Markus Zusak’s ‘Book Thief’ occurs in the fictional city of Molching during 1939-1942.

Why did Zusak decide to have the book take place in a fictional setting rather than a real one? From the reader’s point of view, this falsehood breaks the sense of trust between the author and the reader and gives us a more skeptical view going forward, and all information we attain from the book is seemingly detracted from due to its untrustworthiness, so if this is the case then why would Zusak do this?

No one goes and reads a Dictionary as a fun past time, in fact most people would lose attention after a few pages, this is because humans just aren’t very good at processing a lot of information at once, when we are bombarded with facts we tend to shut down or lose focus, on the other hand, humans excel at creative thinking and linking, we have evolved to do so, the humans who could imagine how a scenario might play out and make informed decisions on that would survive longer than those who couldn’t, this relates in that when we are given an interchangeable idea rather than a straight fact it activates our brains and causes us to process and think, keeping us engaged.

This correlates with Zusak’s book thief in that if it took place in a historically accurate town with an accurate re-telling of recorded characters, it would be like reading a documentary, all be it interesting, its not nearly as engaging in a primal sense as something more fictional, it gets us thinking, if Molching isn’t real, what else might not be real? rather than just excepting everything that is being given to us as factual, there is no active imagination in that.