Why should the diary of a 13 year old Jewish girl living in hiding in Nazi Germany need to be censored? Are our children really supposed to think that this 13 year old had no thoughts about sexuality and her changing body that she would have written in her diary? The censored version was published at her father’s direction during his lifetime, and while other people who had personally known Anne and other people she wrote about were still alive. It was reasonable to withhold material which would have caused embarrassment or discomfort or pain to still-living people (including the father himself, who would have found it painful to know people were reading Anne’s criticisms of her mother, after her mother had died in the concentraion camp), but that’s no longer the case, which is why the Anne Frank Foundation decided to published the unabridged version decades later.
It’s not like she was writing about her adventures with a vibrator or her fantasies about going to a lesbian bar and having sex with a woman she met there. Censoring normal healthy 13-year-old sexuality out of this historical diary is no more defensible than censoring religion out of US history text books. Both are intellectually dishonest.
Firstly, she wasn't in Nazi Germany, she lived in the Netherlands. Secondly, I wasn't talking about censoring, I'm talking about using the original, unaltered version that's been out forever. You tell me, why take a book that has been out forever and change it to include homosexuality? Why do you think the version that her father released was so bad it had to be discarded?