The Book Thief Motif

Category A, Option B

One motif I have found in The Book Thief is the complexity of humans: that they can be  both so beautiful and ugly, good and evil, loving and hateful at the same time. During WWII many people were reduced to less than people. They were polarized and made into caricatures. The Nazis dehumanized the Jews and saw them first as a threat, and increasingly as an infestation to be exterminated. The Americans saw the Axis powers as pure evil, grouping entire nations into one ideology and one crime. I agree that all Germans alive during the Holocaust have some shared responsibility for the atrocity that took place in their homeland, regardless of whether or not they agreed with the stance of the Nazi party or knew the extent of the violence against the Jewish people.

However, I think even now we tend to falter in our view of history. We want to think of the Nazis as less than people: hateful, evil fascists that we would never come across in our America today. I think this is dangerous. It eliminates our ability to identify with the sins of the Germans in the 1940’s and makes us less prepared to prevent it from occurring again. The Germans of WWII were simply people. Some fully bought into the rhetoric of Adolf Hitler, such as Frau Diller, some reservedly joined the party to protect their family, like Alex Steiner, and some silently fought against his regime with everything they could by housing a Jew secretly, such as Hans Hubermann.

Having death narrate the novel helps provide this perspective. He has been around as long as humans have been dying and he knows what the human race is capable of. He has seen many wars and terrible genocides. At the same time, he still maintains the capacity to be fascinated with them. His perspective spans much wider than our scope of narrowing in on the abomination of WWII. The fact that the story focuses on the lives of the Germans also adds to this. We see the internal struggle of many of the characters in following the pace of their government for their own wellbeing or fighting against what they know to be wrong. This shows the story of the 10% of Germans who did not agree with Adolf Hitler. It also shows the story of reluctant Nazi soldiers. It also does not romanticize the Germans; many minor characters in the novel do show outright hatred and disgust toward the Jewish people. Such as Frau Diller. I think more than anything, it shows how easy it is for the majority of society to buy into ethnocentric rhetoric once it becomes the norm.

The inner complexity of this moral struggle for the average German is highlighted well in the chapter titled “Jesse Owens.” There is an aside to describe “The Contradictory Politics of Alex Steiner,” which describes his discomfort and guilt associated with the discrimination he witnessed, but also a secret relief and guilty gladness he felt at the assured safety of his family and prosperity of his tailoring business. He does everything in his power to keep his family safe in the novel, which becomes tragically ironic in the end when he returns to a desolate Himmel Street.

However, I think the passage in the novel that I think most accurately sums up this motif is on the last page. Death and Leisel are sitting on a park bench and Death has an internal monologue about their situation:

“A few cars drove by, each way. Their drivers were Hitlers and Hubermanns, and Maxes, killers, Dillers, and Steiners …

I wanted to tell the book thief many things, about beauty and brutality. But what could I tell her about those things that she didn’t already know? I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating the human race - that rarely do I ever simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant.”

The drastic ambiguity of people is displayed here so aptly as he describes humans as beautiful and brutal, ugly and glorious. It shows that maybe we aren’t all so different after all. He describes the drivers passing by as “Hitlers and Hubermanns, and Maxes and killers, Dillers and Steiners.” He juxtaposes each of these vastly different characters side by side to emphasize their shared humanity.