Wonderful story - with some strange aspects

Rating: 8/10 (16 March 2014)

While I agree with most of the positive reviews, there are some weird aspects about this movie:

It starts in 1938, when Liesel is brought to her new foster parents by her real mother; she herself isn't able to take care of her anymore, because she is a communist. Obviously everybody knows about that, and yet she is moving freely across the country, 5 years after Hitler's "Machtergreifung"? Is she on KZ leave? Or taking a holiday from the underground?

There is a book burning in the little town, where Liesel is living now, at the end of 1938. But the book burnings in Germany were 1933! Did they store the unwanted books for nearly 6 years, just to have a nice warm fire in the winter?

At the beginning, Liesel can't read or write, though she is about 12 years old! Why? She is able to do it, as we see later on. There was compulsory education in Germany, even for kids of communists!

Why is the Jew Max sleeping with a copy of Hitler's infamous "Mein Kampf" in his hands?

From where gets a poor family as the Hubermanns real coffee in 1941? This was pure luxury at that time!

And why are most people speaking English with a German accent, interspersed with German words like "Saukerl", while other people speak German?

The last question has his answer probably in the fact that many of the actors are German and the (english-speaking) stars more or less adapted their style. I suppose that the other points have their cause in the fact that director and author had some problems with the conversion of a book of 500-something pages into a movie of 2 hours. Perhaps I have to read the book ...