In the twenty-ninth chapter of The Book Thief, we finally get a full backstory on Hans Hubermann, learning why he was rejected from joining the Nazi party and how Max came to end up on his doorstep. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to read The Book Thief.
Honestly, I have been anxiously awaiting this much-needed flashback, and Markus Zusak does not disappoint. We’d been given the seeds for the stories of Liesel, Hans, Walter, and Max, but only vaguely understood why these people’s lives were becoming intertwined. In just one chapter, we’ve been given a hung chunk of the story for why Hans Hubermann has turned out the way he has.
PART FOUR
the standover man
CH. 29: THE ACCORDIONIST
(The Secret Life of Hans Hubermann)
Max arrives at the Hubermann household and promptly asks two questions: “Hans Hubermann? Do you still play the accordion?” A strange question to initially ask a man, sure, but Death is quick to give us the context for this. In truth, there was nothing else you COULD ask Hans but this.
Zusak takes his flashback all the way to the first World War, where Hans avoided death with impossible odds for the first time. Death even realized, though much later at the hands of Liesel’s words, that he actually came rather close to Hans Hubermann quite a few times.
The first time we were in the vicinity of each other, Hans was twenty-two years old, fighting in France. The majority of young men in his platoon were eager to fight. Hans wasn’t so sure. I had taken a few of them along the way, but you could say I never even came close to touching Hans Hubermann. He was either too lucky, or he deserved to live, or there was a good reason for him to live.
And maybe this flashback is suggesting that there’s a pretty darn good reason for him to live. Well, I could provide a few, most especially the joy and happiness that he has brought Liesel so unconditionally. I suppose it was also pretty obvious that Hans would have had to have served in the first World War, but I didn’t expect to read about how much it would affect his entire life, especially considering the absurdity of the whole situation.
Another perspective would suggest that in the nonsense of war, it made perfect sense.
Touché, Death.
Zusak moves us through the repetition of men in war. As he writes:
It was like a serial. Day after day after day. After day:
The conversation of bullets.
Resting men.
The best dirty jokes in the world.
Cold sweat–that malignant little friend–outstaying its welcome in the armpits and trousers.
We haven’t spent much time outside of anyone’s world aside from Liesel, so the chance to learn more about the other main player in this tale is appreciated. We learn that Hans is not a particularly good soldier, but he’s also not particularly bad, either. He just is. He is in the middle. He is the middle. And it saves his life, but I’ll get there. We have to talk about Erik Vandenburg first, a German Jew who becomes Hans’s best friend. He’s the man that Hans eventually learns the accordion from.
The two of them gradually became friends due to the fact that neither of them was terribly interested in fighting. They preferred rolling cigarettes to rolling in snow and mud. They preferred shooting craps to shooting bullets. A firm friendship was built on gamboling, smoking, and music, not to mention a shared desire of survival. The only trouble with this was that Erik Vandenburg would later be found in several pieces on a grassy hill. His eyes were open and his wedding ring was stolen. I shoveled up his soul with the rest of them and we drifted away. The horizon was the color of milk. Cold and fresh. Poured out among the bodies.
I’m not sure what exactly motivates Hans Hubermann, but what Death constructs here is the beginnings of what will later inspire Hans to do something incredibly dangerous. Of course, part of what happens is due to pure chance, as Death explains in the next section. He simply doesn’t go into battle on the day that Erik Vandenburg is killed. That’s because of Sergeant Stephan Schneider, a man known for “his sense of humor and practical jokes, but more so for the fact that he never followed anyone into the fire. He always went first.” He’s also a man who constantly asks his fellow soldiers a seemingly inconspicuous question that generally leads to them having to do an unbearable task.
On this particularly day, Schneider asks Hans’s battalion who has neat handwriting. He is met with silence, not only because the soldiers have learned to be reluctant towards anything Schneider asks them, but because they learn whomever volunteers will also miss the day’s battle.
