Maus is a graphic novel by American cartoonist Art Spiegelman. In it, Spiegelman interviews his father about his experiences as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. The book makes use of postmodern techniques in its presentation, most strikingly in its depiction of different races of humans as different kinds of animals, with Jews as mice, Germans as cats and Poles as pigs. It has been difficult to classify, sometimes being labeled memoir, biography, history, fiction, autobiography, or a mix of genres. It was the first comic book to win a Pulitzer Prize.

The story alternates between two timelines. In the "present" frame tale, beginning in 1978 in Rego Park, New York, Spiegelman talks with his father about his Holocaust experiences, gathering material for the Maus project he is about to begin. In the "past", Spiegelman depicts his father's experiences, starting in the years immediately leading up to World War II. Much of the story revolves around Spiegelman's troubled relationship with his father, and the absence of his mother, who committed suicide when he was 20, and whose own written accounts of Auschwitz were destroyed by her grief-stricken husband. Formally, Spiegelman struggles with problems of presentation, working with a strained animal metaphor that is intended to self-destruct. The book is deceptively simple, using a minimalist drawing style while displaying virtuosity in its page and panel layouts, pacing, and structure.

Maus was originally serialized from 1980 until 1991 as an insert in Raw, an avant-garde comics and graphics magazine published by Spiegelman and his wife, Françoise Mouly. It was first collected in two volumes, My Father Bleeds History in 1986, and And Here My Troubles Began in 1991. It has since been collected in a single volume, as well as CD-ROM and DVD editions with extensive supplementary material. In the English-speaking world, it is one of the first comics to have been given attention by schools and academics, and is credited with helping the medium of comics to be taken seriously by a wider public. Maus has been asociated with the early history of the graphic novel, though Spiegelman initially resisted use of the term.

Overview[link]

The book is mostly divided between the "present" frame tale,^[1] in 1978–79^[2] in Rego Park, New York, in which Spiegelman interviews his father, Vladek; and the "past", the story that Vladek tells, beginning in the mid-1930s^[3] and continuing through the end of the Holocaust in 1945 and Vladek and his wife Anja's emigration to the US.^[4] Spiegelman's relationship with his father is strained. Vladek harasses and infuriates his neighbors and loved ones, including his second wife, Mala. He had remarried after Art's mother, Anja, committed suicide in 1968.^[5]

Plot[link]

The book opens with a scene from Spiegelman's Rego Park childhood in 1958.^[2] After running to his father after being left behind by his friends, his father responds in broken English, "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!".^[6]

As an adult, Spiegelman visits his father, from whom he has become estranged, and tries to get him to tell of his Holocaust experience.^[7] Vladek proceeds to tell of his time in Częstochowa,^[8] describing how he came marry into Art's mother's wealthy family in 1937 and move to Sosnowiec to become a rich manufacturer. Vladek begs Art not to include this part of the story in the book, and Art reluctantly agrees not to.^[9] Anja suffers a mental breakdown after giving birth to their first son, Richieu, towards the end of the year. The couple go to a sanitarium in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia for her to recover. After they return, political and antisemitic tensions build until Vladek is drafted just in time for the Nazi invasion. Vladek is captured at the front and put to labor as a prisoner of war. After being released, he finds Sosnowiec has been annexed by Germany, and he is released on the other side of the border in the Polish protectorate. He sneaks across the border and is reunited with his family.^[10]

During one of Art's visits, he finds that a friend of Mala's has sent them one of the underground comix magazine he had contributed to. Mala had tried to hide it, but Vladek finds and reads it. The four-page "Prisoner on the Hell Planet" is reprinted in full,^[11] and in striking contrast with the rest of the book, it is unaltered, with all the characters appearing in human form.^[12] In the strip, done in a surreal, German Expressionist woodcut style inspired by Lynd Ward, Art is traumatized by his mother's suicide three months after being released from the state mental hospital, and in the end depicts himself behind bars, saying "You murdered me, Mommy, and left me here to take the rap!"^[13]

