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Author Interviews

'maus' author art spiegelman shares the story behind his pulitzer-winning work.

Terry Gross

Spiegelman's graphic novel, which was recently banned by a school district in Tennessee, tells the story of how his Jewish parents survived the Holocaust in Poland. Originally broadcast in 1987.

DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. Last month, a Tennessee school district banned the book "Maus," the 1986 Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust by Art Spiegelman. We thought we'd listen back to Terry's 1987 interview with Spiegelman in which he talks about drawing and writing that book.

In "Maus," Spiegelman draws the Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats. He said he found the mouse metaphor appropriate to Hitler's rhetoric of extermination and his references to Jews as vermin. The book tells the story of how his Jewish parents survived the Holocaust in Poland. The comic is like a documentary about the making of the book. It shows Spiegelman in his father's house in Queens, N.Y. He coaxes his father to remember the war years and let him record his stories on tape. He has a difficult relationship with his father, and he hopes these conversations will bring them closer. The book has moving flashback sequences as his father describes passing as a Gentile, hiding out in bunkers, and facing death in a concentration camp. Here's Art Spiegelman talking to Terry Gross.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

ART SPIEGELMAN: People are usually very upset when they first hear that I've done a comic strip about the Holocaust. Like, just too - it's an oxymoron somewhere in there, and people just don't want to hear any more after that.

But it seems to me that comics are, on the one hand, a very direct medium. They come across very viscerally. And on the other hand, they're a very, very abstract medium. You have to do a lot more work to decode a comic strip than you do in understanding a film or even reading a book.

TERRY GROSS, BYLINE: When did you first become aware that your parents were survivors?

SPIEGELMAN: Well, I can't remember not knowing it, but on the other hand, I can't remember it ever being a significant fact. It was just one more thing that I knew about my parents. So that when I was a little kid, my mother had a tattooed number, and every once in a while, friends of mine would ask, Mrs. Spiegelman, why do you have a number tattooed on your - well, not tattooed. Why do you have a number on your arm? And she would say it was a phone number she didn't want to forget or something like that. So it was built into the fabric of our life without it being a specifically pointed one. And on the other hand, a lot of their friends and therefore their friends' children were also involved in the same background. So it wasn't that anomalous.

GROSS: But before you sat down and actually said to your father, tell me the story of how you survived, had he actually told you anecdotes about his survival during the war?

SPIEGELMAN: Oh, yeah, but the same way that some other person my age's parents might have told them about life in the Depression, you know? Oh, it was really hard back then. And the anecdote would just glimmer in and out between talking about taking out the garbage or doing homework.

GROSS: I got the impression that you were frequently taught grim lessons about life based on your parents' experiences during the Holocaust.

SPIEGELMAN: Yeah, that was something I didn't know until I left home. It's true. What would happen is these stories, which really haunted me, I didn't know were haunting me because they were what I was breathing. And it was only when I got some other perspective when I went away to college and was surrounded by people who didn't have those ghosts hovering over them that I realized there was something unusual about growing up with parents who survived a form of hell.

GROSS: Did you have Nazi dreams when you were growing up?

SPIEGELMAN: Yeah, I - see, one thing - I guess one thing that haunted me when I was growing up was this one blown-up photograph. It was a photograph that was originally just maybe two inches by two inches, but it was a large portrait photograph of what would have been my brother if he had survived the war. So I remember having dreams about him, although I never met him or knew much about him beyond a couple of anecdotes and that photograph. And although I don't remember all of them, I remember one fantasy that was recurrent was being in school and then the principal, instead of just telling everybody good morning on the PA system, would tell all the Jewish students to go out to the school yard, you know, that kind of thing.

GROSS: You didn't have dreams where you were chased by Nazis.

SPIEGELMAN: I think I've probably had many, you know. Any older kid that I was having trouble with would immediately have a swastika on his arm, you know.

GROSS: When you approached your father and sat him down and said, you know, tell me chronologically all the details you can remember from the war and from surviving the Nazis, was it hard for him to talk about it?

SPIEGELMAN: Not especially, although when I was growing up, my mother was more voluble than my father on the subject. And yet when I came back as an adult, he was rather giving of it. It wasn't a problem. And in fact, he didn't even seem to be aware of the fact that I was taping or anything till the very end. Getting it chronologically was impossible. Getting the conversation from him came in tidbits that were mosaic that had to be reassembled and worked out later. And sometimes, I felt like I was playing a pinball machine and trying to avoid those penalty holes because I'd ask a question and it would fall right back into an anecdote I had before. And there's no way to get out of the anecdote till I went through the entire 20-minute sequence, you know?

But the way I got it from him was after I did that comic strip in '71, I went back - and so I'm - actually even before I'd finished the comic strip, while I was two-thirds through. And I showed it to him, and I told him I wanted to tape him then. For the entire three- or four-hour session, which was when I got the bold outlines of what's now the book, he seemed totally oblivious to the tape recorder. We were just sitting on the terrace and talking. And then at the very end, he grabbed the microphone from me and says, and so, ladies and gentlemen, this is how it was and I want - you should know so nothing, God forbid, like this - so many millions were killed and that should never happen again - it was a statement for posterity, but I wasn't - he took me by surprise.

GROSS: One of the things that really struck me in "Maus" was that every time he'd finish telling you this story about narrowly surviving some horrible thing, whether it's at a prisoner of war camp or being hidden away in a bunker in somebody's cellar who was protecting him or, you know, trying to pass for gentile, he'd come out of the story and he'd say something really petty, you know, like, criticize you for smoking or what you were wearing or something. Can you tell the coat story?

SPIEGELMAN: Oh, the coat story. After my father finished telling me the story one day, I just went to get my coat to leave, and I couldn't find it. So I was kind of walking around asking my stepmother if she had seen it, and she hadn't. And my father said, yeah, he knew exactly where it was. He had thrown it out. And at first, I don't believe him, and I asked him to give it back, and he says it's too late. He said, when you were sitting first down to dinner, I threw it outside. By now, the garbage men took it away. Such an old, shabby coat, it's a shame my son should wear such a coat. But I like it. I have for you a warmer one. I got myself at Alexander's a new jacket, and I can give to you my old one. It's still like new. Here, just try on it. Try it on a minute. Oh, great, a Naugahyde windbreaker, and it's too big. It looks on you like a million dollars. Look, Dad, you can't do this to me. I'm over 30 years old. I choose my own clothes. After you wear it a little, you'll see how good it looks. Come. I'll walk you downstairs. And then I went downstairs and kind of looked in the garbage can, and it was just buried under muck and I couldn't believe it. But I walked home in a Naugahyde oversized jacket that I didn't like. But it was typical of what my father would do to try to arrange my life to his liking.

GROSS: I kept thinking that just at the moment when you would be feeling tenderness towards your father and realizing the hell that he had survived, that he'd do something really manipulative like that, like throwing out the coat that you really love so he could give you his Naugahyde parka or something. And, I mean, how would you reconcile that? I mean, what you're supposed to do - like, the way it's supposed to be is that you find out your father's life story, all the hostilities of the past are erased, tenderness takes over, you embrace each other, you understand each other, and you reconcile.

SPIEGELMAN: It actually leads to a larger issue for me, which has to do with sentiment in literature and especially in this kind of literature. It's actually one of the banes of so-called Holocaust literature that when you're reading it, you hear violins in the background, you know, and, like soft, mournful chorus sobbing. And, well, I've met some survivors who work toward that, and I've met other survivors who just are much spunkier than that in a way. And what it is is, I guess, this - the subject matter makes such a large claim on your sympathies to begin with that I don't think it's necessary to, like, underline it and push it any further than that. In fact, it kind of seems trivializing and cheap to do it that way. And my life with my father wasn't tender. My life with my father was, well, probably as ambivalent as everybody's life is with their parents, ultimately, if they dig deep and look at what it is that was going on between them. And I just wanted to make an accurate portrait of that relationship.

GROSS: Your father also always complains about money, that his second wife just wants his money, she wants to rewrite his will, everybody's out to get him. And you write in "Maus" at one point - you write, it's something that worries me about the book I'm doing. In some ways, he's just like the racist caricature of the miserly Jew. Did you ever think, oh, well, maybe I should try to present him in a more positive light.

SPIEGELMAN: Oh, of course. I just would never do it. But of course, I'd think it - not even just portray him but in general, try to tailor the story to my own ideological bent or interests. And I just - it's just too dishonest. I mean, one of the things that was important to me in "Maus" was to make it all true. And that truth wouldn't be served by retouching the portraits. And on the other hand, I found that by working with the things that are actual, the book becomes far more potent so that my father isn't a caricature of a miserly, old Jew. He's a miserly, old Jew. But he's not a caricature of a miserly, old Jew. He happens to be Jewish. There are avaricious people of many different ethnic persuasions that I've met.

