Sois gentil et tiens courage! Reshaping Anne Frank’s Diary Through New Imagery

The contemporary Graphic Adaptation by Ari Folman and David Polonsky (2017) joins an editorial history, in which the perception of Anne Frank’s story has been shaped. At the same time, ethics and aesthetics of remembrance have been consistently discussed, not only fuelled by discourses on memory but also the re-imagination of the past by new generations. As Marianne Hirsch states “[p]ostmemory’s connection to the past is thus actually mediated not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation” (Hirsch 2012). Ari Folman and David Polonsky work with those imaginative approaches and reshape historical events on a narratively exigent level of the visual and the verbal. The author and the illustrator have already worked successfully together. Anne Frank’s Graphic Adaptation is an extraordinary testimony of war, based on extensive research. Intermedial references, such as adopted historical photographs, documentaries and journal entries add authenticity to the Graphic Adaptation and enable the reader to travel back in time. This paper discusses the relationship between the visual representation of memory in Anne Frank’s Graphic Adaptation and the reader. With this in mind, the author examines the Graphic Adaptation’s potential for shaping and reshaping the readers’ perception through Folman’s and Polonsky’s creation of multiple viewpoints and discusses its storytelling abilities between fiction and history.