The Book Thief
Part 5 and 6
Part 4 ends with The Standover Man.…In part 5, the author
continues to develop their relationship….
Page 242 “even death has
a heart….”
• A flash forward where Death foreshadows 2 events
o Rudy’s jumping into the river to save Liesel’s book and then asks for a kiss
o Rudy’s death
**Why do you suppose the narrator
Flashed forward to Rudy’s death? **
Page 243 “it started with
gambling.”
• Gambling analogy begins, turning into an extended
metaphor
• Analogy: “Roll a die by hiding a Jew and this is how
you live. This is how it looks” (page 243)
• Death compares hiding a Jew to gambling, to
rolling a die, which is made up of seven sides. He
uses this metaphor to describe the seven major
events he discusses in this chapter that result from
his gamble
#1:The Haircut: Mid 1941
• “the feathery appearance of Max Vandenburg…”
(245)
• “As she cut the feathery strands, she wondered at
the sound of the scissors” (245)
• “…he disappeared again, back into the ground.”
(245)
#2: The Newspaper: Early
May
• Why does Liesel keep repeating to herself, “there is
a Jew in basement?” Why does she want to whisper
it into the mayor’s wife’s ear?
• “…her thieving was not gratuitous. She only stole
books on what she felt was a need-to-have basis”
(246)
The mayor’s library
• Safe haven?
• Why do you think the mayor’s wife allows her, and
seems to like her, coming over to sit in her library?
• The Mud Men- not a real book
• The Shoulder Shrug- not a real book (she stole this
from the fire…)
Pg. 247-Color symbolism
• “yellow mist”
• “coppery clouds”
• “black tears of print”
Page 246“Finding a newspaper
was a good day….”
• Liesel brings the newspaper to Max (even better
when the crosswords are not done yet)
• His way to the outside world, but also WORDS…
Words & Unity
• “She would make her way home, shut the door
behind her, and take it (the newspaper) down to
Max” (247)
• “Where Hans Hubermann and Eric Vandenburg
were ultimately united by music, Liesel and Max
were held together by the quiet gathering of
words” (248)
• Max would quiz her on words and then they would
stand and paint those words on the wall, up to a
dozen times. “Together, Max Vandenburg and
Liesel Meminger would take in the odor of paint
fumes and cement” (248)
The “color” of Max
• “picture of pale concentration”
• “Beige colored skin. A swamp in each eye. And he
breathed like a fugitive. Desperate and soundless.”
(248)
#3 The Weatherman: Mid
May
• “Could you go up and tell me how the weather
looks?” (249)
• “The sky is blue today Max, and there is a big long
cloud, and it’s stretched out, like a rope. At the end
of it, the sun is like a yellow hole….”
The wall written words of
Max…
• “It was Monday, and they walked on
A tightrope to the sun” (249)
#4 The Boxer:
End of May
• Who is the “he” referred to at the top of
page 250? Who is Max “fighting” every day?
• “What great malice there could be in allowing
such a thing to live” (250)- who/what?
• Liesel’s weather reports continue…
o “pure blue sky”
o “cardboard clouds”
o “a sun that had broken through like God sitting down after he’d
eaten too much for his dinner”
Page 250 “he often checked if his skin was
flaking…”
• Why does Max feel that he is “dissolving?”
• What does he do to counter those feelings?
Max VS Hitler
• What he needed was a series of new projects…”
o The first was exercise
• “When he was finished, he would sit against the
basement wall with his paint-can friends, feeling his
pulse in his teeth. His muscles felt like cake” (251)
• “In the blue corner…the Aryan masterpiece”
• “And in the red corner, we have the Jewish, rat
faced challenger- Max Vandenburg”
Page 251 “around him, it
all materialized”
• Hitler: “…red and white robe, with a black swastika
burned to its back. His mustache was knitted to his
face. Words were whispered to him from his
trainer….He smiled loudest when the ring
announcer listed his many
achievements…’undefeated’….over many a Jew,
and over any other threat to the German ideal!”
• Max: “no robe. No entourage. Just a lonely young
Jew with dirt breath, a naked chest, and tired
hands and feet….naturally, his shorts were gray.
Page 253 “Jewish blood
was everywhere”
• Max fights for every Jew
• “Like red rain clouds on the white-sky canvas at
their feet”
• Why would Max image the eyes of Hitler as being
“deliciously brown?” (his eyes were in fact very blue
Pg. 254 “Max Vandenburg could
feel the fists of an entire nation….”
• Read the speech….analyze rhetorically
• Stops fighting Max to give a speech…turns the
tables against Max (demonizes him)
• “The words were visible. They dropped from his
mouth like jewels”
• “Will you climb up on the ring with me?...Will you
climb in here so that we can defeat this enemy
together?” (254)
• “Nothing but dark now. Just basement. Just Jew.”
