Adams, Jenni, '‘‘Into Eternity’s Certain Breadth’’: Ambivalent Escapes in Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief' Children’s Literature in Education' (2010) 41:222–233
‘‘Into Eternity’s Certain
Breadth’’: Ambivalent Escapes in Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief
Jenni Adams
Abstract
This article examines the consolatory possibilities presented by
Markus Zusak’s recent crossover novel The Book Thief, investigating the degree
to which the novel delivers the simultaneous consolation and confrontation
identified with children’s and young adults’ Holocaust texts by such critics as
Adrienne Kertzer and Lawrence Baron. Contending that the supernatural nature of
the novel’s redemptive imagery ultimately undermines its apparently consolatory
purpose, the article concludes with an analysis of the extent to which such a
reading is complicated by the novel’s status as crossover text, and the
triangular gaze that might subsequently be attributed to its adult readers.
Markus
Zusak’s The Book Thief, originally published in 2005, is a recent crossover bestseller
by an Australian children’s writer of German emigrant parents. While the novel’s
marketing has varied according to the country of its publication, in the United
Kingdom the text was published simultaneously for adults and teenagers, in the
dual editions frequently associated with the publication and marketing of crossover
texts. The book charts the wartime experience of a German girl, Liesel Meminger,
who is fostered by a family in Molching, near Munich, in the years preceding
the outbreak of World War II. In 1940, the Hubermanns begin to shelter a Jew in
their basement, and the experience of concealing Max, coupled with her witnessing
of the forced marches of Jewish prisoners from the nearby concentration camp at
Dachau, mobilises Liesel’s resistance to the Nazi regime. Such resistance takes
the form of both an increasing loyalty to Max and an engagement in the practice
of book theft, an activity that is also closely related to Liesel’s mourning of
both her brother’s death and her mother’s disappearance. What makes the novel
unusual for a Holocaust text is its narration by Death, a potentially
disturbing figure who nevertheless functions to mediate the harsh realities of
the novel’s subject matter, enabling Zusak to accommodate the conflicting
expectations surrounding Holocaust literature aimed at children and young
adults. I refer here to the observations of Lydia Kokkola (2003) and
others regarding the atypicality of Holocaust material as a subject matter for
young people’s literature. Kokkola (2003) states that ‘‘one can
argue that any writing about the Holocaust for children breaks a strict taboo:
that children are not to be frightened’’ (p. 11), echoing Lawrence Baron’s (2003)
observation that ‘‘[p]arents and teachers naturally want to avoid traumatizing
children and adolescents with overly graphic depictions of violence or
instilling in them a sense of despair about human nature’’ (p. 394). Despite
this focus on protecting young readers, contributions to a youth literature of
the Holocaust proliferate,1 as critics including Kokkola, Elizabeth Baer (2000) and
Kenneth Kidd (2005) observe—a phenomenon Kidd links to a growing acceptance of the
opposing idea that young readers should be exposed to rather than shielded from
atrocity (p. 120).2 Such debate indicates a perceived necessity that Holocaust
literature for young people negotiates the conflicting imperatives of
protection from and exposure to trauma. This apparent paradox has prompted the
suggestion that such projects necessitate a double narrative approach which ‘‘simultaneously
respects our need for hope and happy endings even as it teaches us a different
lesson about history’’ (Kertzer, 2002, p. 75). Baron (2003, p. 396)
presents one example of what such an approach might entail, observing in
Holocaust films aimed at children a contradiction between the experiences of
central characters, who usually survive, and peripheral characters, who often
meet with a more historically representative fate. A comparable doubleness can
be identified in Zusak’s use of the narrating figure of Death, a figure which
serves simultaneously to confront the adolescent reader with the fact of death
(in both an abstract and a historically located sense) and to offer protection
from the most unsettling implications of this fact. This article will examine
more closely the double narrative approach in Zusak’s novel, before proceeding
to argue that the novel’s crossover status in fact complicates the possibilities
of consolation and confrontation it offers, particularly as regards The Book
Thief’s adult readership.
1 Other
recent examples include Morris Gleitzman’s Once (2005) and Then
(2008) and John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006), the
latter of which also raises interesting issues regarding the possibility of the
‘‘escape from history’’ in children and young adults’ Holocaust literature.
2 In
attempting to explain the emergence of this idea, Kidd (2005) states
that ‘‘[p]resumably the exposure model became necessary because we no longer
have the luxury of denying the existence of or postponing the child’s
confrontation with evil’’ (pp. 120–121).
