YMMV / The Diary of a Young Girl

• Alternate Aesop Interpretation: The diary has been assigned in some North Korean classrooms. Students are taught that while Anne had a beautiful dream, she was naïve and stupid for failing to fight against the Nazis. The students are then taught the importance of fighting against other "Nazi" nations, particularly the United States.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The diary, as is the case with much of Western classic literature, is surprisingly popular in Japan, where it was an instant best seller when published.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Everything Anne says about what she and the others are planning to do when they leave the house falls into this.
  • There is an anecdote where Peter hangs a notice on the bathroom door in Gratuitous French which reads: "S.V.P., Gas" (Please, Gas). In the concentration camps, they killed Holocaust victims with gas chambers designed to look like showers.
  • The conclusion to the entry in which Anne is recounting how she accidentally threw her beloved fountain pen into the stove fire.
    Anne: I'm left with one consolation, small though it may be: my fountain pen was cremated, just as I would like to be someday!^note She most likely wasn't cremated though, as it's now commonly assumed that she died of typhus and was buried in the mass grave.
• Heartwarming Moments: Several, but the biggest one comes at the end:
  Anne: It's difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It's a wonder I haven't abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.
• Memetic Mutation: That passage above is the most well known part of the diary. On Goodreads at least, it's the most voted quote, far outstripping the others.
• Older Than They Think: Some of the things alluded to in the diary, such as a 12-year-old boy rumored to have "gone all the way", the cohabitation of Dussel and his girlfriend, and Anne's own libertine attitudes toward sexuality, would startle many readers who believed that such things started in The '60s.
• Values Resonance:
  • Many of Anne's passages had a surprising amount of sexual frankness. She, for instance, complains on how stringent the adults are about sex and their bodies, and doesn't treat contraception like it's the spawn of the devil. While the prudish attitudes that Anne had to deal with have changed in her native Netherlands (and indeed of most of western Europe), it's clearly not universal, especially in the US. In fact, now that the uncensored edition is out, this diary is often challenged, specifically because many adults are still that prudish.
  • When Anne writes about Dussel's significant other, she writes that she's a Christian woman and Dussel is probably not married to her, and writes "but that's beside the point."

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