2009

Euthanatos and the Word Shaker

Examining the Abject and the Sublime in Vergangenheitsbewltigung through Markus Zusaks The Book Thief

Minor Thesis Submitted to the Department of English, Monash University, as part of the Bachelor of Letters Degree (Honours) Laura-Jane Maher B.P.A., L.L.B

PLEASE OPEN YOUR HISTORY BOOKS................................................................VIII ALAN MILCHMAN AND ALAN ROSENBERG, POSTMODERNISM AND THE HOLOCAUST, (ATLANTA: EDITIONS RODOPI BV, 1998), 281...............................................................IX A SIMPLE BLACK BOOK...............................................................................XI THE POWERS OF HORROR............................................................................XIV CHAPTER 1: IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS THE WORD........................1 ONCE UPON A TIME...................................................................................2 FROM AUSCHWITZ TO OMARSKA AND BEYOND........................................................5 THIS TERM IS USED FAST AND LOOSE TO DESCRIBE GENOCIDE. MOST NOTICEABLY USED BY BILL CLINTON IN HIS 1998 ADDRESS TO THE RWANDAN PEOPLE, APOLOGISING FOR THE INACTION OF THE UNITES STATES TO ACT TO PREVENT THE GENOCIDE WITHIN THAT COUNTRY, IT HAS BEEN USED TO DESCRIBE MANY OTHER EXPERIENCES OF THE GENOCIDE NARRATIVE. SEE: RALPH J. HENHAM, PAUL CHALFONT AND PAUL BEHRENS, THE CRIMINAL LAW OF GENOCIDE, (BODMIN: MPG BOOKS LTD), 71; E. SICHER, THE SCANDAL OF THE HOLOCAUST, THE EUROPEAN LEGACY, VOLUME 6, NO. 5, (2001): 639-641....................................................................5 WHERE NO ONE KNOWS YOUR NAME..............................................................10 WHEN A SPINDLE DRAWS BLOOD...................................................................14 CHAPTER 2: LAMENTING THE SCRIBE AND THE SCRIVEN......................18 FEATHERS TURNED TO TWIGS........................................................................19 A GUIDED TOUR OF SUFFERING ..............................................................19 LAMENTATIONS 1: 1, MASORETIC TORAH..........................................................20 GETTING GRIMM......................................................................................25 LET THE PICTURES DO THE TALKING.................................................................31 CRAIG OWENS, THE ALLEGORICAL IMPULSE: TOWARD A THEORY OF POSTMODERNISM, OCTOBER, VOL. 12, (SPRING, 1980), 74................37 CHAPTER 3: A HUNGER FOR WORDS..................................................41 A GIRL MADE OF DARKNESS........................................................................42 THE GATES OF THIEVERY............................................................................45 THROWING WORDS...................................................................................48 TIRED HEARTS........................................................................................51 SOME DEAD LETTERS................................................................................54 REVENGE IN THE SHAPE OF MIXED LOLLIES.........................................................56 CHAPTER 4: KEEPING A STORY TO RETELL..........................................61 SPEAKING FROM BEYOND.............................................................................62 DARK SHAPES AND THE PRACTICE OF WORDS......................................................62 ii

DEATH AND COLOUR: THE ABJECT AND THE SUBLIME...............................................67 KNOWING THE UNSPOKEN............................................................................71 CONCLUSION....................................................................................75 EVER AFTER..........................................................................................76 APPENDIX A.....................................................................................78 THE STAND OVER MAN.............................................................................78 APPENDIX B.....................................................................................84 THE WORD SHAKER.................................................................................84 APPENDIX C.....................................................................................91 SPEAKING
FOR THE

SILENCED........................................................................91

.......................................................................................................91 APPENDIX D.....................................................................................91 MAUS: TIME FLIES...................................................................................91 APPENDIX E......................................................................................92 THE BOOK THIEF COVER BRITISH EDITION.......................................................92 REFERENCES....................................................................................93 PRIMARY TEXTS......................................................................................93 CASES................................................................................................93 WEBSITES............................................................................................93 SECONDARY TEXTS...................................................................................94

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Declaration 08th of June 2009 i) This thesis contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university or any other institution and ii) I affirm that to the best of my knowledge, this thesis contain no material previously published or written by another person, except where due reference is made in the text of the thesis. Yours sincerely

Laura-Jane Maher B.P.A., L.L.B.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my supervisors, Nina and Rebecca-Anne, for their support, for teaching me to think big and speak small, and for reminding me to focus and not to wander off on tangents which are often a fascinating way to learn some new.... never mind.

Thanks to my friends in the Sdhe Literary Collective, particularly Lenny, who asks me What Would Nina Do? and Deb, the Amazing Gramminator both of whom have given me constant support, encouragement and chai, even when they had heavy clouds to ride.

Thanks also to my (M)other, Ann-Marie for setting such a good example and Catie and Steph for the fabulous food, quiet times and bullying at Rose Cottage. Thanks also to Catie (again) and Lizzie for giving their time as lay-readers.

Finally I would like to thank my loving parents who have been very patient with their eldest child, who steadfastly refuses to grow up and become a lawyer, and also to my brothers and sister for letting me talk at them without smiling, nodding and backing away slowly.

Preface Yea, a deeper import lurks in the legend told my infant years than lies upon that truth, we live to learn1 Once upon a time a Word Shaker picked up a rather thick book. She had been meaning to read it for a few years, but just hadnt had the time, so she was pleased that it was on her required reading list. With each turn of the page she fell more and more in love with the book. It wasnt just the story, although that often made her catch her breath, but with the brush of words and ink, the carefully sculpted paragraphs and the playful twist of words and turn of phrase that conveyed meanings like onions instead of apples.

And so, when it finally became clear that her thesis wasnt working, she picked up this beautiful, elegant book and asked it what she should do. It told her to take up her pen and to follow it into the inken forest. Would you like to walk with her?

Friedrich Schiller, The Piccolomini, III, trans. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1994), English Verse Drama Full-Text Database, accessed 3 June 2009.

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Introduction In which our student: provides a brief historical overview introduces The Book Thief and introduces the theorists

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And if there had been no survivors, and if the remnants had been burnt in flames, the millions would have taken to the grave not only their bodies, but also a great truth.
2

Please open your History Books On 11 May 1945, the German Wehrmacht was overpowered by Allied forces. As tanks rolled through the streets of Berlin, film rolled on the survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau: the celluloid was haunted by wraiths. They whispered of the Endlsung der Judenfrage. They named their experience: Shoah. Holocaust. Genocide. Since the end of the Second World War, perpetrators, survivors and their descendants have struggled with apportioning responsibility for the actions and omissions of civilians under the patronage of the Third Reich. The literary responses to this process are diverse they span private diary and formal testimony through to memoir, autobiography, poetry and prose. Given the sweeping differences between textual responses to this historical and ethical phenomenon, I reject Theodor Adornos declaration that it is barbaric to continue to write poetry after Auschwitz:3 rather, I maintain that poetry and poetic language are the most appropriate ways

Abba Kovner, The Mission of Survivors: Address delivered in Yiddish on 17 July 1945 at a meeting of members of the Jewish Brigade and representatives of the Jewish Partisans and Combatants of Eastern Europe, Reproduced in Yisrael Gutman and Livia Rothkirchen eds., The Catastrophe of European Jewry: Antecedents, history, reflections, (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1976), 671. 3 Theodor W. Adorno, Commitment, in Rolf Tiedemann, ed, Notes to Literature: Volume Two, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 87.

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to articulate that unimaginable horror4

of genocide. I support this

assertion by turning to Julia Kristevas contention that poetry breaks the inertia of language-habits and offers the linguist a unique opportunity to study the becoming of the signification of signs;5 looking through the kaleidoscope of poetry, the reader questions the Holocausts

epistemological basis as well as their and our horrified response to it. Poetry gifts this phenomenon that was unthought, unknown and unnamed with signification beyond screams and tears but does not constrain it to the articulation of a single experience. Instead, poetry creates a textual and semiotic space for the Holocausts Abjection its unspeakability where this Abjection is addressed, lamented and overcome rather than left to perpetually overwhelm. In this space the smoke, ash and loss are recognised. This space is the chora, the realm of the Sublime, wherein lies the possibility of naming the pre-nominal.6 The Holocausts enormity still shocks, but each particular unlearnable experience is cause for personal mourning. In poetry, the signifiers plural referents drive realisation an epiphany of horrors what, why and (most importantly in

Vergangenheitsbewltigung) how. This is where we learn what horror is and where it waits in each of us.

In an effort to assuage the pangs of history, there was initially a national collective silence around the Holocaust. George Steiner is a noted academic who has written extensively about the relationship between
Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, Postmodernism and the Holocaust, (Atlanta: Editions Rodopi BV, 1998), 281. 5 Julia Kristeva, Towards a Semiology of Paradigms, ed. French and Lack, The Tel Quel Reader, (New York: Routeledge, 1998) 28. 6 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 11.

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language, literature and society, focusing extensively on the Holocaust.7 In his short story, Return No More8 Steiner imagines a German soldier who returns to the French village he occupied to hear the silence.9 Steiner facilitates a correlation between this silence and the stench of

forgetting10 in post-war Germany. This synsthesia is a by product of poetic languages multiple referents. He asserted that Germany [wore] an iron collar so it doesn't look back;11 however, perhaps emboldened by the Eichmann trial12 in Israel in 1961, German artists, philosophers, writers and historians began to ruminate on and engage with the seemingly forgotten horrors. The questions they asked were uncomfortable: How did this happen? Who was responsible? Was it me? What would you have done? This process is called Vergangenheitsbewltigung. Given the importance of semiotics to my interrogation, I determine that understanding the meaning and history of the words that frame the discourse is paramount. Vergangenheitsbewltigung translates as coming to terms with the past.13 In historical studies, coming to terms coincides with the concept of die Vergangenheit, while the notion of bewltingung may be

See: George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975); The Death of Tragedy, 2nd ed., (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); Errata: An Examined Life, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). 8 George Steiner, Anno Domini: Three Stories of the War, (London: Faber and Faber, 1964). 9 Steiner, Anno Domini, 171. 10 Steiner, Anno Domini, 176. 11 Steiner, Anno Domini, 176.
12

The Attorney General of the Government of Israel v Adolf Eichmann, Criminal, Case 40/61, 1961. Collins German-English, English-German Dictionary, 5th ed., ed. Peter Terrell (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2004), s.v. Vergangenheitsbewltingung.
13

understood as a process undertaken in order to reconcile oneself with unpleasant past events so that one no longer feels upset or angry. As a technical term in literary studies, Vergangenheitsbewltigung is a genre of fiction relating specifically to stories that engage with the widespread compromise of many German cultural, religious, and political institutions by National Socialisms ideologies. As the survivors tell their experiences, those who hear them gather the tears and release them in waves it is a deluge. Vergangenheitsbewltigung is a paper boat adrift in the storm of ethical confusion and philosophical uncertainty that has flooded post-Nazi Germany.

The diaries and memoirs of Holocaust survivors often flirt with poetry and fictional elements, but they ground themselves in memory, unfurling roots of testimony and recollection. In contrast, Vergangenheitsbewltigung grounds itself in fiction: it holds tight to the truths expressed through metaphor and archetype, and often dallies with wordplay and

intertextuality. It reclaims those belles lettres usurped by National Socialist rhetoric, and ascribes them new meaning.

A Simple Black Book And still the stories crash against us. The Book Thief
14

is Markus Zusaks

first novel for adults. It was published in 2005, sixty years after the Second World War ended, and was inspired by stories Zusaks parents told him, in which they recounted their childhood experiences in a village outside of
14

Markus Zusak, The Book Thief, Sydney: Picador, 2005.

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Munich specifically, when Munich was bombed and when a small boy gave bread to an elderly Jewish man.15 In terms of literary responses to the Holocaust, The Book Thief is an example of second-generation

engagement with Vergangenheitsbewltigung. It follows a young girl through Nazi Germany during the Second World War. She has hair that is a close enough brand of German-blond, but she had dangerous eyes.16 The story is narrated by a gentle Death who proclaims I like this human idea of the grim reaper. I like the scythe. It amuses me.17 He proves a most proficient Captain as he and Liesel navigate the uncertain waters of secrets, symbols and wavering morality. The Book Thiefs prose is appropriately poetic, even fantastical, and the narrative includes a number of embedded texts, most noticeably The Stand Over Man18 and The Word Shaker19. These pieces crest the overarching narrative, both in terms of form and context. They are uniquely formatted, illustrated and textured, ensuring a separate focalisation and presentation and are a symbolic voice for Max Vandenburg, the Jewish character. The stories focalised by Max shift him from the position of victim to survivor.

In this respect, The Book Thief engages with the victim in their own language; it provides a forum where the victims harm is recognised and subsequently validated on their own the victims terms. The victims become survivors.
15

In deference to this revolutionary approach to

Markus Zusak, Markus Zusak talks about the writing of The Book Thief, Childrens Books, PanMacmillan Australia, http://www.panmacmillan.com.au/pandemonium/display_author.asp?Author=Zusak,%20Markus, accessed 20 November 2008. 16 Zusak, The Book Thief, 31. 17 Zusak, The Book Thief, 79. 18 See: Appendix A. 19 See: Appendix B.

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articulating harm, I also draw on the tradition of allusion and poetic language in order to facilitate an academic discourse, with the authority of an ivory (rather than Rapunzels) tower. I tease out the structures from The Book Thief, and sculpt my argument with them. I dress my letters in Golden Cockerel typeface, the same typeface Zusak uses in The Book Thief. This font dates back to 1929 and was designed by stonemason Eric Gill for the Golden Cockerel Press in the United Kingdom and is based on the calligraphy Gill used for his stone carving and wood engraving. 20 This font dressed the pages of books during the darkest times of the Second World War, while smoke and ash covered the sky. Golden Cockerel shapes the words that I shake onto these pages.

Zusak asserted that stories told to him by his parents presented another side to Nazi Germany, and it was a side [he] wanted to write about. 21 The Hubermanns (a reference to Nietzsches ber-Mensch22) are this other side it is they who assist Max Vandenburg in his transition from the victim of oppression to a survivor who understands, perhaps even empathises with, the circumstances and privileges afforded to his protectors. Maxs forgiveness of the Hubermanns empowers the reader to forgive the violence committed by the Third Reich. Max fosters Liesels passion for language, demonstrating its power through his use of Mein Kampf; it is

20 21

Eric Gill, An Essay on Typography, Christopher Skelton ed., (Boston: David R. Godine, 1993, c.1931). Zusak, Markus Zusak talks about the writing of The Book Thief, http://www.panmacmillan.com.au/pandemonium/display_author.asp?Author=Zusak,%20Markus, accessed 20 November 2008. 22 Friedrich Neitzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R.J. Hollingdale and E.V. Rieu, (1885, Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1961).