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In the
context of literature aimed simultaneously at adult and adolescent readers, the
motif of a personified Death most obviously recalls Terry Pratchett’s ‘‘Discworld’’
novels, most notably Mort (1988). While Zusak’s Death bears a strong
resemblance to Pratchett’s, however, it is the tradition of pictorial representations,
rather than the context of recent literary personifications of death, that
provides the greatest insight into the ambivalent potential of the image. As
John Aberth (2001) states, the tradition of representation in which the skeletal or
corpselike figure of Death is pictured claiming the living at the moment of
their demise originated in Northern Europe in the late Middle Ages. Aberth (2001) links
the emergence of this tradition to the impact upon the creative psyche of the
Black Death. In particular, the Dance of Death—a performance in which the Death
figure claims a series of characters from different levels of society—is linked
simultaneously to the desire to enact the plague and the attempt to ward it off
(pp. 205–206). Such a performance, and the central role of the personified
Death therein, is thus both a memento mori and an attempt to domesticate and,
hence, defuse the fear of, death.
Zusak’s decision to have as his narrator a personified Death
presents just such an ambivalent, or ‘‘double,’’ project, simultaneously
rendering death comprehensible and foregrounding its inevitability. This
attitude of ambivalence is clearly evident in such passages as the following
one, which comes at the beginning of the novel: I could introduce myself
properly, but it’s not really necessary. You will know me well enough and soon
enough, depending on a diverse range of variables. It suffices to say that at
some point in time, I will be standing over you, as genially as possible. Your
soul will be in my arms. A colour will be perched on my shoulder. I will carry
you gently away. At that moment, you will be lying there (I rarely find people
standing up). You will be caked in your own body. There might be a discovery; a
scream will dribble down the air. The only sound I’ll hear after that will be
my own breathing, and the sound of the smell, of my footsteps. (Zusak, 2007, p. 4) This
passage places a confrontation with the fact of death alongside a
recontextualisation and mitigation of this fact. The reader is directly
addressed (‘‘you will be lying there’’), forcing a realisation of one’s own
mortality, while the image of being ‘‘caked in your own body’’ evokes a
powerful sense of abjection, effectively confronting the reader with both the
terror of death and the extent to which it defies straightforward depiction. On
the other hand, the compassionate and quasi-parental image of Death bearing
away the freed soul in his arms, added to the figuration of Death as human in
the reference to his breathing,3 articulates an opposing impulse to console.
The personification thus stands between the reader and the reality of death as an
ambivalent figure, both agent and alleviator of this incomprehensible threat.
The ambivalence of Death’s presentation in the novel is
encapsulated in the image of Death as ‘‘standover man.’’ The line ‘‘I will be
standing over you’’ carries a particular resonance in the light of the
illustrated text later produced by the hidden3 Although Zusak’s Death does not
claim any specific gender, I will use the male pronoun to refer to the narrator
as, within the text, Max refers to Death as male (p. 204).
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Max as a
birthday present for Liesel. ‘‘The Standover Man’’ is an autobiographical narrative
in which Max details a number of images of ‘‘standover men’’ that have structured
his life so far—his father, boys with whom he fought in childhood, the imagined
officer of the Gestapo he feared during his time in hiding, and the friend who
assisted him during this period (pp. 244–246). The final image of the ‘‘standover
man’’ comes in Max’s description of his journey to the Hubermanns and his
subsequent refuge in their home: ‘‘I slept there for a long time. Three days,
they told me… and what did I find when I woke up? Not a man, but someone else standing
over me’’ (p. 250). This ‘‘someone else,’’ as the accompanying drawing makes
clear, is Liesel herself.
The story hence traces a series of images of the standover man,
some of which represent Max’s terror and some of which present images of
comfort. The visual style of the narrative likewise evokes its ambivalent
situation between the poles of fear and consolation. In the absence of
available paper, Max has drawn the story over the whitewashed pages of the copy
of Mein Kampf in which Hans Hubermann sent him the keys to their house.