#5 “The New Dreams: A
Few Nights Later”
• “Every night I wait in the dark and the Fuhrer comes
down these steps. He walks down and he and I, we
fight for hours” (255)
Pg. 256 “There’s a Jew and a German standing in a
basement, right. This however, was no joke”
• Liesel asks, who wins?
• “At first, he was going to answer that no one did,
nut then he noticed the paint cans, the drop sheets,
and the growing pile of newspapers in the
periphery of his vision. He watched the words, the
long cloud, and the figures on the wall.” “I do,” he
said.
#6 “The Painters: Early
June”
• “Months later he would also paint over the cover of
that book and give it a new title, after one of the
stories he would write and illustrate inside it” (257)
• The Word Shaker….”basement visions” (257)
• Why does it “feel good to be a painter”
#7 “The Showdown: June
24”
“two days after Germany
invaded Russia…”
• VIDEO here
Page 257 “seven”……bad luck?
• “You roll and watch it coming, realizing completely
that is no regular die. You claim it to be bad luck,
but you’ve known all along that it had to come.
You brought it into the room. The table could smell
your breath. The Jew was sticking out of your
pocket from the outset. He’s smeared to your lapel,
and the moment you roll, you know it’s a seven- the
one thing that somehow finds a way to hurt you. It
lands. It stares you in each eye, miraculous and
loathsome, and you turn away with it feeding in
your chest….”
Just bad luck.
Page 258 “you hide a Jew,
you pay…”
• “deep down, you know that this small piece of
changing fortune is a signal of things to come.”
(rolling a seven)
Page 259 “it was the
sound of a grave…”
• “Her voice, lumpy from lack of use, coughed out
the words. ‘I’m sorry. It’s for your mama.’”
• “…she realized that clocks don’t make a sound that
even remotely resembles ticking tocking. It was
more the sound of a hammer, upside down,
hacking methodically at the earth. It was the sound
of a grave.”
o What is meant in this passage? What is the literal and figurative meanings
at work?
• “felt like the greatest betrayal” (250)
o How does this statement by Liesel illustrate irony?
Page 251 “Molching was
in a jar”
Physical power of words
• Read from the top of page 252 to the bottom of
253 and COUNT how many times the word
“word(s)” is used. Notice the power.
• Liesel “sprayed her words directly into the woman’s
eyes” (252)….
• “The injury of words. Yes, the brutality of words. She
summoned them from some place she only now
recognized and hurled them at Ilsa Hermann”
• “she was battered and beaten up, and not from
smiling this time….Blood leaked from her nose…eyes
had blackened…cuts had opened…a series of
wounds were rising to the surface of her skin. All
from the words. From Liesel’s words” (253)
o How does Ilsa react?
Compare/Contrast: How does each
character use the physical power of words?
Max VS Hitler
Liesel VS Ilsa
Page 256 “they slept, very
much in Munich…”
• “but somewhere on the seventh side of Germany’s
die.”
• These words close out the gambling
analogy/metaphor of hiding a Jew…but is it
resolved? How does this seemingly ambiguous
ending lead readers into the next scenes of the
novel?
Portrait of Rudy
Rudy
Do you think he thinks the world is a good place or a bad place?
The new Arthur Berg
• Viktor Chemmel
• “We must take what is rightfully ours!” (273)- Viktor
quotes Hitler
• “…he possessed a certain charisma, a kind of follow
me.” (273)
• How is Viktor like Hitler?
Page 274, “it was a nice
microcosm…”
• Defined as “human beings, humanity, society, or
the like, viewed as an epitome or miniature of the
world of universe”
• What does the author mean in this situation?
“Sketches”
• “The desecrated pages of Mein Kampf were
becoming a series of sketches, page after page,
which to him summed up the events that had
swapped his former life for another.” (278)
• Look at the image on page 280- in what ways does
this sketch illustrate irony?
Page 283 “I need a win,
Liesel”
• They had to steal something….
• “It was the book she wanted. The Whistler. She
wouldn’t tolerate having it given to her by a lonely,
pathetic old woman. Stealing it on the hand
seemed a little more acceptable. Stealing it, in a
sick kind of way, was kind of like earning it.” (287)
• Liesel “starves” for books as Rudy starves for food…
• “She could smell the pages. She could almost taste
the words as they stacked up around her.” (288)
Page 292 “good night
book thief”
• The first time Liesel had been “branded” with her
title, and “she couldn’t hide the fact that she liked it
very much.”
“The frozen motives of
Rudy…”
• Rudy is continually described as “hungry.” Beyond
physically, in what ways is Rudy “hungry?”
• “His only chance to revel in some victory…” (303)
o Why do you think the author ends part 5 with two chapters, back to back,
of Rudy’s failures and issues?