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page under The Stand Over Man. This is the wave of fiction after testimony, of story after memoir.

Zusaks book utilises language as well as narrative voice, colour and fairytale motifs in order to articulate the horrors and the pleasures of life in Nazi Germany. I maintain that these elements meander throughout the graves of the unsignifiable, the Abject, the horrific, the Holocaust. Each word blooms new signification, they are no longer screaming or wailing, nor diffrended23 and constrained by the linguistic gymnastics of legal discourse. Articulating the Abject is the Sublime in motion it shifts the dichotomous restrictions of guilt and innocence, instead moving toward an understanding of harm and responsibility perhaps even forgiveness. The Powers of Horror Zusaks novel rests in the lamentation of the Holocaust as a social phenomenon that looks beyond the genocide of Europes Jewry, and mourns that which perches just beyond the realm of signification. It clambers from this nest, desperately reconciling the aporia of logic between responsibility and action in Post-Enlightenment Germany. I will examine the use of fairytale, narration, colour and language in Zusaks book and determine how these elements are used as a means of articulating the Holocaust. I maintain that as tools of the Sublime, these elements are better able to interpolate the Abjection of the Holocaust. They take that which cannot be directly signified and represent transient
23

Diffrend: Lyotards term for a dispute resulting from the fact that one party can not voice their argument because the other party insists on speaking within a different language game or genre of discourse. See: JeanFranois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, 7th Ed., trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

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experience through metaphors and transient experience that are more widely experienced. The Sublime expressed though poetry and imagery can catch and tie down the horror, the screams and the pain that confronts it.

The Kantian understanding of the Sublime suggests that beauty and Sublimity do not inhere in objects, but refer to the conditions by which the Subject judges them.24 Friedrich Schiller extended on Kants summation of Sublimity (which was concerned with natural and architectural artefacts) to the sight and site of human suffering.25 Schillers extension on the understanding of Sublimity accords with the sundered senses described by Steiner, that stench of forgetting.26 I turn to the French feminists to invigorate the meaning of the Sublime. Elizabeth Grosz holds that they interrogate the underlying structure and prevailing forms of discourse27. This structure rests on language and signification, culminating in the revolutionary power of word play.

To amend a words symbolic role is to engage in not just linguistic, but social, play: casting a new shadow of meaning, or absenting a previously accepted meaning. This occurs especially through word creation or manipulation such as the portmanteaux. Words that are stitched together, meanings patched to meanings,
24

Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, trans. John T. Goldthwait, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
25

Friedrich Schiller, Concerning the Sublime in Essays, Walter Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Eds., (New York: Continuum, 1993), 70-85. 26 Steiner, Anno Domini, 176. 27 Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions, (Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 1989), 39.

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mixed etymologies and inferences, the stories that each section alludes to contribute to its meaning. The importance of wordplay is of particular import within those discourses that challenge the dominant forms of authority. This is particularly the case for the narrator, death, and for the victim/survivor Max Vandenburg.

There are many paths through this forest of shaken words and traversing it without falling prey to passing girls in red underwrites the The Book Thief. Much of this play revolves around the unacknowledged and unarticulated horror of the Holocaust. The importance of linguistic

symbolism to this process is emphasised from the first turn of the page. Liesels parents are named Kommunist and for Liesel this word is devoid of referent, however, it has a broad referent for the reader, who may look beyond the red flags and tattered copies of Das Kapital to the broader but less discussed issue of the extermination and removal of Rroma, homosexuals, Poles, the disabled and other minority groups. The word Kommunist performs as a metonym for these marginalised groups. Using one referent to signify a spectrum of pain and harm stretches the normative referential values of a signifier.

It is in discussing that for which there is no signification that Kristevas theories of the Abject and the Sublime are essential. They define the Subject by providing an intersection between Subject and Object. In Vergangenheitsbewltigung the Subject is the individual or descendant
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who was privileged under or was complicit in the aims of National Socialism. The acts committed by these individuals to uphold such ideologies are Abjected. The Sublime is that which overwhelms the senses. Our horror and confusion when confronted with the Abject and the Sublime is that they operate within the same linguistic breach; they are opposite sides of the same page. However, where the reader repels the Abject, she desires the Sublime. It is this desire that facilitates engagement with the Abject: the desire to incorporate, the desire to repel and the Subjects realisation that there, but for grace, go I.

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Chapter 1: In the Beginning There was the Word.

Featuring: the inevitable Once Upon A Time, well travelled paths, a call to the unknown and blood drawn from a spindle.

Once Upon a Time After the Second World War we heard a story. There was no Once Upon a Time. There was, however, a Small but Wicked Emperor. There were journeys, long walks through snow and ice, and a little girl in a red coat. 28 There were ovens and fire and the false promise of water. There were children without parents and there were bread crumbs left on the road. The story started with the cries and tears of those who escaped the Fury.29 Those who did not were buried deep, screaming their anguish into the earth30 or were consumed pushed into the ovens and ashed31 even though their arms were no more than chicken bones. They left behind teeth and skin and hair32 to furnish the most macabre gingerbread house.

The horror unfurled and blossomed, entwining an entire nation in its thorns. In the beginning the folk slept and paid it no heed. But those outside saw it growing, saw what weeds the Fury had sown, and they woke the sleepers. Not with a kiss the press of lips is the stuff of nursery tales instead they pushed through the briars, past giant eagles, down broken roads and under a crystal night. They grabbed the sleepers, slapped them, shook them, they screamed at them. They propped tired eyes open with matches bought from a waif in the cold. The folk saw the devastation the Fury had wrought upon their once great Empire. The horror heightens with

28 29

Thomas Keneally, Schindlers Ark, (London: Hodder Headline, 1983). John Boyne, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, (Oxford: David Fickling Books, 2006). 30 Ernst Klee, Willi Dresser and Volker Reiss, Eds., The Good Old Days: The Holocaust as seen by its perpetrators and bystanders, (New York: Konecky & Konecky, 1988), 96 97. 31 Yaakov Gabai, Ill get out of here in Gideon Grief, We Wept Without Tears: Testimonies of the Jewish Sonderkommando from Auschwitz, (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2005), 181 214. 32 Gabai, Ill Get Out of Here, 185.

each telling: the realisation that this happened. The horror was recounted, interpolated and repeated time and time again. Not once have I felt even a breath of divine justice here... There is no God, and if there is one, he is an ox and a bastard!33 We didnt know that Auschwitz meant death.34 What great malice there could be in allowing something to live.35

36

The narrative is recognisable: there is an identifiable structure and a flexible paradigm. The structure utilises tropes, metaphors and archetypes in order to articulate events and circumstances, the culmination of which the international community decries as inconceivable and unrepeatable again and again and again. The horrors narrative was named an effort to contain and control its unruly boundaries: Shoah. Holocaust. Genocide. Shoah and Holocaust stories evoke a particular subset of Genocide narratives. In my interrogation I use the term Shoah to refer specifically to
33 34 35 36

Filip Mller, Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers, (Chicago: Ivan R Dee, 1979), 64 67. Gabai, Ill Get Out of Here, 185. Zusak, The Book Thief, 270. Art Speigelman, The Complete Maus, (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 232.

the genocide of the European Jewry under the Third Reich. Shoah ( ) is a Hebrew word that translates as the Catastrophe.37 The word Holocaust is derived from the Greek (holkauston) and translates as holos, "completely" and kaustos, "burnt".38 Although the incineration of the European Jewry is central to the narrative, one of its key motifs the fire also consumed books and buildings, communists and queers. Therefore, I use the latter term when referring to the cultural phenomenon that contextualised the Shoah rather as a synonym for this genocide.39 Markus Zusaks novel, The Book Thief, narrates disparate elements of the Holocaust addressing the Shoah, the treatment of other targeted groups and the diverse responses to the change in political rhetoric that resulted from this cultural phenomenon. This cultural phenomenon comprised the rise of National Socialist ideology during and following the Weimar Republic and culminated in the perversion of Germanys post-Enlightenment culture.40 Due to the change in social discourse during this period, the study of semiotics is fundamental to interrogating Holocaust scholarship. This is due to the Abjectedness of the events in question and the development of a new discourse to meet this previously unarticulated concept. As such, I am precise in my use of these

37 38

Oxford English Disctionary, http://dictionary.oed.com, s.v. Shoah, accessed 2 February 2009. Oxford English Disctionary, 2nd ed. (1989) http://dictionary.oed.com, s.v. holocaust, accessed 2 February 2009. 39 I am sensitive to the linguistic imperative to respect the labelling of the phenomenon by the social group that experienced it, however I find myself in the camp that considers the exclusory use of the term unhelpful. While acknowledging that the "Endlsung der Judenfrage" (Final Solution to the Jewish Question); See: Franois Furet, Unanswered Questions: Nazi Germany and the Genocide of the Jews, (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), 182; I assert the Holocaust is most certainly is the archetype of genocidal activity, I maintain that the sheer breadth of the extermination against other minority groups also needs to be acknowledged as having occurred and been facilitated by the same perversion of cultural discourse as the Shoah. It is for this reason that I use the Hebrew terminology to refer exclusively to the extermination of the European Jewry and the term Holocaust to encompass the broader change in discourse and its resulting tragedy. 40 Jack Zipes, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Processes of Civilisation, (Hoboken: Routledge, 2006), 137.

signifiers (Shoah and Holocaust) as I wish to minimise confusion regarding signification in this genocide narrative.

Much of the historical and legal discourse that grew from the Holocausts ashes emphasises the philosophical, cultural and linguistic aporia of conceptualising the crimes committed against marginalised groups in Nazi Germany. This conceptual absence is reiterated each time the narrative structure of genocide is applied. It is the chora of genocide studies: its only universal is its status as unsignifiable. I maintain that Holocaust narratives are lodged firmly in this discursive impasse, and that it is necessary to examine them with literary theories that interrogate the cusp of knowledge, the space that separates Subject from Object. These narratives develop new rules for forming linking phrases that are able to express the diffrend disclosed by the feeling... [they] bear witness to the diffrends by finding idioms for them.41 This space is the realm of the Abject, that which the Subject repels in order to Other, and the Sublime, that which the subject seeks to understand and incorporate into their subjectivity.

From Auschwitz to Omarska and Beyond Each time the genocide narrative is articulated there is a similarity in the exercise of signifiers: genocide is always an unimaginable horror. 42 The
41

Lyotard, The Diffrend, 13. 42 This term is used fast and loose to describe Genocide. Most noticeably used by Bill Clinton in his 1998 address to the Rwandan people, apologising for the inaction of the Unites States to act to prevent the genocide within that country, it has been used to describe many other experiences of the genocide narrative. See: Ralph J. Henham, Paul Chalfont and Paul Behrens, The Criminal Law of Genocide, (Bodmin: MPG Books Ltd), 71; E. Sicher, The Scandal of the Holocaust, The European Legacy, Volume 6, No. 5, (2001): 639-641.

signified concept, the referent, is interpolated as a traumatic affront that is beyond comprehension. I assert that this horror (derived from the Holocaust) is a trauma, located in two breaches: the first breach is the perversion of principles developed during the German Enlightenment and the subsequent destabilisation of German cultural identity by National Socialism. This facilitated the second breach: a systematic extermination of those demographics identified as existing on the fringe of, or entirely external to, the National Socialist ideal. In The Book Thief, Zusak identifies both Jews and Communists as located on this fringe.

I explore the Abject and the Sublime as they are expressed in The Book Thief, drawing on Julia Kristevas theories of the Abject and the Sublime, and particularly noting their role in the process of Subject creation and the Othering process. I will then determine how The Book Thief, as an example of Vergangenheitsbewltigung, opens a discursive space for the

diffrended voices of the Holocaust, specifically the Jewish survivors, the Jewish victims of the Shoah and the German citizens who were divested of the means to articulate the harms they suffered as privileged citizens of the Third Reich by mourning the Holocaust, and how

Vergangenheitsbewltigung facilitates an individual experience of group responsibility for the harms committed.

Kristevas theories create novel signification that explodes the diffrend. She locates the Subject in the empty fountain of prelinguistic, instinctual

and sensory components of subjectivity and signification43 rather than in the phallogocentric Cartesian identification of Subjectivity. Kristevas focus on the physical premise of languages semiosis breaks from the philosophical premise of cogito ergo sum. This emphasis on the physical signification rather than the transfer of experiences makes her particularly readable in the context of Genocide narratives. The physical ramifications of Genocide rape, assault, death are identified as harmful only as a Saussurian referent: they are conceptual; the harm is a private experience of the individual victim. This is because the Subjects experience of pain, harm and other like experiences is transferable to another Subject only by means of signification rather than by the transfer of experiences. Where the signified object, the referent, cannot be directly experienced by the person who interpolates the signifier, then the interpretant44 is not so sure. In these instances the addressee must rely on their personal experiences to interpolate the referent. In the instance of the Holocaust, such experience is historically unique. As regards the Shoah it is not only unique but unknowable; as Lyotard argues, those affected are divested of expression through their death.45 It is for this reason that I categorise the Holocaust and the Shoah as unsignifiable in the terms of the subjective addressee and the objective referent. In order to comprehend this absence I look to intransient and quasi-lingual modes of communication. The elements of fundamental import to this process are the Abject, the

43

Vincent Leitch, et al., eds. Julia Kristeva, The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001), 2165. 44 Interpretant: In Pierces model of the sign, the interpretant is not an interpreter but rather the sense made of the sign. Daniel Chandler, Semiotics: The Basics, 2nd ed., (London: Routledge, 2007) 251. 45 Lyotard, The Diffrend, 11.

Sublime and the Chora because these precede the concept of Semiotic signification and the Symbolics restrictions on Signification.

