96 pages • 3 hours read
Monica HesseGirl in the Blue Coat
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
Personal Transformation During Wartime
Content warning: The guide contains discussions of antisemitism, the Holocaust, starvation, and violence that appear in the source text.
Wartime necessitates personal transformation by compelling individuals to adapt to extreme and often life-threatening circumstances. Girl in the Blue Coat dramatizes how, in times of conflict, the ordinary routines and expectations of daily life are upended, forcing people to reassess their values, priorities, and roles. Soldiers undergo rigorous physical and mental training, transforming from civilians into combat-ready individuals capable of facing the horrors of battle. Civilians who don’t go to war also experience profound changes. They take on new responsibilities, such as working in industries critical to the war effort, volunteering for civil defense, managing households with limited resources due to rationing, and selling goods on the black market.
At the beginning of the text, Hanneke has a strong sense that she is “not the same girl” that she was before the German occupation of Amsterdam. She has lost not just her boyfriend and her best friend, but also her sense of optimism and idealism. Where she was once a model student and daughter, she now trades in black-market goods and hides the truth from her parents. While she once would’ve immediately chosen to look for Mirjam, she has sincere doubts that it’s worth putting herself at risk. “Survival first, survival only” becomes her motto until she is able to connect with a sense of urgency and community that helps her rediscover her commitment to the greater good.
Other characters transform as well: in particular, the young Jewish characters of the book, Judith and Mina, must act with incredible bravery. The psychological impact of war necessitates emotional adaptation to cope with loss, uncertainty, and fear. Judith and Mina exemplify this process, developing a deeper sense of empathy and solidarity in the face of danger. Similarly, wealthy and selfish characters like Mrs. de Vries take risks that seem out-of-character in order to resist the occupation and the persecution of Dutch Jews.
It is not just people who transform, but also their homes and their city. Families convert rooms and build false walls in order to hide their friends and neighbors. In addition, spaces like the stately Hollandsche Schouwburg Theater become scenes of despair and abjection. The streets themselves are emptied of civilian traffic at night due to the curfew and become places of great risk. Wartime challenges individuals to confront their mortality and the fragility of life, prompting profound introspection, hard truths, and personal growth. These external, architectural shifts echo the inner changes that character’s experience.
Conflicts Between Love and Friendship
Love and friendship, while both essential emotional experiences, often come into conflict due to their different natures and demands. For instance, romantic love usually requires a level of exclusivity and intense emotional investment that can strain existing friendships. In Girl in the Blue Coat, the characters must navigate the difficulties of love and friendships to maintain their sense of humanity amid challenging times.
This is the case for Hanneke, who draws a clear boundary between her friendship with Elsbeth and Elsbeth’s love interest. Both are complicated by Hanneke’s attitude toward and experience with romantic love. In Hanneke’s case, her love and grief for Bas do not make it easier for her to understand or accept Elsbeth’s love for the German soldier. Although Hanneke understands that whom one loves cannot be helped, she cannot forgive her friend for choosing to love someone on the side of the Nazi occupiers over their friendship. She perceives Elsbeth’s love as a threat to their own closeness and shared experiences, which leads her to feelings of jealousy or abandonment.
Likewise, Amalia’s crush on Christoffel has disastrous consequences for her friendship with Mirjam: When Amalia complains to her uncle that the boy she loves is pining over a girl in hiding, it leads to the death of Mirjam’s family. Later, it leads to Amalia’s own death, as Christoffel finds her actions an unforgivable offense and forces her to leave her hiding spot in his home. Again, Amalia felt threatened by the emotional intimacy Christoffel had with Mijam, and this inadvertently led to her to feel neglected and sidelined.
Romantic love and friendship seem bound to come into conflict: Misunderstandings can arise when the expectations and boundaries of each relationship type are not clearly communicated, which is what happens to the characters in the novel. Balancing these relationships requires mutual understanding, trust, and effective communication. Hanneke sees love and friendship in competition with each other: There is only one choice over the other. Mirjam, however, is able to reconcile the two. Learning of her friend’s death, she describes Amalia as someone she loves like she loves herself. She is able to forgive her friend, inspiring Hanneke to do the same. Ultimately, the conflict between love and friendship in Girl in the Blue Coat highlights the complexity of human relationships, especially in a pressurized environment like wartime during which trust and loyalty are not guaranteed and emotional vulnerability can have life-or-death consequences.
The Necessity and Danger of Keeping Secrets
In occupied Amsterdam, some are onderduikers, people in hiding, but almost everyone is hiding something. Walls open to reveal hidden rooms; people who look like Nazi sympathizers are in fact resistors; and the excuses people give to the guards stationed on the streets may bear little resemblance to the truth. This environment highlights the necessity and danger of keeping secrets. The need to deceive others and the moral complications that brings for the characters is one of the novel’s main themes. It highlights the extremes people must go to to survive in wartime and questions the moral limits between right and wrong that exist when people are not facing life-threatening circumstances.
Resistance also requires that people keep secrets and hide their true identity and intentions. Even small, individual acts of resistance like trading in black market goods, wearing a carnation in honor of the Dutch royal family, and listening to the radio put people at risk and required them to hide their behavior from others. At the beginning of the novel, this is the only kind of resistance Hanneke is willing to risk. Ollie and his friends, however, draw a marked contrast between resistance that only benefits the self, or a few people, and resistance that actively works to combat the system of oppression the Nazis have put in place. They encourage and even expect Hanneke to use her black-market connections and skills at deception to help the greatest number of people possible. This places her in even greater danger, but it also gives her the potential to help a greater number of people.
It is in this secret-filled city that Hanneke tries to make sense of her grief, as well as Mirjam’s disappearance. The secrets and deception involved in both cases mean that things are not always what they seem. When it comes to Bas, Hanneke is convinced that the evidence stacks up against her: she encouraged him to enlist in the navy, and she tore up his goodbye note. Surely she is at fault for his death, and also for his family’s lack of access to his last words.
In the case of Mirjam, it seems that she must have disappeared through the walls—or snuck out through the back door. Hanneke at first assumes she went to pursue her boyfriend, T, and then her friend, Amalia. In both cases, Hanneke misinterprets the evidence. However, when she opens up to others—specifically Ollie and Christoffel—she is finally able to arrive at the truth. Even though keeping secrets and deceiving others is necessary for the characters’ survival, it keeps them from trusting each other, which is essential for maintaining relationships.
