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LITERATURE

Anne Frank diary to go online amid legal row

An academic and a French MP have announced plans to publish online the famous diary of Anne Frank, with the organisation holding publication rights threatening legal action.

Published: 31 December 2015 11:38 CET
Anne Frank diary to go online amid legal row
A memorial stone for Anne Frank at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Photo: Nigel Treblin / AFP
University of Nantes lecturer Olivier Ertzscheid told AFP Wednesday that the planned January 1 publication date in the diary's original Dutch would be after the “Diary of a Young Girl” falls within public domain. European copyright law dictates that a book become public domain on the first day of January 70 years after the author's death.
 
Anne Frank, who penned the historic diary during World War II, died at the age of 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. Her diary is one of the primary pieces of literature detailing life in Nazi-era Europe, with more than 30 million copies sold since its publication in 1947.
 
Ertzscheid, who describes himself as a “activist” when it comes to public domain, calls the pushback against publication “appalling”, adding that anti-Semitic works such as Adolf Hitler's “Mein Kampf” will enter public domain on Friday.
 
The researcher had in October published on his website two French versions of the book, only to take them down after the Livre du Poche publisher sent a formal notice stating that copyright for translators was still in effect.
 
French parliament member Isabelle Attard also plans to publish the book in its original Dutch on January 1.
 
The Anne Frank Fund, based in Basel, Switzerland, holds the rights to publication and told AFP that it had sent a letter threatening legal action if the diary was published.
 
The Fund argues that the book is a posthumous work, for which copyright extends 50 years past the publication date, and that a 1986 version published by the Dutch State Institute for War Documentation (NIOD) is under copyright until at least 2037.
 
“Under Dutch copyright law, a work first published posthumously before 1995 remains protected for 50 years after the initial publication,” the fund said in a statement on its website. It said a decision by a Dutch court on 23rd December confirmed that the book would remain covered by copyright.
 
Attard criticised the move as a “question of money”, adding that if the work was in the public domain Frank would win “even more renown”.
 
The Anne Frank Fund, founded by her father Otto Frank, says it uses money from the sale of Frank's books and licenses for a wide range of charitable purposes.

HISTORY

‘Lost’ manuscript of pro-Nazi French author published 78 years later

A book by one of France's most celebrated and controversial literary figures arrives in bookstores this week, 78 years after the manuscript disappeared

Published: 4 May 2022 11:42 CEST
'Lost' manuscript of pro-Nazi French author published 78 years later

It is a rare thing when the story of a book’s publication is even more mysterious than the plot of the novel itself.

But that might be said of Guerre (War) by one of France’s most celebrated and controversial literary figures, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, which arrives in bookstores on Thursday, some 78 years after its manuscript disappeared.

Celine’s reputation has somehow survived the fact that he was one of France’s most eager collaborators with the Nazis.

Already a superstar thanks to his debut novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Celine became one of the most ardent anti-Semitic propagandists even before France’s occupation.

In June 1944, with the Allies advancing on Paris, the writer abandoned a pile of his manuscripts in his Montmartre apartment.

Celine feared rough treatment from authorities in liberated France, having spent the war carousing with the Gestapo, and giving up Jews and foreigners to the Nazi regime and publishing racist pamphlets about Jewish world conspiracies.

For decades, no one knew what happened to his papers, and he accused resistance fighters of burning them. But at some point in the 2000s, they ended up with retired journalist Jean-Pierre Thibaudat, who passed them – completely out of the blue – to Celine’s heirs last summer.

‘A miracle’
Despite the author’s history, reviews of the 150-page novel, published by Gallimard, have been unanimous in their praise.

“The end of a mystery, the discovery of a great text,” writes Le Point; a “miracle,” says Le Monde; “breathtaking,” gushes Journal du Dimanche.

Gallimard has yet to say whether the novel will be translated.

Like much of Celine’s work, Guerre is deeply autobiographical, recounting his experiences during World War I.

It opens with 20-year-old Brigadier Ferdinand finding himself miraculously alive after waking up on a Belgian battlefield, follows his treatment and hasty departure for England – all based on Celine’s real experiences.

His time across the Channel is the subject of another newly discovered novel, Londres (London), to be published this autumn.

If French reviewers seem reluctant to focus on Celine’s rampant World War II anti-Semitism, it is partly because his early writings (Guerre is thought to date from 1934) show little sign of it.

Journey to the End of the Night was a hit among progressives for its anti-war message, as well as a raw, slang-filled style that stuck two fingers up at bourgeois sensibilities.

Celine’s attitude to the Jews only revealed itself in 1937 with the publication of a pamphlet, Trifles for a Massacre, which set him on a new path of racial hatred and conspiracy-mongering.

He never back-tracked. After the war, he launched a campaign of Holocaust-denial and sought to muddy the waters around his own war-time exploits – allowing him to worm his way back into France without repercussions.

‘Divine surprise’
Many in the French literary scene seem keen to separate early and late Celine.

“These manuscripts come at the right time – they are a divine surprise – for Celine to become a writer again: the one who matters, from 1932 to 1936,” literary historian Philippe Roussin told AFP.

Other critics say the early Celine was just hiding his true feelings.

They highlight a quote that may explain the gap between his progressive novels and reactionary feelings: “Knowing what the reader wants, following fashions like a shopgirl, is the job of any writer who is very financially constrained,” Celine wrote to a friend.

Despite his descent into Nazism, he was one of the great chroniclers of the trauma of World War I and the malaise of the inter-war years.

An exhibition about the discovery of the manuscripts opens on Thursday at the Gallimard Gallery and includes the original, hand-written sheets of Guerre.

They end with a line that is typical of Celine: “I caught the war in my head. It is locked in my head.”

In the final years before his death in 1961, Celine endlessly bemoaned the loss of his manuscripts.

The exhibition has a quote from him on the wall: “They burned them, almost three manuscripts, the pest-purging vigilantes!”

This was one occasion – not the only one – where he was proved wrong.

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