Erik Vandenburg and Hans Hubermann glanced at each other. If someone stepped forward now, the platoon would make his life a living hell for the rest of their time together. No one likes a coward. On the other hand, if someone was nominated…
And that’s when Erik unknowingly saves his best friend’s life. By nominating Hans for the job.
His writing ability was dubious to say the least, but he considered himself lucky. He wrote the letters as best he could while the rest of the men went into battle.
None of them came back.
Thus, Hans escapes Death and inherits his first accordion, the one belonging to the late Erik Vandenburg. After returning home to Stuttgart after the war, Hans tracks down his friend’s wife, only to learn that she once taught the accordion as well. It was in the family and now the accordion, each one littered around her lonely place, was a reminder of Erik. I really liked this scene:
“He taught me to play,” Hans informed her, as though it might help.
Perhaps it did, for the devastated woman asked if he could play it for her, and she silently wept as he pressed the buttons and keys of a clumsy “Blue Danube Waltz.” It was her husband’s favorite.
As I’ve said before, I think this book would be largely impossible to make as a movie, but this scene seems to beg to be filmed. Even that young, Hans had a beautiful heart, one filled with love and compassion. And that heart also breaks–again–when Ms. Vandenburg introduces Hans to her son, Erik’s son.
It didn’t click at all with me the first time I read this chapter. I thought the young boy and the older man named Max were entirely unconnected; I couldn’t figure out exactly how a stranger named Max would end up inside the Hubermann household over twenty years later. But here, in my second read-through for this review, it’s right there, as obvious as ever:
“This is Max,” the woman said, but the boy was too young and shy to say anything.
Max is Erik’s son. That is how he ended up at Hans’s house so far into the future. That is how Max managed to travel so far and get to the Hubermann household. And now my brain has exploded into a trillion pieces of heartbreak because I can’t believe I missed this detail the first time around. Jesus christ, THIS BOOK.
Hans’s life after war is only mildly successful; he does a lot more painting before Liesel ever shows up, but at least he has consistency in those days. He has two children with Rosa, but it isn’t until Hitler rises to power in 1933 that Hans begins to fully form the political and moral thought that guides him to do what he does later. Death spells it out for us:
He was not well-educated or political, but if nothing else, he was a man who appreciated fairness. A Jew had once saved his life and he couldn’t forget that. He couldn’t join a party that antagonized people in such a way. Also, much like Alex Steiner, some of his most loyal customers were Jewish. Like many of the Jews believed, he didn’t think the hatred could last, and it was a conscious decision not to follow Hitler. On many levels, it was a disastrous one.
At this point, we’d received so many huge answers to the character of Hans Hubermann that I was completely taken aback that Zusak would also provide us with the reason Hans actually couldn’t join the NSDAP. It all starts with his realization of a basic, simple fact: what was happening was simply unfair. That’s not to say that Hans reduced the situation to something so simplistic that it erased the reality of the oppression and persecution the Jews faces due to Hitler and the NSDAP. But that’s just where it started. Hans didn’t have words like “oppression” or “tyranny,” so he reduced the situation to something he could understand. As the Jews continued to be maligned and killed and murdered and subject to extreme acts of fear and pain, Hans decided to finally try to join the Party. But Death tells us that Hans makes two crucial mistakes
That first mistake happens on the exact day he gives his form for membership in the Party; in fact, it’s directly after this. He witnesses four men throw bricks into a clothing store run by a Jewish man he knows, Mr. Kleinmann. For Hans, that first mistake starts off as simply as asking Mr. Kleinmann if he is ok. Even though he doesn’t do it until the next day, he paints over the Jewish slur left on Mr. Kleinmann’s door. That is technically the second mistake, though, because immediately after helping out Mr. Kleinmann, Hans foolishly returns to the NSDAP office he came from and PUNCHES THE DOOR AND WINDOW. Unfortunately for Hans, the last member was not out of earshot and returns to ask Hans what is wrong.
