28
offers a convincing portrayal of one such hidden community. Set in a Nazi Germany – a society shaped by the threat of Gestapo surveillance which‘ propaganda presented […] as an omnipresent, all-seeing, all-knowing group’ 60 – the novel foregrounds the tension between visibility and concealment, performance and resistance. It focuses on the subversive efforts of the Hubermanns, a family who take advantage of the public transcript enforced by their panoptic society to stage their allegiance to the state whilst secretly opposing it, through which the novel depicts the limitations of totalitarian surveillance and the quiet potential of hidden networks of dissent. Framed by the established surveillance and performance theory, this paper will examine key moments in the novel that exemplify the Hubermanns’ use of performative compliance to preserve a concealed, resistant community. It challenges the dominant historical narrative of a wholly complicit Germany, asserting the presence and importance of defiant, humanising counter-histories. In so doing, The Book Thief contributes to an urgent cultural imperative: the safeguarding of dissent, the celebration of resistance, and the recovery of stories that authoritarian powers would prefer to remain untold.
A key example of staged conformity in The Book Thief manifests in the depiction of flag-bearing. On 28 th March 1936, the Völkischer Beobachter( the Nazi Party’ s official newspaper) documented the response of millions of Germans to the Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels’ call for them to raise the flag in support of the state. The newspaper reports how‘ Flag after flag appeared at the windows. No more grey frontages in the streets, everything is covered in flags’ 61 – a choreographed exhibition of Nazi symbolism designed to present a united nation under the Party’ s authority. Zusak’ s text echoes this spectacle through its fictional German town, Molching, wherein residents participate in the public display of the Nazi flag in celebration of Adolf Hitler’ s birthday. The narrative describes how,
[ o ] n the streets of Molching that day, each window was decorated for the Fuhrer. In some places, like Frau Diller’ s, the glass was vigorously washed, the flag pristine, and the swastika looked like a jewel on a red and white blanket. In
60
The Holocaust Explained. n. d.“ German collaboration and complicity”. https:// www. theholocaustexplained. org / resistance-responses-collaboration / german-collaboration-andcomplicity / informants /( accessed 31 March 2025).
61
Völkischer Beobachter, ' Die Verkehrsstille in der Reichshaupstatdt ', 28 March 1936, 1.