Haunted by Humans: Inverting the Reality of the Holocaust in Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief

Inversion in The Book ThiefIn Gabriel García Márquez’s A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings a strange angel-like man appears in the human world. A different kind of other-worldly visitor features in Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief 1. In this text it is Death who takes a journey into the hellish realms of Nazi Germany to discover the humanity of the humans who were dehumanised in the Holocaust. The Book Thief is the story of a nine-year-old Liesel Meminger who lives in Germany during the escalation of World War II. The novel has several levels of the plot development: Liesel’s life during war; her relationships with her foster parents Hans and Rosa, the other residents of their neighbourhood, and a Jewish fist-fighter Max, who avoids deportation by hiding in her home; Liesel’s book thievery (as the title suggests) and the power of storytelling. The novel is set in a realistically depicted German town and could belong to the genre of historical realism were it not that Liesel’s story is narrated by the other-worldly character: Death. Death is the only unreal character in this otherwise realistic novel, and though he does not interact with real human characters, we see all the events through his eyes. This ‘magical’ narrator unveils a broader history of the war and the Holocaust by questioning: What is real? What is normal? What is humane? The inversion enables Zusak to present horror that would otherwise be too complex to grasp. As Hegerfeldt comments: ‘The world is an absurd place where [...] anything is more believable than the truth. Magic realist fiction proposes that such a topsy-turvy reality requires a similarly inverted approach’ (Hegerfeldt 2005, p. 339).