And I find that working with everything that seems a problem to me when I'm first approaching it, once it's been kind of looked at from the 15 different angles necessary and assimilated into the story, it becomes a strength of what I'm working on rather than a liability. I find this a lot richer than if I had a far more exemplary father because if I did, then I'd have a book, maybe, whose ultimate moral would be - and if you lead a virtuous, exemplary life, then you, too, can survive the Holocaust. And that's not the point. The point is that everyone should have survived the Holocaust. There should never have been a Holocaust. And that kind of assumption of some kind of supernatural picking of who would survive and who wouldn't wasn't based on ethics. And it wasn't based on goodness, nor was it based on being especially evil, which is, I guess, the flip side of the way one might try to perceive somebody who comes through a situation of extremis.

GROSS: You almost describe yourself as a prisoner in your home in some of your work. Did you ever feel like, oh, it's trivial to feel that you are living as a prisoner or that life is hell when you're not living through the war? This isn't really the Holocaust, you know?

SPIEGELMAN: Yeah.

GROSS: You're living a middle-class life, you know? Is it - (laughter) are you, you know, overexaggerating or, you know, indulging yourself to feel that way?

SPIEGELMAN: Yes.

SPIEGELMAN: But actually, more than that, I've gotten interested in psychological literature about children of survivors. And one common denominator that cropped up a number of times was children who ended up in mental hospitals or in jails. And I was in the former. And what it is is referred to in the psychological literature as an anniversary reaction. It tends to happen not always, but very often - it didn't for me. According to the literature, at approximately the same age the parents were when they got caught up in the concentration camps, the children would end up in the mental hospitals or jails. And I think that I've found a safer way of dealing with all this stuff by drawing a book. And that - you know, one of the things is you can't live through what your parents lived through. And yet, you've been given this mandate to be happy because you didn't have to. And yet, you're not all that happy. And then there's all kinds of ambivalences that come up from that, including a certain kind of very perverse envy of your parents having lived through something that proved that they could - were strong enough to live.

So it's - I don't think it's a total accident that I ended up really starting work on this very long project at the age of 30, which is about the age my father was when he went into the camps, because in order to draw "Maus," it's necessary for me to reenact every single gesture, as well as every single location, present in these flashbacks. The "Maus" cartoonist has to do that with his "Maus" parents. And the result is the parts of my story - of my father's story that are just on tape or on transcripts, I have a very kind of - I have an overall idea. And eventually, I can fish it out of my head. But the parts that are in the book are now in neat, little boxes, you know? I know what happened by having assimilated it that fully. And that's part of my reason for this project, in fact. And in order to do it, like I said, it's necessary for me to do a certain amount of research - photographic research, looking up drawings of survivors, a lot of readings - in order to get a sense of what it was, in order to put it in some kind of visual order for others to look at. I went back to Poland. I went to Auschwitz to look around, tried to find my parents' hometown - all part of the same kind of trying to understand and understand from the bones out what happened. And I'll say, it's still - not totally understandable. But it's my attempt.

BIANCULLI: Art Spiegelman speaking to Terry Gross in 1987. His graphic novel, "Maus," was published the year before, won the Pulitzer Prize and is now more than 35 years old. Yet very recently, it was banned by a school district in Tennessee. After a break, film critic Justin Chang reviews "Kimi," the new movie by Steven Soderbergh. It begins streaming today on HBO Max. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF RARE EARTH SONG, "HEY BIG BROTHER")

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Maus Now: Selected Writing, edited by Hillary Chute review – the Maus that made history

While Philip Pullman and Adam Gopnik illuminate Art Spiegelman’s towering graphic novel, few others in this collection succeed in capturing its spark and sophistication

T his job has taught me to be wary of meeting my heroes, but when I interviewed Art Spiegelman in New York in 2011, it really was one of the great days. In his SoHo studio, the air thick with cigarette smoke and whatever strange substance old paper quietly emits (the place groaned with books), he and I talked long and hard about Maus , then shortly to celebrate its 25th birthday, and every moment was – for me, at least – completely thrilling. I’d long wondered about Spiegelman’s daring in the matter of his famous comic. How on earth had he done it, committing to paper what felt at the time like a kind of blasphemy? But sitting opposite him, I think I understood. In conversation, certainty had only to appear on the horizon for ambivalence to wrestle it to the ground – and vice versa. He simply had to work stuff out. I doubt he could have resisted making Maus even if he’d tried.

I guess there must still be some people out there who don’t know about Spiegelman’s masterwork. So perhaps I’d better explain. The only comic ever to win a Pulitzer prize, Maus is a two-volume graphic novel about the Holocaust. Based on interviews with his father, Vladek, a survivor of Auschwitz, it depicts Jews as mice, Nazis as cats and Poles as pigs, though the source of the shock it caused when it came out ( Maus I in 1986, and Maus II in 1991) lay more in its refusal to sanctify the survivor than in its anthropomorphism. The Vladek we see living in Queens with his second wife, Mala – the book has two time frames, past and present – is a parsimonious bully and a racist, a man his adult son can tolerate only when they’re discussing the camps. As Spiegelman put it when he spoke to me: “This is the oddness of it. Auschwitz became for us a safe place: a place where he would talk and I would listen.” (Vladek died in 1982; Spiegelman’s mother, Anja, another survivor, had killed herself in 1968.)

Naturally, Maus has been much written about down the decades, not least in recent months (in 2021, a school board in Tennessee decided to ban it from an English curriculum; the outcry that followed led to it selling out on Amazon ). Spiegelman’s paradigm-shifting book appeals to so-called serious types in a way most other graphic novels simply do not. But, alas, it has to be said that this isn’t always a good thing. Wading through Maus Now , a new collection of Maus -inspired pieces edited by Hillary Chute, an academic who writes about comics for the New York Times , is a pretty dispiriting experience. So many words expended to so little effect. So much earnestness and showing off! What on earth, I wonder, does Spiegelman make of it? Again, I picture a struggle: a battle between easy flattery and frankly appalled disdain.

Spiegelman, as it happens, appears in the most interesting piece in the book: a Q&A with the writer David Samuels from 2013. If Samuels, who prefers to make mini-speeches than to ask to-the-point questions, comes off like a bit of jerk, Spiegelman is ever zippy and contrarian, carefully explaining that, for him, being Jewish means carrying on the traditions of the Marx Brothers and the cartoonist Harvey Kurtzman (in a poll, most Jewish Americans had said it meant remembering the Holocaust). He’s fascinating about the creation of the state of Israel – and seemingly uninterruptible on the subject, even by Samuels. But elsewhere, our celebrated author hardly exists; his narrative has taken on a life of its own. Turning the collection’s pages, I was brought back to my student days, when the dead hand of critical theory threw a black polo neck over even the most enjoyable of texts, shrouding them in darkness. Maus tells the worst story of all; at moments, it’s almost unbearable. Yet its very existence is a kind of light, extraordinary and transfiguring. This may be something the contributors to Maus Now are apt to forget.

On the plus side, the book includes decent essays by Philip Pullman, the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, and the critic Ruth Franklin (best known as the biographer of Shirley Jackson), and I like its roughly chronological order, a strategy that reveals the way attitudes towards Maus have shifted and settled across the years: Gopnik’s piece dates from 1987, and in it, he’s still agog, wrestling to say intellectually what he knows in his heart to be true. There are also some interesting illustrations, not only by Spiegelman, but by those who worked in the tradition of “physiognomic comparison” (making men look like animals, and animals like men) before him, among them the 17th-century Frenchman Charles le Brun and the artists who made The Birds’ Head Haggadah , a 13th century Ashkenazi illuminated manuscript that is a masterpiece of Jewish religious art. But one must cherrypick; American criticism, which comprises the majority of this book, can be so desperately toneless.

It may be the case that Maus Now , medicinal as it often tastes, will send some readers back to the book that inspired it with new and livelier thoughts in their minds – in which case, hooray. But I also think that one aspect of the genius of Spiegelman’s cartoon is that it speaks so loudly for itself. If it is intricate and masterful, it is also severely and audaciously unpatterned. However many times I read Maus , I always close it with the feeling that no more needs to be said.

Maus Now , edited by Hillary Chute, is published by Viking (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply

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Book review: Essays about Art Spiegelman’s Maus prove the graphic novel is a classic

Maus Now: Selected Writing

Edited by hillary chute.

Literary criticism/Viking/Hardcover/432 pages/$37.88 with GST from Books Kinokuniya/3 stars

Art Spiegelman’s audacious graphic novel Maus broke the mould when it was first serialised in the New York magazine Raw.

Even in the 1980s, before the full story was collated and published in book form in 1986 and 1991 by Pantheon, Maus had already excited commentary from critics and academics.

The idea of a Holocaust story told in the comics medium, with Jews depicted as mice and Germans drawn as cats, boggles the imagination. Yet, as Ken Tucker’s 1985 essay in this collection proves, Spiegelman’s towering achievement was already being recognised, analysed and dissected by critics.

This anthology of 22 essays samples from more than 35 years of this thriving cottage industry and includes essays translated from Hebrew, German and French. Organised in chronological order, the essays show an evolution in the approaches to reading Maus. 

