Yesterday was a certain lunatic dictator's birthday. To commemorate this asshole's entry into the world, I give you Art Spiegelman's Maus, one of the most powerful examinations and indictments of the Holocaust in comics form. I've re-read Maus, but this time with insights gleaned from reading MetaMaus, a tome which gathers together sundry interviews and other materials pertinent to the creation.
This time I read the collected
Maus.
MetaMaus is keyed to this volume and page numbers are specific to this collection book. It's only been a few years since I read and commented on this story, but current events push me to engage with it again. I wonder how my feelings will change when the oppressions depicted in the story are similar to those we might feel today.
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 Auschwitz. 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 ultimately 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.
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 as tragically we are learning again today.
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