Irony In The Book Thief

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

evils of the Nazi regime and living with a Jew (143). In terms of the word around her, the title of the book references the nonchalance and carelessness of the German people in accepting Nazi rule, which Liesel is becoming increasingly hostile towards. After these first few thefts, Liesel gains a more consistent, bountiful source of literature in the form of the mayor’s wife’s library.
After gaining entrance via her mother’s laundry service, Liesel first starts reading The Whistler, but after the mayor’s wife, Ilsa Hermann, drops Liesel’s mother’s laundry service, Liesel decides to steal the book instead. Although she was offered the book as a sort of recompense for her family’s poverty, a stubborn Liesel decides she must steal it and several other books from the library. The title of this crime novel reflects her neighbor Pfiffikus, who seems to communicate exclusively through whistling and curse words. Ironically, a book about violence and reminiscent of an angry man ends up calming the town when Liesel reads it in the bomb shelter and also when she reads it privately to a hostile neighbor, Ms. Holtzapel.
She steals the next three books, The Dream Carrier, A Song in the Dark, and The Complete Duden Dictionary and Thesaurus, in quick succession from the mayor’s wife, receiving a note from her in the dictionary acknowledging the thefts, saying that “it made me smile” and that she “hope[s] you find this dictionary and thesaurus useful as you read your stolen books” (369).

This realization, although suspected by the narrator for a long time, shows the true irony of Liesel’s thefts: that she never needs to steal them. When she steals her last book, The Last Human Stranger, she even takes a plate of cookies and leaves a note. Although none of these books are featured as heavily as her first few thefts, their titles reference parts of Liesel’s struggles such as her relationship with Max, her role in uplifting her community in the bunker, her continuing education, and her status being the only survivor of the final bombing. In conclusion, the books which Liesel steals are very influential in her development through the course of the novel, with the titles themselves references other parts of her life.
Last year, I read Life of Pi, and its focus on spirituality and the analysis of Pi’s religious experience moved me and heavily affected my own spirituality. I was an agnostic atheist beforehand, and that did not change, but instead, Life of Pi pushed me to find my own beauty and wonder, not in religion as Pi did, or in a vague spiritual sense as some others do, but in nature, science, and

mathematics. Instead of finding a god, I feel like I found something just as beautiful, the universe and all its interacting and emergent phenomena.