Once you have finished the book, determine what the theme of the book is and analyze it using textual evidence from the entire book.

      Hey, Alex here, perhaps for the last time. We've finally finished Anne Frank (yeah!), and I'm personally wishing for a better ending than a historical afterword. But anyways, our teacher asked us, after finishing the book, to come up with a theme that you think best represents it. So I tossed around a few possible themes: love, freedom, independence, dependence, loneliness, freedom, etc, etc. After a bit of brainstorming, I finally settled on hope as the theme. More specifically, my theme was that hope can give someone the will to live during even the hardest of times. In the beginning few pages, you can't really get hope as a theme, but as soon as the family prepares to move to the Secret Annex, hope becomes a possible theme. They and the Van Daans and Dussel are constantly hoping that they aren't caught, that conditions improve, and the list continues on and on. So this blog will be to help explain why I think that hope, or my longer theme about it, is one of the many themes of Anne's diary.

 Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, the
general who tried to assassinate Hitler.

      To begin with, Pim (Anne’s Dad) always seems to be hoping that the invasion will come very soon. I feel like half the time you read about Pim in the diary, it has something to do with his expecting the invasion. Before I give the text, keep in mind that was so stupid as to not mark interesting spots with sticky notes after page 160. One of the countless examples of this optimism of Pim’s is in Saturday, 27 February, 1943’s entry, where Anne writes, “Pim is expecting the invasion everyday now,” (Frank 67). He is hoping that the war will end quickly so that he and his family can get back to the way that they lived before the Nazis invaded the Netherlands. Every time he seemed to be proved wrong, but he was always just as confident that the invasion would come. One time he even went to go so far as to bet some scarce food on it, and lost the bet, and D-day came shortly after that, almost as if to mock him. The constant thought that an invasion would come was him being hopeful, him trying to find something to help give him the will to live. And before continuing, please note that all of this text I will show you guys is war related, as that seems to be when hope is found the most in this book. People were constantly hoping that the war would end soon, as is shown on Friday, 31 March, 1944's entry, in which Anne wrote, "In general public feeling about the Russian front is optimistic," (Frank 193). She then goes on to explain why it is so optimistic, as they are about a country away from Germany at this point. To me, optimism is hope in this scenario, because the more optimistic you are in those times, the more hopeful you tend to be. If the whole public is feeling hopeful that Russia will break into Germany soon, that gives them another reason to keep on living, or more of a will to live. The final bit of text that will take a little more explaining is found in Friday, 21 July, 1944's entry, and it says, "An attempt has been made on Hitler's life, and not even by Jewish communists or English capitalists this time, but by a proud German general . . . ." (Frank 264). Fun fact, that general is Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg (Have fun trying to say that!) At least for this instance, I see this as a high ranking German officer who is hoping for the war to end, and/or hoping to come to power through the assassination of the current leader. The news of this would help those against Hitler and his regime gain more hope of the war ending soon, giving them more of a will to live. As for those that liked Hitler, sorry, you're out of luck.

So that there was some text to help explain how I came to the conclusion that one of the many themes of Anne Frank was that hope can give someone the will to live during the hardest of times. This will probably be the last you here of me, so I hope you learned something from the last blog post I that I post. To end this, I'd like to here what you guys think about my theme and what you thought some other themes could be.