Racism Against Jews in Anne Frank’s The Diary of A Young Girl

ABSTRACT

Racism is a negative attitude on how a group of people look at the others. It is in the form of prejudice, discrimination, and even genocide. Racism is basically triggered by the basic prejudice that a group of people are better than the others. This kind of crisis has happened in some places yet many people do not understand this problem completely. During the Nazi regime, Jews had been the victims of racism. They were treated inappropriately as a human being and even murdered at the end. Anne Frank, who lived in that time, wrote a diary to herself about anything happened in her life. She was only fourteen years old when she started writing and she wrote it between 1942 and 1941. This diary becomes very famous since it describes the genocide happened to Jews and other form of racism. It was then published after she died. She died because of typhus 4 days after the last story she wrote.

Based on the above reason, the researcher comes up with three research questions. The first research question is what kinds of Racisms were described in Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl?; the second is what kinds of Racims were found during the Nazy regime or in Netherland in the early 1940’s?; and the last is How are racims that happened in Netherland during the Nazy Regime reflected in Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl?

This research uses genetic structuralism approach in analyzing the diary. The study is divided into three steps; the first is to analyze the literary work; the second is to analyze the real phenomena; and the last is to compare how the real phenomena are reflected in the literary work. The theory used is sociological theory, specifically theory of racism by James M. Henslin which explains about the global pattern of race relations: segregation, population transfer, internal colonialism and genocide. Prejudice and discrimination are added from Conrad Phillip Kottak’s theory of sociology.

After analyzing the data, the researcher found six kinds of racism described by Anne Frank in her diary, i.e. prejudice, discrimination, segregation, population transfer, internal colonialism and genocide. The researcher also found the same kinds of racism in the history of Nazi explained in The Origins of the Final Solutions by Christopher R. Browning. Based on the two sources, the researcher found some similarities on how the racism happened wit h slight differences on how it was reflected in the diary.