are letting us recover text from historical manuscripts, and so these finds will become increasingly common. So, in effect, Frank applied a form of whiteout on a page that had text she would have been embarrassed by later, as she had previously stated on the page:
And so she wrote down four dirty jokes, an imagined talk with someone else about sex education, and mentions some prostitutes her father had told her about. I think many teenagers have this kind of the experience, an interest in sex and edgy jokes, and then the desire to hide that interest in the "forbidden." Ann Frank is so often held up as an icon, but these things can make it easier for teens who are often assigned to read her dairy to connect, and so this is a great find.