The Book Thief

‘Trust me, though, the words were on their way, and when they arrived, Liesel would hold them in her hands like the clouds, and she would wring them out, like the rain.' (p 85)
This is a novel about the power of words which act as a conduit for the writer's imagination and as a haven for the reader in the exploration of our deepest emotions and fears. It's a burning testament to how words can overcome adversity, but also to how they have in extreme circumstances been used to create fanatic hatred. It's about the tragedy of what happens to the human soul when the power to express or write words is taken away from it. It's about the redemptive and the destructive power of knowledge and of love. It's about the themes of death, hope, guilt, survival and redemption. It's about the fact that each and every one of us is haunted by our capacity for evil and our desire to do good. It shows that whilst words are an inspiring force in translating feelings, and in expressing the inexpressible, they can also destroy the very things we hold most dear – that they are ultimately one of the most powerful forces by which humanity transcends the physical, and attempts to describe the spiritual power of the imagination and the force of emotional connection which we have with each other. They help us to survive and to endure the loss of those who don't.

In 1939 in Nazi Germany, Liesel Meminger and her younger brother Werner are being taken by train by their mother to live with a foster family, Rosa and Hans Hubermann, who live at 33 Himmel Street, Molching, outside Munich, when Werner dies. ‘Death', the narrator of this novel, notices Liesel for the first time, and will encounter her again some years later when she and her best friend Rudy discover the grounded enemy aircraft (pp 520-1), and later still when a bomb falls on Himmel Street (p 563). Liesel's love affair with books begins with The Gravedigger's Handbook which she finds by her brother's grave, and continues with fourteen books in total (pp 30-1). Liesel is taken in by the irascible Rosa and by the kindly Hans, who though he is never noticed by anyone, becomes Liesel's beloved papa,
whose innocuousness she is instantly aware is not a true portrait of who he is. ‘The frustration of that appearance, as you can imagine, was its complete misleadance, let's say. There was most certainly value in him, and it did not go unnoticed by Liesel
Meminger.' (p 34) … The girl knew from the outset that he'd always appear mid-scream, and that he would not leave.' (p 38) Their children Hans and Trudy are grown up and live elsewhere, and it is their absence in this house which Liesel fills, as Hans and Rosa fill the absence in her heart.

This novel is premised on the philosophy that words and books have power. Hans teaches Liesel to read, by sharing the book she had found, and it is this which opens doors for Liesel and helps her to cope with the terrible world in which she finds herself. Hans gives her two books for Christmas, The Dog Named Faust and The Lighthouse. And after she rescues The Shoulder Shrug from the book-burning, an act which was observed by the Mayor's wife, Ilsa, the latter shows her into her private library of books (p 146) where
Liesel is almost religious in her worship of their display, and also comes to worship the words within them during her subsequent visits. Liesel discovers how words had also rescued Hans, ‘but I would soon learn that words and writing actually saved his life once. Or at least, words and a man who taught him the accordion…'(p 67) Later still she learns that Erik Vandenburg had taught him to play in the WWI trenches which is ironically what brings him danger during WWII. For Hans's promise to Mrs Vandenburg to help the family of his dead comrade is finally ‘called up' when her son Max is sent to hide with them. Liesel's fury when the Mayor's wife ends her employment of Rosa as ironing lady is wounding (p 283) and ultimately self-destructive, for she deprives herself of her beloved books. She
steals The Whistler from the Mayor's house in retaliation for the sleight, and goes on to steal more, before Ilsa begins to leave books for her to ‘take'. Amongst them is a dictionary, and in Part Seven the novel is punctuated with definitions of words indicating the tantalizing and slippery nature of meaning. For words can injure as well as heal; can obfuscate as much as reveal truth.

