Maus

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Maus

Cover of Maus hardcover #1: "My Father Bleeds History"
Publication information
Publisher Pantheon Books
Format limited series/graphic novel
Publication date 1973 to 1991
Creative team
Writer(s) Art Spiegelman
Artist(s) Art Spiegelman

Maus: A Survivor's Tale is a memoir by Art Spiegelman, presented as a graphic novel. Parts of the story were originally published in the magazine Raw between 1980 to 1991. The complete story was published in two volumes: the first in 1986 ("My Father Bleeds History") and the second in 1991 ("And Here My Troubles Began").[1] The graphic novel as a whole took thirteen years to complete. It recounts the struggle of Spiegelman's father to survive the Holocaust as a Polish Jew and draws largely on his father's recollections of his experiences. The book also follows the author's troubled relationship with his father and the way the effects of war reverberate through generations of a family. In 1992, it won a Pulitzer Prize Special Award. All people are presented as anthropomorphic animals (for example, all Jews are depicted as mice, hence the name Maus which is German for "mouse"). The New York Times described the selection of Maus for the honor: "The Pulitzer board members ... found the cartoonist's depiction of Nazi Germany hard to classify."[2]

Contents

[edit] Overview

The book alternates the stories told by Spiegelman's father Vladek Spiegelman about life in Poland before and during the Second World War with the contemporary life of Art, Vladek and their loved ones in the Rego Park neighborhood of New York City. The book recounts the struggle of Vladek Spiegelman living with his family in Radomsko, Częstochowa, Sosnowiec and Bielsko in the late 1930s and his tragic odyssey during the war which ultimately led him to Auschwitz as prisoner 175113.

Throughout the book, Art Spiegelman confronts his complex and often conflicted relationship with his father. For example, Vladek exhibits racial prejudice against blacks despite his own experiences of anti-Semitism. He is also presented as stingy and a person who makes life very difficult for those around him, including his first wife Anja (Art's mother, who committed suicide) and his second wife Mala, themselves concentration camp survivors. The personality of the present day Vladek seems quite different from that of the man in the concentration camps, where he was resourceful and compassionate.

[edit] Themes

The author's articulation of the Holocaust is the main theme of the two graphic novels, giving the book a metabiographical aspect. Spiegelman often mentions the apprehension he feels in trying to express the inexpressible. The novel depicts the Holocaust through the perspectives of a survivor and of those who did not experience it directly, but are deeply connected to it nonetheless.

[edit] Animals used

Mickey Mouse is the most miserable ideal ever revealed....Healthy emotions tell every independent young man and every honorable youth that the dirty filth-covered vermin, the greatest bacteria carrier in the animal kingdom, cannot be the ideal type of animal....Away with Jewish brutalization of the people! Down with Mickey Mouse! Wear the Swastika Cross!
— newspaper article, Pomerania, Germany, mid-1930s[3]
  • The Jews are represented by mice.
  • The Germans are represented by cats.
  • The Poles are represented by pigs.
  • The Americans are represented by dogs.
  • The Roma (Gypsies) are represented as gypsy moths (found on page 133 of Maus II, page 293 of The Complete Maus).
  • African Americans are seen as black dogs.
  • The French are represented by frogs.
  • The Swedes are represented by reindeer (found on page 125 of "Maus II").
  • The British are represented by fish (found on page 131 of Maus II, page 291 of The Complete Maus).
  • The Russians are represented by bears.
  • Two children of a Jew and a German are shown as a mouse with cat stripes (found on page 131 of Maus II, page 291 of The Complete Maus).
  • The background of page 34 of Maus I (pages 36 and 171 of Complete Maus) also depicts a rabbit, a moose, a horse, an elephant, a goat and a llama all of which are unspecified as a group.

The animals are symbolic of the different nationalities and races for a number of reasons:[4]:

  • The Jews, as mice, can be seen as weak and helpless victims, as well as satirizing the Nazi portrayal of Jews as vermin. Also, this may symbolize the resourcefulness many Jews exhibited during the Holocaust and the inability of the Nazis to completely wipe out such a species. At some point in the narrative, the author is questioned by an Israeli Jew, depicted as a rather stuffy mouse who has gained some weight. When asked what particular animal he would have chosen to represent the Israelis, Spiegelman answers: "I have no idea... porcupines?"
  • After the comic was released in Poland many Poles found it offensive to be represented by pigs. However, there are many Polish characters who are portrayed sympathetically or positively such as the Spiegelmans' governess or Mrs. Motonowa who hides Vladek and Anja at great personal risk. Spiegelman explained that he chose pigs in good faith because of their resemblance to famous American cartoon characters like Miss Piggy and Porky Pig. The choice may also reflect the traditional agricultural Polish way of life.[5][6]
  • The French being frogs would appear to be a direct reference to an oft-used nickname, itself a lampoon of the fact that the French are supposedly renowned for eating frogs: it is also, however, suggested that Spiegelman wanted a certain amount of sliminess about the French, as he says to his (French) wife: "Bunnies are too innocent for the French... Think of the years of anti-Semitism."

