Ilsa Hermann: The Power Of Words

1186 Words5 Pages
1. "I have hated the words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right." (528) After encountering Max being forced on the way to a concentration camp, Liesel becomes hopeless of the written word, seeing Hitler's words as the source of her suffering. Ilsa Hermann gives her a blank book and encourages her to write hoping she will. While then, Liesel writes the story of her life, containing both tragedy and beauty, at a fevered pace. Liesel has come to the realization that words can cause both violence and comfort, and she strives to make them "right" by combating propaganda with writing that emanates from love. The reason I chose this quote to be a part of one of my passages is because it gives a great deal of explanation of how…show more content…
Liesel takes in what she said and imagines of Ilsa's face becoming physically battered by her cruel invective. Liesel later comes to regret her tirade, as she realizes the power of words to inflict harm on others. 6. "Mystery bores me. It chores me. I know what happens and so do you. It's the machinations that wheel us there that aggravate, perplex, interest, and astound me." (243) As narrator, Death employs the technique of foreshadowing throughout the novel to reveal, among other things, the fates, survival, or death. Just prior to this passage, Death describes how Rudy Steiner dies at the end of the book. Marcus Zusak's employment of foreshadowing places emphasis on the events in Nazi Germany that lead the characters to their ends. 7. "There were the erased pages of Mein Kampf, gagging, suffocating under the paint as they turned." (237) Max whitewashes, a brief retelling of his life, his family's persecution by the Nazis, and his friendship with Liesel. Just as Hans used the same copy of Mein Kampf to help bring Max to safety, Max boldly transforms Nazi ideology into…show more content…
She stays at the top of the tree until her friend ("the young man") meets her there. When they climb down, the tree falls, smashing a large part of Hitler's forest. They walk down the tree trunk, people return to Hitler's forest, others quietly follow the two friends. Despite the violent against Jews in Nazi Germany, there were a number of Germans who disagreed, if only quietly, with Hitler's persecution. Max's story aims to encourage Liesel to be brave and willing to counter words of hatred with words of love; these final lines suggest that others would be willing to follow her if she took such a stand. 10. "I am haunted by humans." (550) The Book Thief is framed by Death's and death's inability to reconcile the remarkable cruelty and the remarkable compassion of which human beings are simultaneously capable. Liesel's life story contains elements of both, and by the end of the novel, Death appears to be no more capable of judging humanity than at the novel's outset. Death tells Liesel that it is "haunted" by humans, just as humans are haunted by
Open Document