MAUS A Survivor's Tale - Part Two!

The publication of Maus - A Survivor's Tale in 1986 was one of the markers that comics had grown up into a fully mature narrative form. The splendid creativity and diversity sparked by the advances of the direct sales market meant that while comic books diminished as a mass market entertainment they had in place become fully realized art. Art Spiegelman had hit a home run in the field, book that defied the conventional attempts to categorize it and which functioned equally well as both biographical and autobiographical and which used outsized metaphor to drive home themes that much of a broad audience might reject in a less user-friendly format. 

 

But Spiegelman was not finished. The first chapter of the second volume of the story which would become known as Maus - A Survivor's Tale II - And Here My Troubles Began was first published in the eighth and final issue of RAW magazine where the first part had been serialized. There is a jump in the framing narrative which we'd been following about Spiegelman trying to get the story of his father Vladek's survival of the Holocaust when we learn that Vladek has died. Part of the angst seen in Maus is that of Spiegelman himself who was tortured by his demanding father and the suicide of his mother in 1968. He made it quite clear in the story that he blamed her death on his father and his unyielding pressure about money and other details of daily life. Working through this anger with the help of his wife Francoise Mouly is part of the story we must also consider. 

This story has Vladek and his wife Anja captured at last after many long months of avoiding the Nazis. They are sent to the death camps, and we follow Vladek as we lose touch with Anja's story. There is intense frustration on Spiegelman's part about this aspect of the story since his father had destroyed his wife's diaries about the events of the Holocaust. So we are left with only Vladek's story, and we see that he survived the camps by good fortune and savvy working of personalities and resources. The Jews in the camps are beaten and killed and summarily marched to their deaths by a regime that seemed all too intent on this singular proposition. From the perspective of this story WWII seems much less about tactical decisions on the battlefield and all about the singular mania which demanded that Jews everywhere be put to death, that all things Jewish be absorbed or obliterated. There was little distinction between man and woman or adult and child, all were subject to perhaps the most organized and banal genocide in human history. 

While we follow Vladek's journey in the camps and then out again where the danger is no less intense it seems, we see the horrors of Nazi regime and the war it perpetrated reflected in individuals and their losses. They might be mice and cats and pigs and dogs as rendered by Spiegelman but never does the forget that these are people suffering in stunningly brutal ways. Sudden violent death was a commonplace and only relentless effort and luck could stave it off.  By the end of this second tale, we have followed Vladek not only from Auschwitz to Sweden to New York to Florida and to New York again, we have seen one old and tortured soul who longs for connection with his son but cannot give of himself long enough to find it. There is no happy ending in Maus - Survivor's Tale, just an ending of sorts. Survival is a story that never ends and travels from generation to generation for all time. 

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