In 1943, all Jews were ordered to move from Sosnowiec to Srodula, from where they would be marched to Sosnowiec for work. The family is split up—Richieu is sent to Zawiercie, where it is believed he would be safe. As the round-ups increase, and more Jews are sent from the ghettos to Auschwitz, the woman looking after the boy poisons herself, her children and Richieu in order to escape from the Gestapo. In Srodula, many Jews, including Vladek, build bunkers in order to hide from the Germans' roundups, but Vladek and the people he hides out with are discovered and placed into a "ghetto inside the ghetto", separated from the outside by barbed wire, and eventually those few left of Vladek and Anja's family are taken away.^[10] Eventually, Srodula is cleared out of its remaining Jews, except for a group Vladek hides with in another bunker. When the Germans finally clear off, the group splits up and leaves the ghetto.^[14]

In Sosnowiec, Vladek and Anja move from one hiding place to the next, making occasional contact with other Jews in hiding, with Vladek out hunting for provisions disguised as a Pole. Eventually, it is arranged with smugglers for them to escape to Hungary, but it is a trick—they are captured by the Gestapo on the train, and eventually are taken to Auschwitz, where they are separated until after the war.^[14]

Art has been asking after Anja's diaries, which Vladek lets him know were her account of her Holocaust experiences, written after the war, and the only way to find out her story after being separated from Vladek at Auschwitz. Vladek tells Art she had said, "I wish my son, when he grows up, he will be interested in this", before telling Art that he burned them after she killed herself. Art is enraged, and calls Vladek a "murderer".^[15]

In 1986, the first six chapters of Maus were collected into a single volume, and Art is overcome with the unexpected attention the book has received,^[4] finding himself "totally blocked". Art talks with his psychiatrist, Paul Pavel, a Czech Holocaust survivor,^[16] about the book, who suggests that, as those who perished in the camps can never tell their stories, "maybe it's better not to have any more stories". Art replies with a quote from Samuel Beckett: "Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness", but then realizes, "on the other hand, he said it".^[17]

Vladek tells of his hardships in the camps, of starvation and abuse, of avoiding the selektionen and of his resourcefulness. Though it is dangerous, Anja and Vladek occasionally are able to exchange messages. As the war progresses, and the German front is pushed back, the prisoners are marched from Auschwitz, in Poland, to Gross-Rosen within the Reich, and then to Dachau, where the hardships only increase, with Vladek catching typhus.

Eventually, the war ends, the camp survivors are freed, and Vladek and Anja are reunited. The book closes with Vladek turning over in his bed and telling Art, "I'm tired from talking, Richieu, and it's enough stories for now."^[18] The final image is of Vladek and Anja's tombstone^[19]—Vladek died in 1982, long before the book was completed.^[20]

Primary characters[link]

Art Spiegelman

(born 1948) A cartoonist and intellectual^[2] who has a strained relationship with his father, Vladek, who calls him "Artie". At the opening of the story, Art tells us how it has been a long time since he has seen his father, as they "weren't that close".^[7] He interviews his father about his experiences in the ghettoes and at Auschwitz. Art is presented as neurotic and obsessive, angry and full of self-pity, and feels dominated by his father.^[2] Art deals with his own traumas and those inherited from his parents by seeking psychiatric help,^[21] which continued after the book was completed.^[22]

Vladek Spiegelman

(1906–1982) A Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust and moved to New York in the early 1950s. The 20 hours of taped interviews Art did with him were the basis for the content of Maus.^[23] Speaking broken English,^[24] he is presented as miserly, anal retentive, anxious and obstinate—traits that may have helped him survive the concentrate camps, but which drive his family mad after the War. Despite his being a victim of antisemitism, he displays racist attitudes himself, as when Françoise picks up a black hitchhiker, who he fears will rob them.^[25] He shows little insight as a Holocaust survivor to his own racist comments about others.^[20] While the reader feels the need to respect him as a survivor, he is not found to be likeable.^[26]

Mala Spiegelman

Vladek's second wife. She married Vladek after the suicide of Anja, his first wife, to whose memory she is made to feel she can never live up to.^[27] The couple constantly bicker, Mala calling Vladek miserly, and he accusing her of being out for his money.^[28] Though she too is a survivor, and speaks with Art frequently throughout the book, Art makes no attempt to find out her story of the Holocaust.^[29]

