The Standover Man is a book by Max Vandenberg, the Jew hidden by the protagonist’s family. His story is his own life, written on the painted over pages of Mein Kampf, My Struggle, by Adolf Hitler. He replaces Hitler’s words with his own, and by doing so is setting the slate clean to express himself. It is an interesting twist and quite symbolic. The words used by Hitler to change and ultimately destroy German, along with people like Max, have been blotted out in order to save Max. The book saved a life more than once, on Max’s journey to the Hubermann’s house it was a cover to hide him, once there it became the pages to write his own ‘struggles’ resulting in The Standover Man, The Word Shaker, and many other stories besides that kept Max sane as he worked on them, and finally it saved Liesel’s life as she poured out her story, The Book Thief, onto the painted pages instead of being in bed where she would have been killed during the bombing.
(pages 231-244)