Tucker’s Cats, Mice And History: The Avant-Garde Of The Comic Strip, for example, is an early and sincere plea for the due consideration of comics as high art. He declares of Maus: “This is an epic story told in tiny pictures.” 

As an arts critic writing for The New York Times, Tucker’s piece is one of the more accessible and readable pieces in this collection, which rockets from novelist Philip Pullman’s breezily erudite essay to the stodgy academic sludge of Andreas Huyssen’s Of Mice And Mimesis: Reading Spiegelman With Adorno.

The latter instantly caused in this reader a horrific, and headache-inducing, flashback to undergraduate readings with its determined mapping of Maus to German philosopher Theodor Adorno’s theory of mimesis, the process of imitation or mimicry through which artists portray and interpret the world.  

There are engaging essays here that guide readers into deeper engagement with Maus, reflecting the trajectory of academic thinking which came to embrace the graphic novel as a legitimate medium for high art and serious storytelling in the wake of Maus.

Alan Rosen’s The Language Of Survival: English As Metaphor In Spiegelman’s Maus parses the hierarchy of languages in Holocaust representation; while artist and curator Robert Storr’s 1991 essay, written as accompaniment to an exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), is a compact primer on the artist and his work. 

This information about the MoMA show, however, is missing from the book. A short line would have helped contextualise each essay, some of which are seminal pieces.

What this compilation does highlight is how resilient Maus is to multiple readings and interpretations. It withstands the critical theories academics hurl at it and resists reductive readings with the slippery ease of any great work of literature.

From the extensive quotations and a question-and-answer session with journalist David Samuels for Tablet magazine reproduced here, Spiegelman is the best spokesman for, and most intelligent parser of, his own work.

He is deeply aware of the contradictions that others have observed in the work, the comics medium versus the serious subject matter, narrative constructions of fiction versus reality, the contradictions of making a “hit” Holocaust story. 

In the end, the best way to read Maus is to simply go back to the original.

If you like this, read: Art Spiegelman’s The Complete Maus (Penguin Books, 1996, $37.43 with GST from Books Kinokuniya). This harrowing tale of Holocaust survival remains as vivid and gripping today, and is even more relevant given the rise of ethnonationalism.

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Introduction to Maus

Maus is a graphic novel written by a cartoonist, Art Spiegelman . It was first published in 1980 as episodes. Later, it was published as a book in 1991. Its publication reignited a few Jewish arguments about the Holocaust and Nazi barbarism. The novel presents the story of Art’s father, a Holocaust survivor, and his struggles to escape the Nazis. Using different postmodern techniques and depicting the Jews as mice, the Nazis as cats, the Polish as pigs, and the Americans as dogs. Art Spiegelman uses his art to present life in the concentration camps. His troubled relationship with his father becomes the central idea of this graphic story. Maus is a must-read for many reasons.

Summary of Maus

The story of the novel starts with the author who returns home after a long pause. Wavering between his present and past life, his father, Vladek, with whom he has had a fight, is now in a deep depression. Despite having a tense relationship, Art continues to juggle with the idea of writing a book on his father, a Polish immigrant and Holocaust survivor. The book outlines his childhood, life with his beloved wife, Anja, his family, and life in the concentration camps during the Holocaust as drawn from different interviews he conducts with his father. The novel depicts the estranged relationship between the father and son, the Holocaust experiences of the former, and not being able to relate to them yet being part of it due to his father’s depression over it.

Vladek informs Artie, a presentation of himself, or Art ‘Spiegelman’, as the ‘author’ is called, that he marries Anja in Poland before WWII. Living in Sosnowiec, the couple is quite happy until WWII breaks out and Vladek joins the Polish forces. However, the Germans capture him during a scuffle and throw him in a labor camp to work. When he returns home after winning freedom, he meets his young son Richieu, though, in a stifling environment where German soldiers are ruling the roost. Artie, throughout the novel, dislikes Richieu even though he had never met him, his photograph was always hung in his parent’s bedroom and unable to make his parents proud because of the ‘sibling rivalry’ with his ‘ghost brother’. Vladek finds himself encircled as a Jew.

However, he secures paperwork that can avoid Nazis and have Jewish authorities cooperate with them. Therefore, they escape the mass inspection from the Nazis but they take the father and sister of Anja. Before this to uphold the safety of their son they send him to live with her sister. Soon leave their homes to ghettos where they are surveilled and subjected to violence. More Jews join them to be transported to Auschwitz and other camps where they are forced to work and gassed if they are unable to do hard labor.  Richieu, who is sent with his aunt Tosha, poisons all the children including her own daughter to save them from the Nazi gas chambers and kills herself too.

When the Germans decide to liquidate the Srodula region, Vladek and Anja flee for their lives. However, some stranger finds and hands them over to the Germans. His father and mother-in-law are dispatched to Auschwitz, while Lolek, his main supporter, their nephew is also transported to another camp who later on survives and becomes an Engineer and a college professor. Once again, the couple hides in bunkers and take shelter from local Christians in Srodula but the Germans again find them. Even the smugglers to whom Vladek bribes to win assistance in being smuggled out of the country hand them over to the Germans after which they also reach Auschwitz where they are separated from each other.

Vladek uses his fluent tongue to win the job of a tutor to a Polish supervisor followed by his work as a cobbler. He, thus, saves himself from the forced manual labor during which time the Russians attack the German positions. The Germans hurriedly escape from Auschwitz, while the Jewish prisoners are sent to Gross-Rosen on foot . Vladek and other prisoners were discovered by Americans while they are waiting for death on an abandoned farm. Vladek, meanwhile, believes that Anja is dead, though, she survives. They are overjoyed when they meet in Sosnowiec.

During the narration of the father’s narrative , Art Spiegelman narrates his own story of how he collects the pieces of the story of his father and jots them down to create a coherent picture of the past of his father. Although he states, his interviews end in squabbles and bitterness, he again reverts to his father to know him more. Once Artie becomes furious for burning Anja’s diaries. Anja, who had committed suicide, suffered from mental illness for twenty years.

Vladek marries his second wife Mala who eventually leaves him and moves to Florida because of his frugal personality and accusing her of stealing money. Later, they reunite at the end of the story. Both father and son reconcile when they go through these interviews which prove therapeutic for Vladek, who calls Artie accidentally by his dead son’s name Richieu depicting that the horrific past of the Holocaust still latched onto him.

Major Themes in Maus

• The Holocaust: Holocaust and its barbarism is the primary thematic strand that emerges throughout this graphic novel. Vladek is a mouse and the Nazis are cats, chasing after the mice, the Jews, like in the cat and a mouse game. The narrator is Art’s father, Vladek, from whom he hears the tales of his life in Poland, his arrests and escapes, and finally his release from the camps during the Russian invasion, and his ultimate psychological state of mind that makes father-son relationships estranged and bitter. This estrangement forced Art to write his father’s memories and fictionalize the Holocaust.
• Father-Son Relationships: The novel also highlights the father-son relationships through the character of Art and Vladek. The son is aware of his father’s occasional bouts of depression, having something to do with the Holocaust, and his estrangement with Mala and Art has something to do with his memories of Anja. That is why Art decided to conduct his father’s interviews to narrate his story of the Holocaust and his struggle against his depressive personality.
• Identity: The novel sheds light on the Jewish identity of the writer as well as his father. The main intention of the novelists seems to reach out to the public to highlight the horrors of the Holocaust committed by the Nazis against the Jewish community to exterminate all the Jews. Still, the survival instinct of his father leads him to survive to have his progeny in the United States despite his psychological devastation and estranged relationships with his son and second wife, Mala, who ultimately leaves him.
• Grief and Memory: Grief and memory is another thematic strand that runs through the novel in the shapes of the stories and memories of Vladek, the author’s father. The main objective of Art in depicting the mental state of mind of Vladek in the postmodern fictional technique is to present his situation about his memory of the Holocaust and the grief that he has to go through. Not only does he lose his wife and his childhood, but also his other near and dear ones which have led him to experience bouts of depression and estranged relationships with his relatives, including Art.
• Guilt: The novel shows guilt in that Art does his best to understand his father and even leaves the fractured relationship, but returns and expresses sympathy with his father to understand his tragedy . He makes his father go through different parts of his life to express his side of the story to come out of the trauma and depression of the Holocaust. In one way, it is his sense of guilt and attempts to redeem himself for leaving his father in the critical stage of his life that forces him to write the story of his father.
• Death: The novel shows the theme of death pervading in different episodes. Wherever Vladek goes, death is after him and lurks everywhere but surprisingly he evades and avoids death everywhere. However, the scars of this struggle against death and efforts of survival continue to resonate in him as well as his son’s life, who returns to his father to hear the tales of his survival.
• Past and Present: Double narrative presentation technique used in Maus by Art Spiegelman takes the readers back and forth; to Poland to show Vladek struggling to save his family from the likely elimination and his struggle in the United States to evade the odds in the materialistic society amid traumatic past. Both narratives move side by side to show the impacts of the past Vladek on the presence of his son as well as himself. He is not only going through the rough patch of his life but also facing estrangement from his wife, Mala, and his son, Art.
• Survival: Survival is also a major theme of the narratives presented in the novel. Father, Vladek, is struggling to survive capitalism as he has struggled to survive the Holocaust. Although he has used the money to win his freedom at Auschwitz and Birkenau and has earned enough in the United States, he is unable to use the same in the United States to win love from Anja and the love of his siblings.
• Luck: The theme of luck is significant in the novel in that Vladek saves himself not only from the likely death but also from forced manual labor and by the end, he also succeeds in saving his wife, Anja, from gassing. This is sheer luck that he is successfully living in the United States even though he has lost his wife.

