The Book Thief
The Book Thief
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Markus Zusak on The Book Thief
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
Stories heard at a kitchen table in SydneyThe book’s raw material came not from archives but from Zusak’s own childhood in Sydney, where his German and Austrian immigrant parents told their wartime stories at the family table. He has described the effect of inheriting that world as something closer to fluency than to research.
I owe my parents everything. They gave me the world of this book like a language I didn’t know I had. Sure, there’s a ratio of probably 90 percent fiction in the finished work, but it’s the world and backdrop of the story that they brought to life. It was like waking up one day and being able to speak Russian or Spanish when previously you couldn’t.
One image from his mother’s childhood, set on the outskirts of Munich, lodged in him and would not move. It carried the texture he needed because it was not about the war’s scale but about two people and one piece of bread. The synthesis records it this way: she heard what sounded like cattle being herded down the street; it was people being marched toward a concentration camp, and she watched an old man who couldn’t keep up receive bread from a boy, both of them whipped for it. Years later, when Zusak began to think seriously about a book set in wartime Germany, a girl he had sketched in a discarded page came back to him.
I thought, ‘Maybe I should put that book thief in.’
The girl had originally appeared in a single page he drafted by hand after his computer broke, set in modern-day Sydney and set aside. The fact that she migrated from one abandoned draft into the center of his parents’ world shows how the book assembled itself from pieces that arrived years apart.
What gave the book’s premise its moral logic was a connection Zusak made between language and power. He had been thinking about how Hitler consolidated a nation without a conventional military campaign in the early years, and the implication for a story about a girl who steals books snapped into focus.
Stories are actually what we’re made of. When you have people wanting to control that story, that’s a point of them wanting to control us.
How he wrote it
Two hundred scrapped pages and a line about waterZusak began with his parents and a notebook before he had a manuscript, using what he heard at home as a foundation he could then test against the historical record. He flew to Germany only after finishing a full draft, checking street-level details on the ground.
To begin I interviewed my parents, did some reading and then started writing. So I had a base of the story, then I’d do more research and I’d do more writing.
The narrator was the hardest problem he faced, and he solved it wrong repeatedly before he solved it right. His first attempt with Death ran to 200 pages before he abandoned it. He then tried Liesel as first-person narrator, tried third person, tried different tenses. Each version failed for a different reason.
I wrote 200 pages and he was just too macabre – you know, I’d feel like I’d have to take a bath every time I wrote a page.
The breakthrough came in Tasmania, where Zusak was standing near water and thinking about what the book’s last line needed to be. The closing words of Norman Maclean’s novella, ‘I am haunted by waters,’ gave him the emotional architecture he had been missing for Death as a character.
The real breakthrough was when I thought of the last line of the book. I was down in Tasmania and there was water everywhere around me. I was reminded of the last line of a book called ‘A River Runs Through It,’ which is, ‘I am haunted by waters.’ I thought, ‘Death is afraid of us and haunted by us, because he is on hand to see all the terrible things we do to each other. It makes sense that he is telling the story to prove to himself that humans can be beautiful and selfless as well.’
Once he had Death’s emotional motive settled, the question became what kind of narrator voice that vulnerability required. The final version of Death is not the detached figure of the first 200 pages but something more worn down.
What really clinched it after all the mistakes, all the doubts and other possibilities, was when I realized that Death should have just that slightest edge of vulnerability. It was when I understood that he was actually tired, and afraid, and haunted by all the cleaning up, especially during wartime.
The book’s unconventional structure, including the visual breaks, invented grammar, and small announcements scattered through the text, survived because Zusak stopped writing for a hypothetical reader. He was certain the book would find almost no audience, and that certainty freed him. The emotional cost of finishing it was real: in a video interview, he described writing the final section.
I was just bawling the whole time when I was writing the last 50 pages or so... if I didn’t cry while I was writing it, it would not have been right. [paraphrased from audio]
The personal thread
A book that is everything because of where it came fromZusak had published four novels before this one, and he has not ranked them against each other in public. But he has said something about this book specifically that he has not said about the others, and it points directly to his parents.
All my books are important to me, but this is the one that is everything to me because of where it came from.
The world Zusak absorbed at the kitchen table was so thoroughly part of him that when he finished his manuscript in Sydney and then flew to Germany to check what he had written, almost nothing needed correcting. He described that experience in terms that collapse the distance between the child listening to stories and the adult who built a novel from them.
That world of Germany was in my head the way English is in my head, because of the stories I heard growing up. It was like I could reach for it the same way I can reach for a word to use.
On craft choices
Oddities that stayed because no one was watchingThe book’s length, 580 pages narrated by Death with nearly every named character dead by the end, was not a calculated bet. Zusak was certain the book would be ignored, and that certainty changed every decision he made about what to keep.
As soon as I brought Death in as the narrator, I knew that 100 pages wasn’t going to happen. The fact that it ended up being much bigger is simply the thought that a book is only as long as its ideas, and this one just happened to have more ideas than I expected.
paulcunliffe.wordpress.com, “Interviewed: Markus Zusak, writer of The Book Thief and The Messenger – PAUL CUNLIFFE”Some of the book’s most specific details came not from planning but from chance. Rudy’s defining hero, Jesse Owens, the Black American sprinter who won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics under Hitler’s gaze, arrived when Zusak walked into a library looking for soccer players and found a book lying open to a photograph.
I thought, ‘I don’t need any more; I’ve got Jesse Owens.’
The prologue’s color scheme, red, white, and black, built up across months of drafting before Zusak noticed what he had made. The Nazi flag carries exactly those three colors, and he had arrived at them without conscious design. He has described that discovery as one of several moments in the process when the book seemed to know more than he did. His position on what craft finally requires is direct.
You can only write like yourself. No one else could have written that book, and that is always the goal.
What he wants us to sit with
Story first, subject second, and then look aroundZusak has spent twenty years pushing back against the category his book is most often placed in. His argument is not that the history doesn’t matter but that the story had to earn its right to the history, not the other way around.
I actually never looked at the book as a Holocaust novel or a World War Two novel. While I was writing, I was asking, ‘Does the story work? Do the characters work? I guess it’s a case of story first, subject second.’
When he does offer a summary of what the book is doing, he keeps returning to the same axis: destruction through words and recovery through words. The formulation he has settled on after two decades carries both the ugliness and the aspiration at once.
For me, this was a book about a time and place where people were destroying people with words, and a girl who’s stealing the words back and writing her own story, and it’s a beautiful story. What’s the message? Maybe it’s that stories really make us who we are — the stories we read and the stories we write and the stories we make.
He refuses to sort his morally compromised characters into villains and heroes, asking his readers to hold the same discomfort he held while writing. Figures like Alex Steiner, Rudy’s father, who keeps his head down through the Nazi years to protect his family, receive neither his endorsement nor his condemnation.
My job isn’t to condemn Frau Diller and congratulate Hans Hubermann or Alex Steiner. It’s my job to put them next to each other and see what happens next.
At the book’s 20th anniversary, he reflected on how readers’ relationship to the novel’s setting has shifted. When it first appeared, Nazi Germany was unambiguously the past. He finds no comfort in the change.
Whereas now there’s a sense of you could just be looking around.
That sentence, delivered without elaboration, is the sharpest thing he has said about why the book keeps finding readers. Death in the novel tells Liesel’s story to convince himself that humans are worth something. Zusak seems to write for the same reason, without the certainty that he is right.