Anja Spiegelman

(1912–1968) Art's mother and Vladek's first wife, also Polish Jew who has survived the Holocaust. Nervous, compliant and clinging, she has her first nervous breakdown after giving birth to her first son.^[30] She would sometimes tell Art about the Holocaust while he was growing up, although his father did not want him to know about it. She committed suicide by slashing her wrists in a bathtub in May 1968^[31] and left no note. This was the subject of one of Art's earliest comics, "Prisoner on the Hell Planet" (first published in the underground Short Order Comix #1 in 1973,^[12]), which is also reproduced in Maus.^[32] This "Survivor's Tale" can be said to be as much about Art's surviving the despair of his mother's suicide and his strained relationship with his father as it is about his parents surviving the Holocaust.^[33]

Françoise Mouly

(born 1955) Married to Art, she is French but has converted to Judaism^[34] to please Art's father. Her representation in the book is thus complicated as to whether she should be represented as a Jewish mouse or a French frog (or some other animal).^[35]

Background[link]

Art Spiegelman was born in Sweden following World War II to Polish Jews Vladek and Anja Spiegelman, who were Holocaust survivors. His brother, Richieu, did not survive, having been poisoned by an aunt in order to avoid capture by the Nazis four years before Art was born.^[36] He immigrated with his parents to the United States in 1951.^[37] Growing up, his mother would occasionally talk about Auschwitz, but his father did not want him to know about it.^[22]

Spiegelman developed an early interest in comics and began drawing professionally when he was 16.^[38] He spent a month in Binghamton State Mental Hospital in 1968 after a nervous breakdown. Shortly after getting out, his mother committed suicide.^[3] His father was not happy with him being involved in the hippie movement, and when he bought a German Volkswagen, it damaged their already-strained relationship "beyond repair".^[39] Around this time, Spiegelman had been reading in fanzines about graphic artists like Frans Masereel, who had made wordless novels. The discussions in those fanzines about making the great American novel in comics would later act as inspiration for him.^[40]

Spiegelman became a key figure in the underground comix movement of the 1970s, both as cartoonist and editor. In 1972 he was asked to do a three-page strip for the first issue of Funny Aminals [sic].^[41] He wanted to do one about racism, and at first considered focusing it on African Americans,^[42] with cats taking on the role of the Ku Klux Klan and black mice.^[43] Instead, he turned to the Holocaust that his father had survived. The strip was called "Maus", in which the Jews were depicted as mice persecuted by die Katzen—Nazis depicted as cats. It was narrated to a mouse named "Mickey".^[41] Spiegelman was encouraged to contribute the piece by Funny Aminals editor Justin Green, who had produced the semi-autobiographical Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, a seminal work which inspired a number of underground cartoonists to take the lid off their psyches and produce more personal, revealing work. Spiegelman has said, "without Binky Brown, there would be no Maus".^[44] In 1973, he produced a strip called "Prisoner on the Hell Planet", an expressionist work in a woodcut style about his mother's suicide that would later be reproduced in Maus. The same year, he edited a book of quotations, one that was explicitly pornographic and psychedelic, which he dedicated to his mother.^[31]

Spiegelman visited Auschwitz in 1979 as part of his researches

He spent the rest of the 1970s building a reputation for making short, avant-garde comics, until he decided late in the decade to settle down on a longer project. As material, he decided to return to the subject of "Maus", and got in contact with his estranged father. He moved back to New York from San Francisco in 1975, which he finally admitted to his father in 1977, by which time he had decided he wanted to work on a "very long comic book".^[45] He began a series of interviews with his father in 1978,^[39] and his researches included a visit to Auschwitz in 1979.^[46] The story was serialized in a new comics and graphics magazine he and his wife, Françoise Mouly, had begun in 1980 called Raw.^[47]

Historical background[link]

