Miss Iatarola
Period Two
Sample Essay
1/3/16
The Book Thief
Anne Frank said, “The final forming of a person’s character is in their own hands”. During
Hitler’s reign over Nazi Germany, German citizens of every kind were handed weighty decisions.
The kind that can mean imprisonment or freedom, and even life or death. In Markus Zusak’s
novel, The Book Thief, just about every character is handed an opportunity to accept the
dehumanizing mentality of Nazi Germany—to crush the weak, alienate the “other”, and even throw
away the bonds of friendship and family in the name of nationalism. And some of the characters
do just that. But, in the face of the hateful Nazi rhetoric that dominates their lives, Liesel, Hans,
and Max help Zusak to deliver a desperately necessary message: regardless of who a person is, or
how little power he might have, kindness and understanding are the only way to combat
dehumanization. It is through their stories that the reader comes to understand that a person might
be handed any number of resources, but that each person is also handed a chance to form his own
character, write his own story, and work to create a world that is inclusive and understanding of all.
Hans’s character acts, not only to show the way kindness and understanding can inspire
others to do the same, but also to show that such acts can undo the kind of dehumanization that
only war can create. Hans, though he is sure of his beliefs and does not waver even in the most
desperate of times, faces the unique difficulty of watching his son fall prey to the dehumanizing
nature of Nazi Germany. In challenging his father, Hans Jr. says, ““You’re either for the Führer or
against him—and I can see that you’re against him…it’s pathetic—how a man can stand by and do
nothing as a whole nation cleans out the garbage and makes itself great…you coward” (Zusak 71).
In saying this, Hans Jr. shames his father for refusing to view “undesirable” citizens as Hitler does—
garbage that needs to be cleaned out. Regardless of the way Hans’s neighbors and, eventually, his
family members, criticize Hans’s beliefs, Hans continues his kind actions regardless. Even from the
start of the war, “[Hans] had been called “Der Fuden Maler”—the Jewish painter—for painting
Jewish houses…everyone knew you weren’t supposed to paint over slurs written on a Jewish shop
front” (Zusak 70). In painting over those slurs—erasing dehumanization in the most literal sense of
the term—Hans made a name for himself. He, himself, became subhuman in the eyes of others.
Eventually, after showing several other public displays of kindness and understanding towards
those suffering under Hitler’s oppressive reign, Hans is even sent away to war and given one of the
least pleasant jobs. Surrounded by Nazi soldiers, Hans still treats others with kindness and
understanding—he does not reduce those Nazis to “monsters”, even when they are unkind to him.
He plays cards and shares his winnings; he treats them like people. And after he sustains a serious
injury, Zusak clearly shows us that kindness inspires kindness in others. Hans’s commander says,
“They’ll ask me what we should do with you. I’ll tell them you did a great job…you’re not fit for the
LSE anymore and you should be sent back to Munich to work in an office…you’re lucky I like
you, Hubermann. You’re lucky you’re a good man, and generous with the cigarettes” (Zusak 324).
Even amongst the people in which a reader might least suspect to find any scrap of humanity,
Hans Hubermann’s kindness and understanding prevails.
Hans Hubermann’s actions carry far beyond his fellow soldiers, and can be found, perhaps
the most clearly, in the actions of his adopted daughter. Liesel is, at first, forced to suffer at the
hands of cruel schoolmates, and is made to feel helpless and afraid when Max comes to hide, but
when she begins to show kindness to each of these perceived enemies, she grows in strength and is
able to erase the cruel mark of dehumanization that Hitler hoped to inspire. The first time she
steps up to do this is during a time when she actually feels personally victimized. She attends a
book burning and is forced to listen to a man call communists (a word she associates with her
parents) a disease that must be destroyed. She realizes, in that moment, that Hitler reduces people
to subhuman. She tries to get a way and:
In her attempt to escape, a voice found her…Ludwig Schmeikl…all he was able to do was
pull her toward him and motion to his ankle. It had been crushed among the
excitement…his face wore a helpless expression…he was just an animal, hurt among the
melee of his own kind…somehow, she helped him up and dragged him toward the back
(Zusak 76).