The Book Thief traces the gradual encroachment of Nazism on the everyday life of the Hubermanns and other ordinary families like them. It shows the insidious nature of such control over personal freedom. It reveals how hatred of others including the Jews and the communists (Kommunisten) imbued the rhetoric of Hitler's speeches in order to incite violence, destruction and cruelty. Hans's dislike for the movement is cloaked in the necessary public subservience to its dictates. On the Führer's birthday, they, like all their neighbours, hang a flag in their window. Liesel is required to join the Hitler Youth movement which becomes familiar to her as she is expected to don the brown uniform and practice her ‘Heil Hitler' (p 41). But when Hans Jnr arrives for Christmas we observe how extreme fanaticism can subsume a personality, with his furious denouncement of his father for not being a committed Nazi. He sees Hans Snr as ‘part of an old, decrepit Germany – one that allowed everyone else to take it for the proverbial ride while its own people suffered' (p 112) and accuseshim of being a bystander who ‘does nothing as a whole nation cleans out the garbage and makes itself great.' (pp 113-4) The chilling words used here reduce the Holocaust to a clinical, domestic solution for problems such as unemployment and poverty. Liesel is not concerned until she hears the word Kommunisten spoken with such bile on the Führer's birthday (p 120) and realises that the manifesto is directed at her own family. She begins to fear that her letters to her mother may never be answered since she is in obvious danger. When Hans confirms her fear, she expresses her hatred for the Führer but is admonished by Hans. (pp 124-5) His fear for their safety has led him to take the safest path; to privately hate and publicly adhere to Nazism's tenets, and later in the novel the Hubermanns' predicament is spelled out (p 215). Later still Max fantasises about boxing with the Führer only to have his victory destroyed by Hitler's mental manipulation of the crowd who are spectators to the imaginary conflict. (p 275) This scene is a metaphor for how Hitler convinced an entire nation to willingly allow or turn a blind eye to human suffering on such a vast scale. It also describes how those who tried to resist, like Hans, and Rudy's father, Alex Steiner, were recruited and made to serve as soldiers for a cause they didn't believe in. ‘When they come and ask you for one of your children, … you're supposed to say yes.' (p 446) Anti-Semitism and Jewish resistence to persecution is one of the strands in this story.

‘There was, of course, the matter of forty million people I picked up by the time the whole thing was finished, but that's getting all metaphoric.' (p 121) Liesel lives near Schiller Street – the road of yellow stars – and observes the destruction of Jewish homes and their disappearance from the neighborhood. The irony of the situation is pointed out forcibly: Rudy's ‘father's business wasn't doing so well of late (the threat of Jewish competition was taken away, but so were the Jewish customers.)' (p 161) The essence of Jewish humour is to laugh at adversity in a black form of hilarity. A far greater irony is present when Max Vandenburg is given a false identity and a copy of Mein Kampf in which to hide his papers and to hide behind when traveling by rail to his new hideout. ‘Of all the things to save him.' (p 173) Later Max systematically removes each page and paints over it in order to write his own story on the pages beginning with the tale he gives Liesel for her birthday. As they and their neighbours watch successive groups of Jews being herded through the streets on their way to Dachau, we observe the penalty paid by those who, like Hans, attempt to offer to them the smallest act of kindness. (pp 418- 423) Their fear for the repercussions which might be brought to bear on their own families provides a chilling impetus to remain silent in the face of the inhumanity of anti-semitism. The real meaning of hatred is brought home to Liesel and Ludwig Schmeikl at the rally when they realise that their petty disputes in the schoolyard were a pallid reflection of the hatred evinced by the burning, and their shock amid the chaos forces both to apologise for their fight. (p 122) Later on, however, the human pendulum swings back. ‘How quickly the pity would leave her, and how quickly it would spill over into something else completely.' (p 160) Guilt is the terrible burden felt by survivors who not only lament the loss of their loved ones, but also the danger they inflict on others. ‘To live. Living was living. The price was guilt, and shame.' (p 227) When Max is taken by Walter Kugler into hiding he has to abandon his family, and ‘the relief struggled inside him like an obscenity. It was something he didn't want to feel but, none the less, he felt it with such gusto it made him want to throw up.'(p 208) When he makes his way out of hiding to seek refuge in the Hubermanns' home, ‘He reminded himself that this was no time for hope … How could be show up and ask people to risk their lives for him? How could he be so selfish?' (p 183)

The power of this description of such atrocity is grounded in a poetic expression of human suffering. It's a prayer for the dead; a dirge for the living who allowed it; a lament for their common humanity. Later Death describes the terrible events in the snows of Stalingrad
when Robert Holtzapfel died (pp 499-501) and the novel concludes with Death's resonant observations on humanity. If humans have been responsible for the most brutal of events, they have also survived them and this dual capacity provides a source of wonder to every writer, everywhere. The movement of history is like a tide which scoops up people, some early and some later in life, and washes them away leaving the survivors to tell their stories, and to regret their loss. We are all survivors in one way or another. But we will all die, of course, as well.