The Book Thief

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The Book Thief (original title The Book Thief ) is a 2005 published novel of the writer Markus Zusak .

content

The action takes place in Germany, before and during the Second World War . The narrator of the novel is death, which takes people's souls with it and which is deeply repugnant to his profession. It tells the story of the nine-year-old girl Liesel Meminger at the beginning of the novel in 1939. The child's experiences in the fictional town of Molching near Munich are portrayed from the perspective of death, based on the real town of Olching , west of Munich, during the Nazi era .

The - mostly fictional - books that Liesel either receives as a gift, lets them go with them on favorable occasions or secretly borrows them play a central role: The Handbook for Gravedigger , Faust , the Dog , The Lighthouse , The Shrug , The Piper , The People of Clay , Der Überstehmann , Die Wortschüttlerin, The dream carrier , The last human stranger , A song in the dark , Duden dictionary of meanings . One book is somber over all events: Mein Kampf .

The story ends with Liesel's death when she is already an old woman and lives with her family in Australia. Death asks her about her life, shows her her long-forgotten autobiography and confesses that it is haunted by people , an unusual, ironic perspective, since people are usually afraid of death and not the other way around.

Dietmar Gerts writes in his essay Wut auf Gott : “Death likes you and leaves you alone. Perhaps also because Liesels and her friends' objections are against him? In any case, he has a weakness for people who love books and stories and are committed to life - like the Jew who gives Liesel stories or like Liesel and her friend who slipped bread to the concentration camp inmates who were driven by. "

expenditure

The book was published in 2008 in a translation by Alexandra Ernst by cbj- Verlag and by Blanvalet in a youth and adult edition with the same text. The original The Book Thief was published as a novel for young adults in Australia in 2005, and as a youth book in the United States in 2006. In Great Britain the book was published in January 2007 as a book for young people and as an adult book and became a bestseller in both categories. In January 2008, paperback editions came on the market. The book has now been translated into more than 40 languages.

Awards

Audio book

The book thief was published in 2008 as an audio book by Random House Audio in a slightly shortened reading version, performed by Boris Aljinović .

filming

The filming of the film Die Bücherdiebin , directed by Brian Percival, took place in the Babelsberg studio in Potsdam in 2013 . The main roles are played by Geoffrey Rush , Emily Watson and Sophie Nélisse . Behind the camera, this American-German co-production was Florian Ballhaus . The music was written by the Oscar- nominated American composer John Williams . The majority of the shooting took place in the studios and the outside backdrops of Studio Babelsberg, including on Berliner Straße .

The book thief came to cinemas nationwide on March 13, 2014.

According to the Reading Foundation , novels and films are suitable as impulse material for interdisciplinary school lessons in grades 8–12.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Nina Rehfeld: Children's book adaptation "The Book Thief": Bombs for the whole family . In: Spiegel Online . March 12, 2014 ( spiegel.de [accessed August 10, 2015]).
  2. ↑ Dietmar Gerts: Anger on God. Retrieved August 10, 2015 .
  3. ↑ Julia Deißler: The phenomenon of all-age literature. In: Diploma thesis at the FH Potsdam. 2010, accessed August 10, 2015 .
  4. ^ Vita for Markus Zusak: The book thief . Retrieved January 27, 2015.
  5. ↑ Sabine Erbstößer / Christina Klätte: Children's literature on the Holocaust / National Socialism - assessed from the perspective of historical learning (Part 2). 2010, accessed August 10, 2015 .
  6. ↑ The Book Thief | 20th Century Fox. In: The Book Thief | 20th Century Fox. Retrieved August 10, 2015 .
  7. ↑ Susan Vahabzadeh: "The Book Thief" in the cinema - In the letter dance hall . In: sueddeutsche.de . ISSN  0174-4917 ( sueddeutsche.de [accessed on August 10, 2015]).
  8. ↑ Start dates for The Book Thief in the Internet Movie Database
  9. ↑ The Book Thief. In: www.stiftunglesen.de. Retrieved August 10, 2015 .