What do you think of Barbro Karlens claim to be the reincarnation of Anne Frank?
A-6. I wrote an extensive article exploring this issue called Anne Frank Returned? which was published in Life and Soul (London) in 1999 and re-printed in Venture Inward (USA) in January 2000, and which you can now read online. Since then, new issues have come to light which I’ll briefly mention here. Barbro Karlen, a well-known writer in Sweden, first made this claim publicly on an Amsterdam TV program in 1995. The story was later published in German in 1997 as Und die Wölfe heulten, (And the Wolves howled), a novelized version of her biography. Since then, the case has been hotly debated in the Continental press. I have read the book in German and, although I don’t doubt Ms. Karlen’s sincerity, in my opinion the story reads more like an archetypal identification with the story of Anne Frank’s suffering, rather than an actual reincarnation of Anne Frank’s soul. Plus, as I have already pointed out elsewhere, she was the sixth person (but not the last!) to tell me she was Anne Frank ret
