Illiteracy and literacy development

Illiteracy and literacy development is one of the central transformations in Liesel Meminger’s life: it begins as a source of public humiliation and isolation, then becomes a practical skill, a means of intimacy, and finally a form of authorship. Her movement toward literacy is not presented as a simple school success. It is created outside the institutions that fail her, through Hans Hubermann’s patient instruction, the physical labor of forming letters, the texts shared with Max Vandenburg, and the voice Liesel eventually brings to frightened communal spaces.

School and Domestic Failure

School is described as a “terrific failure” for Liesel. Although the school is state-run, its heavy Catholic influence makes her Lutheran identity an immediate disadvantage, and the discovery that she cannot read or write compounds that alienation. She is pushed down among much younger children who are only beginning the alphabet. Thin-boned and pale, she nevertheless feels enormous among them, wishing she could become pale enough to disappear. Illiteracy therefore operates socially before it operates academically: it marks her as conspicuous, childish, and deficient in front of her peers.

The household offers little conventional educational support. Hans Hubermann left school in fourth grade, while Rosa Hubermann left in third, so neither parent can provide a confident formal model of reading. There are no books in the house apart from the book Liesel has hidden under her mattress. Her early practice is reduced to whispering the alphabet until she is ordered to be quiet. The absence of books and the adults’ limited schooling show that Liesel’s difficulty is not merely an individual weakness; it is reinforced by poverty, family circumstance, and an environment with few available reading resources.

The Midnight Class

The turning point comes after a bed-wetting incident in which Hans discovers the hidden book. The immediate scene joins shame to opportunity. After washing the sheets and hanging them up, Hans returns and begins what becomes the unofficial “midnight class,” although it usually starts around two in the morning. Liesel sits on cold, clean sheets, ashamed but elated, determined to read the book. The lesson is conducted beyond the school’s authority and at a time when ordinary domestic life has fallen silent, making education a private act of care rather than an institutional obligation.

Hans’s method is practical and materially inventive. When the first approach does not work, he returns with a thick painter’s pencil and a stack of sandpaper, announces that they will start from scratch, and draws a small square containing a capital A in one corner and a lowercase letter in the other. Liesel repeats the letter aloud. The lesson turns literacy into something that can be touched, traced, corrected, and rehearsed. The painter’s pencil and sandpaper are not schoolroom equipment, but they allow Hans to build an alternative classroom from whatever the household possesses.

Liesel later recognizes that Hans, rather than school, taught her to read. She knows that he does not read quickly, yet she also understands that words and writing once helped save his life, alongside the man who taught him the accordion. Her retrospective account gives the education a larger meaning: literacy is not measured only by speed or credentials. Hans’s own limited schooling does not prevent him from making language available to Liesel, and his patience converts a humiliating deficiency into a shared practice.

Reading as Shared Action

As Liesel’s ability develops, reading moves beyond private instruction. The narrative identifies her initially as “the book thief without the words,” a figure whose desire for books precedes her power to read them. The phrase captures the tension at the heart of her development: her identity is already attached to texts before she can fully possess their language. Words are presented as approaching her, eventually becoming something she can hold and wring out, like clouds releasing rain. Literacy thus links physical possession of books with the gradual acquisition of expressive power.

This power becomes visible in the basement during an air raid. When Rosa releases Liesel, Liesel opens The Whistler from the pile and reads aloud in an effort to concentrate and shut out the noise. At first the opening paragraph barely reaches anyone through the din. She ignores Rosa’s demand to repeat herself and continues to the first page. When she turns to page two, Rudy Steiner notices what she is doing, draws the attention of his siblings, and begins listening. Hans comes closer, and by page three a quietness has spread through the crowded basement. Everyone is silent except Liesel.

The scene changes reading from an acquired school skill into social action. Liesel cannot stop the air raid, remove the danger, or repair the damaged world outside. She can, however, organize the attention of the people around her. The text gives her voice a concrete consequence: noise yields to listening, panic yields briefly to concentration, and a frightened group becomes an audience. Reading is no longer proof that she has caught up with younger children; it is a way of making a temporary community.

Writing, Rewriting, and Counter-Authority

Max Vandenburg’s work in the basement extends Liesel’s literacy into a collaborative practice of writing and interpretation. During the week when Liesel is kept away from the basement, Max cuts pages from Mein Kampf, paints over them in white, and hangs them on strings from one end of the basement to the other. The pages are physically transformed from a text associated with Nazi power into a surface for another story. Once the paint dries, Max composes The Standover Man with a small black paintbrush, first formulating the words in his head until he can recount them without error.

Max is educated enough to manage, but he is not a writer or an artist, and his process includes repeated failure. He calculates that he needs thirteen pages, paints forty, and expects at least twice as many mistakes as successes. He practices on pages of the Molching Express, gradually improving his clumsy artwork to an acceptable level. Liesel’s whispered suggestion that the man’s hair resembles feathers enters this process, showing that her literacy is not passive reception: she observes, responds, and contributes language to a handmade book.

The episode also demonstrates that literacy can contest the authority of an existing text. Pages taken from Mein Kampf become the material for Max’s account, while the new story records a relationship between the hidden man and the girl who learns to read. The transformed pages make writing an act of reclamation. Language is not simply a neutral school commodity; it can be taken from a hostile system, repainted, and used to preserve a different human connection.

Authorship and Lasting Change

The culmination of Liesel’s development is her ability to write her own story. In the basement she uses a small paint can as a seat and a large one as a table, then sticks a pencil onto the first page and writes “THE BOOK THIEF,” followed by “a small story.” The improvised furniture recalls the improvised materials of Hans’s lessons and Max’s painted pages. Her authorship grows from the same scarcity that shaped her reading: discarded or ordinary objects become the tools of a deliberate literary act.

This ending changes the significance of her earlier illiteracy. The child who was once forced down among beginners, who could only whisper the alphabet and had no books in the house, has become someone capable of naming, arranging, and preserving experience in writing. Her education remains marked by the institutions that failed her, but it is ultimately formed through relationships and repeated practice: Hans teaches, Max creates, the people in the shelter listen, and Liesel answers by becoming a writer. Literacy therefore develops from private vulnerability into shared voice and finally into control over narrative memory.