Revealing a hidden side of Anne Frank

A new exhibition gives a rare glimpse into the family life of the young Dutch diarist, writes Derek Scally in Berlin

The sleeping child in the photograph is scarcely three years old, but the dark smudges under the eyes are unmistakably Anne Frank. Generations have read her diary, detailing her life in hiding from the Nazis with her family in Amsterdam, but the image of Anne never varies, the result of the same few portrait photos that stare from the covers of 60 editions and 25 million copies of the book worldwide.

Now, nearly six decades after she died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, private family photographs have gone on display for the first time, offering a glimpse into the private life of a family made public through Anne's diary.

Anne's surviving friends and relatives gathered in Berlin last week on what would have been her 75th birthday for the opening of the exhibition, Anne Frank And Family. Anne's father, Otto Frank, was an enthusiastic amateur photographer, and the 70 photographs on display are proof that his Leica was never far from reach.

The photographs, taken from family albums kept hidden along with Anne's diaries, document the life of a Jewish middle-class family in the 1930s with no trace of the impending nightmare.

"My wife and I did everything in our power to conceal our anxiety from our children, so that they would have a relatively carefree life," said Otto Frank in 1968. This is the world we see in his photographs: a world of dressing up, taking baths, playing on the street and at the seaside, even sitting wearing goggles under an old-fashioned sunlamp.

Anne always appears alert to the camera, even as a small child, and the later photographs show a poised teenager sitting at a desk, pencil in hand.

One of the most affecting is that of a newly born Anne lying in the arms of her sister, Margot, then three years old, who gazes in to the camera with a gleaming look of wonder and excitement.

The only photograph not taken by Otto Frank shows him as an old man in the secret annex where he hid with his family, his eyes cast downward, leaning against a beam. It's the only image in the exhibition taken in the annex: Otto Frank took no photographs during this time, though Anne kept boredom at bay by flicking through the photo albums, rearranging the pictures and rewriting captions, occasionally even taking a photo or two to keep in her diary.

The photographs present her as her proud father saw her - a smiling, pretty girl - not how she saw herself, and how the world best knows her, through the anxiety-filled pages of her diary.

A decade ago a new version of the book, The Diary Of A Young Girl, appeared with reinstated passages concerning Anne's developing sexuality and her difficult relationship with her mother. Just as this so-called definitive edition of the diary presents a more rounded Anne, so too does this worthwhile exhibition, finally returning Anne Frank to the world in which she lived.