American comic books, which had been big business and flourished in a diversity of genres in the 1940s and 1950s,^[48] had reached a commercial low ebb in the 1970s.^[49] By the time Maus first started to be serialized, Marvel and DC Comics, who published predominantly superhero titles, had become the "Big Two" companies that dominated the comic book industry.^[50] By the time Spiegelman and Mouly began publishing Raw in 1980, the underground comix movement that had flourished in the late 1960s and early 1970s also seemed mordant.^[51] The public perception of comic books was one of adolescent power fantasies, inherently incapable of mature artistic or literary expression.^[52] Comics was seen as a genre rather than a medium.^[53]

Maus came to prominence when the term "graphic novel" was beginning to gain currency. The term was first popularized by Will Eisner with the publication of A Contract with God in 1978. It was used partly to mask the culturally low status that comics had in the English-speaking world, and partly because the term "comic book" was being used to refer to thin periodicals, making it awkward to talk about book-form comics.^[54]

Publication history[link]

Spiegelman began interviewing his father, Vladek, for the book in 1978. Vladek died in 1982,^[3] long before the book was finished.^[20] The first chapter of Maus appeared in December 1980 in the second issue of Raw.^[40] A new chapter of the story would appear in every subsequent issue as a small insert in the oversized magazine until it came to an end in 1991. Every chapter except the last appeared in Raw.^[55]

Spiegelman struggled to find a publisher for Maus,^[36] but in 1986, the first six chapters were collected by Pantheon into a book, after the publication in the New York Times of a rave review of the work-in-progress.^[56] The volume was titled Maus: A Survivor's Tale and subtitled My Father Bleeds History. Spiegelman has said he was eager to have the book come out early, even if incomplete, in order to avoid comparisons with the animated film An American Tail from Stephen Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, which he believed was inspired by Maus.^[57]

The book's Commonwealth rights were licensed to Penguin in 1986, with the exception of South Africa. Spiegelman refused to "compromise with fascism" by allowing his work to be published there, in support of the African National Congress's cultural boycott in opposition to apartheid.^[58]

The book was difficult not only for critics and reviewers to classify, but also for booksellers, who needed to know on which shelves the book should be placed. Pantheon pushed for the term "graphic novel". Spiegelman was not comfortable with the term, however, as many book-length comics were being referred to as "graphic novels" whether or not they were novelistic. He also suspected the term was being used in an attempt to validate the comics form, rather than to describe the contents of the books.^[54]

The last five chapters were collected in the second volume, subtitled And Here My Troubles Began, in 1991. The two volumes have been collected into soft- and hard-covered two-volume boxed sets and single-volume editions by Pantheon Books.^[59] In 1994, The Voyager Company released The Complete Maus on CD-ROM, a collection which, in addition to the original comics, contained taped transcripts of Vladek, filmed interviews with Art, sketches and other background material.^[60] In 2011 Pantheon Books published a companion to The Complete Maus entitled Meta Maus, with further background material, including filmed footage of Vladek.^[36]

As of 2011, Maus had been translated into around thirty languages. Three translations in particluar were important to Spiegelman to have done: French, as his wife was French, and because of his respect for the sophisticated comics tradition there; German, given the book's focus on the Holocaust; and Polish. Poland was the location of the majority of the book, and Polish was language of his parents and, he says, was his own mother tongue in infancy. The German reception was positive—Maus was a best-seller, and even found its way into classrooms. The Polish translation ran into difficulties, however, and did not appear until 2001. As early as when he planned a 1987 research visit to Poland, he was questioned about the Poles being depicted as pigs by a Polish consulate official who had approved Spiegelman's visa. He was made to understand that, in Poland, calling someone a swine was a much stronger insult than in the US. Publishers and commentators since then had hesitated to touch the book for fear of protests and boycotts.^[61]

In the Israeli publication of Maus, a few panels had to be changed when the portrayal of one of the minor characters was objected to by a descendent.^[62] This Hebrew version of the first volume of the book was indifferently or negatively received, and the second volume never appeared.^[63] This may have highlighted a difference between the self-images of Israeli Jews and American Jews—the image of the resistance fighter in contrast to the timid and weak diaspora Jew,^[64] a perceived self-hatred that one Israeli writer called "the diaspora sickness".^[65][a]