“I can no longer join,” Hans stated.
The man was shocked. “Why not?”
Hans looked at the knuckles of his right hand and swallowed. He could already taste the error, like a metal tablet in his mouth. “Forget it.” He turned and walked home.
It is that slight and subtle error, that brief vocalization of his honesty, that would forever stain Hans Hubermann. It doesn’t help that he paints over Kleinmann’s door, but it all adds up to act against him. Luckily, Hans has no more outbursts like this. And he has his accordion.
Painters there were, from all over Munich, but under the brief tutorage of Erik Vandenburg and nearly two decades of his own steady practice, there was no in Molching who could play exactly like him. It was a style not of perfection, but warmth. Even mistakes had a good feeling about them.
I love the parallel here that both Liesel and the Nazis of Molching can find joy or comfort in Hans’s accordion playing. Obviously, they are not the same, but it was hard to ignore that Hans Hubermann’s playing was one of his saving graces.
That saving grace only played a part in what was to come. It is not the entirety of the man’s character or his fate. On June 16, 1939, unbeknownst to me and to Liesel and to anyone else but the two of them, a young stranger visits Hans at his work. He asks those same two questions that Max asks him the next year.
Are you Hans Hubermann?
Do you play the accordion?
This time, though, the stranger asks a third question:
The stranger rubbed his jaw, looked around him, and then spoke with great quietness, yet great clarity. “Are you a man who likes to keep a promise?”
Hans took out two paint cans and invited him to sit down. before he accepted the invitation, the young man extended his hand and introduced himself. “My name’s Kugler. Walter. I come from Stuttgart.”
They sat and talked quietly for fifteen minutes or so, arranging a meeting for later on, in the night.
Chills. Hans Hubermann is going to try to save his best friend’s son. Unbelievable.
Oh good, you're alive! I was confused and then worried by yesterday's lack of review.
I love the image of little Max. So cute. So sad.
And because it can not be said enough: Hans is awesome.
I love finding out more about Hans in this chapter. Some of it is just awful to read (in a good way) because it's such an impossible situation…what's happening to the Jews is unforgivable, but when Hans made his 'mistakes', all I think of was 'Idiot,idiot,idiot!'
I can't imagine what I would do in that situation. I think Zusak does this part really well; the pressure to join the party, the fear of what will happen if you don't (not just to you but your family too), and the terrible feeling of guilt and betrayal Hans has when he gives in.
I love how Hans' experience in WW1 gives him a sort of excuse to not go along with the Nazis. It's almost as if he needed something to justify to himself the risk he was taking by not joining – simply not agreeing with what was happening was not enough, but his life having been saved by a Jew proves to him that this whole thing is 'unfair' and he can tell himself that it's the reason he feels the way he does.
Does that make sense?
Augh, I love this book so much!
Ooops, not sure what happened there. I had some internet problems so I think I posted twice…I didn't log in properly the first time? So now I can't delete this comment either! *headdesk*
I love finding out more about Hans in this chapter. Some of it is just awful to read (in a good way) because it's such an impossible situation…what's happening to the Jews is unforgivable, but when Hans made his 'mistakes', all I think of was 'Idiot,idiot,idiot!'
I can't imagine what I would do in that situation. I think Zusak does this part really well; the pressure to join the party, the fear of what will happen if you don't (not just to you but your family too), and the terrible feeling of guilt and betrayal Hans has when he gives in.
I love how Hans' experience in WW1 gives him a sort of excuse to not go along with the Nazis. It's almost as if he needed something to justify to himself the risk he was taking by not joining – simply not agreeing with what was happening was not enough, but his life having been saved by a Jew proves to him that this whole thing is 'unfair' and he can tell himself that it's the reason he feels the way he does.
Does that make sense?