The discourse that interpolates genocide whether legal, ethical or artistic is circular. One gleans meaning from each word only in its relation to other words the language is loaded and referential, perpetually reflecting a wealth of meanings and understandings a universal plurality of existence. It is mimesis and metaphor at their most insidious. The experiences of those who survived the camps are recounted and interpolated as horrific. Judith Becker testifies to her experience in the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau: So then after that we went to the cutting room and we managed to get out of there relatively okay and then they pushed us into the gas chamber. In the gas chamber they had a, like a little glass booth, you know it's very interesting that they had that glass booth later on for Eichmann because they had them in the gas chamber. They were like about the size a little longer than this table and narrower and it was like a protrusion that they could go in without actually coming into the gas chamber - there was a separate entrance to it. And they could watch the people inside and the controls were inside that thing. And I recognised this man from the Sonderkommando and I looked at him and he puts down. So I tried very hard to distract my mother. It was
8

the hardest moment of my life ever, to know that we are going to die and yet to act so that we don't make a spectacle for the Germans, for the Nazis who were watching us, to make more of a spectacle, you know, to give them more enjoyment. So we did say the Shma Yisrael and my mother insisted that we say parts of Vidui and I didn't tell her that it was going to be gas, but it was so hard not to scream, not to jump, not to do something - it was the hardest thing ever. I must have used up kilos of energy in those few minutes. And by a miracle again, instead of the gas came the water. Later on it turned out that he had switched on the Zyclon and the delivery system had been damaged and it didn't come so instead, the other valve opened up and the water came. Now we're coming out of the gas chamber. It's like...the only comparison I can give is when I read about Japanese committing "hari-kiri", you know, when they're coming close to death and later on they are so totally exhausted. And that's the feeling, you know, that's really the feeling. I was so exhausted I could hardly... I couldn't walk, I couldn't speak - it was such an effort to withstand the terrible fear and the pressure of dying any second.46

46

Shoah Resource Center, The International 1/1 School for Holocaust Studies, From the Testimony of Judith Becker on Surviving the Gas Chamber, Yad Vashem Archives, 0.3- 9416, www1.yadvashem.org, (accessed 23 April 2009).

This experience is constructed to bring the particular experience of fear to those who did not experience it. Becker uses language that refers to experiences of horror and the Abject. She uses hari-kiri, a ritual disembowelment performed by dishonoured Samuris, to explain her experience of emotional exhaustion. She recognises her inability to articulate her silence itself signifies the absent referent. Becker also talks about the Sublime of poetry and prayer and miracles and she invokes correlated stories the glass case is identifiable from both the Eichmann trial and also from Snow White47 and The Glass Coffin.48 The meaning of each section of testimony is gleaned from simile and metaphor. All of these elements intertextuality, loaded language, plurality of meaning appear throughout Vergangenheitsbewltigung and form the textual spine for Zusaks writing style in The Book Thief.

Where No One Knows Your Name The academic response to the Holocaust is varied, regardless of discourse or discipline. Much of it grew out of the desire to understand what motivated the Shoah and the Holocaust. Often this is directed toward determining a single and universal truth at the root of the horror rather than addressing the multitude of experiences that comprise the

signification. This is particularly true of legal discourse, which seeks authoritative narrative via majority judgement: it operates on the very myth of a universal, singular and objective truth. The legal discourse that unfurled from the Nuremberg, Eichmann and other subsequent trials
47 48

Grimms Complete Fairytales, (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1993), 328. Grimms Complete Fairytales, 88.

10

motivated a substantial amount of literary theoretical criticism, which highlighted the conceptual limitations of individualist readings, particularly surrounding the function of survivor testimony. Questioning these

universal, singular and objective readings raises anxieties. The Book Thief engages in a plural reading at different levels, through history-telling, story-telling and shifting narrative perspectives.

The Book Thief plays with this passing of telos, with the nominal faith that no consensus of beliefs49 remains that can define a common ground on which the Other can be spoken.50 This shift toward pluralist readings of the Holocaust, to understand it as motivated by more than one hate-filled man and instead as drawn from the experiences and fears of disparate groups, underwrites the development of Vergangenheitsbewltigung.

Kristeva notes that the Sublime does not acknowledge the possibility of Otherness; instead it draws both Object and Subject into each other. Of course, her prose says this more elegantly even in translation: [when] the starry sky, a vista of open seas or a stained glass window shedding purple beams fascinates me, there is a cluster of meaning, of colours, of words, of caresses, there are light touches, scents, sighs, cadences that arise, shroud me, carry me away, and sweep me beyond the things that I see, hear, or think... as soon as I perceive it, as soon as I name it, the Sublime triggers it has always triggered a spree of perceptions and

49 50

Gay Clifford, The Transformations of Allegory, (London: Routledge, 1974), 116. Catherine Bernard, A Certain Hermeneutic Slant: Sublime Allegories in Contemporary English Fiction, Contemporary Literature, Volume 38, No. 1, (1997): 167.

11

words that expands memory boundlessly.51 This is precisely what the poetry and plurality of Vergangenheitsbewltigung achieves.

In The Book Thief, Zusak employs all these things poetry, imagery, symbolism and the invocation of colour, scents and textures, and layer upon layer of meaning and experience stitched over each other in ink and sounded through a susurrus of pages each page requires its other side to be whole. The Sublime is the point where Otherness and Self embrace. Jean-Franois Lyotard asserted that what happens in the Sublime is a quandary where we realise the shortcomings between imagination and reason.52 What we are witnessing, says Lyotard, is actually the diffrend; the straining of the mind at the edges of itself and at the edges of conceptuality.53 Lyotard premised his writing on the diffrend on the Holocaust, responding to Holocaust denial. Lyotard defined the diffrend as: The unstable state and instant of language wherein something that must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be... This state is signalled by what one ordinarily calls a feeling: one cannot find the words etc... In the diffrend, something asks to be put into phrases, and suffers the wrong of not being able to be put into phrases right away... what remains to be phrased exceeds what [one] can presently phrase.54
51 52

Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 12. Jean-Franois Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 39. 53 Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic, 123. 54 Lyotard, The Diffrend, 13.

12

In this sense, the Jewish witness of the Shoah is divested of the means to argue, for if they attempt to prove that Auschwitz was an extermination camp in Poland during the Second World War where many Jewish people and others were systematically murdered, as an empirical fact, the moral gravity is lost; if they attempt to demonstrate the personal effect of Auschwitz, the general is lost and there is no way to determine either collective harm or collective and individual responsibility. This plurality of meaning is at the heart of The Book Thief and is encapsulated in its central voices, the narrator, death and the Word Shaker, Liesel. The radical revisionist denies not merely the referent, but the sense, the addressee and the interlocutor as well. As narrator, death transcends all experience he possesses all and none, it is unknown but is the only certainty, it saw and was drawn into the systematic murders as death himself tells us I am a result.55 This is clearly what Gay Clifford is referring to when she notes that both meaning and value are recognised as internal or personal. The collective values are precisely those that threaten or obstruct the individual, and the significance of the action is often as an assertion of solipsism against these.56 Death speaks for those who are unable to speak, to write or to tell; he experiences what they experience and he can signify both the group and the individual suffering. His Abjectedness speaks the absence of the diffrended.

55 56

Zusak, The Book Thief, 7. Clifford, The Transformations of Allegory, 44.

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When a Spindle Draws Blood In The Book Thief, Markus Zusak also undermines the diffrend by couching his exploration of the Holocausts effect on the broader German community in allegory. Catherine Bernard asks in a world deprived of the positivist certainties on which realistic mimesis thrived, what could be more appropriate than the demonic imagery ... of allegory? Faced with political terror, the exponential degradation of values and the shadow of death... novelists attempt to circumvent fear, to oppose the irony of fiction to the obscure abyss of awe57.

Zusak answers this question emphatically. In The Book Thief not only does he write analogies through Max, but he employs fairytale motifs throughout the rest of the narrative. The characters invoke figures from the fairy tale tradition. The belles lettres are referenced through most of the characters. Death himself invokes Grandfather Death, a beneficent but eventually businesslike godfather. Liesel Meminger and her dead brother are cold echoes of Hansel and Gretel. Their parents are absent, a recurring motif throughout this genre. In terms of active parents, Hans and Rosa Hubermann draw on a number of fairy tale conventions, the adoring father of Snow White and Cinderella and an amalgam of the wicked stepmother and Frau Hlle. Most striking is the echo of Briar Rose, with Max Vandenburg as the sleeping beauty. Jack Zipes, the godfather of academic interrogation into fairytales, contends that the real fairytale originates unconsciously, collectively in the course of longer time-spans58 and this is
57 58

Bernard, A Certain Hermeneutic Slant, 166. Edwin Hoernle, Die Arbeit in den kommunistchen Kindergruppen, (1923) in Zipes, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, 138.

14

demonstrated by Maxs illness-induced slumber, which is littered with references that draw the reader into a parallel reading, where the Holocaust narrative derives its meaning from a more universalist experience of the fairytale.

Briar Rose59 is a particularly elegant invocation to address the Shoah. It was used by Jane Yolen in her 1992 novella of the same name60 and plays readily with both ideas of silence and inarticulation. Yolens Briar Rose centres on the escape of a female inmate from the Chelmno Concentration Camp. In her after-word to the novel, Yolen notes [t]his is a work of fiction. All the characters are made up. Happy-ever-after is a fairytale notion, not history. I know of no woman who escaped from Chelmno alive.61 Yolen uses the forgetting of trauma and the silence of sleep as a metaphor for death. This silence is not nothingness; rather silence is the everything of those women who never escaped. Their absence, the untold and untellable nature of their shared experiences, is told through the hush of death. Zusak also employs this motif in The Book Thief.

When Max Vandenburg first arrives at Himmel Street he sleeps for three days.62 Liesel watches him sleep but finds the idea of his waking, of his watching her watch him, mortifying63 the possibility of the male gaze brings her to death and both [plagues] and [enthuses] her.64 Liesels role
59 60

Grimms Complete Fairytales, 96. Jane Yolen, Briar Rose, (New York : Tom Doherty Associates, 1993, c1992). 61 Yolen, Briar Rose, 241. 62 Zusak, The Book Thief, 222. 63 Zusak, The Book Thief, 222. 64 Zusak, The Book Thief, 222.

15

as a viewer operated in a transient space of anticipation for both her as the Voyeur and for Max as the Viewed. When Max does wake to find the upside-down face of a girl above him,65 he experiences the fretful moment of unfamiliarity and the grasp for recollection.66 This fretful moment67 comprises the uncertainty of switched positions as each navigates gendered power through play and performance, but instead of bringing Max the Sun and the Moon, Liesel brings him Snow. Zusak reintroduces the sleep motif and calls his variation The Snowman, a nod to Snow White and an acknowledgment of genders performative function. Snow White and Briar Rose are both stories of sleeping princesses woken by true loves kiss (or, in an earlier version Sun, Moon and Talia by a suckling child resulting from rape). Zusak begins his rendition by alluding to the storys sexual history: [Liesel] became thirteen years of age. Her chest was still flat. She had not yet bled. The young man from her basement was now in her bed.68 There are repeated allusions to the princesses of popular allegory. As he is carried to Liesels bed one of his shoes falls off.69 Liesel is still prepubescent and able to perform as unfeminine: she can posses the gaze, own it, do it. She can watch. In contrast, Max is the feminised Other, a sleeping princess. He is passive and devoid of agency; he is on his back. Liesel assumes the powers of masculinity and leans over Max, gazing at him, and Max is most immediately and dramatically a woman when [he] lies beneath a man, and
65 66 67 68 69

Zusak, Zusak, Zusak, Zusak, Zusak,

The The The The The

Book Book Book Book Book

Thief, Thief, Thief, Thief, Thief,

223. 223. 223. 333. 337.

16

[his] submission is the apex of [her] manhood.70 The paradigm of the fairytale is drastically amended but it demonstrates again its flexibility as the genre is embraced by a new lover.

70

Angela Carter, The Sadein Woman: An exercise in cultural history, (London: Virago, 1979), 7.

17

Chapter 2: Lamenting the Scribe and the Scriven Featuring: A New Take on an Old Miracle, Grimmness, and Some Pictures Worth Six Million Words.

18

Feathers Turned to Twigs

A Guided Tour of Suffering

To your left, perhaps to your right, Perhaps even straight ahead, You find a small black room. In it sits a Jew. He is scum. He is starving. He is afraid. Please try not to look away.
71

Looking at the Abject meeting the gaze of that which offends and reaching to hold it, is the cornerstone of this research into

Vergangenheitsbewltigung. Kristevas Powers of Horror engages in the critical practice of unabashed voyeurism, directly addressing the motives of anti-Semitism and the position of the Jew as the paradigm Subject and the nadir of Abjection. It reveals the epistemological roots of the Shoah. In The Book Thief, Zusak examines the Shoah through the Jewish character, Max Vandenburg. In reading Max Vandenburg I am guided by Kristevas assertion that when a scription on the limits of identity comes face to face with Abjection, it enters into competition with biblical abominations and even more so with prophetic discourse72 by turning to the biblical element this identity is set against: the Sublime in language.

71 72

Zusak, The Book Thief, 150. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 186.

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The intersection between Vergangenheitsbewltigung and Jewish culture occurs in a textual space of poetry and tears and structure and story. Language and the Sublime underwrite the entirety of Judeo-Christian culture. The sacred texts of monotheism reflect the creation of the world through naming, through language and through words. Johns Gospel condenses the creation process to a series of assignations: In the beginning was the Word: the Word was with God and the Word was God.73 Even the opening lines of Bereshit/Genisis establish the

relationship between language and creative force: God said, God said, Let there be light, and there was light. 74 This posits a relationship between the divine that which is beyond comprehension and the emblematic symbol (words) that constrain that comprehension.

I open Lamentations. This book is called Eichah in Hebrew, translated as How.75 The song of wailing follows a specific structure. The first, second and fourth chapters commence with a formulaic question:76 How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! How is she become as a widow!77 How hath the Lord covered with a cloud the daughter of Zion in His anger!78 How is the gold become dim! How is the most fine gold changed.79

73 74

John 1:1, Jerusalem Bible. Genesis 1:3, Jerusalem Bible. 75 Sol Scharfstein, Torah and Commentary, (Jersey City: KTAV Publishing House, Inc, 2008), 435. 76 The third and fifth chapters introduce the narrator and beseech forgiveness, respectively. 77 Lamentations 1: 1, Masoretic Torah.
78 79

Lamentations 2:1, Masoretic Torah. Lamentations 4:1, Masoretic Torah.

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The language is poetic but it is constrained by very strict style and structure.80 This format ensures an expressive containment and

establishes a point of reference the poetry is read in relation to its textual similarities: although the words change, the rhythm and its source are constant. The lamenting how is adopted in and

Vergangenheitsbewltigung.