Major Characters in Maus

• Art Spiegelman : Art Spiegelman is the narrator and protagonist of Maus. A surviving child of Vladek and Anja, he has estranged relations with his father and decides to help his father recall his memories through interviews to redeem his guilt of leaving his father at odd times. Thus, his narrative is not only redemptive but also a tribute to his father’s survival during the Holocaust. Although he lives away from his father, this new connection of interviewing his father makes him visit and take care of him. It also helps him understand the complex traumatic experiences that his father has gone through during his arrests and escape from Auschwitz and Birkenau. He also understands the stingy behavior of his father as the resultant feature of the sufferings during those trying times. Finally, his publication of the novel proves a redeeming act.
• Vladek Spiegelman: A central character of Maus, Vladek shows his unique resilience and surviving spirit that works for him during his stay in Poland and then in the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau. He escapes several times but again faces arrests due to the perfidy of his protectors. He finally sees his wife after the Russians uproot the Nazis during the invasion of Poland, and he migrates to Sweden to have a second child, Art Spiegelman while Anja commits suicide. However, the most important parts of his life comprise his memories of the Holocaust that he could not shed off from his personality, the reason that he could not make up with Mala, who runs away. Even his son, Art, does not reconcile with his traumatic behavior.
• Anja Spiegelman: The character of Anja appears throughout the novel as the dominating character on account of being the beloved of Vladek, father of Art. Although they marry before WWII, they had had to go through the rigors of the Holocaust, and yet they survived it. Despite having blue blood , she stayed loyal to Vladek until her suicide in Sweden after giving birth to Art.
• Richieu Spiegelman: The first child born in Poland, Richieu dies during the Holocaust as the couple sends him to live with his uncle Persis. However, when they are traveling with other relatives to run away from the Nazis, he perishes with all the relatives. The couple keeps memories of the child until they have Art in their life when living in Sweden years after the Holocaust. His presence constantly echoes in the novel as Art considers him a ghost brother.
• Mala Spiegelman: When Vladek reaches the United States, he remarries Mala. Unfortunately, she could not go along with her husband, neither she try to understand his traumatic past that has bearings on his present. Instead, she chooses to leave him after Vladek alleges that she is after his money though she tries her best to go along with him. Though she is a survivor of the Holocaust and joins him, they finally part ways.
• Mr. Zylberberg: Mr. Zylberberg is Anja’s father and also the benefactor of the couple, who provides Vladek a base with a gift of a factory to launch his career as an entrepreneur. His entrepreneur skills could be gauged from the merchandising business he owns in the pre-war period. Both he and his wife die at Auschwitz despite the best efforts of Vladek who joins with Haskel, his cousin, to arrange their release without success.
• Vladek’s Father: Despite having no name, Vladek’s father often peeps through some crevices in his narrative in that he goes with him as being a tough and religious person who lost his beloved wife in the Holocaust. His starvation of his son is for the good purpose that is to saving his son from the likely conscription. He seals his end by joining his family though his cousin, Mordecai, saved him from being sent to Auschwitz.
• Tosha: The significance of Tosha in the novel lies in her relationship with Anja as her elder sister and daughter of Mr. Zylberberg. Having enjoyed good family life in her father’s house in pre-war Poland, she leaves with her husband, Wolfe, and her daughter, Bibi, at the assurance of Uncle Presis to the region where he is a Jewish council elder, but she commits suicide seeing Germans exterminating Jewish settlements.
• Francoise: Francoise is Art’s wife, who embraces Judaism to make Vladek, father of Art, happy. Her intelligence and kindness bubble through her during the relationships with her father-in-law and her husband, the writer, despite having a minor role in the narrative.
• Orbach: Orbach is significant in the course of the novel as a friend of the family of Vladek when they are in Poland. His courage lies in his claim of announcing Vladek as his cousin to win his release and bring him home.
• Uncle Herman: The significance of Uncle Herman lies in his role of staying patient during the war and the Holocaust which he has luckily escaped due to his New York visit. He loses his son and a daughter during the Holocaust.  

Writing Style of Maus

The writing style of Maus has combined graphics, irony , and simple sentence structure to create a masterpiece. The purpose of Art Spiegelman is to touch the raw nerves of humanity without causing numbness as a huge body of the Holocaust literature has done. Art Spiegelman beautifully combined his writing and cartooning skills with irony, depicting the Jews as mice and the Germans as cats, playing the deadly game in which the Jews are the victims of the highhandedness of the Germans. The diction , as well as the phrases , suit the graphics given in the novel. For the effectiveness of the thematic idea, Maus relies heavily on the use of figurative language , using metaphors , similes, and irony.

Analysis of the Literary Devices in Maus

• Action: The main action of the novel comprises the whole life of Vladek from his early childhood to marriage and his survival during the Holocaust up to his life in the United States. The falling action occurs when Vladek is arrested several times during his escapes during WWII. The rising action occurs when he finds Anja alive and kicking after the Holocaust and restarts his conjugal life.
• Allusion : The novel shows good use of different allusions as given in the below examples, i. But I took private lessons…I always dreamed of going to America . (15) ii. And new some Vodka to toast to the young couple. (22) iii. It has nothing to do with Hitler, with Holocaust!. (23) iv. See, here are the black market Jews they hanged in Sosnowiec…. (133) v. Ya Walt Disney! (133) vi. No. Far for a longer time, it is was better. There in Hungary for the Jews. But then, near the very finish of the war, they all got put also to Auschwitz. These examples allude to something or someplace, such as the first alludes to America , the second to Vodka, a type of Russian wine, the third to Hitler and an event, the Holocaust, the third to a place, the fourth to a play in the United States and the last to Auschwitz and Hungary, both important places in the Jewish history.
• Antagonist : The antagonist of this graphic tale is the Nazis as represented by the cats in the storyline, for they create obstacles and make the life of the Jews hell including that of Vladek.
• Conflict : The novel shows both external and internal conflicts. The external conflict is going on between Art and Vladek as well as Vladek and the Nazis and the Jews and the Germans. However, the internal conflict is going on in the minds of Vladek about his conflictual past and Art about his relationship with his father.
• Characters: The novel shows both static as well as dynamic characters . The young man, Art Spiegelman, and his father Vladek are dynamic characters as they show considerable transformation in their behavior and conduct by the end of the novel. However, all other characters are static as they do not show or witness any transformation such as Anja, Mala, Mandelbaum, and several others.
• Comics: The novel shows the use of comics through the graphics as Art Spiegelman has himself created this graphic novel in pictures with dialogues or narration written in bubbles.
• Climax : The climax in the novel occurs when Vladek finally finds Anja alive in Auschwitz and both start life anew.
• Foreshadowing : The novel shows many instances of foreshadows as given in the examples below, i. I went out to see my Father in Rego Park. I hadn’t seen him in a long time – we weren’t that close. (11) ii. Yes. You see how you mix me up? In 1939 we were on the frontier pigged into trenches by a river . (47) iii. Has the family been talking good care of my Bielsko textile factory. (76) The mention of a long time, 1939 and Bielsko show the shadows of the coming events.
• Imagery : Imagery is used to make readers perceive things involving their five senses. For example, i. I could avoid the truth no longer. The doctor’s words clattered inside me…I left confused. I felt angry, I felt numb. I did not exactly feel like crying. But figured I should! (94) ii. No, it’s only wood. But chewing it feels a little like eating food. (123) These two examples show images of feeling and sound clearly.
• Metaphor : Maus shows good use of various metaphors as given in the below examples, i. The extended metaphor used in the novel is of cat and mouse . The Germans are shown as cats while the Jews are shown as mice. ii. We joked and called you “Heil Hitler.” (30) iii. I must be seeing things. How can a tree run? (48). iv. Often we played chess to keep our minds busy and make the time go. (54) These examples show that several things have been compared directly as the last one compares their son to Hitler. However, the third one shows the person compared to a tree and the time as if it is some person.
• Mood : The novel, Maus , shows various moods; it starts with a jolly mood but suddenly turns to tragic, somber, and macabre and moves to ironic and sarcastic until it reaches the end where it is satisfying and calm.
• Motif : Most important motifs of the novel are cats as Nazis, mice as the Jews, stamps, camps, and dogs.
• Narrator : The novel is narrated from the first-person point of view , the author, who narrates his father, Vladek’s, story in his own words. He also becomes a third-person narrator at times.
• Parallelism : The novel shows the use of parallelism in the following examples, i. Follow Jews: On Wednesday, August 12 th , every one of you, youth and old, male and female, healthy and sick, must register at the Dienst Stadium…(88) ii. It was so crowded that some of them actually suffocated…no food, no toilets. It was terrible. (92) iii. I felt angry, I felt numb. I did not exactly feel like crying. But figured I should! (94) iv. So we worked day after day. We survived week after week. The same. (58) The sentences show the examples of parallelism such as parallel nouns in the first, the same in the second, and then verbs in the third. The last, however, shows parallel sentences.
• Protagonist : Vladek is the protagonist of the novel. The novel starts with his entry into the world and moves forward as he narrates his story of growing up, marrying, going through the terrible situations of the Holocaust, and teaching in the United States.
• Repetition : The novel shows the use of repetitions as given in the below example, i. And so we lived for more than a year. But always things came a little worse, a little worse…(79) ii, What! Put everything back exactly like it was, or I’ll never hear the end of it! Okay…Okay…Relax. (93) iii. And she was so laughing and so happy so happy, that she approached each time and kissed me, so happy she was. (35) These examples show the use of repetitions such as “little worse” in the first and “Okay” in the second and “happy” in the third.
• Setting : The setting of the novel is Poland, some German towns, Auschwitz, and then the United States.
• Simile : The novel shows excellent use of various similes as given in the below examples, i. You want it (home) should be like a stable. (52) ii. And it seems like years since I have felt warm or been in a bed. (55) iii. You are a Pole like man. (64) These are similes as the use of the word “like” shows the comparison between different things.

