Content Warning: This section contains descriptions of self-harm and war-related violence.

War and terror form the most prominent motif in the novel, and they define its characters lives and choices. Oskar’s entire family has been affected by war, beginning with his grandparents, who survived the Dresden bombing during World War II. That single day changed their entire futures, as it caused the deaths of Thomas’s love and his future child, as well as Oskar’s grandmother’s sister, and it is the reason Oskar’s grandparents migrated to America. Thomas Sr. recalls having to run through pieces of bodies as he tried to find Anna, and how he was tasked with shooting all of the precious and innocent animals at the zoo: “A rhinoceros was banging its head against a rock, again and again, as if to put itself out of its suffering, or to make itself suffer, I fired at it, it kept banging its head, I fired again, it banged harder, I walked up to it and pressed the gun between its eyes, I killed it” (213). The trauma of that day and the losses he felt led to a severe form of PTSD in which Thomas lost the ability to speak.