Anne Frank in the ultra-Catholic Franco periodChallenge and exploitation of the American mythification of Het Achterhuis

Resumen

This paper examines Spaniards’ responses to the Americanised construction of Anne Frank and her diary. In addition to analysing the context in which the first translation into Castilian Spanish was published, consideration is given to the transformative moves that the original text and the Broadway and Hollywood rewritings of the diary underwent when they were made available in Spain in the second half of the 1950s. Special attention is paid to the discursive reconfiguration of the mythicised view built around the figure of Anne Frank in the United States and to its challenge and exploitation in the ultra-Catholic years of Franco’s regime. In that sense, one of the major driving forces behind this paper is answering the question of whether or not the reception of this text in Francoist Spain was affected by the fact that its author was an adolescent, a Jew, and a woman.