MAUS A Survivor's Tale - Part One!

Art Spiegelman's Maus - A Survivor's Tale is one of the most brutally frank comics I've ever read. Spiegelman is not only intent on relating the dreadful details of his father's survival of the Nazi regime's attempt to exterminate the Jews in Hungary and elsewhere in Europe, but he shows what effect that bloody campaign had on the survivors of the genocide. His father was one such survivor and the man Vladek Spiegelman is presented as a fully rounded character, a man with grit and capacity for love, but a man who is overwhelmed by his need to be prepared for the next time the Jews come under assault. This need expresses itself in his miserly approach to life which makes him a challenging person to live with. Spiegelman does not attribute all of Vadek's stingy ways on his war experience, but increasingly as the story unfolds before us in chapter after chapter, we see that had Vladek been someone else, he and his wife might not have lived through the horror of Aushwitz. And we also can tell that the survival has also had a toll on Vladek 's spirit. The story follows Vladek's and Anja's story as they see the rise of the Nazi regime and attempt to survive and later hide from the predations. They are ulitmately unsuccessful and the story leaves off as they are both ultimately captured and sent to join their people in Hitler's death camps. 

Maus was originally produced in six chapters spread over six issues of the comic magazine RAW. RAW produced a new issue annually for the most part and so the saga of Maus was begun by Spiegelman in issue number two of RAW in 1980. And each issue and year after that until the final installment of what became part one of the saga was published in RAW#7 in 1985. The story was then collected and published by Pantheon Books as Maus - A Survivor's Tale in 1986. When a sequel was finished some years later the title was lengthened to Maus - A Survivor's Tale Part I My Father Bleeds History. (We'll get around to Part II next week.) 

Spiegelman is attempting some complex things in this story. He simultaneously wants to detail the horrors of the Holocaust as seen first-hand through his father's eyes. In addition, he wants to show the relationship between himself and his father which is rocky at best. Spiegelman's mother Anja had committed suicide some years before and his father had remarried to a woman named Mala. Spiegelman also had a brother who was killed during the Holocaust, and he seems to suffer from having been compared all his life to this ideal brother who never grew up. It's clear that guilt and angst are wide and deep inside the family and getting an understanding of that dysfunction seems to be Spiegelman's ultimate goal in pushing his father for details of the WWII atrocities. 

Maus also makes an interesting choice, one which I'm sure has made for its long-lasting reputation and that is to use the tried-and-true comic book convention of using intelligent animals to stand in for human beings. Whether it's Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny or Huckleberry Hound, we respond to this idea with eagerness, and it allows for the crimes and horrors to be shown with a degree of separation which oddly allows them to bypass our defense mechanisms to no see horror. It seems we understand immediately that certain animals can represent certain kinds of people, perhaps too easily. Spiegelman has drawn criticism for using pigs to represent non-Jewish Poles and cats to represent the Nazis. But it only makes sense in a universe in which the oppressed Jews are seen as Mice. The seeming slow but steady progress by the Nazis to eradicate the Jews is presented at one level in the story as literally a "cat-and-mouse" game. 

Given this trope, it's easy to understand why some folks who are careless in their thinking and lazy in their reading might jump to a conclusion that the treatment is inappropriate for kids. Funny animal comics are the very essence of kid's stuff, but this is a different animal story which ain't all that funny after all. The Tennessee school board which banned Maus from its classrooms only succeeded in making sure that more people were aware of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize winning work and that sales flew through the roof. Their objections to the work are laughable and it seems clear that these folks want their children to grow up free of the moral dilemma the Holocaust presents to all modern peoples. They are derelict in their responsibility both to the students under their care and to history itself which requires that we remember the evil which is done, so that the chances of that evil reviving is minimized. 

Next week we follow Vladek and Anja into the camps of Aushwitz and Birkenau.

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