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Maus essay questions.

Though the author was born in Sweden after the end of the Holocaust, the events have nevertheless had a profound effect on his life. Discuss the nature of these effects and why the Holocaust remains such a formative event.

What is the significance of the author's decision to portray people of different races and nationalities as different animals? What effect does this have on the understanding and impact of the story?

Maus is written in the rather unconventional form of a graphic novel. Is this format an effective means of telling a Holocaust narrative? How might it differ from a more conventional Holocaust narrative?

To what degree was Vladek's survival based on luck, and to what degree was his survival based on his considerable resourcefulness?

To what extent are Vladek's aggravating personality traits a product of his experiences during the Holocaust?

Discuss Art's portrayal of his father. Is it a fair portrayal? What feelings does Art have about this portrayal?

Throughout Maus , Art is consumed with guilt. Discuss these different forms of guilt. How do they relate to one another? How do they differ?

The second chapter of Book II of Maus begins with a third level of narrative, which takes place in 1987, nine years after Art began working on Maus and five years after the death of his father. What is the purpose of this narrative, and what does it tell us about the author's relationship with his father and with the Holocaust?

Compare Vladek's marriage to Mala with his previous marriage to Anja. Why is Vladek's relationship with Mala so contentious, while his relationship with Anja was so filled with love?

Though Maus focuses largely on the Jewish people, the narrative generally avoids issues of religion. To what extent are the major characters religious? What role does religion play in their lives?

MAUS Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for MAUS is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Page 32, “Right away, we went.” Where are Vladek and Anja going and why?

Right away, we went. The sanitarium was inside Czechoslovakia, one of the most expensive and beautiful in the world.

Anja, Vladek's wife and Spiegelman's mother, went to a sanatorium in Czechoslovakia in 1938.

Vladek wants to go to Hungary in order to escape the danger and uncertainty of his life, as well as Anja's. Hungary represents hope and safety.

The visual device used to show the difference betweem Vladek and Anja is that Anja has a tail protruding from under her coat, a detail that emphasizes her Jewish identity.

Study Guide for MAUS

MAUS study guide contains a biography of Art Spiegelman, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• MAUS Summary
• Character List

Essays for MAUS

MAUS essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of MAUS by Art Spiegelman.

• Stylistic Detail of MAUS and Its Effect on Reader Attachment
• Using Animals to Divide: Illustrated Allegory in Maus and Terrible Things
• Father-Son Conflict in MAUS
• Anthropomorphism and Race in Maus
• A Postmodernist Reading of Spiegelman's Maus

Lesson Plan for MAUS

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to MAUS
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• MAUS Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for MAUS

• Introduction
• Primary characters
• Publication history

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Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale: A Bibliographic Essay

Related Papers

Abdul Walid Azizi

The graphic novel Maus by Art Spiegelman is the story of the writer’s own parents who survived several Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz. In the novel, Jews are depicted as mice and Germans as cats. Spiegelman’s father has trouble coming into terms with the war experience. He, as the son of two Holocaust survivors, also struggles to make sense of the brutal reality of the war and the concentration camps. The irrelevant digressions in the text is a significant indicator of the writer’s difficulty to come into terms with the horror of war while, paradoxically, these digressions assist him to articulate ideas and put his parents’ story into paper. Spiegelman employs the dialogue form to overcome this struggle and communicate about the brutal reality of the war and Auschwitz. Opposite to the typical narratives, the author then employs the comics form—replacing the human figures with the animal cats and mice masks—to speak of the unspeakable horrifying tale. Using this particular form of comics enables the writer to disrupt the linear time concept and, consequently, aids him to report his parents’ story.

DISCOVERY: Georgia State Honors College Undergraduate Research Journal

Jonathan Kincade

Julian Lawrence

Prandium the Journal of Historical Studies at U of T Mississauga

Puneet Kohli

Alec Leibsohn

Daan Tweehuysen

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Donna Witters Banks

While comics have long struggled for legitimacy within the cultural arena, graphic memoir stands out as a relatively recent and unique addition that proves the importance of the medium and offers tremendous potential for individuals and society. As two of the earliest and most well-regarded graphic memoirs, Maus by Art Spiegelman and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi provide powerful examples of what the comic medium is capable of, and, indeed, paved the way for an entirely new genre. Beyond the artistic and literary feats these graphic memoirs represent, these authors and those following in their footsteps demonstrate that this is also a profound vehicle for awakening voice and facilitating healing.

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An examination of the specifically graphic-novelistic strategies employed in Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir, Maus, in leading the reader into a punctuated experience of time and memory, and in forcing complicity with the novel’s problematic animal-as-ethnicity metaphor, in a wider attempt at putting together the critical vocabulary for discussing comic books as simultaneously textual and pictorial ‘texts.’

Law Text Culture

Honni van Rijswijk , Karen Crawley

Scholars working at the intersection of law and trauma have often turned to literature to supplement the law’s version of justice. In this article, we consider what the unique formal properties of comics – which we refer to here as graphic novels – might bring to this pursuit, by reference to Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1996) and In the Shadow of No Towers (2004). We suggest that these two works offer a critique of the underlying model of trauma upon which law relies, suggesting alternative understandings of trauma in a mode which is particularly instructive for law. Although Spiegelman organizes his treatment of trauma through specific events that have defined the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – the Holocaust and 9/11 – he represents the impact, as well as the ethical and aesthetic questions of these experiences, in ways that radically challenge the supremacy of the event by showing the ways in which the event fails to be contained.

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Heroism in Maus : Vladek and Anja Spiegelman

This essay about “Maus” by Art Spiegelman explores the distinct forms of heroism exhibited by Vladek and Anja Spiegelman, two Holocaust survivors. It highlights Vladek’s resourcefulness and practical intelligence as crucial survival tools during the Holocaust, illustrating a form of heroism that emerges from necessity rather than traditional valor. Similarly, Anja’s resilience in the face of severe emotional and psychological challenges is discussed, emphasizing her quiet strength and the preservation of her diary entries as acts of bravery. The essay also reflects on the couple’s mutual support, showcasing heroism as a collective endeavor within relationships. Furthermore, it considers the lingering impacts of their experiences post-war, portraying ongoing struggles as an extension of their heroic efforts to survive past adversities. Through their stories, the essay presents a nuanced understanding of heroism, framed by the harsh realities of war and the enduring human spirit.

How it works

In Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel “Maus,” the depiction of heroism is intricately portrayed through the lives of Vladek and Anja Spiegelman, two Holocaust survivors whose experiences and resilience offer a profound insight into the human spirit. The novel does not merely present heroism in the conventional sense of valor in battle; rather, it explores the everyday bravery of surviving the horrors of the Holocaust and the subsequent challenge of carrying those memories.

Vladek Spiegelman, the central character through whom the Holocaust experiences are recounted, demonstrates heroism through his incredible resourcefulness and will to survive.

Throughout the narrative, Vladek’s ingenuity in navigating the dangers of Nazi-occupied Poland is striking. From crafting hideouts and bargaining for food to learning multiple languages to aid in his survival, Vladek’s actions exemplify a form of heroism that is born out of necessity rather than choice. His survival tactics often blur the lines between moral ambiguity and the harsh ethics of survival, presenting a more complex form of heroism that goes beyond traditional heroic ideals.