Lamentations

Vergangenheitsbewltigung try to resolve that which offends and horrifies by understanding how that which overwhelms the senses and reason occurred. In both traditions this interrogation is linked to the mourning process. Further, both genres invoke the divine/Sublime within the constraints of rigid language. If the word is the divine made flesh, it is also the Sublime made text. Such art is a secular experience of the divine and Vergangenheitsbewltigung is a prayer of mourning and reconciliation. Vergangenheitsbewltigung is a secular Lamentation: it empowers both writer and reader to sit Shiva for the Holocaust81 For these things I weep, mine eye, mine eye runneth down with water because thy comforter is far from me, even that he should refresh my soul, my children are desolate because the enemy hath prevailed.82 Kristeva asserts that writing, which allows one to recover, is equal to resurrection. The writer, then, finds himself marked out for identification with Christ, if only in order for him, too, to be rejected, ab-jected.83 In The Book Thief, Max Vandenburg is Immanuel made text.
80

See: David Noel Freedman and Erich A. von Fange, Metrics in Hebrew Poetry: The Book of Lamentations Revisited, Concordia Theological Quarterly, Volume 60, No. 4, (1996): 286: The Book of Lamentations includes poetic structure with tight, disciplined boundaries, such as the rigid demands of the acrostic or the lines of equal length regardless of the thought expressed. 81 Sitting Shiva is part of the Jewish mourning tradition. See: Maurice Lamm, The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning, 2nd ed., (New York: Jonathan David Publishers, 2000). 82 Lamentations, 1:17, Masoretic Torah. 83 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 26.

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Max performs two roles in The Book Thief. Firstly, he is Zusaks interpolation of the Shoah survivor, a character coming to terms with his past he is a character who should not be writable, the victim of a crime that should never be committed and is Abjected by his position as neither Subject nor Other. Secondly, the Abjected Max is a mimetic Jerusalem: he is six million lost voices piled under one speaker.84 As such, I will interrogate Maxs Abjectedness and his Sublimity by ascertaining the characters position within the genre and questioning how the character uses genre to confront the Holocaust. As a Jew, Max is one of Gods chosen people, but he is also chosen by the Fhrer with more sinister intent. The character of Max Vandenburg is crafted as the ultimate Abject. Max is regularly described as inhuman, with twigs of hair and swampy eyes.85 This echoes the description of Jerusalems Princes in

Lamentations, whose skin is become like a stick.86 He blurs the distinction between the Subject Self and the Object Other; however, his curse is also his saving grace, the maged David performs as the Mark of Cain.87

Max is written as a transgressive character he breaches the performance of gender and Subjectivity, his mere existence is an affront to Nazi Germany and his survival is an affront to his experiences. Zusak writes
84

This representation of the testator is invoked in The Book Thief (see: Appendix C). It is not unique to this text, having been invoked in other responses to the Holocaust (see: Appendix D). 85 Zusak, The Book Thief, 541. 86 Lamentations, 4:9, Masoretic Torah. 87 Zusak acknowledges that Max would not have known Liesel if he were not Jewish. He could not have created those artworks in the basement. See: Magdalena Ball, Interview with Markus Zusak, http://www.compulsivereader.com/html/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1273, (accessed 5 May 2009).

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[with] a clean-shaven face and lopsided, yet neatly combed hair, [Max] had walked out of that building a new man. In fact, he walked out a German. Hang on a second, he was a German. Or more to the point he had been.88 The implication is that Max as Jew transgresses actuality through performance, that he is no longer actually any of the things listed he is not clean, neat nor German. Now he is become as one unclean. 89 In the Jewish tradition uncleanness equates with Abjection. One who is Abject may not enter the Temple until they are again tahor (pure) they are socially excluded.90 Max is conscious of this juxtaposition between cleanness and group involvement, and we are told that [when] he was pushed out by the rest of his family the relief struggled inside him like an obscenity. It was something he didnt want to feel but, none the less, he felt it with such gusto it made him want to throw up.91 This expression of the Abject (nausea) and the Sublime (relief) demonstrate that Max acknowledges his transition from Subject German to Abjected survivor. It echoes the Torah: See, O LORD, and behold how Abject I am become92 The Subject Jew believes they are one of Gods chosen people. The Othered Jew is dehumanised and extinguished, divested of the means to recount the harm he has suffered the Othered Jew is inhuman (or dead) and therefore unable to engage in semiotic representation. The Abject Jew is the survivor, neither citizen nor victim; they can recount their experiences but cannot employ meaningful metaphor to express it to the Subject. Even the child Liesel is aware that Abjection is undesirable, that
88 89 90 91 92

Zusak, The Book Thief, 172. Lamentations, 1:9, Masoretic Torah. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 92-93. Zusak, The Book Thief, 208. Lamentations, 1:12, Masoretic Torah.

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although her brother practically died in her arms [and her] mother abandoned her... anything was better than being a Jew.93

What is fascinating about this Abjection is the resulting feminisation.94 Max writes: he takes on the literary mantle of Anne Frank, Rutka Laskier and Helene Berr. These writers wrote about avoiding the camps, and detailed their existence on the periphery of Subject and Object. Their writing occurs in a space where they are, outside of masculinity either as a result of their sex or the performance of gender and also because they are not yet totally objectified as a prisoner by German authorities. This is contrasted with the Testimony and Memoir of writers such as Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel and Jean Amery which recounts their objectification and stems from their time in the concentration camps.

Maxs writing occurs prior to his capture, internment and subsequent objectification, but after his abjection. Furthermore, his narrative is signified by both emblematic and expressive imagery, in keeping with the concept of pluralistic and multilayered terms of address. These are better able to express referents of intransferable experience. Max is hidden in feminised choratic spaces: the small black room and the Hubermanns basement. The choratic space in the Hubermanns basement is the safe space where he and Liesel both write, live and survive. Max is hidden from the Schutzstaffel and he writes his life: he exists in words, through words.
93 94

Zusak, The Book Thief, 174. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 174; I do not contend that feminisation is emasculating. Such a supposition would be premised on the notion that the performance of masculinity and femininity are mutually exclusive and I reject such an assertion.

24

He is resurrected, made Subject and agent, when he carves himself a path from Abject to subject through the Sublime of emblematic and expressive imagery.95 As feminised agent, Max rebels by writing his story, his parables he incorporates the I, he demands signification. He does this not through his masculinity, through the paradigm of subject that he claimed as a son of Abraham, but through his femininity: his Otherness is his alignment with the Sublime.

Max employs the Sublime, a point where human imagination and understanding reach their limit, to explode his Abjection. There are three signifiers of this feminisation: method, motif and (m)othering. Max employs motif and structure drawn from the traditionally feminised and disregarded belles lettres of Anderson, Grimm and Perrault. He writes for Liesel, telling his story through a blend of illustration, visual and linguistic symbols. Finally, Max is resurrected, both metaphorically and textually, and returns to the Damascus of Molching where he performs as Liesels other mother. Getting Grimm Fairytales occupy a unique place in historical and literary discourse. It is a single glass slipper left on the stair in the midst of a tumultuous crowd. When it fits, the truth it presents is difficult to refute. Although not considered factual fairytales are revered as true to historythat is, to deeper psychological truths.96 They employ flexibility, using archetypes
95

Ronald Paulson, Emblem and Expression: Meaning in English Art of the Eighteenth Century, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 52. 96 Kenneth Kid, A is for Auschwitz: Psychoanalysis, Trauma Theory, and the Childrens Literature of Atrocity Childrens Literature 33,(2005): 133.

25

and generalisations that can be paradigmatically shifted. They speak from the position of the disempowered individual, but articulate a broader narrative of communal oppression. They provide power to testimony. Kenneth Kidd notes that, as regards individual testimony, to witness horror, such personalisation... can sometimes lead to a denial of historys complexities, which arent always so easily plotted.97 The fairytale is historically located, and the complexities are textually absent but still inferable. It is for these reasons that the fairytale genre has been popularly utilised in Vergangenheitsbewltigung. Max employs motifs and structures from fairytales to relate his experiences to Liesel he locates himself with the traditional realm of women and the hearth rather than in the masculinised genre of the Bildungsroman.

Marina Warner addresses the particularly feminised qualities of fairytales in her book From the Beast to the Blonde.98 She asserts that this genre details the remembered, lived experiences of women, not fairy tale concoctions from the depths of the psyche99 and continues that such narratives are rooted in the social, legal and economic history of marriage and the family, [having] all the stark actuality of the real and the power real life has to bite into the psyche and etch its design. 100 This very realness of fairytale is appropriated within The Book Thief by Max, who uses them as a form of memoir. Maxs reality is, of course, confounded by his very status as a book character rather than a witness
97 98

Kid, A is for Auschwitz, 134. Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers, (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994). 99 Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde, 238. 100 Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde, 238.

26

in testimony, but nonetheless it alludes to the powerful narrative structures that supported the Holocaust and illuminates their means of deconstruction.

Kimberley Pierson addresses this notion of the fairytale as a powerful discursive force for marginalised demographics. In Revenge and

Punishment: Legal Prototype and Fairy Tale Theme101 she propounds fairytales as demonstrative of a reparation process for individuals when the institutionalised system fails to provide redress within particular groups. She specifically identifies women and children as such

individuals;102 however, I would extend her thesis to incorporate other marginalised and feminised groups in this instance targets of the Shoah and the Holocaust. Her particular focus is on the ability to achieve individual justice through revenge. This idea of individualised justice, guilt and suffering is sacrosanct to masculinist libertarianism and is often explored in Bildungsroman.103 I assert that it is more revolutionary to challenge legal norms by employing fairy tale narratives to substantiate claims of group harm and the corresponding responsibility as the individual characters act metonymically. It is therefore appropriate that those crimes that take on the role of legal archetypes, such as the prohibition on genocide, should appropriate the narrative structure of the fairy tale (a genre rooted in generalisation and archetype).

101

Kimberley J. Pierson, Revenge and Punishment: Legal Prototype and Fairytale Theme, Circles Buffolo Womens Journal of Law and Sociological Policy 3 (1988). 102 Pierson, Revenge and Punishment, 32.
103

Joseph R. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007).

27

Pierson identifies two functions for fairy tales: the exemplary (such as Aschenputtel and Hnsel und Gretel) and the cautionary (such as Rotkppchen). In exemplary tales the title characters have done nothing wrong or disobedient in order to deserve their ill-treatment104 where in cautionary tales a taboo is broken and due punishment is meted out to the wrongdoer. The Book Thief is written in the former tradition; however, Zusak plays upon the cautionary motif. He presumes the reader is at some level aware of these differing purposes, and teases out the notion of guilt in both Liesel as thief and Max as Jew and survivor. The reader may also imply the cautionary aspect of the tale from their historical knowledge concerning the fall of the Third Reich, particularly Hitlers suicide and the subsequent trials at Nuremburg. This path of the story, although absent from the text of The Book Thief serves to demonstrate the punitive element that underlies the novel. Hitlers demise is shared by Germany, the German people and their progeny. Othering the leader from the state is a fight against powerful mimetic forces.

Mimesis between the leader and the state is a commonly used metaphor in war and genocide discourses and it plays into the allegorical Villain and Hero narratives. George Lakoff, a cognitive linguist, notes that fairy tale motifs surface in other kinds of texts about war.105 However, literary critic George Steiner counters this assertion, arguing that [it] is by no means clear that there can be or that there ought to be, any form, style, or code of articulate, intelligible expression somehow adequate to the facts of the
104 105

Pierson, Revenge and Punishment, 9. George Lakoff, Contemporary Theory of Metaphor, in Metaphor and Thought, 2nd ed., ed., Andrew Ortney, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 243.

28

Shoah.106 The question of adequacy is related to the diffrend, but what standard does Steiner propose is adequate? Is it legal authority and irrefutable allocation of responsibility, or an expression of harms suffered? Christa Kamenetsky points out that: The National Socialist conception of folk, community, peasant and folklore differed substantially from that which emerged from even the most nationalistic writings of Herder, the Brothers Grimm, Arndt, Goerres or Jahn, as it combined some romantic notions with the ideological orientation of the Third Reich. The fighting folk community, standing in a single column behind the Fuhrer in unity and unquestioning loyalty, had but little to do with the rural folk community of an idyllic village. The innocent folktale was transformed into an ideological weapon meant to serve the building of the Thousand Year Reich. Thus, Party official Alfred Eyd announced in 1935, the German folktale shall become a most valuable means for us in the racial and political education of the young.107 Given the Party placed so much emphasis on the folk tale, it is imperative that Vergangenheitsbewltigung reclaim it and use fairytale discourse to satisfy this last purpose to understand harms and to actively take responsibility rather than to apportion blame. Steiner suggests that the use of fairytale discourse does not, and cannot legitimately engage in
106

George Steiner, "Postscript", in Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (London: Faber & Faber, 1967), 199. 107 Christa Kamenetsky, Folklore and Ideology in the Third Reich, Journal of American Folklore 90 (1977): 169.

29

Holocaust specifically Shoah discourse; however, this assertion is confounded by the sheer volume of work inspired by this genre in response to the Shoah. The artistic turn to established narrative and known motifs embraces a communal understanding of broad referents Hansel and Gretel do not just signify young, blond siblings it is a sign for the lost, the abandoned, the scared, and the disempowered. Hansel and Gretel signifies a range of emotions and power dynamics beyond lost bread crumbs.

Bruno Bettelheim famously suggests that fairytales help children work through both painful experiences and everyday psychic trouble. 108 Donald Haase, among others, takes Bettelheims assertion and examines the fairy tales potential as an emotional survival strategy109 in and around Holocaust narrative. Haase asserts that the fairy tales potential as an emotional survival strategy is premised on its anticipation of a better world 110 and its future-oriented111 nature happily ever after is not the end of a story, it is a wish for the future. In The Book Thief, the reading and writing of fairytales is a survival strategy employed by both Max and Liesel as they struggle to live through the Holocaust.

In examining Maxs stories, The Stand Over Man and The Word Shaker, it is useful to incorporate both Kristevas and Bettelheims theories. Where
108 109

Kid, A is for Auschwitz, 122. Donald Haase, Children, War and the Imaginative Space of Fairy Tales, The Lion and The Unicorn 24 (2000), 361. 110 Donald Haase, Overcoming the Present: Children and Fairytales in Exile, War, and the Holocaust, in Mit den Augen eines Kindes: Children in the Holocaust, Children in Exile, Children under Fascism, ed. Viktoria Herling, (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), 87. 111 Haase, Overcoming the Present, 94.