An Arabic translation has been in the works, but has been complicated by Israeli relations in the Middle East.^[43]

The book is dedicated to Spiegelman's brother, Richieu, who died during the Holocaust and whom he had never met, and Spiegelman's first daughter, Nadja. A photograph of Spiegelman's brother also prefaces the book.^[66] Its epigraph was a quote from Adolf Hitler: "The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human".^[67]

Themes[link]

Presentation[link]

Struggling with issues of presentation, Spiegelman takes a postmodern approach,^[68] choosing to portray different races as different species of animals—the Jews as mice, Germans as cats, and ethnic Poles as pigs,^[3] amongst others. Spiegelman made the Jews mice as the Nazis had referred to Jews as rats and vermin, and depicted them as such in propaganda films.^[69] They seem to be mice and cats only in the predator/prey relationship they have, however. In every respect other than the heads, they act and speak as ordinary humans.^[70]

Maus "feeds on itself", telling the story of how the story itself was made. It examines the choices Spiegelman made in the retelling of his father's memories, and the artistic choices he had to make—for example, when his French wife converts to Judaism, Spiegelman frets over whether should she be depicted as a frog or a mouse.^[71] Jewish characters try to pass themselves off as ethnic Poles by tying pig masks to their faces, with the strings showing at the back.^[72] Vladek's disguise was more convincing than Anja's—"you could see she was more Jewish", Vladek says, and Art renders this Jewishness by having her tail hang out of her disguise.^[73] This literalization of the genocidal stereotypes that drove the Nazis to their Final Solution risks reinforcing racist labels,^[74] but Spiegelman uses the idea to create anonymity in the story's characters. This anonymity of the animal "masks" paradoxically enables the reader to identify with the characters as human, stripping the reader of the ability to identify the racial characteristics based on facial traits, while reminding readers that racist classification is alive and well.^[33]

In making people of a single nationality look "all alike", Spiegelman hoped to show the absurdity of dividing people by these lines. In a 1991 interview, Spiegelman noted that "these metaphors...are meant to self-destruct in my book—and I think they do self-destruct."^[75] Professor Amy Hungerford saw no consistent system to the animal metaphor.^[76] Rather, it signified the role of the characters in the story, rather than their races—the gentile Françoise is a mouse because of her identification her husband, who identifies with the Holocaust victims. When asked what animal he would make Israeli Jews, he suggests porcupines.^[77] When Art visits his psychiatrist, the two wear mouse masks instead of having mouse heads.^[78] Spiegelman's own perceptions of the animal metaphor seems to have evolved over the book's making—in the original publication of the first volume, he had a mouse head in his self-portrait, but by the time the second volume arrived in print, his self-portrait was of a man wearing a mouse mask.^[70]

Spiegelman, like many of his critics, worries that "[r]eality is too much for comics...so much has to be left out or distorted", admitting that his presentation of the story may not be accurate.^[23] Additionally, as he had not been at the camps himself, he found it difficult to understand or visualize this "separate universe" in order to depict it.^[22]

Memory[link]

To Marianne Hirsch, Spiegelman's life is "dominated by memories that are not his own".^[79] His work is one not of memory but of postmemory—a term she coined after encountering Maus. This describes the relation of the children of survivors with the survivors. While these children have not had their parents' experiences, they grow up with their parents' memories—the memory of another's memory—until the stories become so powerful, that for these children they become memories in their own right. The children's proximity creates a "deep personal connection" with the memory, though separated from the memory by "generational distance".^[80]

Art tried to keep his father's story chronological, because otherwise he would "never keep it straight".^[81] His mother Anja's memories are conspicuously absent from the narrative. Though she had left diaries detailing her Holocaust experiences, Vladek destroyed them unread after her suicide, and Hirsch sees Maus as being in part an attempt to reconstruct her memory. Vladek keeps her memory alive with the pictures of her he keeps on his desk, "like a shrine" according to his second wife, Mala.^[82]

Guilt[link]