Schmeikl taunted Liesel at school for being illiterate before she sees him here—he reduces her to
an idiot, and at the time she reacts violently. But in this instance, after she realizes what
dehumanization does to people—after she sees that it takes away parents and allows people to
commit unspeakable cruelty, she does not take revenge on this boy. Instead, she shows him
kindness, and ushers him, symbolically away from the people he once trusted to care for him, but
were so swept up in the nationalist craze they did not see his suffering. Liesel is challenged again
when Max enters her home. Her papa tells her that if they are caught harboring Max, “They’ll drag
that man up there away, and maybe Mama and me too—and we will never, ever come back”
(Zusak 137). Liesel fears Max—Nazi propaganda echoing in her head about Jewish people, the
possibility of losing her family defines how she sees him. Regardless of her intentions, she does
not, at first, see him as a person she could possibly understand. But after she begins to share her
life with Max: sharing her nightmares, learning their similarities, exchanging books and crosswords
and so many words besides. It is this relationship with Max that allows her to follow in her father’s
footsteps and publically denounce the dehumanization of Jewish people. When a “parade” of Jews
walks through her town, and she sees Max among them, she enters the crowd several times, even
after she is thrown painfully away:
The girl had landed sprawling with pain, but now she stood again. She recovered and
waited. She reentered…’There once was a strange, small man’, she said. Her arms were
loose by her hands were fists at her side. ‘But there was a word shaker, too…Liesel walked
at him. She was courageous enough to reach out and hold his bearded face… (Zusak 343).
She has grown to be stronger than the scared, helpless girl who feels constantly threatened. She
refuses to let the people of Himmel Street look on as dozens of starved, suffering people are
marched through their town. She refuses to let those neighbors see the Jewish people as anything
less than human. She greets Max as a dear friend, publically embraces him and weeps over his
suffering, all at her own expense. She has, at this point, refused to accept dehumanization as part of
her life and has come to realize that the people she once saw as “threats” were just people she did
not understand.
Max, more than any character, feels less than human throughout the entire novel. When
he moves into the Hubermann’s basement, a living situation he considers “better than I deserve”
(Zusak 140), his dehumanized state of living begins to eat away at who he is. He “could not
withstand the basement much longer…he could slowly feel himself deteriorating in the cold…”
(Zusak 144). Although he might try to face down his condition by meekly accepting his fate, that
submissive attitude began to destroy his hope. It was only through the time he began to share with
Liesel that revived him:
During the nights, both Liesel Meminger and Max Vandenburg would go on about their
other similarity…it would be nice to day that after this small breakthrough, neither Liesel
nor Max dreamed their bad visions again…the nightmares arrived like they always did…the
only thing that changed was that Liesel told her papa that she should be old enough to cope
on her own” (Zusak 148).
It is important to note that it was not only Liesel that had to overcome the dehumanizing realities
of Nazi Germany by seeing Max as anything other than a monster. Max, too, had to learn to trust
Liesel—a girl who was part of Hitler Youth, and that he knew for a fact had been saturated with
relentless Nazi propaganda. Even he was tempted to give her his only possession for her birthday,
Mein Kampf, he couldn’t bring himself to: “there was no way he’d give such propaganda to a
young German girl. That would be like the lamb handing a knife to the butcher (Zusak 149). In
Max’s eyes, Hiter’s propaganda reduced both himself and Liesel to categories: Jew and Nazi; lamb
and butcher. Max fought, metaphorically with Hitler, struggling to overcome the feeling that he
could “feel the fists of an entire nation. One by one they climbed into the ring and beat him down.
They made him bleed. They let him suffer” (Zusak 175). He felt surrounded and overwhelmed—
hated by all and betrayed by his country. When he began to see Liesel as separate from those
masses, he began to find himself again: “he watched the next person climb through the ropes. It
was a girl, and as she slowly crossed the canvas, he noticed a tear down her left cheek. In her right
hand was a newspaper” (Zusak 175). Even at the very end of the novel, when Max faced his
darkest nightmares and was captured by Nazis, it was the kindness and understanding that he had
established with Liesel by giving her a book the way her friendship saved his life that allowed him
to salvage his humanity. When Liesel approached him in the crowd and spoke his words back to
her, “The words were given across from the girl to the Jew. They climbed on to him…Max looked
first at the girl and then stared directly into the sky…a great day to die, like this” (Zusak 343). He
escaped from his assigned identity as a subhuman “monster”. He stepped apart from the crowd,
allowed Liesel to embrace him, and as he was whipped for showing Himmel Street that he was just
as human as she was, so was she. In that moment, through the combined kindnesses of Liesel and
Max, they managed to give Himmel Street a brief flash of harsh reality—the Nazis were not
“cleaning out the garbage” or “eliminating a disease”. They were killing and torturing people just as
fully human as they were.