FROM LIFE TO DEATH: BARE LIFE IN THE BOOK THIEF

Abstract

This article examines Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief through the theoretical lens of thanatopolitics, arguing that the novel represents Nazi Germany as a regime that systematically reduces political subjects to “bare life.” Drawing primarily on Giorgio Agamben’s concept of homo sacer, alongside Michel Foucault’s articulation of biopolitics and thanatopolitics, the study analyzes how Jewish characters, political outsiders, civilians, and children are rendered legally abandoned and exposed to death. Rather than depicting death as an episodic outcome of war, the novel presents everyday existence as a gradual movement toward death, marked by hunger, fear, surveillance, and disposability. The narrative voice of Death further exposes the administrative and normalized nature of killing under totalitarian rule, functioning as a witness to lives stripped of protection and value. By focusing on thanatopolitical exposure rather than trauma alone, this article contributes to Holocaust literary studies by reframing The Book Thief as a political narrative of sovereign power, killability, and ethical abandonment. It demonstrates how the novel illuminates the mechanisms through which modern states transform living into a slow form of dying.