Spiegelman displays his sense of guilt in many ways. He anguishes over his dead brother, Richieu, who perished in the Holocaust, and whom he feels he can never live up to.^[83] The eighth chapter, made after the publication and unexpected success of the first volume, opens with a guilt-ridden Spiegelman (now in human form, with a strapped-on mouse mask) atop a pile of corpses—the corpses of the six million Jews upon whom Maus's success was built.^[84] He is told by his psychiatrist that his father feels guilt for having survived, and outliving his first son,^[85] and that some of his Art's guilt may spring from having painted his father in such a publicly unflattering way in Maus.^[86] He also feels inadequate in portraying the Holocaust, given he has never experienced it first hand like his parents did.^[87]

Racism[link]

Aside from the Nazis' vision of racial divisions that Spiegelman parodies, Vladek's own seemingly inexplicable racism is put on display, as when he becomes upset that Françoise would pick up a black hitchhiker, a "schwartser" in his words. When he, victim of antisemitism, is berated by her for his racist attitudes, he replies, "It's not even to compare, the schwartsers and the Jews!"^[88] Spiegelman gradually deconstructs the animal metaphor throughout the book, especially in the second volume, showing where the lines cannot be drawn between races of humans.^[89]

The Germans are depicted with little difference between them, but there is a great variety of character and little stereotyping in the Poles and Jews who dominate the story.^[90] Sometimes Jews and the Jewish councils themselves are shown to comply with the occupiers. Some trick other Jews into capture, others act as police for the Nazis.^[91]

While the Poles have often been demonized for a perceived widespread antisemitism and complicity with the Nazis, Spiegelman shows numerous instances of Poles who risked themselves to aid the Jews. However, antisemitism is depicted as being rife. The Kapos who run the camps are Poles, Anja and Vladek are tricked by Polish smugglers into being captured by the Nazis. Even in post-war Poland Anja and Vladek hear that Poles continue to drive off and even kill returning Jews.^[92]

Language[link]

Vladek's knowledge of English helps him initiate his first contact with Anja, and also helps him out several times during the story. His English, the language in which he recounts his story, however, is broken, highlighted by the contrast with Art's therapist, Paul Pavel, who is also an immigrant and Holocaust survivor.^[93] He makes friends with a Frenchman via his English, and the two continue to correspond in English after the war. His recounting of the Holocaust, first to American soldiers, then to his son, is never in his mother tongue,^[94] and English becomes his daily language when his dream to move to America is realized.^[95] His difficulty with his second language is emphasized by Art's having his dialogue written in broken English. In one instance, late in the book, Vladek talks of being brought to Dachau, saying, "And here[...]my troubles began". Of course, his troubles had begun long before Dachau. This unidiomatic expression was brought further into the foreground when Art used it as the subtitle of the second volume.^[96]. In polish translation Vladek speaks with Yiddish accent, however it is pointed out that real Vladek was fluent in Polish.

The German word maus is cognate to the English word "mouse",^[97] but also reminiscent of the German word mauscheln, meaning "to speak like a Jew"^[98] and referring to the particular way Jews spoke German^[99]—a word not etymologically related to maus, but distantly to Moses.^[98]

Style[link]

Spiegelman's taking on the Holocaust, a subject seen as being untouchable, was seen as particularly audacious. This was compounded by his using the comics medium to tell the story, as the medium itself was viewed in the English-speaking world as being inherently trivial,^[100] thus trivializing and degrading the subject matter, especially as he used animal heads in place of recognizably human ones.^[101] Funny animals have been a staple of comics, and while they have traditionally been thought of as being for children, the underground had long made use of them for adult stories,^[102] notably in Robert Crumb's work (amongst which his Fritz the Cat stories are perhaps most famous), which showed that the genre could "open up the way to a paradoxical narrative realism" that Maus would exploit.^[103]

Ostensibly about the Holocaust, the story as it is told becomes sublimated by the frame tale of Art interviewing and interacting with his father. Aside from Vladek's story of the Holocaust, Art's "Prisoner on the Hell Planet" is also embedded within the frame.^[12] Holes are intentionally made within the narrative, as when Spiegelman, neurotically trying to deal with what Maus is becoming for him, says to his wife, "You'd never let me do so much talking without interrupting if this were real life".^[104] When a prisoner who is believed by the Nazis to be a Jew claims he is really a German, Spiegelman is confronted with the difficulty of whether to present this character as a cat or a mouse.^[105] Throughout the book, Spiegelman incorporates and highlights banal details from his father's tales, sometimes humorous or ironic, giving a lightness and humanity to the story which "helps carry the weight of the unbearable historical realities".^[6]

