The Book Thief by Markus Zusak was published in 2005. Zusak dedicated his book to his parents, Helmut and Lisa Zusak, who witnessed the treatment of the Jews and them marching to Dachau in WWII. The book follows a German girl on her journey during WWII. That girls name is Liesel, commonly known by me as The Book Thief. Who am I you may ask? I am the narrator of the novel, Death. While I focus on Liesel, I also focus on the other people in her life, especially the people who live on Himmel Street. By doing this, I allow the audience to see an overview of all the characters and their feelings, rather than having the book seen through Liesel’s eyes, in which limits this.
The audience for the novel is young adults and people who have a connection with WWII. The purpose of The Book Thief is to educate and inform the younger generation of life during WWII for both Jews and the Germans, in an entertaining form. I show this by giving the audience a chance to see the broad overview of what life is like for Liesel, as well as people around her. Max is an important character in the book when it comes to showing what life is like for Jews. This is seen by him having to hide in the Hubermann’s basement from the Nazi party.
This book is situated during the time of
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I predominantly use the motif of colour to explain multiple aspects in the story. Colour is the first thing I mention to you in the story, colours are my vacation from reality. When Frau's son, Robert, gets severely injured at war, I describe there being "hot hands and a red scream” and the “smell of rotting snow" (pg. 459). All the colours I talk about relate to a particular emotion, for example, red symbolises anger and war. Another colour I use is white, which refers to innocence. Working alongside with red, the white element is the snow. The war changes Robert, removing a part of the innocence he once had. The war having a similar effect on
Markus Zusak’s novel The Book Thief depicts the life of a certain young German girl named Liesel Meminger during World War II. Her story was told through the eyes of Death, who narrates both the blessings and devastation that occurred during that era. Liesel experiences living with her new foster parents and come across a boy named Rudy Steider who will later on become her best friend. As the story unfolds, Liesel gradually discovers the horrifying truth behind the Nazi regime as her foster parents take refuge of a Jewish man. Despite being in the midst of destruction and recently coping from her traumatic background, she undertakes on a journey of self-discovery and
In the novel The Book Thief by Markus Zusak the narrator is Death, who shows itself as sympathetic and sensitive towards the suffering of the world and the cruel human nature, through its eyes, we can get to know the heartbreaking story of Liesel Meminger an ordinary, but very lucky nine-year old German girl; living in the midst of World War II in Germany. In this book the author provides a different insight and observation about humanity during this time period from a German view and not an Allied perspective, as we are used to.
The Book Thief: A novel taken place in Germany during War World 11. Throughout this novel we meet a girl named Liesel meminger,
In The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, Liesel Meminger, an orphaned little girl living in Nazi Germany, evolves partly through her numerous literary thefts. At her younger brother’s gravesite, she steals her first book, The Grave Digger’s Handbook, which teaches her not only the method to physically bury her brother, but also lets her emotionally bury him and move on. The theft of her next book, The Shoulder Shrug, from a book burning marks the start of Liesel’s awareness and resistance to the Nazi regime. As a story with a Jewish protagonist “who [is] tired of letting life pass him by – what he refer[s] to as the shrugging of the shoulders to the problems and pleasures of a person’s time on earth,” this novel prepares her both for resisting the
The chaos and destruction that the Nazi’s are causing are not changing the lives of only Jews, but also the lives of citizens in other countries. Between Night by Elie Wiesel and The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom, comradeship, faith, strength, and people of visions are crucial to the survival of principle characters. Ironically, in both stories there is a foreseen future, that both seemed to be ignored.
The Book Thief and Nazi Germany The heavily proclaimed novel “The Book Thief” by Markus Zusak is a great story that can help you understand what living in Nazi Germany was like. Throughout the story, the main character, Liesel goes through many hardships to cope with a new life in a new town and to come to the recognition of what the Nazi party is. Liesel was given up for adoption after her mother gave her away to a new family, who seemed harsh at first, but ended up being the people who taught her all the things she needed to know. Life with the new family didn’t start off good, but the came to love them and her new friend, Rudy.
In Night, Author Elie Wiesel describes his experience in Nazi Hungary and in concentration camps such as Auschwitz and Buchenwald to bring awareness about the horrors of the Holocaust and warn the people about any future atrocities. Furthermore, in The Book Thief, the main character, Liesel Meminger, describes her experience with stealing books and how it helped her survive and stay courageous during the Nazi regime. Lastly, in The Dairy of a Young Girl, Anne Frank writes a series of Dairy journal entries that describe her horrendous experiences with the Jewish persecution in the Netherlands. Additionally, he used posters to portray his hate against the Jim Crow laws.