Anja Spiegelman’s heroism, while less pronounced, is equally significant. Her journey is imbued with emotional and psychological resilience. Anja’s struggles with mental health, highlighted by her battles with depression both during and after the war, introduce another layer of heroism that is often overshadowed by physical survival stories. Her ability to maintain hope and continue living in the face of unimaginable loss and trauma, including the suicide of her mother and the pressures of hiding during the war, underscore a quieter, yet incredibly powerful form of heroism. Anja’s preservation of her diary entries during the Holocaust, despite the risk, also serves as a testament to her bravery. These writings not only provided a historical artifact for her son but also a means of confronting and processing her traumatic experiences.

The dynamic between Vladek and Anja also brings to light the relational aspect of heroism. Their support for each other during their concealment, Vladek’s persistent efforts to protect his wife, and their shared determination to secure a future for their son, Richieu, who tragically does not survive the war, highlight how heroism often manifests in the sacrifices made for loved ones. This mutual support system illustrates the broader theme of communal and relational heroism, where survival is not an individual endeavor but a collective one.

“Maus” goes beyond the depiction of Vladek and Anja’s wartime heroics to also delve into the post-war effects on their lives, exploring the enduring impact of their experiences. Vladek’s resourcefulness turns into miserliness, a trait that strains his relationships with those around him, including his son, Art. Anja’s depression continues to affect her, eventually leading to her suicide years after the war’s end. These portrayals highlight the ongoing battle with past demons and the continuous act of survival, suggesting that heroism is not only about overcoming immediate threats but also enduring the lasting scars of such adversities.

In conclusion, “Maus” presents heroism through the nuanced portrayals of Vladek and Anja Spiegelman, characters who embody the complexities of survival and resilience. Their stories challenge the traditional notions of heroism, offering a deeper understanding of what it means to be a hero in the direst circumstances. Through their lives, Art Spiegelman crafts a narrative that honors the memory of those who survived and those who did not, reminding us of the profound impact of human endurance and the spirit’s capacity to persevere through unimaginable horrors. This layered exploration makes “Maus” not only a pivotal read but also a tribute to the unsung heroes of everyday life.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Books — Maus

Essays on Maus

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Symbolism in Maus by Spiegelman

The themes of suffering and survivor's guilt in maus, the concept of guilt and its representation in maus, analysis of father-son relationship in maus, let us write you an essay from scratch.

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The Importance of Anthropomorphic Characters in Maus

Art speigelman’s depiction of the father-son relationship in his book, maus, the interconnection between the past and the present in maus, the use of visual narrative and formal structure in maus: a survivors tale by art spiegelman, get a personalized essay in under 3 hours.

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An Analysis of Maus, a Graphical Story by Art Spiegelman

Analysis of artie's impressions of the holocaust in maus, maus through the prism of postmodernism, the means of stylistics used and their influence on the text in maus, the representative means of comics in maus, analyzing allegories in "maus" and "terrible things", graphic novel series "maus": world war ii and the holocaust, family dynamics in life is beautiful, maus, and barefoot gen, comparative analysis of maus by art spiegelman and night by elie wiesel, the theme of religion in graphic novels by spiegelman and sturm, the themes of family and guilt in maus by art spiegelman, a powerful idea and a prominent action in the novels unbroken and maus.

1991, Art Spiegelman

Comics, Novel, Graphic novel, Comic book, Biography

Vladek Spiegelman, Art Spiegelman, Anja Spiegelman, Mandelbaum, Mala Spiegelman, Françoise Mouly

"Maus" is a graphic novel written by Art Spiegelman and is based on the experiences of his father, Vladek Spiegelman, a Holocaust survivor. The novel is a unique and poignant exploration of the Holocaust, using the medium of comic art to depict the harrowing events. Inspired by his father's firsthand accounts, Art Spiegelman tells the story of Vladek's life during World War II, including his time in Auschwitz concentration camp and his struggles to survive and protect his family. "Maus" stands out for its innovative portrayal of the characters as anthropomorphic animals, with Jews depicted as mice and Nazis as cats. This metaphorical representation adds depth to the narrative, allowing readers to engage with the story on multiple levels.

The story begins with Art's attempts to understand his father's past and the impact it has had on their relationship. Vladek shares his harrowing journey, from the rise of anti-Semitism in Poland to the Nazi occupation, the horrors of Auschwitz, and his eventual liberation. Throughout the novel, Art grapples with the weight of his father's story and the responsibility of representing it truthfully. The narrative not only explores the brutality and dehumanization of the Holocaust but also delves into the complex dynamics between father and son, the trauma of survivors, and the challenges of memory and storytelling.

"Maus" is primarily set in two distinct time periods: the present-day 1970s in New York City and the past during World War II in Poland and various concentration camps. In the present, the story takes place in the urban landscape of New York City, depicting the everyday lives of Art Spiegelman and his father, Vladek. The city serves as a backdrop for Art's interviews with his father, as well as their interactions and struggles in dealing with the lingering effects of the Holocaust. The past setting of the narrative is situated in Poland during the rise of Nazi Germany and the subsequent occupation. It portrays the stark realities of life under Nazi rule, the ghettos, and the horrors of concentration camps such as Auschwitz. The grim and oppressive atmosphere of these settings highlights the extreme circumstances faced by Vladek and countless others during the Holocaust.

One of the primary themes is the trauma and its intergenerational effects. The graphic novel delves into the psychological impact of the Holocaust on both survivors and their children. It portrays the burden of memory, guilt, and the struggle to reconcile personal experiences with the larger historical context. Another significant theme is the power of storytelling and the role of art in representing history. Art Spiegelman employs the medium of comics to convey the complex and emotional story of his father's survival. Through visual imagery and the use of anthropomorphic animals as characters, the narrative challenges traditional depictions of the Holocaust and highlights the capacity of art to engage with difficult subject matter. Additionally, "Maus" explores themes of prejudice, dehumanization, and the consequences of unchecked bigotry. It delves into the ways in which individuals grapple with their identities, navigate social hierarchies, and confront prejudice in a world scarred by the Holocaust.

One prominent literary device is symbolism. Art Spiegelman utilizes anthropomorphic animals to represent different groups of people, with Jews portrayed as mice and Nazis as cats. This metaphorical approach adds depth and complexity to the storytelling, allowing readers to grasp the power dynamics and dehumanization inherent in the Holocaust. For example, the use of mice to represent Jews underscores their vulnerability and prey status in the face of Nazi persecution. Another literary device employed in "Maus" is foreshadowing. Through subtle hints and clues, Spiegelman foreshadows future events, creating suspense and anticipation. An example of this is when Art's father, Vladek, mentions his first wife and children who died during the war, foreshadowing the tragic fate that awaits them. Additionally, the use of flashbacks is a significant literary device in "Maus." The narrative frequently shifts between the present and past, offering glimpses into Vladek's experiences during the Holocaust. These flashbacks provide crucial context, deepen character development, and offer a layered understanding of the historical events. Moreover, the graphic novel format itself is a distinct literary device in "Maus." The combination of visuals and text allows for a unique storytelling experience, providing visual cues and imagery that enhance the emotional impact of the narrative. The illustrations contribute to the overall narrative structure and create a powerful synergy between the words and images.

First and foremost, Art Spiegelman's groundbreaking work revolutionized the graphic novel medium. "Maus" demonstrated the artistic and narrative potential of the graphic format, elevating it from mere entertainment to a serious and respected literary form. Its success opened doors for other graphic novels to explore complex themes and historical events. In terms of Holocaust representation, "Maus" introduced a new perspective by using anthropomorphic animals to depict the characters, reflecting the dehumanization and brutality of the Holocaust itself. This innovative approach challenged traditional portrayals and expanded the possibilities of Holocaust storytelling. Moreover, "Maus" sparked critical discussions about trauma, memory, and the transmission of history. Spiegelman's exploration of his father's experiences as a Holocaust survivor highlighted the intergenerational impact of trauma and the complexities of memory. This prompted a reevaluation of how personal narratives and collective memory shape our understanding of historical events.

1. "Maus" was the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize. In 1992, Art Spiegelman's groundbreaking work received the Pulitzer Prize Special Citation, marking a significant moment in the recognition of graphic novels as a legitimate form of literature. 2. "Maus" has been translated into over 30 languages, reaching a global audience and resonating with readers worldwide. Its powerful storytelling and unique visual style have transcended cultural boundaries, making it a universally acclaimed and widely read work.

Maus is an important subject for an essay due to its exceptional contribution to literature and its innovative narrative style. The graphic novel by Art Spiegelman delves into the Holocaust and its aftermath, presenting a poignant and deeply personal account of the author's father's experiences as a survivor. By using anthropomorphic animal characters to represent different groups, Spiegelman creates a powerful metaphorical framework that explores complex themes of identity, trauma, memory, and the impact of historical events on individuals and generations. Writing an essay about Maus provides an opportunity to delve into the unique literary and artistic techniques employed by Spiegelman, such as the use of panels, visual symbolism, and interweaving narratives. It allows for an examination of the graphic novel's impact on the acceptance and recognition of the genre as a form of serious literature. Additionally, an essay on Maus can shed light on the Holocaust's ongoing relevance, the responsibility of memory, and the power of storytelling in confronting historical atrocities. Overall, Maus prompts critical analysis and deep reflection, making it a compelling and important subject for an essay.