Spiegelman started taking down his interviews of Vladek on paper, but quickly switched to using a tape recorder,^[106] in person or over the phone.^[107] In rendering his father's words, Spiegelman would often condense what Vladek said, but occasionally would add to or expand the dialogue,^[106] or synthesize multiple similar retellings into a single instance of dialogue.^[107] Spiegelman also did extensive research, reading survivors' accounts and talking to friends and family who also survived. One "really important" source for him was a series of Polish pamphlets published after the war detailing what happened to the Jews by region, from which he was able to get very detailed information about Sosnowiec.^[107]

Spiegelman worried about the effect his organizing of Vladek's story would have on its authenticity. In the end, he eschewed a more Joycean approach he had considered, and settled on a linear narrative he thought would be better at "getting things across". He also strove to present how the book was recorded and organized as an important part of the book itself, where the reader experiences the "sense of an interview shaped by a relationship".^[107]

Artwork[link]

The story is text-driven, with few silent panels^[4] out of its 1500 black-and-white drawings.^[108] In the "present" portions, the pages are arranged in eight-panel grids, but in the "past" sections, Spiegelman found himself "violating the grid constantly" with many unique page layouts.^[24]

The original 3-page "Maus" and "Prisoner on the Hell Planet" were done in highly detailed, expressive styles. Spiegelman initially thought to draw Maus in such a sophisticated manner, but after initial sketches decided it would be more appropriate to use a pared-down style, one little removed from his pencil sketches, which would be more direct and immediate. Characters are rendered in a minimalist way, with dots for eyes and slashes for eyebrows and mouths, looking "as if they were human beings with animal heads pasted on them".^[30] Spiegelman wanted to get away from the rendering of the characters in the original "Maus", in which oversized cats towered over the Jewish mice, an approach which Spiegelman says, "tells you how to feel, tells you how to think"^[109]—he would prefer the reader to make the moral judgments.^[110] The cat-Nazis are drawn in proportions no different from those of the mouse-Jews, and the stereotypical villainous expressions are also dropped.^[72]

The contrast between the artwork in "Prisoner on the Hell Planet" and Maus drives home the effectiveness of the simpler artwork—"Prisoner" is alienating, while Maus is more inviting, encouraging deeper contemplation and understanding.^[34]

Spiegelman wanted the artwork to have a diary feel to it, and so drew the pages on stationery with a fountain pen and typewriter correction fluid. It was reproduced at the same size it was drawn, in contrast to his other work, which was normally drawn larger and shrunk to hide defects in the art.^[43]

Influences[link]

Wordless woodcut novels like those by Frans Masereel were an early influence

Spiegelman is a cartoonist who is conscious of his medium's history, and has published articles promoting a greater knowledge of comics' past. Chief amongst his early influences were Harvey Kurtzman, Will Eisner,^[111] and Bernard Krigstein's "Master Race".^[112] While he acknowledges Eisner's influence on his work, he denies that Eisner's first graphic novel, A Contract with God (1978), had any impact on Maus.^[113] Amongst the artists who influenced Maus, Spiegelman cites Frans Masereel, who had made an early woodcut novel called Mon Livre d'Heures (1919, titled Passionate Journey in English).^[40] Justin Green's Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary (1972) inspired Spiegelman to open up and include autobiographical elements in his comics.^[44]

Reception and legacy[link]

