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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
PART FOUR<\/strong> CH. 29: THE ACCORDIONIST<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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.<\/p>\n Another perspective would suggest that in the nonsense of war, it made perfect sense.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Touch\u00c3\u00a9, Death.<\/p>\n Zusak moves us through the repetition of men in war. As he writes:<\/p>\n It was like a serial. Day after day after day. After day:<\/p>\n The conversation of bullets.<\/p>\n Resting men.<\/p>\n The best dirty jokes in the world.<\/p>\n Cold sweat–that malignant little friend–outstaying its welcome in the armpits and trousers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And that’s when Erik unknowingly saves his best friend’s life. By nominating Hans for the job.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n None of them came back.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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:<\/p>\n “He taught me to play,” Hans informed her, as though it might help.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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:<\/p>\n “This is Max,” the woman said, but the boy was too young and shy to say anything.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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:<\/p>\n 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.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n “I can no longer join,” Hans stated.<\/p>\n The man was shocked. “Why not?”<\/p>\n 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Are you Hans Hubermann?<\/p>\n Do you play the accordion?<\/p>\n This time, though, the stranger asks a third question:<\/p>\n 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?”<\/p>\n 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.”<\/p>\n They sat and talked quietly for fifteen minutes or so, arranging a meeting for later on, in the night.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Chills. Hans Hubermann is going to try to save his best friend’s son. Unbelievable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Continue reading
\nthe standover man<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n(The Secret Life of Hans Hubermann)<\/strong><\/p>\n