Connection: Hans Junior & Max Vandenburg (216-218)

After reading pages 216 to 218, I felt that there was a connection between how boys, particularly the opposites of Hans Junior and Max Vandenburg, are stubborn and selfish. In previous pages around that of page 103, we as the readers learn that Hans Junior and his father get into an argument about how Hans hasn't tried to apply to get into the Nazi party; we also learn on page 104 that Hans Junior is a strong member of the party. Hans describes his son as "still a boy...[who] sometimes has the right to be stubborn" (216) when Max is sorry Hans Jr. hadn't come home. After I read Max's words, "'I'm so selfish'" (218), I immediately related back to when Hans describes his son as stubborn, possibly because selfish and stubborn can both be put under the category "foolish". Markus Zusak gives his readers a nice, or rather, not-so-nice, balance between the two groups of majority, the Aryans, and minority, the non-Aryans. In this "balanced contrast", he shows that in both the Nazi party and the Jewish community, there are people who are foolish, or at least think they are, in the case of Max. For a split second, Zusak equips the reader with the ability think the two groups are equal in a sense, but then they realize again that the fact is the Nazis were dominant over the Jewish people.