“ANNE FRANK: THE GRAPHIC DIARY”, WAR, IDENTITY, TIME AND LANGUAGE

GUERRA, IDENTIDADE, TEMPO E LINGUAGEM

Abstract

Anne Frank was a Jewish girl who experienced the horrors of the Holocaust. For two years (1942-1944), she lived in hiding and recorded her daily life in a diary, which was published posthumously in 1947. Folman and Polonsky have recreated the young woman’s stories using the language of comics. In this article, the main objective is to understand how the Second World War (1939-1945) influenced the identity development of the protagonist and narrator in Anne Frank: The Graphic Diary (Folman; Polonsky, 2018). Methodologically, the diary was contextualized socio-historically in relation to the time. As for the language of comics, we considered: (a) the ways in which time is represented; (b) the framing, the functions of the frames and interrelationships. Based on the ideas of Bauman (2005), Silva (2014) and Woodward (2014) on human identities, eight fragments of the graphic diary were analyzed (interpretivist look and sampling). The War stood out as a driving force behind Anne’s identity crisis, as she was stripped of her right, for example, to position herself as a Jew, a young woman, to live and grow freely. Imprisoned and forced to live with people who were not her family, Anne was constantly criticized and compared to her sister Margot. Her parents and other adults told her how to act and think. In the midst of the war, of the conflicts evident in the social relationships in the Secret Annex and of her own internal conflicts, Anne was at the mercy of an endless identity process of forming, undoing and remaking herself. All this materialized in the language of comics.