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Metaphor
Explanation and Analysis—Deer in Lights:
In Part 2: 100 Percent Pure German Sweat, Liesel attends a mandatory, violent book burning and ends up helping Ludwig Schmeikl after his ankle is crushed by the mob. Death uses an idiom and a metaphor to describe the look on Ludwig's face when he finds Liesel:
All he was able to do was pull her toward him and motion to his ankle. It had been crushed among the excitement and was bleeding dark and ominous through his sock. His face wore a helpless expression beneath his tangled blond hair. An animal. Not a deer in lights. Nothing so typical or specific. He was just an animal, hurt among the melee of its own kind, soon to be trampled by it.
When a driver is about to hit a deer with their car, the deer will often stare directly into the oncoming headlights. Instead of getting out of the way while there is time, the deer stands frozen to the spot as though waiting to be hit and even pleading with the driver to help. The expression "deer in lights" or "deer in the headlights" is thus an idiom referring to shock and fear that freezes a person in place, helpless.
In this passage, Death brings up the idiom only to argue that it is not quite right to describe Ludwig's expression. Ludwig is shocked, afraid, and badly injured. He needs someone to help him. And yet, Death claims, Ludwig's expression is "nothing so typical or specific" as a deer in lights. A deer in lights is typical in that people hit deer with their cars all the time. And yet it is the result of a very specific kind of cross-species encounter: a deer crosses the road at an inopportune time, and a human fails to anticipate the deer's presence in time to avoid it. The deer's shock is partly owing to the fact that the deer and the car come from different worlds and do not expect to run into one another.
Ludwig may appear shocked, fearful, and helpless. However, Death claims, this is no unfortunate and unexpected encounter between beings from different worlds. "He was just an animal," Death writes, "hurt among the melee of its own kind, soon to be trampled by it." Ludwig, in his required Hitler Youth uniform, is part of the mob until it turns on him. In fact, he helped to whip up the frenzy that turned into the stampede that injured him. This injury is no unfortunate accident, as a deer collision is. Instead, it is the predictable outcome of mob behavior. Its predictability makes it all the more horrifying. Humans are supposed to use their reason and compassion to curb instincts that might make them hurt one another. These humans have abandoned all reason and compassion, to the point that they don't even notice Ludwig's injury. They have turned into "just animals" who visit casual violence on one another without any thought.
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