How an Obscure German Noblewoman Influenced the Way Anne Frank Wrote Her Diary

As a biographer, I try to use every means possible to see the world through my subject’s eyes. While writing Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, I read the books that were important to Jackson, listened to the music she liked, and purchased a vintage bottle of her favorite perfume. I even tried cooking some of her recipes, although my family was less than enthusiastic about her famous meatballs containing Italian dressing and pickle juice.

Researching The Many Lives of Anne Frank, my new book about Anne’s life and afterlife as an icon and symbol, presented a different kind of challenge. Anne left almost no documentation other than her famous diary, which readers and scholars have investigated from seemingly every angle. Could there be anything still left to discover by following the clues she left there? To my surprise, by carefully examining Anne’s reading while in hiding, I discovered a possible new inspiration for her diary.

For decades, scholars have believed that the Dutch writer Cissy van Marxveldt was Anne’s most important influence. Van Marxveldt was the author of the Joop ter Heul books, an extremely popular series for girls about a spunky Dutch teenager and her friends. The first book in the series is written as a diary that Joop keeps in the form of letters to a “paper confidante.” Anne would eventually conceive of her own diary as letters to an imaginary friend she called “Kitty.”

It’s clear that Anne adored and was inspired by the spirited group of girls at the center of these novels. Joop is a tomboy who delights in playing pranks, neglects her homework, and sneaks cigarettes behind the bike shed at school. Like Anne, she is often scolded for talking to her friends in class and even made to write an essay as punishment—as Anne too describes doing. Before Anne went into hiding, she and her best friend would read aloud their favorite passages from the books and act them out.

During her first few months in hiding, Anne was a haphazard diary keeper. But when one of the helpers who supplied her family with food and other necessities brought Anne a book from the series, she suddenly found her voice. She began writing much more often, sometimes more than once a day, addressing her entries to girls named Conny, Phien, Jetje, Emmy—the girls in Joop’s circle.

Especially in the early days of Anne’s diary, Van Marxveldt’s influence is evident. As Joop does, Anne sometimes appends a postscript to her letters to introduce information acquired later; she also uses a chatty mood similar to Joop’s. But this lighthearted tone jars in contrast with Anne’s subject matter. While the problems Joop faces are mainly limited to bad grades and misunderstandings, Anne’s diary is filled with anxiety about the fate of her friends, frustration with the constraints of being in hiding, and fear about her future. As time passes, the tone of those early entries shifts dramatically into one that is more serious and contemplative.

The closer I looked, the more I started to suspect that Joop ter Heul wasn’t the only possible model for Anne’s diary.

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While in hiding, Anne spent many hours a day doing schoolwork. This reflected her father’s influence: as an avid reader, it was important to him that she keep up with her studies. Her diary entries often note the books she’s reading and other schoolwork: French verb conjugations, history and mythology, English lessons, shorthand. In an entry dated May 11, 1944, Anne mentions reading biographies of Galileo and Emperor Charles V, studying foreign-language vocabulary, and reading stories from the Bible. Meanwhile, she writes, “I’ve left Liselotte von der Pfalz completely in the lurch.”

I must have read the Diary four or five times without noticing these words. One day, while I was looking over my notes, they jumped out at me. Who was Liselotte von der Pfalz? None of the literature I had read about Anne mentioned her—not even an extensive scholarly essay documenting Anne’s reading.

Naturally, I turned first to the Internet. From English and German Wikipedia, I learned that Liselotte (also known as Charlotte of the Palatine or Elisabeth Charlotte, Duchess of Orléans) was a German noblewoman sent at age nineteen to France to marry the brother of King Louis XIV. Despite her high rank, she was all but a prisoner in the court, her movements restricted by the whims of the king—a situation she described as “tyranny.” And on the website of Heidelberg Castle was a tantalizing snippet describing her as “an enthusiastic letter writer.”

Intrigued, I went in search of Liselotte’s letters, which I found in an English edition from 1984 called A Woman’s Life in the Court of the Sun King, edited and translated by Elborg Forster, who was then a professor at Johns Hopkins University. Forster’s introduction described the letters as “a literary classic in Germany and a valuable historical source in France.” Now I could guess how Anne came to be reading them: her father, an assimilated German Jew who received a traditional education at one of Frankfurt’s oldest and most distinguished high schools, likely selected them for her.

Born in Heidelberg in May 1652, Liselotte had an unhappy childhood. Her father, Elector Karl Ludwig von der Pfalz, repudiated her and sent her away at age seven to live with his sister, the Duchess Sophie. Her love of writing letters began in those years and continued after she was sent back to live with her father and his second wife at age eleven.