30

Kristeva

suggests

that

poetry

and

poetic

language

ruptures

the

Subject/Object/Self/Other-divide and promotes engagement with the Abject/Sublime, Bettelheim blurs the distinction between fantasy and reality, abuse and everyday angst, turning to the fairy tale112 but instead operating directly in the spectrum of trauma rather than in the binary of normalcy and deviance. Maxs writing traverses the trauma of uncertain morality facilitated by National Socialisms perversion of Enlightenment ethics. It is revolutionary, not just in content, but also in narrative genre and structure. Max engages with the genre that National Socialism sought to assimilate. Jack Zipes maintains that [the] very fact that the Nazis recognised the necessity to create a policy with regard to folktales and fairy tales demonstrated a general awareness about their cultural impact on children and adults.113 Where National Socialism intended to control folk-identity as a tool of the civilising process, Max reclaims the idea of the folk to overwhelm and destabilise this dominant socio-political discourse, and his stories are directed at Liesel, in order to explain social contradictions... in a highly illuminating way.114

Let the Pictures do the Talking115 The allusion to the Grimms tale of The Seven Ravens flits through the text. By physically expressing difference from his oppressor, Max allies himself with the feminine; he and Liesel grow into their womanhood together. The importance of corporealism is mirrored in The Book Thief,
112 113

Kid, A is for Auschwitz , 131. Zipes, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, 138. 114 Zipes, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, 141. 115 Ball, http://www.compulsivereader.com/html/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1273, (accessed 05 May 2009).

31

particularly through the embedded narratives. Max is dehumanised, Othered and ultimately feminised by the National Socialist rhetoric. As the feminised non-human, Max writes himself as the Bird-child in The Stand Over Man.116 This illustrated story explores power relations, domination and otherness though both emblematic and expressive imagery.117

In The Stand Over Man, Max identifies his oppressor in the mimetic fashion identified by Lakoff: Hitler is Germany, is her people, and is illustrated as humanoid. This follows Jack Zipes assertion that in fairy tales [it] is important to have a strong leader of the realm who sets a model for the rest of society.118 The feminised bodies (Liesel, the woman on the train, Maxs female relatives) already function outside of the masculinist discourse of power, and often in opposition to it, and therefore their bodies are already inhuman by virtue of their femaleness. As such, the female characters are Othered through their femininity while the male Jewish characters are Othered and anthropomorphic, focalised by Max as bird-like creatures. The exception to this theme is where Max is drawn from Liesels perspective; she tells him he looks like something else.119 In this illustration Max is human, although his reflection the image his illustrated character is looking at is still bird-like. This expressive text accords with Bettelheims argument that fairy tales facilitate a

psychological defence mechanism that impels the normal ones to set

116 117

See: Appendix A. I use the term emblematic imagery to refer to words as symbols while expressive imagery refers to the symbolic value of non-linguistic imagery. See: Ronald Paulson, Emblem and Expression, 52. 118 Zipes, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, 151. 119 Zusak, The Book Thief, 252.

32

themselves apart from the barbarians of the Holocaust:120 Max chooses his Otherness, he does not attempt to reconcile his normalcy with that of his oppressors.

He claims wings.

These feathers brush against the pages of The Book Thief: where Cixous writes with milk,121 Max writes with his quills, and both white ink and feathers smother the hateful ramblings of a small man who bemoans his struggles. The text is corporeal again, the word made flesh, and gripped by eager hands.

The Book Thief follows in the tradition of childrens books that incorporate the physical into their text. From Beatrix Potters books for little hands to the tactile touch and feel books for early readers, the pages of The Book Thief emphasise their protagonists direct experiences of the Holocaust, experiences that extend to and presumably interpolate the child reader outside the story.122

120 121

Bruno Bettelheim, The Informed Heart, (New York: Free Press, 1966). Hlne Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa, in New French Feminisms, eds. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, (New York: Schocken, 1981). 122 Kid, A is for Auschwitz , 120.

33

 Physicalising the Text There are empty spaces throughout The Book Thief. These spaces on the page indicate silence, there is also the violence of a textual aside that ruptures the narratives flow.

Kristeva notes that if one wished to proceed farther still along the approaches to Abjection, one would find neither narrative nor theme but a recasting of syntax and vocabulary the violence of poetry and silence. 123 This is reinforced in the internal narratives, The Stand Over Man and The Word Shaker. In particular, The Stand Over Man has a unique

textualisation.124 The Book Thief narrative recounts that Max Vandenburg and Hans Hubermann paint over the pages of Mein Kampf so that Max can write the story of his own struggles and repression. The words of Mein Kampf (in English) permeate the text of The Stand Over Man, visible beneath them. The text is rewritten in the most literal sense, it is whitewashed, painted over, and a new art is created over it. This is the reuse of a text and a usurpation of its intention.

In an interview with Magdelena Ball at The Compulsive Reader125, Zusak acknowledged the importance of this process for the text. He wrote that [one] of the most important elements was having Mein Kampf bleed through the pages as Max used an old copy of the Farers book to paint
123 124

Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 141. See: Appendix A. 125 Ball, http://www.compulsivereader.com/html/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1273, (accessed 5 May 2009).

34

over and create his own story. It was an idea I had early on, and then Trudy [the illustrator] had the same thought later onIt just helps the idea of the power of words and also the idea that we all have the power to rewrite the ugly with some beauty.126 The white ink of criture feminine is manifested on the page, in accordance with ideals of experience before language, and privileging non-linear, cyclical writing that evades the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system.127 Such writing, whether emblematic or expressive (and in this instance a combination of the two) is the Sublime in action.

It is in The Word Shaker that Max addresses issues of Abjection in relation to language. Similar in form to The Stand Over Man, The Word Shaker is presented as a hand written, illustrated text inserted into the narration. 128 It explicitly engages with the notions of language, power, the Abject and the Sublime. Where The Word Shaker is read as a fable or fairytale of the Holocaust (bearing in mind that at this textual juncture, Max has yet to experience the Shoah) the story takes on the responsibilities of Vergangenheitsbewltigung. Max prefaces the story with a request that Liesel find some good in it;129 this is also a request made of the reader, focalised through a future victim of the Holocausts violence. This request is very complex: it is made by an author of German descent who has a particular interest in reconciling his parents history. What right has he to use a Jewish fist-fighter to do so? And yet this search for a silver-lining, the
126

Ball, http://www.compulsivereader.com/html/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1273, (accessed 5 May 2009). 127 Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa, 253. 128 See: Appendix B. 129 Zusak, The Book Thief, 474.

35

Sublime, the good, in relation to the inversion of German cultural mores and the systematic extermination of marginalised demographics, is found in the development of language.

The Word Shaker relates this directly to the use of words, where the Fhrer decided that he would rule the world with words.130 This power is scripted as an authentic relationship between the earth and language, an ecological war rooted in the very ground that nourishes its victims. I read this alignment, specifically the reference to a homeland,131 rather than the Fatherland as a subtle implication of the way language was manipulated in National Socialist discourse. Max writes and draws forests of words, invoking that motif of the Black Forest that is so often found in German fairy tales such as Rotkppchen, Hnsel und Gretel and Dornrschen. He uses the Grimm tradition, usurped by National Socialist rhetoric, and unfurls it, showing the wolf in the eagle.

The Word Shaker also addresses the role of expressive imagery in the form of non-linguistic symbols to capture unarticulated meaning. This method is signposted early in the text when death assures the reader that the Nazi salute was not lethal in and of itself. Death quips I can only tell you that no-one died from [the salute], or at least not physically. There was, of course, the matter of forty million people I picked up by the time the whole thing was finished, but thats getting all metaphoric.132 This non

130 131 132

Zusak, The Word Shaker, in The Book Thief, 1. Zusak, The Word Shaker, 1. Zusak, The Book Thief, 121.

36

linguistic communication ties in particularly with the narrators obsession with colour. Expressive imagery such as illustration, gesture and colour are clear examples of the Sublime in signification. Death and Max draw parallels between colour, symbols and Liesel: she is golden and brown and dangerous she can shake the words and cut-down the National Socialist discourse. This repetitive motif is not merely endowed with a structural or even meta-fictional function. Instead, the insistent degradation of certain paradigms, such as Liesels power over words, and their interconnection (particularly deaths synsthesia) force a diagrammatic reading grid onto the text, which is then already encoded and trapped in the crisscrossing of correlative meaning. Craig Owens suggests in his exploration of postmodern allegory, the world is shown to be encoded discursively. It becomes a script, this endless encoding proving not dynamic, but static, ritualistic, repetitive [by] [superinducing] a vertical or paradigmatic reading of correspondences upon a horizontal or syntagmatic chain of events.133 This referential meaning is the Holocaust discourse in motion: it is compulsive, a determined attempt to restore the paradigm of Enlightenment through the darkness of National Socialism, to expand the spectrum beyond the red, black and white that paints this history. Max likens the process of distributing National Socialist rhetoric to people being placed on a conveyer belt and run through a rampant machine which gave them a life time in a few moments.134 This description draws a parallel for the reader who has an implied knowledge of the mechanic
133
134

Craig Owens, The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism, October, Vol. 12, (Spring, 1980), 74.

Zusak, The Word Shaker, 2.

37

process undertaken in the Death Camps between the manufacture of life and the manufacture of death. The space between the fates of ordinary peoples is dependent on the words and symbols ascribed to them: those who are drawn in expressive imagery a golden star, a pink triangle are not fit to exist in emblematic imagery.

Max elucidates the Holocaust as a linguistic and social phenomenon, drawing on Liesels assertion that, without words, Hitler was only a small, angry man. Hitlers power was with words. There is perhaps an acknowledgement that Hitlers power traversed emblematic and

expressive imagery: his written work, namely Mein Kampf, is at best poorly written and at worst incoherent and inarticulate. His power came from the spoken word, the Schreierei, the use of noise, pageantry and colour that culminated in a frenzied response and total control, of power pouring from his mouth and fingertips.

38

135

In contrast, Max introduces Liesel as a Word Shaker - a person who was employed to climb the trees and throw the words down to those below.136 However, she is different from most Word Shakers as she knew how powerless a person could be
WITHOUT

words,137 having already drawn

herself from the silence into the scream of language. Liesel has power over both written and spoken words. She understands the importance of, and interrelation between, emblematic and expressive imagery. Max writes about her understanding as part of surviving his mourning.

Max is Zusaks mourning. The character is Abjected that he may bewail on Zusaks behalf. Through Max, Zusak remembers the affliction and [the] anguish138 of the Jewish people. Max experiences survivor guilt. This is the pain that even death fears: the leftover humans with punctured hearts
135 136 137 138

Zusak, The Book Thief, 301. Zusak, The Word Shaker, 2. Zusak, The Word Shaker, 2. Lamentations, 3:20, Masoretic Torah.

39

and beaten lungs.139 Max mourns Im so selfish... leaving people behind. Coming here. Putting all of you in danger... Im sorry. Do you believe me? Im so sorry, Im so sorry, Im - .140 The words lose meaning, they are removed from their symbolic position to become a bewailing, as demonstrated by the short end to the final sentence its repetitiveness expresses remorse and loss. It is addressed to those both present and left behind. There is an uncomfortable implication within this survivor guilt that both the victim and the assistant are lost and that responsibility for these losses lies with Max, rather than with the collective German State. Max embodies this, The smell no, the stench of guilt141 which in turn physicalises the Abjecting process. Max creates poetic testimony and memoir: he is the bystander. He returns to Molching to find Liesel: he is the survivor.

139 140 141

Zusak, The Book Thief, 5. Zusak, The Book Thief, 237. Zusak, The Book Thief, 173.

40

Chapter 3: A Hunger for Words Featuring: A Girl Made of Darkness, The Cates of Thievery, Thrown Words, Tired Hearts Some Dead Letters And Revenge in the Shape of Mixed Lollies

41

A Girl Made of Darkness She was a girl. In Nazi Germany. How fitting that she was discovering the power of words.142

The Book Thief explores life in Nazi Germany through Liesel Memingers experiences. Liesel is the quintessential lost babe; she is a lost, skinny child in another foreign place, with more foreign people. Alone.143 Liesel is a war orphan, removed from her parents and placed in the foster care of Hans and Rosa Hubermann. Hers is the metonymic body that feels the pleasures, hardships, pride and shame of Nazi Germany. She is a synecdoche for the second and third Post-Holocaust generations of Germans. She signifies those people who were or would have been privileged under the Third Reich, but whose personal responsibility is mitigated or contentious. Liesels transient location within National

Socialist rhetoric is reflected in her colouring. At a cursory glance she is everything an Aryan girl should be: Her hair was a close enough brand of German-blond.144 However death notes that she was not this ideal, that she had dangerous eyes. Dark brown. You didnt really want brown eyes in Germany around that time.145 Liesels dark eyes represent her subversive potential: her parents deviant political lineage and the threat posed by eugenic persecution. Liesel incorporates the Sublime and corporealises it through colour. Her Sublimeness is naturalised and is
142 143 144 145

Zusak, Zusak, Zusak, Zusak,

The The The The

Book Book Book Book

Thief, Thief, Thief, Thief,

159. 32. 31. 31.

42

integral to her status as a Subject. By extension, her experience of a naturalised Sublimeness is imputed to those whom she represents, especially those who, like Zusak, Liesel is partake the in the process Subject of who

Vergangenheitsbewltigung.

Sublime

experiences and incorporates the Abject into her Self: [e]very minute, every hour, there was worry, or more to the point, paranoia. Criminal activity will do that to a person, especially a child. They envision a prolific assortment of caughoutedness. Some examples: People jumping out of alleys, Schoolteachers suddenly being very aware of every sin youve ever committed. Police showing up at the door each time a leaf turns or a distant gate slams shut.146 Liesel resists an ugly truth, to reveal her own filthy, thieving nature. 147 Again the Abject and the Sublime are helixed. Liesel first steals books, but her criminal activity escalates, culminating in gang activity.

Liesel sets up a conflict between the perverse morality of National Socialism and her own internal perversity it is almost a mirror for Jean Genets experiences when he mourns if I steal[in Nazi Germany] ... I obey the customary order. I do not destroy it. I am not committing evil. I am not upsetting anything. The outrageous is possible. Im stealing in the void. 148 She encapsulates the parallel existence of the Abject and Sublime as both

146 147 148

Zusak, The Book Thief, 140. Zusak, The Book Thief, 137. Jean Genet, The Thiefs Journal, (Paris: The Olympia Press, 2004, c 1949), 96.

43

the thief and the hero: So much good, so much evil. Just add water.149 By incorporating both elements into her sense of self, she traverses the uncertain position between Subject and Object: she dallies with ethical uncertainty and is caught between guilt and innocence. She is aware of the power of words and symbols but is (initially) unable to grasp that power for herself. It is in the fact that Liesel is the Sublime, the word made flesh, that she instinctively understands their power. More than that, she grasps the relationship between power and discourse.