Hitler’s words are still visible in places through the paint, with the effect
that the antisemitic tract is both hidden by the fable and exposed within it,
the story both confronting and protecting its young reader, Liesel, from the
ugly truth about Germany. The visual vocabulary of the story is also striking,
in that both Max and a number of the standover men are drawn as birds, in an
apparent literalisation of Liesel’s comment that Max’s hair ‘‘is like
feathers’’ (pp. 235, 252). Max’s use of the vocabulary of his most recent and
reassuring standover figure in the representation of his earlier fears might be
viewed as inflecting even the sinister dark bird of the story’s opening with a
degree of ambivalence, to an extent defusing the negative connotations of these
images through their presentation in a visual mode associated with friendship
and shelter.
The narrative of ‘‘The Standover Man’’ thus presents a visual
summary of the novel’s ambivalent attitude towards fear and consolation. As a
supplementary standover man, Death presents just such a figure: sinister (‘‘You
are going to die’’ (p. 3)) yet protective (‘‘Your soul will be in my arms’’),
and, like Max’s bird drawings, death is framed in a vocabulary whose
familiarity functions to mitigate its accompanying sense of fear. This
dimension of comfort ostensibly forms a key element of the double narrative
approach necessitated by the novel’s adolescent readership, allowing the fact
of the Holocaust’s death toll to be introduced, while qualifying this fact with
the suggested existence of both a benevolent gatherer of dead souls and the
possibility of a consciousness after death. Nevertheless, we might also
question both the ethical validity of such redemption and the degree to which these
apparently consolatory elements do indeed function as such for a readership of adults
and adolescents rather than young children, as I discuss further below. We see
this double narrative approach not only in the presentation of Death in an abstract
sense, as a ‘‘SMALL [but disconcerting] FACT’’ of human experience (p. 3), but
also in the novel’s focus on specific historical losses, most notably in its depiction
of the Holocaust. While the novel’s engagement with the Holocaust is wide-ranging,
its treatment of the deaths of Jews in the concentration camps is confined to
such passages as the following, which occur in one of the middle sections of
the novel, entitled ‘‘Death’s Diary: The Parisians’’:
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Summer
came.
For the
book thief, everything was going nicely.
For me,
the sky was the colour of Jews.
When
their bodies had finished scouring for gaps in the door, their souls rose up.
Their fingernails had scratched at the wood and in some cases were nailed into
it by the sheer force of desperation, and their spirits came towards me, into
my arms. We climbed out of those shower facilities, onto the roof and up, into
eternity’s certain breadth. They just kept feeding me. Minute after minute. Shower
after shower. (p. 372)
Please
believe me when I tell you that I picked up each soul that day as if it were
newly born. I even kissed a few weary, poisoned cheeks. I listened to their
last, gasping cries. Their French words. I watched their love-visions and freed
them from their fear. (p. 373)
These
passages appear highly problematic, obscuring the event’s traumatic historical
reality in their presentation of a narrative of escape which seeks to recuperate
the atrocities represented. From the understated pathos of ‘‘[f]or me, the sky
was the colour of Jews,’’ the narrator quickly shifts to the presentation of an
impossible flight from the gas chamber, which apparently seeks to minimise even
the luridly imagined sufferings of the Jews by depicting their passage from
this earthly torment into ‘‘eternity’s certain breadth.’’ The second passage,
likewise, not only reframes these deaths in terms of rescue, as illustrated in
Death’s claim to have ‘‘freed them from their fear,’’ but also construes death
as a form of rebirth, as suggested in the statement that ‘‘I picked up each
soul … as if it were newly born.’’ Such elements of redemptive repositioning
are compounded in this passage by the narrator’s personal appeal to the reader
(‘‘Please believe me’’), in a sentimental endeavour to mobilise the reader’s
desire for such redemption.
These sections of the novel, while demonstrating the doubleness
often considered necessary in Holocaust representations for young readers, thus
also provide a firm illustration of the ethical problems surrounding escape and
consolation in Holocaust literature. I refer here to the possibility that softening
the finality of death by offering a redemptive aftermath entails a form of
narrative fetishism, which Eric Santner (1992) defines as ‘‘the
construction and deployment of a narrative consciously or unconsciously
designed to expunge the traces of the trauma or loss that called that narrative
into being in the first place’’ (p. 144). In other words, the redemptive
narrative of Jewish death distorts the events in a significant way, denying
both their traumatic dimension and their status as an unresolved ethical and memorial
site that continues to demand a response. The ethically problematic nature of
such representations raises the question of whether a double narrative approach
is always the best strategy in representations of the Holocaust for young
readers, given that certain instances of this approach risk distorting the
reality of these events to an unacceptable degree.
