Anne Frank who?

Hello,

Welcome to my new blog. Many of you are going to be wondering why did I create and what will I be doing here. It is pretty simple, I will be posting my opinions and thoughts on a number of different topics from politics to history to even random events in the history of man kind.

Today, I feel I need to post about a comment I read on the website fmylife.com (Click here) The OP states that they are disappointed that the student asked who wrote the book The Diary of Anne Frank. Upon first read you want to smash your face into the desk in front of you. What makes it even worse is that you realized that OP indicated that they are living in France. At this point you are thinking to yourself that you want to straight up strangle this child because they live in France and you would assume they would have a stronger connection to the war. It is utterly horrifying that today's youth could not know who Anne Frank is...right?

The answer is not so clear cut, and it becomes one of those yes and no answers. This is the point where you want to put your head into your desk. I am going to try and explain why you may have to accept this and just go with it.  The odds of this student not being the brightest bulb of the class is pretty high and the title does tend to suggest that Anne Frank wrote it. To be fair, to the student, you can not always determine the author of a book just based on the title of the book and if I gave you titles of well known books could you give me their authors?

The Hobbit, The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe, The Old Man and the Sea, To Kill A Mockingbird, and The Great Gatsby. I will venture to guess that you drew a blank on at least one of them, I am nice I will give you the answers.  J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Harper Lee and F. Scott Fitzgerald are the answers, how did you do? Okay, okay...you are going to argue that those books did not refer to the author and that is a very good point, so I am going to give you some other examples. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Jane Eyre, Bridget Jones Diary, and The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole age 13 3/4. The last two titles even make the book sound like they are a published diary of both Adrian Mole and Bridget Jones, but they were written by Helen Fielding and Sue Townsend.

I know, I know I can hear many of you screaming that even if that was the case how could anybody NOT KNOW ANNE FRANK!!! I can explain it, as long as you give me a chance. It is a generational thing, many older adults know who she is because they have a direct connection to the events that took place in the diary. The older generation's parents were the people who went to fight, who read about it every day in the news paper and listened to updates of the horrors of the war on the radio. That information was passed down to their kids with stories...or even personal experiences as a very young child. My generation and down don't really have a direct connection to the Second World War and don't have a really good grasp of it in turn. Many of us were young when our grandparents died, or they died before we were able to really sit down with them and talk about the war with them.

The further you get away from an event the less people will be able to connect to those events. It starts to become a story, where fiction and non-fiction start to merge together. Would it be fair to ask our parents to really connect to the family of Archduke Ferdinand, or to ask our great grandkids to feel the way we felt on 9/11?

In the end, I would not be shocked if a question like this is asked again or becomes a more common place. It is just the way things go, time marches on leaving history to become blurred between fact and fiction.