Autobiography, Coming-of-Age, Jewish Literature
So we know what you’re thinking: this isn’t exactly an autobiography. Anne is writing it herself and about herself, but she’s not really telling her life story per se.
A diary is a very different kind of literature: an intimate portrait of an individual’s daily experiences, not filtered through any kind of editorial process and often not with the intention of telling the whole of your life’s experiences, just those surrounding the time of the particular entry.
All the same, this book is one of the most searingly honest and lucid first-person portraits of both teenage life and life during the horrors of the Holocaust.
It's pretty much impossible to write a novel about being a teenager without it being a coming-of-age story—after all, you "come of age" during your teen years. You grow into yourself, you struggle with forging your identity, and you suffer the indignities of hormones and pimples. Anne Frank is no exception to this, even though she spent her only two years of teenage-hood in hiding.
Finally, The Diary of Anne Frank focuses on one of the darkest chapters of Jewish (and human) history: the Holocaust. Anne is keenly aware of first the persecution, and then the genocide, of European Jews under the Third Reich.