It is in this sense that the passages cited invite urgent speculation
about the reception of such material by the novel’s adult and adolescent
readerships, speculation to which I will devote the remainder of this article.
I aim first to explore the extent to which the possibility of narrative
fetishism is mitigated, for both adult
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and
adolescent readers, by the supernatural nature of the ‘‘rescue’’ offered in the
text, before moving on to examine the degree to which the status of The Book
Thief as a crossover text creates the possibility of an unambivalent acceptance
of such fetishistic consolations on the part of the adult reader.
To return to the problematic figuration detailed above, of the
escape of the Holocaust’s victims ‘‘into eternity’s certain breadth,’’ I’d like
to suggest, first of all, that to readers able to distinguish between the real
and the supernatural—and I would include all of Zusak’s adult and adolescent
readers in this category—such passages, rather than providing easy consolation,
in fact invite a much more complex response. As a point of comparison, we might
examine the critical response to D. M. Thomas’s controversial adult Holocaust
novel The White Hotel (1981), a novel which, like Zusak’s, juxtaposes historical brutality
with a redemptive presentation of an afterlife.4 In Thomas’s novel, the
description of the violent death of the protagonist, Lisa, in the Babi Yar
massacre, is followed by the line, ‘‘[b]ut all this had nothing to do with the
guest, the soul, the lovesick bride, the daughter of Jerusalem’’ (p. 222). The
next section of the novel, suggestively entitled ‘‘The Camp,’’ begins with
Lisa’s arrival in the ‘‘sweet air’’ of Palestine (p. 225), and details her
reconciliation with a number of deceased friends and relatives. James Berger (1999)
succinctly summarises the bewildered and even angry response that such images
of posthumous rehabilitation ostensibly invite:
But what,
might we ask, is going on here? What kind of perverse comedy has Thomas
perpetrated? These people do not recover, they do not reconcile, they do not
heal. … They died in the camps. Why are we provided with this sick consolation …
where no consolation is possible or even permissible? (Berger, 1999, p. 98)
Berger’s
response to his own questions indicates one means of interpreting the apparently
false consolation attaching to both Thomas’s ‘‘The Camp’’ and what I have thus
far identified as the double narrative of The Book Thief. Berger goes on to state:
Since
‘‘The Camp’’ is so consciously a consoling fantasy, it both consoles and does
not. … The fantasies of healing cause pain because we know that the dead will
not heal, however much we wish them to. For on this point Thomas recognizes our
desire: we want Lisa to live. It is unacceptable that she die at Babi Yar. And
so, Thomas lets her live, although we know she died and that there is no
heaven. (p. 98)
Berger’s
compelling reading of ‘‘The Camp’’ suggests another sense—beyond the attempt to
console its adolescent readers as it presents them with distressing material—in
which the escapes presented by Zusak are ambivalent. The impossibility of any
‘‘escape’’ provided through a magical device such as Zusak’s or
4 While
the afterlife itself is not clearly elaborated in The Book Thief, its existence
is strongly implicit both in the souls’ survival of their physical deaths and
in the novel’s occasional (if equivocal) references to God (e.g. p. 373).
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Thomas’s
descriptions of recuperation after death exploits ontological tensions in order
to foreground the confrontation between historical actuality and reader desire.
The magical nature of the escape presented here thus both signifies the
impossibility of such an escape at the level of the historically real, and
forces the reader to confront the disparity between narrative expectation or
convention and a historical reality which starkly resists recuperation to the
redemptive narrative trajectories of popular fiction.
The nature of the double narrative provided for young readers is
hence more complex than is evident at first glance. The novel undoubtedly
offers a mixture of consolation and confrontation in its portrayal both of
mortality in a general sense, and of specific historical horror. However, to
the reader able to identify the consolation as supernatural, these redemptive
possibilities are troubling rather than complacent in their offer of a form of
satisfaction that cannot be accepted. Since adolescent readers, like their
adult counterparts, are able to distinguish adequately enough between reality
and fantasy, we might conclude that Zusak’s novel implicitly faces even its
younger readers with transparent ‘‘fantasies of healing’’ which ‘‘cause pain
because we know that the dead will not heal, however much we
wish them
to,’’ to borrow Berger’s phrase. (This assertion does, of course, assume an
atheistic standpoint; as Berger’s remarks make clear, such escapes are only experienced
ambivalently in the knowledge that ‘‘there is no Heaven.’’)