With the exception of the Americans (dogs), the animal characters are all drawn alike. For instance, most of the Jewish mice resemble each other regardless of sex or age. Clothing and other details are used in order to tell them apart: Spiegelman himself, for instance, is always wearing a white shirt and a black sleeveless overshirt; his French wife, Françoise (herself portrayed as a mouse, because she converted to Judaism), wears a striped t-shirt, and Vladek's girlfriend before Anja, Lucia, has very noticeable breasts (Maus, vol. 1, p. 15). While wandering the streets of their Nazi-occupied town, the Jews wear pig masks in order to show the trouble they went through to pass themselves off as non-Jewish Poles.

The use of animals in the graphic novel may seem incongruous, but instead of creating social typecasts, Spiegelman lampoons them and shows how stupid it is to classify a human being based on nationality or ethnicity.[7] His images are not his: they were "borrowed from the Germans... Ultimately what the book is about is the commonality of human beings. It's crazy to divide things down along nationalistic or racial or religious lines... These metaphors, which are meant to self-destruct in my book — and I think they do self-destruct — still have a residual force and still get people worked up over them."[citation needed]

The use of animals may also be used in order to detach the reader from real life. This may have been done to appeal to a younger generation of readers, yet still telling a story of survival and death during the Holocaust. But instead of fully detaching the reader from the book, he shows a human aspect by illustrating how his father tells his story and by showing the emotions and relationships of the characters throughout.[7]

[edit] Publication

Maus was originally published as a three-page strip for Funny Aminals(cq), an underground comic published by Apex Novelties in 1972. In 1977, Spiegelman decided to lengthen the work,[8] publishing most of the work serially in RAW magazine, a publication Spiegelman co-edited along with his wife Françoise Mouly. It was then published in its final form in two parts (Volume I: "My Father Bleeds History" in 1986 and Volume II: "And Here My Troubles Began" in 1991), before eventually being integrated into a single volume. A CD-ROM edition also exists.

[edit] Impact

Since its publication, Maus has been the subject of numerous essays. Deborah R. Geis published a collection of essays involving Maus titled Considering Maus: Approaches to Art Spiegelman's "Survivor's Tale" of the Holocaust, which received criticism in an Image & Narrative essay for, among other things, excluding several essays praising and even the rare essay critiquing the graphic novel.[9]

Alan Moore praised Maus, saying "I have been convinced that Art Spiegelman is perhaps the single most important comic creator working within the field and in my opinion Maus represents his most accomplished work to date."[10]

Maus has also been studied in schools.[11] It is used both in courses dedicated to the study of modern English literature and Jewish culture.

In 2008, Entertainment Weekly listed Maus 7th on their list of The New Classics: Books - The 100 best reads from 1983 to 2008, making it the highest ranking graphic novel on the list.[12]

[edit] Awards and nominations

[edit] Awards

[edit] Nominations

[edit] Editions

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/holocaust/spiegelman.html
  2. ^ Stanley, Alessandra (April 8, 1992). "'Thousand Acres' Wins Fiction As 21 Pulitzer Prizes Are Given". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/04/05/specials/smiley-pulitzer.html. 
  3. ^ , Ian Johnston, On Spiegelman's Maus I and II
  4. ^ Krzysztof Masłoń, Goebbels' Tradition in the Comic Book
  5. ^ Prof. Marcuse, sample journal entries, Laura Byrne, journal entries for UCSB Hist 133D, Fall 2001 "Maus and the “Gray Zone”
  6. ^ a b Wally Hastings, Art Spiegelman's Maus
  7. ^ "Art Spiegelman" (http). Witness & Legacy - Contemporary Art about the holocaust:. http://sunsite.utk.edu/witness/artists/spiegelman/. Retrieved on February 14. 
  8. ^ Ole Frahm, Review of Considering MAUS
  9. ^ RAW: "recommended by Alan Moore"
  10. ^ Teaching Resources for Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale
  11. ^ http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20207076_20207387_20207349,00.html

[edit] References

[edit] External links

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