Liesel first alludes to the power of words in a dream. Zusak writes: the book thief had been dreaming about the Fhrer, Adolf Hitler. In the dream, she was attending a rally at which he spoke, looking at the skull-coloured part in his hair and the perfect square of his moustache. She was listening contentedly to the torrent of words that was spilling from his mouth. His sentences glowed in the light.150 However, her realisation is triggered at a rally where she overhears whispers of the word she associates with her removal from her parents and her brothers death: Kommunist.151 A Small Addition The word communist + a large bonfire + a Collection of dead letters + the suffering of her mother + the death of her brother = the Fhrer.152

149 150 151 152

Zusak, Zusak, Zusak, Zusak,

The The The The

Book Book Book Book

Thief, Thief, Thief, Thief,

178. 20-21. 124. 124.

44

This strange word153 haunted her dreams hand in hand with her dead brother; it was always there somewhere, standing in the corner, watching from the dark. It wore suits, uniforms.154 The word is a name used by these suits as a threat. This word is used by State officials, not by Liesels activist father her mother is disinclined to name their ideology.155 Liesel begins to understand the overwhelmingness of words and their relation to power. For Liesel, the referent of this word is not a whirlwind of red flags, idealism and tattered copies of Das Kapital. Instead it is the silent, ominous presence of authority and power which results in a series of absences as her father, brother and mother are taken from her by these suits, by this word. For Liesel, the word Kommunist means leaving. In contrast, death expounds on Liesels understanding of not-leaving as an act of trust and love, often deciphered by children.156 The Gates of Thievery The power of naming is central to Liesels story. She understands that the correct label can make a small man stamp until his foot goes through the floor. Whether it is National Socialism naming what is unGerman, Rosa Hubermanns vehement and prolific157 endearments or the whispers about Hans Hubermanns painting habits,158 the labels indicate, but do not constrain the characters. Instead they provide guidance; they are signposts to understanding. Rudy Steiners pet name for Liesel is a charming example of this signposting. He refers to her as Book Thief,159
153 154

Zusak, The Book Thief, 31. Zusak, The Book Thief, 31. 155 Zusak, The Book Thief, 31. 156 Zusak, The Book Thief, 38. 157 Zusak, The Book Thief, 32. 158 Zusak, The Book Thief, 112. 159 Zusak, The Book Thief, 314.

45

and both Liesel and death adopt this as her title. The name identifies her as one who steals books: The Gravediggers Handbook, then The Shoulder Shrug and finally The Whistler. However, the name goes beyond that it sets her apart from the degradation of petty theft (a crime committed against the state); instead she has a vocation and is performing a service. She is a stranger in a strange land, her legation is in Himmel Street, a heaven on earth, and she saves books, she rescues them from snow, from seclusion and from the fires that would reduce them to silent cinders.

The physical manifestation of words in books the Sublime corporealised is important to Liesel. Ilsa Hermann, the Mayors wife, initiates Liesel into this textual maturity by welcoming Liesel into her home. Ilsa performs as Liesels mother Ilsas child and Liesels mother are dead or gone, and so they perform the roles of mother and child for each other. Ilsas home is the manifestation of the pronominal chora, and she exists within this womb, unwilling to leave. Her silence is further evidence of a refusal to enter the symbolic: Ilsa uses no words. Not once.160 Initially Liesel casts her as the wicked mother, alluding to the witch of Hansel and Gretel and the fires of Auschwitz-Birkenau: Shes going to torture me, Liesel decided. Shes going to take me inside, light the fireplace and throw me in, books and all.161 However, as Liesel slowly draws the performance of

motherhood from Ilsa, both of them are able to rebirth into the textual symbolic the library is the choric womb and the tower of books against

160 161

Zusak, The Book Thief, 102. Zusak, The Book Thief, 145.

46

[Ilsas] stomach162 is the phallogocentric signifier. Although fascinated by the books she steals and is given, Liesel is not overwhelmed by their awesome power until she is invited into Ilsa Hermanns private library.

The library is Liesels initiation into the Sublime, aligning the Piets divinity and the ranks of Miltons rebellious angels with the written word: Jesus, Mary... She said it out loud, the words distributed into a room that was full of cold air and books. Books everywhere! Each wall was armed with overcrowded yet immaculate shelving... There were all different styles and sizes of lettering on the spines of the black, the red, the grey, the every-coloured books. It was one of the most beautiful things Liesel Meminger had ever seen. With wonder, she smiled. That such a room existed!163 Liesel is awed by the library. She immediately responds to its

Sublimeness, but is conscious that her appreciation is bound to her thievery and her abjectness. She has the skills to appreciate the beauty that confronts her only because of her own degradation. Liesels name, Book Thief, annexes her Sublime nature to her base instincts. In giving Liesel the small black book in which she writes her story, Ilsa gave

162 163

Zusak, The Book Thief, 145. Zusak, The Book Thief, 145.

47

[Liesel] a reason to write her own words, to remind her that words had also brought her to life.164 Throwing Words Liesel is also named by Max: she is the Word Shaker, the one who grows and controls words. Liesel uses words to heal and to hurt. She comes to understand the injury [and]... brutality of words.165 During her

confrontation with Ilsa Hermann, Liesel summoned [the words] from some place she only now recognised and threw them at Ilsa Hermann. 166 Liesels violent verbal attack left Ilsa battered and beaten up... Liesel could see it on her face. Blood leaked from her nose and licked at her lips. Her eyes had blackened. Cuts had opened up and a series of wounds were rising to the surface of her skin. All from words. From Liesels words.167 In this passage, the injuries are active; Ilsas body is passive, as is Liesel. The words summon forth the injuries, which occur of their own accord. Liesel realises the real and physical ramifications of words; their ability to hurt, but to leave the victim unmarked to the eye, devoid of evidence of the harms they suffered. However, this crystallises her understanding that she can also use words to heal. She does this for Max after his capture. Zusak writes: Jews were being marched through the outskirts of Munich, and one teenage girl somehow did the

unthinkable and made her way through to walk with

164 165 166 167

Zusak, Zusak, Zusak, Zusak,

The The The The

Book Book Book Book

Thief, Thief, Thief, Thief,

557. 283. 283. 284.

48

them. When the soldiers pulled her away and threw her to the ground, she stood up again. She continued.168

If Liesel is Word made flesh, this is her walk to Golgotha, her Passion. Liesel chases after Max as he marches, until she can no longer reach him. She heals him with words, creates an army of her love: This time, she did not reach out, she stopped. Somewhere inside her were the souls of words. They climbed out and stood beside her. Max... There was once a strange, small man... but there was a word shaker too. ... The words were given across from the girl to the Jew. They climbed onto him.169 Liesel understands that words are not the only means of communication, and that silence, touch, laughter and incoherent noise also have their place.

Liesel writes a personal Vergangenheitsbewltigung to come to terms with her experience of the Holocaust: [Liesel] had seen her brother die with one eye open, one still in a dream. She had said goodbye to her mother and imagined her lonely wait for a train back home to oblivion. A woman of wire had laid herself down, her scream travelling down the hill, it fell
168 169

Zusak, The Book Thief, 543. Zusak, The Book Thief, 543.

49

sideways like a rolling coin starved of momentum. A young man was hung by a rope made of Stalingrad snow. She had watched a bomber pilot die in a metal case. She had seen a Jewish man who had twice given her the most beautiful pages of her life marched to a concentration camp.170 Liesel asks why the words had to exist. She rails without them, there wouldnt be any of this. Without words the Fuhrer was nothing. There would be no limping prisoners, no need for consolation or wordly tricks to make us feel better. What good were the words?171 Hans Hubermann passes on to Liesel the life affirming potential of reading and writing Death recounts directly from her journal it was Papa [who helped her to read]. People think hes not so smart, and its true that he doesnt read too fast, but I would soon learn that words and writing actually saved his life once.172 It saves his life in the trenches of World War I and saves hers as Molching caved when Munich was bombed. In terms of engagement with the Abject, Subject and Sublime, this revelation is startling. Language more specifically the ability to write, to use language, is what keeps Liesel alive: she is an active subject rather than an abjected corpse. In her study of aesthetics and the dead body, Elizabeth Bronfen describes the referent of death: beyond any speaking subjects experiential realm, [death] is always culturally constructed, always metaphorical; a signifier of lack which itself lacks a fixed signified in the symbolic register...certain only in

170 171 172

Zusak, The Book Thief, 553. Zusak, The Book Thief, 553. Zusak, The Book Thief, 66-67.

50

its negativity.173 Translating this anxiety into literature becomes a means of confronting and containing it within the symbolic realm as a source of exorbitant and destructive anguish.174

At its simplest, the Abject is the human reaction (such as horror or vomit) to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between Subject and Object. The corpse is often cited as an example of what may cause such a disruption, it confronts us with the awareness of our own materiality, whereby Otherness is identifiable within the Self, and is harrowing. By controlling symbolic representation, Liesel controls life: she writes to survive, to live, and to mourn. Jacques Derrida notes, mourning always follows a trauma. . . . [T]he work of mourning is not one kind of work among others. It is work itself, work in general, the trait by means of which one ought perhaps to reconsider the very concept of production.175 Tired Hearts Liesel experiences the Holocaust and is touched by the Shoah. She is forcibly removed, her moral compass spins wildly. She is unsure of why that which is good for her country and by extension its people, causes such suffering to her and those she loves. Her mourning is a metaphoric microcosm of individual loss, horror and sorrow in the asterism of the Holocaust. Her mourning is the lived experience of the Holocaust survivor. Liesels earliest experience of trauma is her brothers death. She is
173

Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic, (New York: Routeledge,1992), Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 132.

72.
174

175

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International,trans. Peggy Kamuf, (New York: Routledge, 1994), 97.

51

haunted by her brother after he dies she experiences his existence. She was sure her mother carried the memory of him, slung over her shoulder. She dropped him. She saw his feet slap the platform. 176 He continues to haunt her in dreams and from the corner of her eye, watching her growing and living and mourning on Himmel Street. This mourning continues after Himmel Street is destroyed. Liesel experiences Abjection, she has a referent for horror, pain and loss, for fire and blood and the otherwise unknowable. She expresses this loss in the same way as any other survivor she relinquishes the Sublime of language and returns to the prelinguistic significations: She dropped the book She kneeled. The book thief howled.
177

Her brothers manifestation is physical, the Abject is corporeal and the Sublime is the Word made flesh. The physical representation of text flows through Zusaks novel. The changing textuality, the shifting fonts, the spacing and the symbols are as meaningful as voices. They are Brechtian in effect they breach the conventional fourth wall between the reader and the text, demanding they leave voyeurism behind and instead interpolate these changes in font and alignment. The empty space on the page means as much as the words that course across it. This space is where the reader catches their breath and considers the letters crawling before them. These asides are intended to differentiate between recollections of Liesels journal and the narrators personal recollections.
176 177

Zusak, The Book Thief, 25. Zusak, The Book Thief, 15.

52

They set up a fugue between Liesels writing, Deaths experience and the readers implied knowledge. This knowledge manifests in the physical text its spaces, imagery and words.

For Liesel, the words of the Fhrer, textualised in Mein Kampf, and her own burgeoning textuality become the centre of her development: When she came to write her story, she would wonder exactly when the books and the words started not just to mean something, but everything. 178 Her emotional maturity develops in proportion to both her literacy and her access to books. Her experience of books is initially linked to death, first her brothers and then the death of both books and Shoah victims: The Germans loved to burn things. Shops, synagogues, Reichstags, houses, personal items, slain people and, of course, books. They enjoyed a good book-burning all right which gave people who were partial to books the opportunity to get their hands on certain publications that they otherwise wouldnt have.179 The book burning is Liesels experience of the Holocaust fires; it is living material slipped from inside the ash. 180 The book burning demonstrates both breaches that source the Holocausts Abjectness. The breach of Enlightenment philosophies is a point of confusion for Liesel. Her morality is naturally aligned with that of an earlier age but she experiences the irrational fervour of propaganda, something inside told her that [burning books] was a crime [but] she was compelled to see the

178 179 180

Zusak, The Book Thief, 30. Zusak, The Book Thief, 90. Zusak, The Book Thief, 128.

53

thing lit.181 The collective effect of this event is also part of Liesels experience. Zusak writes: A horizon of Nazi flags and uniforms rose upwards, crippling [Liesels] view The crowd was itself. There was no swaying it, squeezing through or reasoning with it. You breathed with it and you sang its song. You waited for its fire.182 He embeds Liesel within hoi polloi, ascribing an agency external to the individual members. This is the breakdown of reason made manifest, and it is from this point that the fire takes over. Some Dead Letters Liesel experiences the Holocaust and the Shoah as the destruction of banned books; these forbidden texts appropriate the forbidden otherness of the Jewish community represented by Max Vandenburg, and of other marginalised demographics: The Material Half a red flag, two posters advertising a Jewish poet, three books, and a wooden sign with something written on it in Hebrew. (128) It is implied that the earlier mass hysteria was built on anti-Semitism, a somewhat over zealous leader and a nation of hate fed bigots; 183 however, Liesel makes Hitler the metonym of her suffering. Liesel ascribes
181 182 183

Zusak, The Book Thief, 118. Zusak, The Book Thief, 119. Zusak, The Book Thief, 90.

54

responsibility for the Holocaust, its epistemological distortions, to the archetype of Hitler. This echoes the contemporary understanding of the genocide narrative, specifically demonstrated by the international legal desire to determine that individual criminal responsibility for the Bosnian genocide at Srebrenica could be ascribed to Slobodan Milosevic. Liesel expresses this realisation to her confidante, her surrogate father, vehemently declaring I hate the Fhrer... I hate him.184 This textual equation establishes the metonymy between the national leader and the collective horror of the Holocaust. Hans response demonstrates the role of the bystander, He clenched his eyes. Then opened them. He slapped Liesel Meminger squarely in the face.185 This betrayal brings Liesel to the cusp of the Abject and the Sublime, the surprise in her voice rushed her and it rendered her useless.186 This realisation is the point that Kristeva referred to as a jouissance in which the subject is swallowed up but in which the other, in return, keeps the subject from foundering by making it repugnant.187 By acknowledging the perpetual danger of her Subject

status, Liesel is able to engage with language at a newly sophisticated level. The narrator then places Liesel in the position of the Holocaust victims, obliquely referring to the closing doors of the gas chambers: Two Questions Would the gates shut behind her? Or would they have the good will to let her back out? (126)
184 185 186 187

Zusak, The Book Thief, 124. Zusak, The Book Thief, 125. Zusak, The Book Thief, 125. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 9.

55

Liesels escape places her in a unique position: she is scripted as both victim and survivor, subject to and overcoming the Holocaust, the victim who articulates and who mourns.

