Symbolism In Girl In The Blue Coat

When the Nazis took over the Netherlands, they began to deport Jews and discriminate them to scare others into following Nazi Ideals. In the book “Girl in the Blue Coat” by Monica Hesse, main character Hanneke struggles against Nazi Racial discrimination as her friends experience the full blow of the hatred towards non-aryan races, while she is a bystander, being of the Master Race. In Amsterdam during WWII, Nazis were treating anyone that did not fit into the Aryan Race as inferiors and abusing and even killing them, and many Jews especially were targeted in propaganda that demonized them, which scared people into following the Nazi culture. Hesse incorporates figurative language such as a symbol of society, the allusion of the Eye of the Needle in a daunting mission, and the allusion of Job to identify and illustrate the struggle against society’s views of Nazi culture.
To begin, in Girl in the Blue Coat, Hesse uses the symbol of an old theatre to depict …show more content…
These uses of figurative language help highlight the importance of the Nazi influence on the society that they are in, and the effects on the way entire groups of people act towards one another. Nazi culture changed the way the majority of society looked upon the Jewish culture, making it difficult for the Jews to live normal lives or participate in social activities without being discriminated or shunned by “normal” people, losing friends, customers, jobs, and their social status, wherever it may be. Although this kind of prejudice has been seen elsewhere, Nazi discrimination towards non-Aryans is one of the most extreme occasions and is often revisited as a reminder of the extreme injustice and to never let something like it reoccur in present