Throughout life many people face difficulties. Depending on the person’s strength some will get through tough times, but some will fail to overcome them. Two books where characters have to face many challenges include: Their Eyes Were Watching God and The Book Thief. These two stories deal with people overcoming the difficulties faced throughout everyday life. Some difficulties include racism, religious discrimination, and dealing with others’ cruelness or kindness. Examples from these books prove that the characters have challenges throughout the stories to overcome. In the face of adversity what causes some individuals to fail while others prevail?
One of the most unforgettable genocides to occur was the Holocaust, where 6 million Jews, along with gypsies, homosexuals, and communists, were killed by Hitler’s Nazi regime. It is very common for authors to have their literature’s central idea be about the Holocaust. The Book Thief, written by Markus Zusak, is about a German girl, Liesel, who lives in Nazi Germany and faces the inescapable pains of growing up in a time of war. Her emotional journey is one that begins with a journey. Zusak incorporates the events that occurred during the Holocaust in the book in order to show the reality that Liesel and everyone she loved had to face.
In The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak, beauty and brutality is seen in many of the characters. Rudy, Liesel, and Rosa display examples of beauty and brutality often without realizing what exactly they are doing, because it is a part of their human nature. Zusak not only uses his characters, but also the setting of the novel in Nazi Germany to allude to his theme of the beauty and brutality of human nature. The time in which the novel is set, during World War II, displays great examples of beauty and brutality, such as the mistreatment of the Jews. As a result of this time period, the characters have to go through troubling times, which reveals their beautiful and brutal nature in certain circumstances. Zusak uses his characters and their experiences to demonstrate the theme of the beauty and brutality of human nature in the novel.
In the epilogue of The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, the story has come to an end as we learn the destiny of the book thief. Death, the narrator, says, “Liesel Meminger lived to a very old age, far away from Molching and the demise of Himmel Street. She died in a suburb of Sydney. The house number was forty-five—the same as the Fielders’ shelter—and the sky was the best blue of afternoon. Like her papa, her soul was sitting up. In her final visions, she saw her three children, her grandchildren, her husband, and the long list of lives that merged with hers. Among them, lit like lanterns, were Hans and Rosa Hubermann, her brother, and the boy whose hair remained the color of lemons forever” (397). Liesel, the “perpetual survivor” and so full of
The Book Thief is an example of living outside of the concentration camps. In Nazi Germany, the story of a young girl, Liesel Meminger, is told through the eyes of “Death”. Liesel was unaware of what was occurring during the time, she only knew as much as she had read in books. The Book Thief started with the idea of suffering. The reader is directly introduced to the suffering through hunger, loss of family, and
The novel, The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak is set in Nazi Germany in the midst of World War 2 and considering this, is an uncommon type of novel in regards to its focus. The Jewish, or other non-Aryan people who were persecuted so vehemently are often the focus of books set during World War 2, rather than the Aryan German population. Having this seen so predominantly in The Book Thief enabled the consequences of Hitler’s regime that are more sparsely known to be displayed, accrediting a much further depth to the detriments of the war upon European society. The novel exhibits this death, destruction and tragedy implicit in war as one of its main themes. This theme is displayed by the evils which humans are able to inflict upon each other, of which there are
Much of The Book Thief revolved around a common German family hiding a Jew. During the Holocaust and the book, Jews and other people seen as insignificant were imprisoned in concentration camps. Max, the Jew that the Hubermanns were hiding, could cause them to get into deep trouble. However, they still hid him. The Hubermanns lived in a town close to a concentration camp and often saw marches of prisoners through town. Even with a potential prisoner living in their residence, the Hubermanns, along with most everyone else in Molching, were unaware of the events that actually happened in the concentration camp and marches.
Death states that, “I’m always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both” (Zusak 491). This book shows us human doing things that weren’t even imaginable before this point. Many people give into ideas that were lies. But, we also watch a few people go out of their way and sacrifice everything for a man they barely even know. They do everything they can to keep him safe and alive. They work harder, the get another job, and they even steal. In Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, death examines the ugliness and the beauty of humans.