The Book Thief: Motifs 3 key examples

Alex Steiner is the loving father of Liesel's friend Rudy. As Death states here, he does not hate anyone. In fact, over the course of the novel, he comes to bear the most animosity toward Hitler's oppressive regime, which tears apart his family. It seems strange at first that Steiner would join the party as early as he does. Hatred, after all, is the cornerstone of the Nazi party. Steiner of course hopes that complying will protect his family, but he nonetheless joins without the same intense duress that eventually leads Hans Hubermann to do the same. Steiner, like many other characters, seems too quick to sign up for the party if he truly does not buy into their ideology.

"Point Two" explains why else Steiner and other kind people might be willing to back a genocidal regime: he has read propaganda that warns him of "a plague of Jewish tailors" coming for his business. Steiner is not hateful, but he is fearful. Germany's economy was severely depressed after World War I. Implicit in the novel is the idea that Steiner built his tailoring business in the throes of this economic depression. Even when business is running, he and his wife must make impossible daily choices such as which children will have to go hungry so others can eat. He has always understood that at any time, he and his family might lose what little they have.

For many people, Steiner included, this kind of financial insecurity breeds intense anxiety that does not always remain tethered to reality. The Nazi party exploited this kind of economic anxiety. They published propaganda that scapegoated Jewish people and other minority groups for the poor economy. This propaganda positioned Hitler as the economy's savior. Meanwhile, the Nazis suppressed all media that put forth alternative viewpoints. People like Steiner were drawn into the terrible fantasy that Nazism was the only way they could gain economic security. Fear thus drives many characters to join a party that is otherwise out of line with their feelings. Steiner does not relish in the suffering of others, and yet he has been led to believe that he and his Jewish neighbors are locked in a zero-sum game for survival.

Soliloquies appear most often in drama, not fiction. A soliloquy might simply look like a character narrating their thoughts, or it might be a more direct address to the audience outside the earshot of other characters. In either case, soliloquies play on the idea that there is an audience watching events unfold onstage. They are a way to give the audience privileged insight into what is happening—insight that one character has but others do not.

In a novel, most of the characters are incapable of performing soliloquies because they cannot speak directly to the reader in their own voice. The narrator, however, can. A soliloquy in a novel typically draws attention to the narrator and the control they have over the delivery of the story. In this passage, Death pauses the action of the plot in order to speak directly to the reader about his power to "clap [Liesel and Max] together." The soliloquy emphasizes not only Death's power, but also the powerlessness of the characters to drive their own destinies.

Death's soliloquies frequently have something to do with his power and omniscience. However, unlike many narrators, he does not seem to relish in this power. He would rather not know all he does about the way the characters die. He would rather not carry away the souls of children like Rudy, simply because war demands a human toll. As a motif, Death's soliloquies emphasize the ambivalent tragedy of the novel: of course all the characters must eventually die in the grand scheme of the universe, but it can hardly be just for many of them to die in the horrible ways they do. Furthermore, the soliloquies emphasize the futility of many characters' attempts to direct the course of their lives. The choices characters make are intensely meaningful in the novel, and yet they make these choices in a sea of other human choices. Very few people can control the way the tide of human choices will push them.

Max and Walter grew up fighting one another, but through their fights they developed a close bond. In this scene, Walter laments that their friendship is now forbidden. He slaps the star on Max's sleeve to indicate the institutional barriers that have sprung up between them. Whereas they used to be just two boys in the schoolyard, Max is now required to wear a star on his sleeve indicating that he is Jewish, and therefore (according to the Nazis) a threat to society. The world they live in no longer makes room for them to stand next to each other on equal footing.

Max is not so sure. He reminds Walter that their friendship never looked all that friendly from the outside. They could still fight one another, and people might mistake their bonding for hostility. They could thus use the specific language of their friendship to defy the Nazis in plain sight. As Max suggests, regulating marriage, adoption, school enrollment, and even reproduction is all within the Nazis' power. Friendship, though, takes so many different forms and is so adaptable that it cannot be regulated in the same way. A law might stop a marriage, but it cannot stop two people from considering themselves friends. Indeed, even Walter's eventual enrollment as a Nazi soldier cannot stop him from helping his friend go into hiding.

Because friendship can bridge social categories and withstand Nazis' attempt to fracture society, it often becomes a matter of life and death. Hans's friendship with Erik Vandenburg is fundamental first to Hans's survival, and later to Max's. Max and Liesel form an unlikely friendship that teaches Liesel the value of resistance, independent thinking, and hope. Even Liesel and Rudy's friendship emboldens them to resist power structures, stealing food and books that sustain them throughout the war. Again and again, friends save each other by standing in solidarity against the abuses of those more powerful than them.