The deaths of the Hubermanns and the Steiners, and Liesels eventual move to Australia testify to the degradation of the allegorical motif of the hermeneutic journey.188 The Book Thief is not a Bildungsroman; Liesel never returns home. There is no warm window waiting for her return. This does not abjure a return to narrative equilibrium. Instead the defeat of hermeneutic stability provides the basis for poetic legitimacy. The dissolution of referential origin allows signification to recover the power at the heart of metaphors. When their poetic meanderings have carried them away from their initial motivation, away from literalism, from the certainty of Grandmas house, then metaphor will forge new legitimacy in the representation a rich plurality of inference and meaning fosters clarity. Revenge in the Shape of Mixed Lollies As a metaphor for those who were not victims of the Shoah, Liesel is also afforded certain pleasurable experiences. The threat of an oven looms, but the house is made of gingerbread. She occupies that shifting position between childhood obliviousness and adult responsibility for her, the simple act of finding money and buying lollies ensures that [t]he day had been a great one, and Nazi Germany was a wondrous place.189 For the reader this simple pleasure is soiled by the knowledge that the store owner is devout in her support of National Socialism and that Liesel
188 189

Bernard, A Certain Hermeneutic Slant, 167. Zusak, The Book Thief, 169.

56

understands this. Her action is simultaneously an expression of carefree youth and an indictment of moral fibre, but Liesel normalises a historical period that is troped as horrific. The Book Thief also addresses those Germans who embraced National Socialist ideologies, and the antagonism between people who opposed the Third Reich. This is articulated in the relationship between Hans and his son. A Short History of Hans Hubermann vs His Son In the opinion of Hans Junior, his father was a part of an old, decrepit Germany one that allowed everyone else to take it for the proverbial ride while its own people suffered. Growing up he was aware that his father had been called der Juden Maler the Jew painter for painting Jewish houses. Then came an incident that Ill fully present to you soon enough the day Hans blew it, on the verge of joining the party. Everyone knew you werent supposed to paint over slurs written on a Jewish shop front. Such behaviour was bad for Germany, and it was bad for the transgressor.190 Although too young to be active or autonomous, Liesel and Rudy are nonetheless bystanders and are therefore complicit in (although perhaps not responsible for) the horrors of the Holocaust. They participate in Hitler Youth and United German Girls, and they lack the experience and knowledge to comprehend the implications of their involvement in these
190

Zusak, The Book Thief, 112.

57

organisations.

Geoffrey

Scarres

article,

Understanding

the

Moral

Phenomenology of the Third Reich,191 asserts that most of the Nazi perpetrators were ordinary, otherwise ethical people who allowed their moral perspectives to become distorted. The idea that the Nazis were human that good and evil are helixed is important. At its broken and weeping heart, Vergangenheitsbewltigung responds to the feelings of contemporary Germans and people of German descent about the former Nazis whom they do not abhor. It is one thing to loathe a Small but Evil Emperor, with his caterpillar moustache and his hateful salute. It is something else entirely to look to a loved one, a lover, parent or grandparent, someone who has loved and laughed and played and scolded, who has wiped away tears and taught right from wrong, and then address their complicity in such heinous crimes. Zusak sculpts this relationship between Liesel and Hans Hubermann.

The Book Thief involves the painful witnessing of acts performed by adored figures, particularly Hans Hubermann, who capitulates and joins the Nazi Party. The reader must determine whether the characters affiliations make these actants complicit in the genocide narrative, and whether the juxtaposition with acts of rebellion, of saintliness, is only possible because of their seeming moral questionability. Zusak writes: Some Crunched Numbers Since 1933, ninety per cent of Germans showed unflinching support for Adolf Hitler.
191

Geoffrey Scarre, Understanding the Moral Phenomenology of the Third Reich, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, Vol. 1, No. 4, Solidarity and the Welfare State (Dec., 1998), 423-445.

58

That leaves ten per cent who didnt. Hans Hubermann belonged to the ten per cent. There was a reason for that.192

Hans is not unerringly moral, instead he is unflinchingly ethical he makes a promise and he keeps it. Zusak balances collective responsibility for and complicity in for the Holocaust with the possibility of individual exemption and redemption. In terms of national healing, this is precisely the redemption that comes from the conventional metaphors of war. 193 This simultaneously plays into the Ruler as State Metonymy,194 ensuring the State and its peoples can be rehabilitated and successfully rejoin the international community. Where the Ruler is the State, blame may be directed to one person, freeing the remainder of the population from immediate responsibility. After all, looking back at a beloved figure, one with eyes that were made of kindness, and silver. Like soft silver, melting195 it is difficult to ascribe culpability, guilt, blame. These are words that jar, that point: these are not words that are tempered with compassion. To deny the responsibility of ancestors would be unjust; but to fail to teach children to understand and perhaps even to forgive, could
192

Zusak, The Book Thief, 65.

193

George Lakoff, Metaphor and War: The Metaphor System Used to Justify War in the Gulf (Part 1 of 2), http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Texts/Scholarly/Lakoff_Gulf_Metaphor_1.html, accessed March 30, 2009. Lakoff analysed metaphors used by the administration and the media with regards to the First Gulf War. These were summarised by Victor Kennedy as (a) a fixed set of metaphors that structure the way people think; (b) a set of definitions that allow us to apply such metaphors to a particular situation; and that, as a result, (c) use of a metaphor with a set of definitions can hide realities in a harmful way the STATE IS A PERSON metaphor, which posits that strength for a state is military strength and suggests war is a fight between two people; and the RULER-FOR-STATE METONYMY, which allows characterisation of an aggressor as a bully and an intervener as a policeman and leads to the fairytale of the just war, in which there is a villain, a victim, and a hero: The villain commits a crime against the victim, who is then rescued by the hero. See: Victor Kennedy, Intended Tropes and Unintended Metatropes in Reporting on the War in Kosovo,Metaphor and Symbol,Volume.15, No. 4, 25365 at 254. 194 Lakoff, Metaphor and War, http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Texts/Scholarly/Lakoff_Gulf_Metaphor_1.html, accessed March 30, 2009. 195 Zusak, The Book Thief, 34.

59

send them toward one of two extremes: the self righteous condemnation of every perpetrator, or (like the Neo-Nazis) the re-affirmation of fascist principles in order to exonerate their complicit loved ones. In terms of Vergangenheitsbewltigung, Hans Hubermann is that ethical and

beneficent figure in German history he is a bystander and possibly a perpetrator, but his responsibility is mitigated by his acts of rebellion by painting over hateful words on doors and in books, by hiding and protecting a friends child, and by teaching a lost child words, to read that she may live.

60

Chapter 4: Keeping a Story to Retell Featuring: Speaking from Beyond, Dark Shapes and the Practice of Words, Death and Colour:, and Knowing the Unspoken

61

Speaking from Beyond I have examined the role of words and symbols in

Vergangenheitsbewltigung and how this is experienced in The Book Thief. I now turn my attention to the complex issue of narratorial absence and plurality in The Book Thief and examine the role and purpose of the narrative voice. In his essay Postscript, George Steiner stated that after the death camps everything is possible.196 I have already argued that Vergangenheitsbewltigung engages with the Abject through the Sublime of poetic language. In The Book Thief this is taken further: the text is predominantly focalised through the personification of death as a psychopomp, one who does not take lives, but instead guides souls to the next realm. I contend that by using death as the narrator, Zusak breaks the barriers of the diffrend. Further, death continues this notion of pluralism that permeates the text, resulting in a fluidity of meaning and understanding that transcends normative human experience. I shall first discuss the intersection of narrative structure and poetic language. I shall then address Zusaks use of death and colour as aspects of the Abject and the Sublime. Finally, I shall interrogate the effect of an absent narrator and its relationship to the diffrend.

Dark Shapes and the Practice of Words The Book Thief is a playful text. The language and its construction are engaging and elegant, sometime obtuse and always loaded: each phrase incorporates a hushed whisper of meanings and inferences, waiting to be
196

Steiner, "Postscript", 193.

62

plucked by the reader who draws on them. It is perhaps curious that this level of almost chaotic meaning is trapped by the highly structural format the story is presented in. While the story on the page floats like lftballoons, our narrator ties it to the paper is this an attempt to derive some authority from a work of beauty? Or is it a gentle poke at the stereotype of German order and precision? If it is the latter, may the reader infer that our narrator is the Godfather Death of the Grimms tradition?197 It is a work of structured poetry the wild chaos of language is tied down, chained between indicators of intention. The Book Thief employs a series of thresholds198 there is a prologue and there are parts, chapters, descriptors, asides and even dot points as well as the imbedded narratives discussed in the previous chapter. There is as much in the paratext the covers for various editions, the dedications and fonts as there is in the story itself. This structure is important because it alerts the reader to the presence of an embedded text. The structure on the page preceding the prologue (and the various parts) is not the work of The Book Thiefs narrator. Rather it occurs around him. There is a circus master, hidden from even death himself, who presents deaths story to the reader. The British edition199 plays on this notion. Its cover is already embraced by the plush red curtain, setting a stage and alerting the reader to the Brechtian self-consciousness of the text, simultaneously

representing the book as a re-entry to the womb, the chora and the source of all language, poetry and laughter derive. The cover implies that
197 198

Grimms Complete Fairytales, 590. Grard Genette, Richard Macksey, Jane E. Lewin, Paratexts, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, c.1987). 199 See: Appendix E.

63

the narrator is a character who tells the story from within, but that there is an external narrator who introduces him and facilitates the exchange between death and his audience. This notion is extended within the text itself: there are chapters entitled Deaths Diary that recount his experiences during the war. These chapters have the qualities of an aside and suggest the structured, performative qualities of witnessing and testimony. These performative qualities are exacerbated by deaths narration of Liesels experiences. His narration is uncertain and fluid he occasionally slips from his own mind into that of one of the other characters and recounts their thoughts. When Liesel is talking to a

kindly party member200 death tells the reader that she is thinking Just get off me, get off me.201 However, death does not infer that Liesel recounted these thoughts in her journal.

This shifting focalisation affords death the presumption of omniscience often ascribed to the third person objective narrator while still affording him the intimacy of individual experience. This shadows the function of Vergangenheitsbewltigung such as The Book Thief, where personal testimonies are woven through the broader acceptance of fictional stories. The fictional elements of the story testify for those who are diffrended. Deaths testimony recounting the gas chambers takes Beckers testimony in its arms, as death carries souls. Zusak writes: When their bodies had finished scouring for gaps in the door,
200 201

their

souls

rose

up.

Their

fingernails

had

Zusak, The Book Thief, 364. Zusak, The Book Thief, 364.

64

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, on to the roof and up, into eternitys certain breadth. They just kept feeding me. Minute after minute. Shower after shower. Ill never forget the first day in Auschwitz, the first time in Mauthausen. At that place, as time wore on, I also picked them up from the bottom of the great cliff, when their escapes fell awfully awry. There were broken bodies and dead, sweet hearts. Still, it was better than the gas. Some of them I caught when they were only halfway down. Saved you, Id think, holding their souls up in mid-air as the rest of their being their physical shells plummeted to the earth. All of them were light, like the cases of empty walnuts. Smoky sky in those places. The smell like a stove, but still so cold.202 Deaths testimony is much like Judith Beckers. They both see the inside of a gas chamber and are able to talk about their experiences afterward. Becker, Death, Max and Liesel survive and beg forgiveness for their survival. Death does so by ascribing agency to those who are divested. He has heard them speak. He begs, [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
202

Zusak, The Book Thief, 372-373.

65

French words. I watched their love-visions and freed them from their fear.203 More than just speaking the deads words, he also knows their thoughts. Death can forgo the inadequacies of language and translation and instead can directly experience the pre-linguistic referent. Death experiences the cognitive process that incorporates both emblem and expression it is for this reason that his language is purposefully transgressive. He plays with established metaphor. In the above passage death is involuntarily complicit in, and subjected to, the horrors. Death references Dorothy Canfield Fishers The Bent Twig:204 Minute after minute. Shower after shower compounds the temporal and the physical experiences of the gas chambers victims. Again this fictional experience of voices calls out to the diffrendeds testimony.

Death others humanity from himself and searches to vindicate their existence. He points at the reader, a JAccuse205: They were French, they were Jews, and they were you.206 This line continues the linguistic play, utilising an internal rhyme motif with the repeated sound. Death calls to sweet hearts, not as a noun but instead using sweet as an adjective and heart as a metonym for a person. This playfulness is integral to the texts language it harkens back to the laughter of choratic speech, an emphasis on sound and invoked but absent meaning through metaphor. This linguistic play is deaths most ffective means of
203 204

Zusak, The Book Thief, 374. Dorothy Canfield Fisher, The Bent Twig (1915), Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11221/11221-8.txt, accessed 19 February 2009: Sylvia often wondered in those days if there ever had been a situation so precariously balanced which continued to hang poised and stable, minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day. 205 JAccuse was an open letter from Emile Zola to the French government published on 13 January 1898 which accused the government of, among other things, anti-semitism and the unlawful jailing of Alfred Dreyfus. 206 Zusak, The Book Thief, 374.

66

communication because it is how he hears the testimony of those he represents, as a pre-signified amalgam of signs, symbols, images, sounds and emotions.

Death and Colour: the Abject and the Sublime Death is a neatly constructed narrator, a result as it would happen. He is as much a part of the paratext as he is the focalised narrator. The Prologue is subtitled: A Mountain range of Rubble in which our narrator introduces: Himself the colours and the Book Thief.207 The Prologue is then divided into four chapters (Death and Chocolate, Beside the Railway Line, The Eclipse and The Flag). Deaths narration commences thus: First the colours. Then the humans. Thats usually how I see things. Or at least, how I try.208 A telling introduction. When this opening passage is read in the context of the prologues direction on the previous page, a link is drawn between the narrator and the colours. The prologues directive voice guides the narrator, but is separated from the narrator by Othering him it possesses our narrator and it is allied with the reader as audient to
207

Zusak, The Book Thief, 2.

208

Zusak, The Book Thief, 3; See also: Zusak, The Book Thief, 331, where, in 1942, this approach fails, and instead he sees: So many humans. So many colours.

67

deaths narratorial performance. The directive voice directs death to introduce "himself" - it genders death, rendering him masculine. Our

narrators introduction is purposefully obtuse he is, of course, unspeakable and unknowable, Abjection in motion and so it makes sense that the words skirt and dance around He Who Cannot Be Named. Even when he refers to himself in the third person, when he pleads with the reader to understand that [even] death has a heart,209 he does not give himself a pronoun, or a name, just a result. The reader infers that our narrator is death by drawing on the suggestions of the paratext. The chapters title is Death and Chocolate, a reference to the narrators identity and his favourite colour.210 The blurb also notes that Death... notices Liesel it names death, ascribes him a capital letter that he does not take for himself, and that I have not forced upon him he has enough to carry. The narrator does not refer to himself as Death, and there is no reason that he should. Death signifies an absence; however, he (if only to himself and to those who are dead) is eternally present, unable to absent himself. The narrator is most honest about who he is when he tells the reader [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 your shoulder. I will carry you gently away.211

Our narrator is allied with colour. He is synsthetic, ascribing flavours to colours and sounds to scents.212 His experience of colour accords with an
209 210 211 212

Zusak, Zusak, Zusak, Zusak,

The The The The

Book Book Book Book

Thief, Thief, Thief, Thief,

262. 4. 4. 4.