In 1671, her father married her off to Philippe I, the brother of Louis XIV. Superficial and also gay, he turned out to be a poor match for Liselotte, who was “full of intellectual curiosity and loved to ‘reason’ with learned men,” Forster writes. She endured thirty years of marriage until his death in 1701, after which she had to seek the help of the Louis’s mistress to keep herself and her children in good standing with the king. At the same time, Forster writes, she lived “almost in retirement in the midst of the court, but her eyes and ears … were wide open, and she recorded everything—daily events, the weather, illnesses, deaths, scandals, anecdotes, unusual occurrences, her own reading—in an increasingly prodigious correspondence.”

Even if I hadn’t been looking for a connection, I would have thought of Anne—imprisoned for very different reasons, but with her eyes and ears nonetheless wide open in the close confines of the Annex, recording everything important that happened to the residents (her family and the Van Pels family, as well as the dentist Fritz Pfeffer): daily routines, illnesses, conversations, fights, news from the outside world, and more. Like Liselotte, who complained that the king would not allow her to visit her family in France and Germany or even to seek medical treatment when she was in pain, Anne chafed at the restrictions imposed upon her. Also like Liselotte, Anne was brought up bilingually, in German and Dutch (Liselotte spoke German and French); she loved fairytales and read them voraciously; and she put more trust in the healing powers of nature than in conventional religion.

Liselotte sought refuge from the impositions of her daily life in writing, withdrawing increasingly into a solitary existence. “Writing is my principal occupation,” she confessed at one point. Like Anne’s diary-letters, her letters are full of literary imagery and sensual descriptions. Her relationships with some of her correspondents were nearly as fictional as Anne’s friendship with Kitty: in reality, she was emotionally distant from her half-sisters, who were among her most frequent correspondents. To call writing her “principal occupation,” Forster concludes, is “an understatement. In fact, it was Elisabeth Charlotte’s whole life, her way of mastering a destiny that was forced upon her by transforming her loneliness, her frustrations, and her anger into literature.”

Anyone who has read the Diary knows just how much this sounds like Anne. In my book, I argue that the practice of keeping a diary was essential to Anne’s survival in hiding. Not only did it allow her to blossom as a writer, but it gave her a sense of agency and a way of asserting authority over her personal narrative, which was otherwise driven by forces beyond her control.

This was especially true when Anne began revising her diary in the spring of 1944, after she had been in hiding for nearly two years—and, as it happens, at the same time as she mentions Liselotte’s letters. After hearing a radio speech in which a minister of the Dutch government-in-exile called for citizens to preserve their documents of the war years for a future national archive, Anne went back and rewrote her diary from the beginning. One of the key changes in her revision was to get rid of the most childish material from her early months in hiding—the parts of the diary most obviously modeled on Joop ter Heul.

The main thrust of Anne’s revision was to add greater context on the persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands—context that makes it clear that she wished to claim ownership of her own story. One small example illustrates this point. In an entry in which she first imagines the eventual publication of her diary—or, more precisely, of a novel based on it—she writes, “It would be quite funny 10 years after the war if we Jews were to tell how we lived and what we ate and talked about here.” This echoes a letter Liselotte wrote more than 250 years earlier. Addressing Duchess Sophie on January 11, 1678, Liselotte wrote: “I am certain that I should amuse Your Grace for at least an hour if I were to tell Your Grace about life here and the things that go on, which one cannot possibly imagine unless one sees and hears them and is in the midst of them.”

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For decades, most readers have assumed that Anne’s diary was “a work of art made by life itself,” as the Dutch novelist Harry Mulisch once described it, rather than a deliberately conceived testimony to the persecution of the Dutch Jews. Without acknowledging the major changes that Anne made herself, critics accuse those who edited it, particularly her father, of censoring her. Even readers who recognize Anne’s determination and artistry in carefully crafting her revision have long believed that her primary model was a comic work of young-adult fiction. But if Anne started her diary by modeling her literary strategies on those of Cissy van Marxveldt, she ended it in a very different place.

The connection between Anne Frank and Joop ter Heul was first noticed by Mirjam Pressler, the translator of Anne’s diary into German, after the all-male team of Dutch editors who put together a scholarly edition of the diary overlooked it. Similarly, generations of critics who have insisted on seeing Anne as an accidental heroine rather than a young woman trying desperately to take charge of her own destiny have failed to notice the strong parallels between her story and Liselotte’s as well as the evidence of Liselotte’s influence on her.

A scholar to whom I reached out for advice when beginning my research pointedly warned me that Anne Frank studies was a “crowded field.” I hope my experience will encourage other writers to be persistent and “turn every page,” as Robert Caro famously puts it. Even when the ground has been trampled by many feet, a person with a fresh perspective and a careful eye may yet find something unexpected.

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Ruth Franklin’s The Many Lives of Anne Frank is available now from Yale University Press.