Week 7: Maus

Maus by Art Spiegelman is interesting to read in today’s current political climate. I am aware that while this comic was being created in the eighties, there were Holocaust deniers and documentation of this event was necessary. With today’s rise of Neo-Nazis, we are reliving this issue. In Volume II, Spiegelman’s therapist ponders if we need a “bigger Holocaust”. That’s crazy to me: what could be a bigger tragedy than the Holocaust? The only way this message could reach everyone is if aliens enslaved all of humanity. Even still, if humans were marginalized or exploited by an “other”, there would still be racism as evidenced by Vladek still having prejudices against black people for no reason.

            As Vladek is telling Art his story, we also get to see their father-son relationship. The first novel even informs the reader that Art is not very close to his father and hadn’t seen him in a few years. Vladek is shown to be a frugal perfectionist who is in a constant struggle with his second wife, Mala, who was also a Holocaust survivor. He often berates her and compares her to his first wife, Anya. We only get to hear the story from Vladek’s point of view: we could have heard through Anya’s perspective through her diaries if Vladek hadn’t had a manic episode and threw them away. The audience only sees Anya through Vladek’s stories or in a reprint of an old comic Spiegelman made about her suicide. We don’t get to see the later years of their marriage. It makes me wonder how reliable of a narrator Vladek is, especially when he frames himself as almost always right and supposedly never did anything wrong.

            In terms of craft, Maus has a very graphic style where characters have thick outlines and shading is done in solid black or cross-hatching. There isn’t an excessive amount of gore or other graphic content, it’s more implied with panels of the smoke from the oven’s chimneys or having the violence conveniently out of frame. Spiegelman made more of the focus on the psychology and sociology of Holocaust life, which I personally find more tasteful.

            I had always meant to read Maus, and now I wish I had read it sooner, that it had been required reading in high school. I lived in a school district with a big Jewish population and many of my friends growing up were Jewish, but I know some people here at college did not know a lot of Jewish people growing up. Jewish people also have limited representation in media, but to me that doesn’t excuse a lack of empathy.