I have suggested thus far in this article that the doubleness of The
Book Thief’s narrative approach—the simultaneous comfort and confrontation
accompanying the perspective of Death—is in fact more complex than first
appears, due to the conflict between the reader’s desire for such comfort and
his/her knowledge that the posthumous escapes presented are impossible. In the
remainder of this discussion, I want to consider further the complexities
attaching to the supernatural consolations offered by the text, with a
particular focus on the reception of Zusak’s crossover novel by its adult
readers.
An adult’s reading of a crossover novel always unfolds within the
context of the reading being attributed to an imagined child reader of the
text. In this sense, the adult’s approach to the crossover novel can be
usefully compared to Marianne Hirsch’s characterisation of the response of the
adult viewer to photographs of child Holocaust victims. In Hirsch’s
understanding (1999), images of children, because they are ‘‘less marked by the
particularities of identity … invite multiple projections and identifications’’
(p. 13). As a result, the adult’s encounter with the child in the photograph is
not so much a direct relation to the child in the image but a relation mediated
by the adult’s idea of ‘‘the child,’’ an idea replete with the adult’s own investment
in this figure. As Hirsch states:
It is my
argument that the visual encounter with the child victim is a triangular one,
that identification occurs in a triangular field of looking. The adult viewer sees
the child victim through the eyes of his or her own child self. (Hirsch, 1999, p. 15)
The
suggestion that the adult viewer of the photograph enters into a triangular relation
with both the child pictured in the image and an imagined projection of the viewing
adult as child has interesting implications for a study of cross-reading. In
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the
context of crossover literature, this triangular relationship encompasses the
adult reader, the imagined perspective of the child reader, and the crossover
text itself.
Adult readers’ paratextually-imposed awareness that they are
reading a text at least partly intended for a child reader inevitably has the
effect of their invocation of and partial identification with the imagined
perspective of a co-reading child—a problematic fact when it comes to a consideration
of ‘‘escape’’ in Zusak’s novel, given the nature of this imagined perspective.
Before exploring these ideas further, it might be asked why the
discussion has thus far focused on the imagined child counterpart of the adult
reader, given the fact that The Book Thief, as a young adult novel, does not
possess a readership easily categorisable as ‘‘child.’’ It is questionable
whether the model of triangular looking is applicable to young adult texts,
given that the process is expressly linked by Hirsch (1999) to the
specific potential for universalisation implicit in the image of the child (p.
13).5 While the young readership of Zusak’s novel is more readily identifiable
as young adult rather than child, however, it should be noted that in the context
of Holocaust discourse, the notion of youth is inextricably bound up with the
idea of innocence, an idea which renders the figure of the (imagined) co-reader
in Holocaust crossover texts susceptible to a particular kind of stylisation.
Kertzer, for instance, makes the following observation regarding the reception
of representations of children and young adults in literary responses to
atrocity:
In
Cynthia Ozick’s ‘‘The Shawl’’, Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments … and Zlata
Filipovic’s Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in Sarajevo, the voices of childhood
are strikingly different from [Anne] Frank’s voice; what remains constant is
the adult need to hear in those voices a lesson about innocence.(Kertzer, 2002, p. 112)
Kertzer’s
comments indicate a tendency on the part of adult readers to homogenise
representations of youth in Holocaust literature within the overarching concept
of childhood innocence. This adult investment in the notion of childhood innocence,
even as such innocence is posited as ‘‘lost’’ in the face of historical horror,
may be understood as the basis for the potentially distorted apprehension of
the young character as innocent child in the eyes of the adult reader. Such stylisation
must also be considered a factor in the adult constitution of the imaginary
figure of the co-reading ‘‘child,’’ a young person whose actual status as teenager
or young adult is, in the context of the endurance of the concept of innocence
as a popular means of approaching the Holocaust, susceptible to being overwritten
by the image of a much younger child conceived of as both ethically and
historically naive.
This kind of slippage between adolescent and young child is echoed
in the novel itself in the following passage, which relates Liesel’s grief at
her discovery of the dead body of Hans Hubermann:
5 Alison
Waller (2009, p. 6) has suggested the resistance of the idea of adolescence to
such identifications and investments, indicating its status as ‘‘a liminal
space onto which a distinct dichotomy of desires and fears cannot easily be
projected.’’
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Papa was
a man with silver eyes, not dead ones.
Papa was
an accordion!
But his
bellows were all empty.