68

oral sexuality, a sky to slowly suck on.213 His experience is multilayered and pluralistic. Further, he places colours in the in between space, the increments214 (5) that he occupies. Colour is clearly an aspect of the Sublime death deliberately seeks out colours to keep [his] mind off 215 the Abjection he both corporealises and is eternally confronted with. Colour is integral to Deaths narration. It not only describes, but actually is people, places and experiences. Hans Hubermann is his kind silver eyes, Liesel her dangerous brown and Rudy is his safe blue. Colour is a taste, space, a bird perched on [his] shoulder.216 This busy emptiness is precisely that space that Death occupies. He posits a modest proposal: A Small Theory People observe the colours of a day only at its beginnings and ends, but to me its quite clear that a day merges through a multitude of shades and intonations, with each passing moment. A single hour can consist of thousands of different colours. Waxy yellows, cloud-spat blues. Murky darknesses. In my line of work, I make it a point to notice them.217 Death tells the reader that during the war the sky was the colour of Jews.218 Again death compounds unalike elements. Where previously he has knotted time and physicality or sight and flavour, this synsthetic
213 214 215 216 217 218

Zusak, Zusak, Zusak, Zusak, Zusak, Zusak,

The The The The The The

Book Book Book Book Book Book

Thief, Thief, Thief, Thief, Thief, Thief,

4. 5. 5. 4. 5. 372.

69

experience binds the heavens with an earthly hell, clouds with burnt bodies and collected souls.

Using colour to describe Abjection is a startling link between the Abject and the Sublime. Compare the description of Hamburgs destruction in Clines Rigadoon219 with Zusaks description of Molching. Cline writes: These green and pink flames were dancing around...and around... and shooting up at the sky!... those streets of green... pink... and red rubble... you cant deny it... looked a lot more cheerful... a carnival of flames... than in their normal condition... gloomy sourpuss bricks... it took chaos to liven them up... an earthquake... A conflagration with the apocalypse coming out of it!
220

I contrast this with Zusaks description of Molching under siege: The last time I saw her was red. The sky was like soup, boiling and stirring. In some places it was burnt. There were black crumbs, and pepper, streaked among the redness...Within minutes, mounds of concrete were stacked and piled. The streets were ruptured veins. Blood streamed until it was dried on the road... the sky remained a devastating, home-cooked red... Snowflakes of ash fell so lovelily you were tempted to stretch out your tongue to catch them taste them...221

219 220 221

Louis-Ferdinand Cline, Rigadoon, tr. Ralph Manheim, (New York: Dell, 1974). Cline, Rigadoon, 130. Zusak, The Book Thief, 13-14.

70

Where Cline uses a carnival of descriptive colours, Zusak employs a motif that runs through the entirety of The Book Thief: deaths synsthesia, his confused senses. They establish a contrast between experiences. He ties this back to expressive imagery via articulated and unarticulated signification. For all her control over the symbolic, upon emerging from her choratic womb into the horror and destruction of her beloved Himmel Street, Liesel, although surrounded and supported by the structure or signification, can only express the emotive referent through inarticulate but coherent action: She leaned down and looked at his lifeless face and Liesel kissed her best friend Rudy Steiner soft and true on the lips. He was dusty and sweet. He tasted like regret in the shadows of trees and in the glow of the anarchists suit collection.222 This story uses fairy tale motif, but it is not a fairy tale, and I have already told you that kisses do not wake the sleeping, nor do they liven the dead.

Knowing the Unspoken George Steiners book The Portage to San Cristobel of A.H.223 attempts to represent narrative pluralism and, in doing so, asks the reader to reject any one version of the past.224 This literary tradition is continued in Vergangenheitsbewltigung. As fiction, these books are, of necessity, alternative histories. In The Book Thief, Zusak uses the narrative voice of
222 223

Zusak, The Book Thief, 570. George Steiner, Passage to San Cristobel of AH, (London: Faber & Faber, 1981). 224 Steiner, "Postscript," 193; Joseph Lowin, "Steiner's Helicopters", Jewish Book Annual, Volume 41, (1983-84): 48-56.

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death to give credence to a factual history that he as author could never know. He writes of Auschwitz: I shiver when I remember as I try to de-realise it. I blow warm air into my hands, to heat them up. But its hard to keep them warm when the souls still shiver. God. I always say that name when I think of it. God. Twice, I speak it. I say His name in a futile attempt to understand. But its not your job to understand. Thats me who replies. God never says anything. You think youre the only one he never answers?225 Again, we hear the echo of Lamentations: Yea, when I cry and call for help, He shutteth out my prayer226 this allies the manifestation of Abjection, death, with the Abjected Jew, Max, as removed from Gods favours. This death is not the Grim Reaper of Western tradition, but is gentle, uncertain and perhaps a little timid.

Death asks, [the] question is, what colour will everything be at that moment when I come for you? What will the sky be saying?227 But even for Death the colour disappears: You see, to me, for just a moment, despite all of the colours that touch and grapple with what I see in this world, I will often catch an eclipse when a human dies.228 In terms of
225 226 227 228

Zusak, The Book Thief, 373. Lamentations, 3:8, Masoretic Torah. Zusak, The Book Thief, 4. Zusak, The Book Thief, 12.

72

articulating the Abjection of the Shoah and the Holocaust, death is the ideal narrator. He is the chief curator of our imaginary museum; he would protect us in the last resort from the Abjection that contemporary literature claims to expend while uttering it.229 He is explicit about this, proclaiming I am a result.230 This is precisely what Kristeva addresses when she writes: The corpse (or cadaver: cadere, to fall), that which has irremediably come to a cropper, is cesspool, and death; it upsets even more violently the one who confronts it as fragile and fallacious chance. A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. The presence of signified death a flat encephalograph, for instance I would understand, react, or accept.231 The Abject that Death feels most keenly is the leftover humans. The survivors. Theyre the ones I cant stand to look at, although on many occasions, I still fail. I deliberately seek out the colours to keep my mind off of them, but now and then, I witness the ones who are left behind, crumbling amongst the jigsaw puzzle of realisation, despair and surprise. They have punctured hearts. They have beaten lungs.232

229 230 231 232

Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 16. Zusak, The Book Thief, 7. Zusak, The Book Thief, 3. Zusak, The Book Thief, 5.

73

Deaths sympathy aligns with those who are diffrended, those who cannot speak the suffering. He speaks for those who are silenced his is the voice of the Abjected.

74

Conclusion

The Book Thief Last Line I have hated the words and I have loved them, and I Hope I have made them right.233

233

Zusak, The Book Thief, 562.

75

Ever After Kristeva wrote: [in] the dark halls of the museum that is now what remains of Auschwitz, I see a heap of childrens shoes, or something like that , something I have already seen elsewhere, under a Christmas tree, for instance, dolls I believe. The Abjection of Nazi crime reaches its apex when death, which, in any case, kills me, interferes with what, in my living universe, is supposed to save me from death: childhood, science, among other things.234

The death who walks through the pages of The Book Thief has interfered: he has taken a book from amongst the souls and carried it in the hopes of finding redemption for the (in)humanity that works him so hard. And in the scribbled pages of a girl who has lost and found and lost and lost and survived and mourned, he finds that redemption. Death can forgive humanity the horrors they force him to confront, because he can realise the complex interplay between group and individual responsibility.

Vergangenheitsbewltigung works throughout The Book Thief, drawing together the disparate elements of screams, tears, snow and words to show us their beauty. Abjection and Sublimation shiver side by side in the
234

Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4.

76

northern snows while I while we with the benefits of a developed genocide narrative gleaned through both temporal and geographical distance, listen to the susurrus of pages swell to a cacophony. Over and over they tell us: to read is to survive, to survive is to live, to live is to mourn and to mourn is to love, to love is to write, and closing the circle to write is to reinvent love.235

235

Julia Kristeva, Colette, trans. Jane Marie Todd, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

77

Appendix A

The Stand Over Man

78

79

80

81

82

83

Appendix B

The Word Shaker

84

85

86

87

88

89

90

Appendix C
Speaking for the Silenced

Appendix D Maus: Time Flies

91

Appendix E
The Book Thief Cover British Edition

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References Primary Texts

Boyne, John, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, Oxford: David Fickling Books, 2006. Cline, Louis-Ferdinand, Rigadoon, tr. Ralph Manheim, New York: Dell, 1974. Genet, Jean, The Thiefs Journal, Paris: The Olympia Press, 2004, c 1949. Grimms Complete Fairytales, New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1993. Keneally, Thomas, Schindlers Ark, London: Hodder Headline, 1983. Kristeva, Julia , Powers of Horror, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Speigelman, Art, The Complete Maus, London: Penguin Books, 2003. Yolen, Jane, Briar Rose, New York : Tom Doherty Associates, 1993, c1992. Zusak, Markus, The Book Thief, Sydney: Picador, 2005

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Ball, Magdalena, Interview with Markus Zusak, http://www.compulsivereader.com/html/index.php? name=News&file=article&sid=1273, accessed 5 May 2009. Fisher, Dorothy Canfield, The Bent Twig 1915, Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11221/11221-8.txt, accessed 19 February 2009 Lakoff, George, Metaphor and War: The Metaphor System Used to Justify War in the Gulf Part 1 of 2, http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Texts/Scholarly/Lak off_Gulf_Metaphor_1.html, accessed March 30, 2009. Schiller, Friedrich, The Piccolomini, III, trans. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1994, English Verse Drama Full-Text Database, accessed 3 June 2009.
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Genette, Grard, Richard Macksey and Jane E. Lewin, Paratexts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, c.1987. Gill, Eric, An Essay on Typography, ed. Christopher Skelton, Boston: David R. Godine, 1993 c. 1931. Grosz, Elizabeth, Sexual Subversions, Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 1989. Henham, Ralph J., Paul Chalfont and Paul Behrens, The Criminal Law of Genocide, Bodmin: MPG Books Ltd. Kant, Immanuel, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, trans. John T. Goldthwait, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Klee, Ernst , Willi Dresser and Volker Reiss, Eds., The Good Old Days: The Holocaust as seen by its perpetrators and bystanders, New York: Konecky & Konecky, 1988. Kovner, Abba, The Mission of Survivors: Address delivered in Yiddish on 17 July 1945 at a meeting of members of the Jewish Brigade and representatives of the Jewish Partisans and Combatants of Eastern Europe, Reproduced in Yisrael Gutman and Livia Rothkirchen eds, The Catastrophe of European Jewry: Antecedents, history, reflections, Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1976. Kristeva, Julia, Towards a Semiology of Paradigms, ed. French and Lack, The Tel Quel Reader, New York: Routeledge, 1998. Kristeva, Julia, Colette, trans Jane Marie Todd, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.. Lakoff, George, Contemporary Theory of Metaphor, in Metaphor and Thought, 2nd ed., ed., Andrew Ortney, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Lamm, Maurice ,The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning, 2nd ed., New York: Jonathan David Publishers, 2000. Lyotard, Jean-Franois, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991. Lyotard, Jean-Franois, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, 7th Ed., trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Milchman, Alan and Alan Rosenberg, Postmodernism and the Holocaust, Atlanta: Editions Rodopi B.V., 1998.

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Mller, Filip , Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers, Chicago: Ivan R Dee, 1979. Neitzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R.J. Hollingdale and E.V. Rieu, Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1961, c. 1885. Paulson, Ronald, Emblem and Expression: Meaning in English Art of the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975. Scharfstein, Sol, Torah and Commentary, Jersey City: KTAV Publishing House, Inc, 2008. Schiller, Friedrich, Concerning the Sublime in Essays, Eds. Walter Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahlstrom, New York: Continuum, 1993. Slaughter, Joseph R., Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law, New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. Steiner, George, "Postscript", in Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966, London: Faber & Faber, 1967. Steiner, George, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Steiner, George, Anno Domini: Three Stories of the War, London: Faber and Faber, 1964. Steiner, George, Errata: An Examined Life, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. Steiner, George, Passage to San Cristobel of AH, London: Faber & Faber, 1981. Steiner, George,The Death of Tragedy, 2nd ed, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Warner, Marina, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers, London: Chatto & Windus, 1994. Zipes, Jack, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Processes of Civilisation, Hoboken: Routledge, 2006.
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Bernard, Catherine, A Certain Hermeneutic Slant: Sublime Allegories in Contemporary English Fiction, Contemporary Literature, Volume 38, No. 1, 1997: 164-184.
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Freedman, David Noel, and Erich A. von Fange, Metrics in Hebrew Poetry: The Book of Lamentations Revisited, Concordia Theological Quarterly, Volume 60, No. 4, 1996: 279-305 Haase, Donald, Children, War and the Imaginative Space of Fairy Tales, The Lion and The Unicorn 24, 2000, 360-377. Haase, Donald, Overcoming the Present: Children and Fairytales in Exile, War, and the Holocaust, in Mit den Augen eines Kindes: Children in the Holocaust, Children in Exile, Children under Fascism, ed. Viktoria Herling, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998: 86-99. Kamenetsky, Christa, Folklore and Ideology in the Third Reich, Journal of American Folklore 90 1977: 168-178. Kennedy, Victor, Intended Tropes and Unintended Metatropes in Reporting on the War in Kosovo, Metaphor and Symbol,Volume.15, No. 4, 253-265. Kid, Kenneth A is for Auschwitz: Psychoanalysis, Trauma Theory, and the Childrens Literature of Atrocity Childrens Literature 33,2005, 120-150. Lowin, Joseph, "Steiner's Helicopters", Jewish Book Annual, Volume 41, 1983-84: 48-56. Owens, Craig, The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory Postmodernism, October, Vol. 12, Spring, 1980: 67-86. Pierson, Kimberley J., Revenge and Punishment: Legal Prototype and Fairytale Theme, Circles Buffolo Womens Journal of Law and Sociological Policy 3 1988. Scarre, Geoffrey, Understanding the Moral Phenomenology of the Third Reich, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, Vol. 1, No. 4, Solidarity and the Welfare State Dec., 1998: 423-445. Sicher, E. ,The Scandal of the Holocaust, The European Legacy, Volume 6, No. 5, 2001: 639-641. of

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