Was Anne Frank’s uncle gay? That’s what newly discovered pages of her diary seem to imply.
Recently, the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam has announced that they found two new pages to Anne Frank’s diary.
Apparently, they’ve had these pages for some time, but they were covered with “brown gummed paper.” At first, they did not want to try removing this top layer and end up destroying the pages, but recently they decided to give it a try.
In order to see what Anne Frank had wrote, researchers “photographed the pages, back-lit by a flash, and then used image-processing software to decipher the words, which were hard to read because they were jumbled up with the writing on the reverse sides of the pages,” as stated by the museum.
What they discovered was that the pages included a lot of talk about sexuality. This includes a few sexual jokes, Frank’s thoughts on sexuality, and a passage that implies that her uncle was gay.
Some of the jokes she wrote down were:
“A man had a very ugly wife and he didn’t want to have relations with her,” she wrote. “One evening he came home and then he saw his friend in bed with his wife, then the man said: He gets to and I have to!!!!!”
Another joke she had heard: “Do you know why the German Wehrmacht girls are in Holland? As mattresses for the soldiers.”
In that latter passage, she says:
“All men, if they are normal, go with women, women like that accost them on the street and then they go together,” she wrote. “In Paris they have big houses for that. Papa has been there. Uncle Walter is not normal. Girls sell this.”
The Diary of Anne Frank is a classic among Western literature. That said, the book that many read is an edited and incomplete version.
After the end of the war, Anne Frank’s father, who’d survived the concentration camps, tried to publish his daughter's diary. Unfortuntately, he decided to edit out a lot of content like talk of sexuality and Anne’s unfiltered thoughts on her mother.
That said, a Definitive Edition was published in 1991 with the unedited pages to show Anne Frank’s full personality and perspectives on the last few years of her life.
Ah, we must beware whenever
Ah, we must beware whenever academics/researchers use the term "suggest" (or "seems to suggest" or "is very likely"). This is academic Bull**t-Speak for "we really want this to be true, but we just can't prove it." So Uncle Walter could have been gay or he just could have believed that seeing prostitutes was morally wrong which made him "not normal" for a man of his generation.