Nothing
went in and nothing came out. (p. 572)
The references
to Hans as ‘Papa’ in this passage invoke Liesel’s viewpoint, arguably positioning
the passage as free indirect discourse, yet the syntactic simplicity of such
phrases as ‘[n]othing went in and nothing went out’ suggests the perspective of
a child much younger than Liesel, who is at this point fourteen years old. The
highly stylised nature of this free indirect discourse thus invokes in the
place of both Liesel and, significantly, the passage’s implied reader, a young
child of limited interpretive and linguistic capacities, facilitating the
adult’s approach to the text in part through this imagined child perspective.
While the question of the way in which readers read is necessarily a matter of
speculation, then, the novel itself at certain points invites precisely the
kind of speculation advanced above as a result of its own susceptibility to a
comparable form of slippage.6 Significantly, in the example above, this
slippage occurs at a moment detailing the adolescent’s encounter with
historical horror, underscoring the significance of such horror as a
determining factor in the forms of developmental re-positioning detailed above.
The developmental re-positioning of the imagined co-reader carries
particular significance in its implications for the orientation of this
construct towards reality. As suggested by Roni Natov’s reference (2006) to
‘‘the child’s ability to pass in and out of the imaginative and ‘realistic’
realms, to live often fully and without much discomfort in both’’ (p. 5), the
child reader, in contrast to the adolescent consumer of literature, is
popularly figured in terms reflecting a lack of differentiation between magic
and reality. The notion of childhood innocence prevalent both in responses to images
of youth in Holocaust discourse (in Kertzer’s reading), and in the wider conception
of the child within the Western cultural imagination, is thus not only moral
and linguistic (as such critics as Rose, 1984, p. 8 suggest), but also ontological,
characterised by an inability to discriminate between real and unreal.
The possibility that the co-reading child does not distinguish
between the states of reality and unreality has crucial repercussions for a
consideration of the ethical implications of Zusak’s novel. If the adult reader
of Holocaust crossover literature in part reads through the eyes of this
constructed child counterpart, then the fact that the adolescent reader of the
novel is able to distinguish between reality and fantasy and thus avoid fully
accepting the novel’s magical ‘‘escapes’’ is of little consequence. The adult
reader identifying with his or her child counterpart in approach to the text is
permitted, by the nature of this ontologically and historically innocent
perspective, to accept the possibility of the rescue of the dead Jews, underlining
the fact that, as Hirsch (1999) states, ‘‘our culture has a
great deal invested in the children’s innocence and vulnerability’’ (p. 13).
This belief in the child’s innocence thus permits the adult reader’s vicarious
acceptance of the consolatory possibilities offered within the ‘‘double
narrative’’ of Zusak’s novel, demonstrating an adult interest both in the
belief in the child’s ontological naivety
6 Liesel’s
illiteracy at the beginning of the novel provides another example of this
slippage, again attributing to her one of the characteristics of a much younger
child.
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and in
the related belief that the child requires a happy ending from its literary experience.7
Before moving on to discuss the additional possibilities of
‘‘looking’’ created by the Holocaust crossover text’s triangular figuration,
there is another problematic aspect of the image of the child both as present
in the novel (to the extent that Liesel is nine at the novel’s opening) and, in
the reception of the text by the adult reader, as potentially read into the
text. As Hirsch (1999) notes, ‘‘images of children readily lend themselves to … universalization’’
(p. 12), with the problematic consequence that the image of the child may
function as a means of eliding political, cultural and experiential
differences. The capacity of the child’s image to mediate between or collapse
adult categories of difference is also emphasised by such theorists of childhood
as Jacqueline Rose (1984, p. 10) and Virginia Blum (1995), the latter noting the
capacity of the child to ‘‘elide the differences it contains’’ in order to cement
‘‘otherwise disparate agencies’’ (p. 7).