Augh, I love this book so much
Oh, I love that–you're saying that it's not his experience in WWI that led him to want to resist the Nazis. It's because of Hans's very nature that he could never go along with something like this, but without having had this clear, solid example he could point at and say "a Jew saved my life! I can't hurt his people!" he'd have had more trouble dealing with the idea of risking his life and family's wellbeing by not joining. That's a great thought.
This book breaks my heart and mends it over and over again. It makes me weep for the monsters that human beings can be, but delight in how wonderful we are capable of being.
The Nazi Germany/WWII period in general seems to do that (at least, it does for me). I really love that this book manages to capture that.
I couldn't help but think of Full Metal Jacket when Sgt. Schneider had another soldier clean out the latrine. He isn't cruel like
<img src="http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lhgsjbO2wJ1qhb85vo1_500.gif">
but it had a similar effect on the guy who is singled out for punishment or special treatment. No one wants to be the guy who doesn't go into battle, and it's alienating. He's a perfectly average guy, but he was made exceptional by the intervention of a friend. Hans has spent the rest of his life reflecting on his "cowardice" because he was lucky enough to be spared. It wasn't fair that he was the only one to survive, and he's abhorred unfairness ever since. It was sort of surprising to get all of these answers at once, but we need to see how Hans has been trying to fight against the unfairness of other people and Death over the past two decades.
I love baby Max. I'm weird, and I'm adding him to the list of fictional characters I wish I could hug through the book.
My father, like myself, never talked much, but I remember this:
The family lived in
District 12a small mining town near the belgian border. In spring, they may have seen Panzer and marching columns on their way to occupy Belgium (I’m not sure if my father ever mentioned this), but generally the war seemed far away, and while the UK suffered in the Air Battle of Britain, this was just a happy summer for a ten year old german boy.Food supply was not really short, particularly if you had a Heavy Worker’s Food Ration Card, and the miners had more work than they could handle and earned good wages. Food Ration Cards (the Hubermanns and Steiners got the normal variant) only gave you permission to purchase certain amounts of bread, milk, meat etc., but you had to pay for it, so Liesel and Rudy starved from lack of money caused by lack of customers, not from a general famine.
I don’t know if my father ever found a Pfennig to buy a lolly. Lolli seems to be a german word now, but Zusak didn’t write it this way, and I’m sure I never heard it during my childhood, the golden Wirschaftswunder fifties. My parents called this thing a Lutscher, which exactly describes what Liesel and Rudy do with it. Maybe german kids adopted this wonderfull word “lolly” from british soldiers, and it took about two decades to reach the parts of Germany where kids adopted words from american soldiers?
To put this in historical context, german troops were spread all over Czechia, Poland, Norway, Danmark, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg and parts of France, and from a german point of view it was only a question of time when the UK would negotiate or be successfully invaded. But when Italy had joined Germany in invading France, british troops from Egypt had invaded Libya (then an italian colony), and when autumn came, Italy seemed to loose this war. Fresh troops were needed to help out.
So my fathers oldest brother, who had intended to becaome a miner like his father, had to become a soldier and was send to Tripolis to join what would be known as the Deutsches Afrika Korps. This was the first time my family was touched by the war.
Unlike Hans junior, my uncle Heinrich didn’t experience the terrible winter of Stalingrad. Death met him on a sunny day at Tobruk. The family received the message in spring 1941. And then, their father died in a mine accident.
Thank you for listening, and sorry for the delay. It took some time until my memory was triggerd by the sudden realization that Walter Kugler, in Novermber 1940, could not longer care for his friend because he was probably sent to Libya. Fortunately he had arranged a substitute.
Teehee district 12…
I can't help but wish Death had included one of his little asides for Walter Kugler, too. He risked his life to keep Max hidden. Your story just adds a little more depth to his situation. Thank you very much for sharing this with us.