"I cannot forget it...tonight, you have made me hate you, and the whole ghetto, because of this ridiculous uniform you're wearing!" "Friends? Your friends...if you lock them together in a room with no food for a week...then you could see what it is, friends!" "I'm tired of hearing about the Holocaust!" "Richieu, my brother, where are you now?" "To die, it's easy...but you have to struggle for life!"

1. Rothberg, M., & Spiegelman, A. (1994). " We Were Talking Jewish": Art Spiegelman's" Maus" as" Holocaust" Production. Contemporary Literature, 35(4), 661-687. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/1208703) 2. Young, J. E. (1998). The Holocaust as Vicarious Past: Art Spiegelman's" Maus" and the Afterimages of History. Critical Inquiry, 24(3), 666-699. (https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/448890?journalCode=ci) 3. Orbán, K. (2007). Trauma and Visuality: Art Spiegelman's Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers. Representations, 97(1), 57-89. (https://online.ucpress.edu/representations/article-abstract/97/1/57/95740/Trauma-and-Visuality-Art-Spiegelman-s-Maus-and-In) 4. Tabachnick, S. E. (1993). Of Maus and memory: the structure of Art Spiegelman's graphic novel of the Holocaust. Word & Image, 9(2), 154-162. (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02666286.1993.10435484) 5. Tabachnick, S. E. (2004). The religious meaning of Art Spiegelman's Maus. Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 22(4), 1-13. (https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/17/article/170723/summary) 6. Spiegelman, A. (2008). Maus I & II. Historia de un sobreviviente: Y aquí comenzaron mis problemas. (https://www.tpet.com/content/PHSamples/MausRJs.pdf) 7. Knowles, S. (2015). The postcolonial graphic novel and trauma: From Maus to Malta. Postcolonial traumas: memory, narrative, resistance, 83-96. (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137526434_6)

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Visual Narrative of Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” Essay

The topic of World War II is not easy to discuss or display. Such works are often subjected to severe criticism for their relevance to reality (Kohli 4). Particularly close attention is paid to the deviation of the narrative from any generally accepted canons in content and form. Art Spiegelman’s Maus belongs to the latter type, as it presents the reader with a story about the life of a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust in the unusual form of a graphic novel.

However, despite the chosen environment’s unusualness to reflect such topics, Spiegelman uses its features to his advantage. Considering the format selected by the author, this work should be examined precisely in the context of a visual rather than a purely textual narrative (Ewert 87). Graphical display of events allows switching between two time periods without losing the narrative’s coherence, even if one timeline suddenly interrupts the other. Thus, Spiegelman uses graphic means to convey the narrative in more detail, paying attention to critical points and developing characters who think about the story being told right during the retelling. This essay aims to research this graphic novel using additional sources to support the thesis put forward.

Several vital elements characterize Maus’s graphic form. First of all, a distinctive feature of the work is the use of anthropomorphic animals as characters, while the type of animal depends on nationality. Thus, Jews are represented as mice, and Germans are portrayed as cats. The riskiness of such a step, which may be associated with national stereotypes, is justified by the need to vividly visualize the horrors of the Holocaust (Gavrilă 61). Secondly, as mentioned above, there are two timelines in the novel, the first of which takes place in the present relative to the author of the time, and the second is the memories of one of the characters.

The story is recorded from the words of Vladek Spiegelmann by his son Artie, whose names coincide with the names of the author himself and his father. Artie’s father is a Polish Jewish Holocaust survivor, so this story aims to convey the story of the Nazi invasion (Spiegelman 23). Already here, one can note the skillful use of the graphic form of the novel. Anthropomorphic animals’ use does not make the story more childish but instead expresses specific subtext (Munk 55). The choice of animals implicitly indicates the relationship between the Nazis and the Jews since the former hunted the latter in the same way as their animal counterparts.

However, to analyze Maus more deeply, it is necessary to turn to how the narrative is structured. First of all, one can note the presence of the author’s voice in the form of Vladek and gaps in the text (Rajkhowa 45). Transitions from one timeline to another are a crucial element of the narrative, as they are almost always associated with Vladek’s comments on the situation. Most of the story takes place in the past tense; however, Artie and Vladek periodically interrupt it with their lines, asking questions to comment on what is happening.

One of the first manifestations of this technique can be seen already in the book’s first pages. Behind such moments, the direct reaction of the characters to the described events is hidden and the assessment or reassessment of what is happening. The first example of this behavior can be noted when Artie asks his father an awkward question about the nature of Vladek and Lucia’s relationship (Spiegelman 15). Although Vladek responds with just one line, the reader can see the character’s regret for what happened thanks to the graphic display. The father recalls moments of his life, rethinking them and admitting his mistakes.

Such moments make the characters much more alive and turn Vladek from a storyteller into a living person who doubts his deeds and sometimes interrupts the story because of everyday trifles. A man can be distracted, for example, by fallen ash, thereby showing himself as a character with his own emotions and attitude (Spiegelman 52). Often, Vladek is quite strict both to his son and those around him. Besides, in his everyday comments, a reader can see the traits of a Holocaust survivor, for example, in an uncompromising attitude towards money, which saved his life many times, or leftover food (Merino). For a person who has gone through tremendous hardships, waste of food or a frivolous attitude towards things is unacceptable.

However, even more essential breaks in the narrative are those that directly or indirectly emphasize Vladek’s ability to survive under challenging conditions. For example, describing his life as a prisoner-worker, the father notes that some prisoners could not bear the hard work and returned to the cold camp to starve. However, Vladek notes that he does not know what became of them, thereby hinting that he had enough strength to work and survive even under the Germans’ yoke (Spiegelman 56). Later, having already lived in the ghetto with his wife, Vladek began to sell various items and stealthily delivering sugar to shops. Vladek comments that despite the immense danger of being hanged, even when he was caught, he managed to wriggle out, pretending to have a grocery store (Spiegelman 85). Such moments show the character’s assessment of his actions, which helped him survive.

There are also abundant moments of reevaluation and rethinking of the spoken words. Vladek’s memories are quite heavy, and he retells them either reluctantly or with a heavy sadness. So, for example, at the moment of grief of the father’s wife for relatives who ended up in a concentration camp, the narration is interrupted, while Vladek from the “modern” timeline repeats the words he said many years ago (Spiegelman 122). At other times, Vladek had to sacrifice his interests to survive and ensure his wife’s survival. Despite facing insults towards Jews, the man maintained his disguise using a fascist greeting (Spiegelman 149). Through an assessment of the past events, one can emphasize the courage and dedication of Vladek, who hid right in the enemy’s lair, using only his arrogance and cunning. However, in many cases, he had to be ruthless and manipulative for his survival, lying to the people (Ketchum Glass 16). Through the available visualization, the reader can see that Vladek regrets many of his actions but considers them necessary.

Thus, most of the moments when the narrative is interrupted by the words of Artie or Vladek communicating with his son serve several purposes. First, Vladek gives the reader his assessment of his ability to survive, allowing him to understand him as a character better. Besides, a man periodically shows his perspective and doubts it, hesitating about the correctness of certain decisions. Finally, such moments are sometimes associated with how a man survived and with simple, everyday trifles that reveal him as a character – courage, resourcefulness, and perseverance. Through interactions in the “modern” timeline, the reader can better understand what Vladek went through, thereby gaining a deeper understanding of the depth of the tragedy of the Jewish people in World War II. Thus, Spiegelman’s graphic means are an effective way of conveying the author’s thoughts, which would otherwise need to be expressed in a large number of detailed descriptions. Using the graphic novel format, Spiegelman made a much shorter but no less meaningful story than full-fledged text novels, replacing some of the text tools with graphics and illustrations.

Works Cited

Ewert, Jeanne C. “Reading Visual Narrative: Art Spiegelman’s “Maus”.” Narrative, vol. 8, no. 1, 2000, pp. 87-103.

Gavrilă, Ana-Maria. “Holocaust Representation and Graphical Strangeness in Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale:“Funny Animals,” Constellations, and Traumatic Memory.” Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Communicatio, vol. 4, 2017, pp. 61-75.

Ketchum Glass, Susannah. “Witnessing the Witness: Narrative slippage in Art Spiegelman’s Maus.” Life Writing, vol. 3, no. 2, 2006, pp. 3-24.

Kohli, Puneet. “The Memory and Legacy of Trauma in Art Spiegelman’s Maus.” Prandium: The Journal of Historical Studies at U of T Mississauga, vol. 1, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1-23.

Merino, Ana. “Memory in Comics: Testimonial, Autobiographical and Historical Space in MAUS.” Transatlantica. Revue d’études américaines. American Studies Journal, vol. 1 (2010).