Such contentions are extremely relevant to an examination of the
child’s image in
The Book
Thief, in which the character of Liesel presents the possibility for a conflation
of German and Jewish identity. Liesel’s parents, it is implied, were communists
(p. 31), making her both part of a group positioned as persecuted other by the
authorities (and a group frequently linked to the Jews in such propagandist inventions
as ‘‘Judeo-Bolshevism’’) and, in her fostering by the Hubermanns, a part of
mainstream German society. There are also a number of parallels between the German
Liesel and the Jewish Max, as Hans Hubermann points out; these include the
preoccupation of both with books and words and the fact that both enjoy ‘‘a
good fist-fight’’ (p. 237). Like Max, Liesel also experiences nightmares, the
content of which seems intended to create associations with Holocaust
experience. For
example:
In the
night, Liesel dreamed like she always did. At first she saw the brownshirts marching,
but soon enough they led her to a train, and the usual discovery awaited. Her
brother was staring again. (p. 65)
The
linking of the brown-shirts to the image of the train suggests the deportation
of Jews by the Nazi authorities, as does the very fact of Liesel’s forced
transportation and the death of her brother en route, which calls to mind the
high proportion of fatalities occurring in overcrowded freight-cars. The
passage thus illustrates not only the parallels that exist between the
experiences of Liesel and those of Germany’s Jews, but also the extent to which
the imagery used to represent these plot elements seems calculated to emphasise
such similarities.
This use of language to blur the distinction between German
Christian child and Jewish victim is, in some places, manifest in the casual
use of highly charged phrases to describe Liesel’s experience. The Hubermanns’
home, for example, is located on ‘‘Himmel Street,’’ a slang term used to refer
to the pathway to the gas chamber at Treblinka (Epstein et al. 1997, p.
126), while the description of Liesel’s arrival at the Hubermanns’ reads as
follows:
7 On the
topic of the adult desire for a happy ending in young people’s literature, see
also Hamida Bosmajian (2002, p. 135).
231
A man was
also in the car. … Liesel assumed he was there to make sure she didn’t run
away, or to force her inside if she gave them any trouble. Later, however, when
the trouble did start, he simply sat there and watched. Perhaps he was only the
last resort, the final solution. (pp. 27–28)
While it
might be argued that the use of the term ‘‘final solution’’ in this passage is merely
an ill-judged attempt at humour or an effort to foreshadow the later events of the
Holocaust, the sense of threat implicit in the speculation that the man’s role
is to ‘‘force her inside if she gave them any trouble’’ creates parallels
between Liesel’s experience and the forcing of victims into the gas chambers by
SS guards. Although the extent to which the child status of Liesel is
significant in this blurring of the boundaries between German and Jew is
debatable, it might be argued, in the context of Hirsch’s and Blum’s remarks,
that Liesel’s youth makes the blurring more likely to be accepted without
scrutiny by an adult reader. This blurring of boundaries minimises the complex
ethical issues raised by the treatment of German citizens’ experiences in the
context of Holocaust history, in particular de-emphasising the issue of German
responsibility by applying the images and motifs of Jewish victimhood to the
experience of the German Christian child.
This article has attempted to unpack the complexity of the double
narrative approach used in Zusak’s The Book Thief by considering the degree to
which the novel functions simultaneously to confront its readers with a
knowledge of historical horror and to protect them from it. I have examined the
ostensible consolation offered by the benevolent figure of Death, suggesting
that the supernatural register of such devices in fact undermines their
apparently fetishistic purpose, instead functioning to confront even the
adolescent reader with the refusal of Holocaust material to conform to a redemptive
narrative trajectory. Nevertheless, I have also explored the degree to which
the triangular possibilities of crossover reading retain the opportunity for a
consolatory reading on the part of the crossreading adult. As detailed above,
the concept of innocence prevalent within Holocaust discourse invites a
developmental re-positioning of both the young person represented and the
adolescent co-reader. Consequently, the adult reader may approach the text via
the mediating figure of a child who is unable to recognise the proffered
consolation as impossible.
Nevertheless, it should be remembered that such a reading is only
one of the multiple possibilities of ‘‘looking’’ permitted within the
triangular relationship of cross-reading. As Hirsch (1999) states,
‘‘[t]he adult also encounters the child (the other child and his/her own child
self) both as a child, through identification, and from the protective vantage
point of the adult-looking subject’’ (p. 15). A parental gaze is thus directed
towards the imagined child reader and the child portrayed in the text, at the
same time that a ‘‘childlike’’ gaze is invoked through the adult reader’s
sideways glance at his/her imagined juvenile counterpart. Bearing in mind both
the complexity of this dynamic, and the individual reader’s own role in
actively and independently negotiating the multiple possibilities of response,
it is clear that the degree to which the adult reader of Zusak’s novel is likely
to succumb to the falsely consolatory possibilities detailed above remains an
open question. What does emerge is an understanding of the multiplicity of
issues which impact on the
232
reception
of images of escape in crossover literature, and the complexity of double narrative
approaches in such recent young adults’ Holocaust fictions as The Book Thief.
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