...all of the text of the books displayed in English, etc., was very strange.
This would have been better as a German production in German -- somehow they could have "English-ized" it without making it totally absurd.
I do agree.
If it were in german language totally (unless certain characters does not speak german), I wopuld gave it a 10.
Please excuse my terrible redaction, english is not my native language.
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Hollywood gets this wrong all the time. People speaking in German (or any) accents should be reserved for:
(1) Germans speaking in English
(2) Germans speaking in German when the main language of the film is English and the filmmaker wants us to understand that a different language is being spoken without the use of that language or subtitles (e.g. an old war movie where everyone is speaking English and the Germans have accents).
But this film really made no sense that way. The characters could just have spoken English without an accent and we all would have understood that they were speaking German. The scene where Liesel says, "Accountant!" and the word Buchhalter is shown on the sign, makes this perfectly clear. Now, since the book is in English the author may have used German terms from time to time to preserve the flavor—Saumensch, etc.—and so their inclusion is part of the relaying of the story. But it makes no sense to use 'ja' and 'nein' in this way.
Audiences are generally smart enough to figure out that the characters in a story that takes place in Germany are all speaking German and that English in the movie stands in for German so that the filmmakers don't need to resort to these gimmicks.
Most troubling, however, was the way that German was used. It was clear that the German being spoken at the book burning rally was meant to be the same language that everyone was speaking in, but why have the audience rely on subtitles for the speeches and not for the conversations? Additionally, the fact that all the really Nazi stuff got said in German also undermines the universality of the story. The audience naturally sympathizes with the main characters, who are all speaking English (albeit accented and peppered with German), but when the terrible songs and speeches come out, it's all in pure German which creates the sense that the Nazis were some 'other' different from the rest of the people. They weren't. They were friends and neighbors and family members. The worst of those speeches should have been in English in order to make them less removed, less 'other', and in that way, more terrifying. Those sentiments were not expressed by some foreign invading army, they were expressed by the characters' fellow countrymen and women. The English speaking audience should have been given the linguistic approximation of that experience: everyone in the movie should have spoken unaccented English so that there is no barrier between us and them, between them and each other.