Thanks for sharing. And since it was early in the war, the rationing wasn't too bad yet, so yeah, Rudy and Liesel were hungry because their families' businesses are suffering because of the war, though for different reasons. And Rudy also has to fight a bunch of siblings for food.
And I know it's not the important thing to take away, but thanks for more information about "lolli." Lutscher means sucker, right? Or a lollipop in normal American english, so we've come back to lolly! I obsess over the wrong things.
Wow, thanks for this. There's been a few comments on this project that have showed me just how much of Word War II I don't know about. It really is an era that contains multitudes, many perspectives and many many stories.
I love the parallel here that both Liesel and the Nazis of Molching can find joy or comfort in Hans’s accordion playing.
I think 'Nazis' is a bit of a… generalisation? A lot of these people might well be members of the Nazi Party but most of them are probably only "Nazi" in the loosest sense of the term – I think the mention of Hans' friend being afraid to meet his eyes really gets this across. It's not *really* that Hans doesn't agree with the Nazis that bothers people. They're afraid of undermining their own "credentials", of suddenly being the ones singled out.
Even though I think a fast read-through is better the first time round, I'm really enjoying this slowed pace. I didn't quite realise before just how big a theme fear was in this book.
Also, how painful is the irony of WWI shaping Hans Hubermann's anti-Nazi convictions vs. the many soldiers (including Hitler) who came out of it bitter and ashamed, eager to blame someone else for their troubles and to make Germany great again?
Also, how painful is the irony of WWI shaping Hans Hubermann's anti-Nazi convictions vs. the many soldiers (including Hitler) who came out of it bitter and ashamed, eager to blame someone else for their troubles and to make Germany great again?
Amazing point. It really speaks to Hans' character. I loved getting his backstory so much.
I do love this book. I was glad to finally read about Hans and understand him better. 🙂
I have an exam today on Nazi Germany…but reading your review is studying right?
I agree, it's so beautiful that Hans refuses to join the Nazi party not because of some high and mighty moral code, but because of fairness. It's so him.
A SMALL BUT NOTEWORTHY NOTE
I’ve seen so many young men
over the years who think they’re
running at other young men.
They are not.
They’re running at me.
^this part gave me chills
Same here!
Oh gosh, I loved that part. So stoic and direct and unassuming and cold. Death seldom sounds cold in this book, but here he does. Not in a cruel way, but more a hopeless acceptance.
Very chilling.
Same.
have i missed something about the review of chapter 28? will that be coming as well, or is this skip to chapter 29 on purpose?
Mark accidentally posted the last two review sections out of order, so the one that ends with chapter 28 was posted on the 31st rather than the 1st. It should be the third one down on the home page.
Some jerk downvoted you >:/ Come on, people, play nice.
no, that ends with chapter 27.
No, I'm pretty sure it ends with 28, but the description says it ends with 27. 3 reviews ago, we had Chapters 21-22, followed by 25-28 (with the description saying 24-27), then 22-23 (number 22 repeated, the chapter itself is different, so it should actually read 23-24), and ending with this! Chapter 29.
…wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff…
the review of "chapters 21-22" covers chapters 21 and 22. the review of "chapters 22-23" cover chapters 22 and 23. the body of the review of "chapters 25-28" covers chapters 24, 25, 26 and 27. one of us has to be missing something.
lol the past week of reviews has been kind of confusing. I pulled up the past few Mark reviews and this is what I've come up with:
"Chapters 21-22" covers 21 and 22, which is The Mayor's Library
"Chapters 22-23" covers 23, which is mislabeled as 22: Enter the Struggler, and 24, labeled as 23
"Chapters 25-28" covers 25-28, but each chapter is mislabeled by one number
And "Chapter 29" is in the right order and labeled correctly and is thus beautiful!
So basically there are two 22s but they are actually different chapters.
Thank you for this. I knew something was amiss, but hadn't gone back to check the details.
