The Book Thief: Situational Irony 3 key examples

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

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

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

Mein Kampf is Hitler's manifesto, which brazenly laid out his anti-Semitic ideology and policies. Hans Hubermann has acquired this copy by joining the Nazi party. He has sent it to Max for this dangerous train ride because no one will suspect a reader of Mein Kampf to be Jewish. Death's comment, "Of all the things to save him," points out the irony that a Jewish man's survival depends on a piece of propaganda that instructs Germans in why and how Jewish people must be eradicated from society. The dark irony demonstrates that even in a totalitarian society, humans' compassion, creativity, and determination can never be fully stamped out. Hans, Max, and Walter Kugler have found a way to turn Hitler's horrible book against him.

Later on in the novel, Max further adapts Mein Kampf from a force for evil into a force for good. At first, he is afraid to let Liesel see the book. She has a young, impressionable mind, and the book is designed to turn people like her into Hitler's weapons. However, instead of keeping the book hidden from Liesel, Max tears it apart and paints over the pages so that he can turn it into a new book. This new book tells the story of "The Word Shaker," a girl who uses language not to manipulate people (as Hitler does) but to save them. The story roughly corresponds with the story of Liesel and Max's friendship. What Max creates is a palimpsest, or a book that is written on top of another book. In so doing, he takes the cruel world envisioned by Hitler and makes from the material something far more beautiful and compassionate. It inspires Liesel to write her own story in defiance of a government that aims to suppress free speech and dissenting viewpoints.

Dramatic irony has hung suspended between Liesel and Rudy for much of their friendship, as Liesel has kept her friendship with Max a secret from him. This secret was necessary to ensure everyone's safety, but it has kept Liesel and Rudy from being as close as they might otherwise have been. She always keeps him at an arm's length. In this scene, Liesel is finally able to be honest with Rudy about her life-changing friendship with Max. As Rudy looks at the book Max made her, he realizes that he is featured in it as a boy with "hair the color of lemons," meaning that Liesel has described him to Max in caring detail. This scene thus reveals not only Liesel's secret friendship with Max but also the important place Rudy holds in her life. It is a rare moment of vulnerability when his love for her is explicitly reciprocated.

However, just at the moment when the dramatic irony resolves and they are closer than ever, Death introduces a new secret that neither one of them knows. Rudy will die in just one month. The reader must bear this heartbreaking knowledge with Death throughout the rest of the novel. The dramatic irony is even more poignant because of the situational irony: Liesel and Rudy have finally started to sort out their relationship just in time to be torn asunder by circumstances beyond their control. Death reminds the reader that this kind of irony is all too common to the human experience, especially in times of war.