The Book Thief

Jacque Le

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07/04/17

The Book Thief

Markus Zusak

2005 Picador

584

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The Book Thief is narrated by Death and is centered around a nine-year-old girl called Liesel Meminger, it’s set in Mulching (fictional town) just outside of Munich, Germany. Liesel and her brother had been given up by their mom to her foster parents, Hans and Rose Huberman, however on their way there Liesel’s younger brother dies and it takes a very big toll on her and she continuously has bad dreams for many nights. Han’s comforted her every night and he read to her, this is how Liesel eventually learned how to read books. She eventually comes to befriend the Hubermans neighbor Rudy and a Jew named Mac Vandenber comes to stay with them, hidden away in their basement.
As she grows older she begins to understand what Hitler’s propaganda is and that it was most likely the cause of her biological family but her neighbor Ilsa gives her a little black book and encourages Liesel to write. She does, Liesel starts writing down her whole story in the little black book leaving minimal pages blank. One night she was down in the basement, which was ironically deemed too shallow to protect them from air raids when the sirens aren’t sounded fast enough. Bombs are dropped from the sky, and her whole street dies while she lived because she was down in the basement working on ‘The Book Thief’. Liesel is pulled under the debris by the LSE who managed to hear her hit a paint can with a pencil. This is also how Death got his hands on ‘The Book Thief’ because while Liesel was saying goodbye to her deceased loved ones, she dropped it and Death picked it up. The book ends with Liesel dying, many years later, and Death returning ‘The Book Thief’’ to the book thief and saying he’s forever haunted by humans.

One of the major themes in the ‘The Book Thief’ is humanity and dehumanization. ‘The Book Thief’ was set in Germany during WWII, one of the most prominent events during WWII was the Holocaust. It’s quite evident most Germans believe that they’re their superior to everyone else, especially the Jewish. By burning books writing by their authors, writing slanderous things on walls about the, however it’s mostly implicated in Chapter 17 when Hans said; “It’s pathetic—how a man can stand by and do nothing as a whole nation cleans out the garbage and makes itself great.” He was referring to how Hans was yet to be accepted into the party and he truly did not seem interested in being accepted. The humanity side is mostly portrayed through Hans, he referred to himself many times as a ‘communist’ at a point in time where it was incredibly dangerous thing, he painted over the hateful comments made towards Jews on walls, he gave a dying one a piece of bread (an incredibly selfless act considering how Hans’ family had next to nothing to eat with minimal income). Hans, Liesel, and Rosa also hid a Jew, Max, in their basement to keep him from getting sent to a concentration camp