A few reasons I think that the misunderstanding persists:
1. Anne was a good writer! So she did a good job of putting together a convincing document that seems authentic as a found object. Of course it is authentic, but it's also, as you explained, very intentional.
2. Fake found manuscripts are the genesis of the novel in many ways. We feel better about believing something that we read when we think "no one was supposed to even read this!" When we know it has been created intentionally for consumption, we feel manipulated in some way. And so we become skeptical. We don't want to be skeptical about a girl forced to live in hiding and ultimately killed by the Nazis, so we assume that the most correct assumption is the simplest.
3. Innocence is such an important piece of how people respond to Frank's diaries. The idea of her as an innocent child is so important. Her own revisions and thoughtfulness about how her diary might be understood undermines her position as a child (even though of course she still was an innocent child--she was also a really smart one).
I don’t know what the situation is now, but it used to be that, in many schools, some form of Anne Frank’s diary was the sum total of what passed for middle school Holocaust education. Girls related to it as expressing their desires, frustrations, and irritations with adults, siblings,and particularly their mothers. Boys tended to be unaffected by it , if not disliking it, for the same reasons. It all cases, Judaism and the Holocaust were barely visible, if at all, which is why Anne Frank is so many people’s favorite- if not only- Holocaust victim.
A few reasons I think that the misunderstanding persists:
1. Anne was a good writer! So she did a good job of putting together a convincing document that seems authentic as a found object. Of course it is authentic, but it's also, as you explained, very intentional.
2. Fake found manuscripts are the genesis of the novel in many ways. We feel better about believing something that we read when we think "no one was supposed to even read this!" When we know it has been created intentionally for consumption, we feel manipulated in some way. And so we become skeptical. We don't want to be skeptical about a girl forced to live in hiding and ultimately killed by the Nazis, so we assume that the most correct assumption is the simplest.
3. Innocence is such an important piece of how people respond to Frank's diaries. The idea of her as an innocent child is so important. Her own revisions and thoughtfulness about how her diary might be understood undermines her position as a child (even though of course she still was an innocent child--she was also a really smart one).
Very insightful and well put
I don’t know what the situation is now, but it used to be that, in many schools, some form of Anne Frank’s diary was the sum total of what passed for middle school Holocaust education. Girls related to it as expressing their desires, frustrations, and irritations with adults, siblings,and particularly their mothers. Boys tended to be unaffected by it , if not disliking it, for the same reasons. It all cases, Judaism and the Holocaust were barely visible, if at all, which is why Anne Frank is so many people’s favorite- if not only- Holocaust victim.