I'm guessing it just refers to Liesel and the readers themselves, but the fact that this chapter is subtitled "The Secret Life of Hans Hubermann" makes me wonder whether Rosa actually knows this story about Hans, and how she's going to react to being asked/told to hide Max. It doesn't seem like we're getting much information about what Rosa really knows about her husband, beyond the things she's seen of him on a day to day basis.
When Hans started pondering about his cowardice re: WWI after the fight with Hans Junior, I was thinking that maybe he had been some sort of deserter, and that he was beating himself up with survivor's guilt, making the answer to the "is there cowardice in acknowledging fear and being glad you're alive" question a definite no. Here, though, it seems like the cowardice was in knowing that he was involved in a more or less zero-sum game and knowingly letting Erik lose; he knows he could have volunteered Erik's name first, or counter-volunteered Erik's name afterward, but he didn't. There's the implication that if Hans had known about Max, the game would've gone in Erik's favor. Now, though, Erik is dead and Hans is alive, trying to hide the young man who might not even need Hans' help if only Hans had made a different choice.
And then there's Max himself, who probably has no idea about Hans' story at all, who in the last chapter was blaming himself and calling himself selfish and sinful for risking the Hubermanns' lives in an attempt to save his own.
On the other hand, Max probably still would have needed a place to hide, but had Erik survived and Hans died, there wouldn't be anywhere for him to go after Walter got sent off to war. Either way, it's good that Hans is using his extra chance at life to right a wrong.
I was thinking of it in terms of Erik providing his family with an extra income, therefore increasing the chances of them escaping the country, therefore taking away the need for hiding in the first place. The more I think about it, though, the more I tend to doubt that Erik and his wife would be making enough money in the first place, so it probably wouldn't be very likely that they could flee the area completely, and they probably would need someone to take them in.
Ah, I see what you mean. But yeah, most people couldn't flee. It's just good that Max has somewhere to go.
But if Hans had made a different choice, and he had died instead of Erik, Erik's family would still need saving. Erik himself would need saving, but there would be no Hans to help him. It's entirely possible that Hans accepting Erik's nomination in WWI was, in a roundabout way, the only way to give Max a chance to survive WWII.
Hans Hubermann is an outstanding human being.
I loved this part of the review:
I suppose it was also pretty obvious that Hans would have had to have served in the first World War, but I didn’t expect to read about how much it would affect his entire life, especially considering the absurdity of the whole situation.
Another perspective would suggest that in the nonsense of war, it made perfect sense.
Touché, Death.
Yes, it's exactly like that,
Speaking of THG, they cast Peeta and Gale! Don't know much about the actual actors, but based on appearances, the casting directors seem to be going for the opposite of the book descriptions.
Especially the "Gale is handsome" aspect.
Book Theif Fun Fact: This novel has had 10 different covers…
I just googled this but I only found 4! I love them.. I have the dominoes version
i think there are 4-5 English covers, but other languages have different covers too
There are technically twelve or possibly more of them, but some of them are very similar so I guess they'd really only count as one.
It looks like this person might have posted all of them: http://www.tickettoanywhere.net/2010/01/cover-des…
I love the covers for The Book Thief, that so many of them get it right, or at least look evocative. With some books it's hard to find even one cover that does! When Mark started the project I looked as many of them up that I could find (which was hard – there doesn't seem to be a list of all the countries it's published in anywhere), I managed ten, but there are three in Mauve_Avenger's link that I hadn't seen, which bring the total up to 13!
Whoa, really?
I have the blue-white-bloodstained one.
not sure if anyone mentioned this but The Book Theif has been filmed and was set to be released in 2010… thought i'll ive seen is the trailer… not sure if the full movie came out…
I finished this book right as we were beginning the World War II unit at school. When my teacher spoke about why the German people supported Hitler, I kept wanting to stand up and say, "But not ~all~ of them liked Hitler!" 🙂
I put the Blue Danube Waltz on as I read that scene. In all honestly my eyes got a little watery.