Amsterdam
The Dutch parliament is considering granting posthumous citizenship to Anne Frank, the legendary young diarist who was killed in the Holocaust. It wasn’t until Frank was named as a candidate in a TV show’s contest for the greatest Dutch personality in history that most of the country found out she wasn’t actually Dutch. The Franks were Jewish refugees from Germany, and though Anne spent most of her 15 years in the Netherlands and wrote her diary in Dutch, she was never a citizen. Some Dutch scholars ridiculed the idea of granting Frank citizenship for the sake of a television program, arguing that a person’s contribution to Dutch culture doesn’t depend on nationality. William of Orange, for example, the Netherlands’ great conqueror, was also a German.
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