Munk, Tea-Maria. “The Holocaust in Pictures: Maus and the Narrative of the Graphic Novel.” Leviathan: Interdisciplinary Journal in English , vol. 2, 2018, 54-59.

Rajkhowa, Baishalee. “Multimodal Stylistics in Graphic Novel: Understanding the Visual Language Syntax in Art Spiegelman’s Maus.” International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation , vol. 4, no. 1, 2021, pp. 45-51.

Spiegelman, Art. Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History. Pantheon, 1986.

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IvyPanda. (2022, September 28). Visual Narrative of Art Spiegelman’s “Maus”. https://ivypanda.com/essays/visual-narrative-of-art-spiegelmans-maus/

"Visual Narrative of Art Spiegelman’s “Maus”." IvyPanda , 28 Sept. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/visual-narrative-of-art-spiegelmans-maus/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'Visual Narrative of Art Spiegelman’s “Maus”'. 28 September.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Visual Narrative of Art Spiegelman’s “Maus”." September 28, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/visual-narrative-of-art-spiegelmans-maus/.

1. IvyPanda . "Visual Narrative of Art Spiegelman’s “Maus”." September 28, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/visual-narrative-of-art-spiegelmans-maus/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Visual Narrative of Art Spiegelman’s “Maus”." September 28, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/visual-narrative-of-art-spiegelmans-maus/.

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Art Spiegelman, author Maus, on Book Banning, Culture Wars & America’s Drift Toward Fascism

While censorship of books, comics, graphic novels and films has been with us since the advent of books, comics, graphic novels and films, over the past several years, book banning, and book burning, has become a driving force in the right wing’s culture wars. Books that tell LGBTQ+ stories are under attack. Librarians are under attack. Libraries are under attack. And in some states, the American Library Association has come under attack. One of the earliest modern-day censorship efforts revolved around Art Spiegelman’s Maus , a Holocaust story that the good folks in Tennessee thought was too racy for its schools.  

Several years ago, while in Paris, Gale and I had the opportunity to visit the Art Spiegelman retrospective at the Pompidou Centre library. Little did we suspect -- or imagine -- that Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivors Tale -- the Pulitzer Prize–winning genre-defining comic memoir -- would be the subject of headlines regarding the censoring of his work.

In 2022, the McMinn County, Tennessee school board banned Spiegelman’s book, a hybrid of memoir and oral history, over a few curse words and a nude image of Spiegleman’s mother in the bathtub after having committed suicide.

MSNBC noted that Maus . “[t]he first ever graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize, …. is a frank and visceral look at the Holocaust through his father’s eyes. … Spiegelman famously depicts his characters in Maus as animals – Jewish mice, Nazi cats, Polish pigs, French frogs, and American dogs -- subverting common Nazi propaganda portraying Jewish people as ‘rats’, ‘vermin’, and ‘sub-human’. The black-and-white drawings masterfully illustrate anguish, love, fear, and brutality. The reader is not just hearing about the depravity of the Holocaust – they’re seeing it. At its core Maus is a memoir –a story about the Holocaust–but it also explores intergenerational trauma, the complexities of family, mental health, and enduring love.

In an interview with PEN America’s Lisa Tolin, Spiegelman joked that the school board apparently wanted “a kinder, gentler, fuzzier Holocaust” to teach the children. Spiegelman added, “We haven’t learned much from the past, but there’s some things you should be able to figure out.  Book burning leads to people burning. So it’s something that needs to be fought against” ( https://pen.org/art-spiegelman-on-banning-mau/#:text=Art%20Spiegelman%20was%20shocked.a%20district%20in%20Tennessee ).

"Maus Now: Selected Writing" (Pantheon), edited by Hillary Chute, distinguished professor of art and design at Northwestern University, "bolsters Spiegelman’s rightful place in history through various cultural, scholarly and philosophical texts that dissect and analyze facets of Maus’ form, format and what makes it such a seminal opus in a unprecedented discipline that has spawned and influenced hundreds of subsequent graphic novels," Steven Heller pointed out in an essay on The Daily Heller ( https://www.printmag.com/daily-heller/the-daily-heller-the-maus-that-roars/ ).

Margaret Atwood had her graphic novel version of her critically acclaimed book "The Handmaid's Tale" removed from classroom libraries in a Texas school district. Speaking out on book bans across the country, Atwood called it a "a culture war that’s totally out of control," and "woke snowflakery," while Spiegelman has branded it "Orwellian.”

PEN America’s Tolin asked Spiegelman: “The Nazis  obviously banned books. What does it say to you that book banning is now happening here?”

Spiegelman: I think that book banning is not the only threat. I mean, there are many threats right now, where it seems to be, memory is short, fascism is a while back, the don’t know much about it. And, you know, it’s maybe attractive. It’s so complicated to lie in a plurality, a democracy of some kind, even is it’s a flawed one, an I try to balance out all those needs, and make decisions for yourself. So there’s a desire to keep it simple. And maybe fascism looks simple to them. And it seems to be the direction we’re moving in, more and more in various ways. And not just in America. It’s a worldwide phenomenon.”  

In addition to Maus , Spiegelman is the author of Co-Mix: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics, and Scraps , and Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!. He has been a contributor to The New Yorker magazine since 1992 and has drawn dozens of covers for the magazine.

Last year, in an interview ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnOaE2ExG4A ) with MSNBC’s Ali Velshi on the VelshiBannedBookClub, Spiegelman said that he never expected to be in the position of talking about book banning in the country. And while Maus has thus far survived with “flying colors,” he is concerned about the censoring of books about race and gender.

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Critic’s Pick

After 70 Years, Si Lewen’s Wrenching ‘Parade’ Marches On

This sequence of 63 bravura antiwar drawings hasn’t been shown in New York in nearly seven decades but they’re up again now, thanks to Art Spiegelman.

By Will Heinrich

At the very beginning of Si Lewen’s “The Parade,” the series of untitled antiwar works on artist’s board that forms the pulsing heart of a new exhibition curated by the cartoonist Art Spiegelman, four sketchy, ecstatic boys and girls stride into the endless possibility of unmarked white gesso. In the second panel, a family leaning out their window catches sight of someone waving a flag.

The flag itself is also faint and white, but the family is surrounded by an ominous black shadow. And as that single flag turns into a parade, and the parade acquires rifles, swords, black banners and German helmets, Lewen’s painting and drawing — he made “The Parade” around 1950 with a mix of crayon, ink, paint and graphite — gets denser and darker.

As Spiegelman notes, the work is full of allusions. There’s a dog from “Guernica” and direct quotations from the notably antiwar German artists Otto Dix and George Grosz. “The Parade” has been exhibited in galleries, projected in a theater, and published as a book, each time in a slightly different edit, though this particular set of 63 images, hung around James Cohan Gallery in a single narrative line, is the first appearance of the originals in New York in nearly 70 years. And just about every one of those 63 bears examining as an art work in its own right.

But one of the chief glories of the piece overall is seeing what happens to painting styles meant to be looked into when they’re dropped into a cinematic sequence that moves inexorably from left to right. Jagged rows of bayonets may borrow from Cubism’s fractured perspective, but here they chiefly mean clamor and noise. As the boys from the first panel become teenage cannon fodder and the dogs of war howl, a Jackson Pollock-style splatter is a jazzy nod to the art of the day, but also reads unmistakably as blood left behind by a firing squad.

Whether it’s a movie, a symphony, a story, or a line of small paintings, part of the appeal of a narrative is the way it mimics the sequence of moments and days to which we’re all subject even as it offers a temporary respite from them. The exhilarating sense of motion in “The Parade” easily keeps Lewen’s beautiful drawing balanced against his disturbing content. A dismembered woman in a wheelbarrow may upset you, or a graphic line of goose-stepping legs might look more stylish and striking than you’d care to admit. But before you feel any real dissonance, you’re on to the next picture.

Lewen’s own life may have destined him to this approach. A Polish Jew raised in Germany, he was already a fan of movies and altarpiece polyptychs when, at 13, he was given a copy of “Passionate Journey” (published multiple times since 1919) by Frans Masereel, the Belgian woodcut artist who pioneered the form he called “novels without words.” The same year, Lewen, an atheist, made a series of biblical watercolors in lieu of a bar mitzvah. His family made it to New York in 1935, but after enlisting in the U.S. Army in 1942, he spent the war in Europe, advising Nazi soldiers to surrender from a sound truck at the front, and saw Buchenwald shortly after it was liberated. Back in New York, he forged a successful painting career with brightly colored, Cubist-inflected scenes, a few of which are on display here — but he couldn’t get over his memories of combat and the death camp, and he finally had to put them in order.

Through April 27 at James Cohan, 52 Walker Street, Manhattan; 212-714-9500, jamescohan.com .

Will Heinrich writes about new developments in contemporary art, and has previously been a critic for The New Yorker and The New York Observer. More about Will Heinrich