Summary Of The Book Thief By Markus Zuzak

One form of social history, alltagsgeschichte, known as everyday history, concerns itself with studying the links between the regular everyday experiences of ordinary folk, and their link to the wider political and social evolution of a particular society. A prime concern of alltagsgeschichte is the engagement with questioning accepted understandings of “big structures” and “large processes.” Specifically, Alltagsgeschichte examines the role of ordinary individuals in areas such as industrialisation, bureaucratisation, and modernisation. In order to examine the role of society in these areas, alltagsgeschichte historians are foremost concerned with studying the experience of everyday life among the individuals across wider society. Therefore, alltagsgeschichte historians reconstruct the lives of every day folk through historical narrative, with the aim of determining how these experiences concern the development of society’s “big structures” and “large processes.
Jackson Jr. Examines the nineteenth century history of Germanic migration, seeking to find societal factors that motivated the movement of people. In addition, Kirril Shields utilises a fictional historical narrative, Markus Zuzak’s The Book Thief, in order to develop an understanding of how the lives of everyday folk relate to the institution of National Socialism in 1930s Germany. Shields utilises the work as a fictional source, paralleling with historical evidence in a way that provides evidence for the personal and collective exoneration of everyday German folk as it concerns their role in propagating National Socialism. In order to empirically validate this assertion, Shields conducts a comparative study between researcher Martin Broszat’s historical analysis and Zuzak’s work of historical fiction, drawing comparison between the two in a way that bolsters Shield’s assertion that exculpates the ordinary German