Spiegelman's work as cartoonist and editor had long been known and respected in the comics community, but the media attention it gained after the first volume's publication in 1986 was unexpected.^[114] Hundreds of overwhelmingly positive reviews appeared, and Maus became the center of new attention being focused on comics at the time.^[115] It is one of the "Big Three" book-form comics from around 1986–1987, along with Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, that are said to have brought the term "graphic novel" and the idea of comics for adults into mainstream consciousness in the English-speaking world.^[116] It has been credited with changing the public's perception of what comics could be,^[117] at a time when, in the English-speaking world, they were considered to be for children, and strongly associated with superheroes.^[51] Initially, criticism of Maus showed a resistance to including comics in higher literary discourse,^[118] as when the New York Times "praised" the book by saying, "Art Spiegelman doesn't draw comic books",^[51] but after its Pulitzer Prize win, it has gradually won greater acceptance and interest amongst academics.^[119] An exhibition on the making of Maus was staged at the Museum of Modern Art in 1992.^[120]

The genre of Maus proved difficult to classify.^[121] It has been called biography, fiction, autobiography, history, and memoir.^[122] Spiegelman petitioned the New York Times to move it from "fiction" to "non-fiction" on their bestseller list,^[104] saying, "I shudder to think how David Duke...would respond to seeing a carefully researched work based closely on my father’s memories of life in Hitler’s Europe and in the death camps classified as fiction", to which one editor responded, "Let’s go out to Spiegelman’s house and if a giant mouse answers the door, we’ll move it to the nonfiction side of the list!" The Times eventually acquiesced.^[123] The Pulitzer Prize Committee sidestepped the issue by giving Maus a Special Award in 1992.^[104]

Maus has ranked highly on a number of high-profile comics and literature lists. The Comics Journal called it the fourth greatest comics work of the 20th Century,^[4] and Wizard placed it first on their list of 100 Greatest Graphic Novels;^[124] Entertainment Weekly listed Maus as #7 on their list of The New Classics: Books - The 100 best reads from 1983 to 2008;^[125] and Time put Maus at seventh place on their list of best non-fiction books from between 1923 and 2005,^[126] and fourth on their list of top graphic novels.^[127] Praise for the book also came from Spiegelman's contemporaries like Jules Feiffer, and literary writers like Umberto Eco.^[128] Spiegelman turned down numerous offers to have Maus adapted to film or TV.^[129]

A number of Holocaust survivors objected to Spiegelman making a comic book out of their tragedy.^[130] Some critics took the position that the Holocaust should not be trivialized by being portrayed in comic book form.^[100] Literary critic Hillel Halkin objected that the animal metaphor was "doubly dehumanizing", reinforcing the Nazi belief that the atrocities were perpetrated by one species on another, when they were actually done by humans against humans.^[131] Harvey Pekar and others^[132] saw Spiegelman's use of animals as potentially reinforcing stereotypes.^[133] Pekar was also disdainful of Spiegelman's overwhelmingly negative portrayal of his father,^[134] calling him disingenuous and hypocritical for his portrayal in a book that presents itself as objective.^[135] Comics critic R. C. Harvey argued that Spiegelman's animal metaphor threatened "to erode [Maus's] moral underpinnings",^[136] and played "directly into [the Nazis'] racist vision".^[137]

Some commentators expressed concern over the Poles' depiction as pigs—a much greater insult in Polish culture than in American culture. Pigs, and pork, are also viewed as being non-kosher, or unclean, in Jewish culture—a point that was unlikely to be lost on the Jewish Spiegelman.^[138] Some critics have said that the portrayal of Poles is unbalanced—that, while some Poles are seen as helping Jews, they are often shown to do so for self-serving reasons.^[139]

Other critics objected to what they saw as fatalism in the book. One anonymous French publisher produced a book called Katz, a remix of Spiegelman's book with all animal heads replaced with cat heads. The book reproduced every page and every line of dialogue from Maus, and thus was forced by Spiegelman's French publisher, Flammarion, to destroy all copies, under charges of copyright violation.^[140]

A "cottage industry" of academic research has built up around Maus,^[141], and it has frequently been used as course material in American schools in a range of courses: history, dysfunctional family psychology,^[3] language arts and social studies.^[142] One of the earliest scholarly works on Maus was Joshua Brown's 1988 "Of Mice and Memory" from the Oral History Review, which deals with the problems Spiegelman faced in presenting his father's story. Marianne Hirsch wrote an influential essay on post-memory called "Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-Memory", later expanded into a book called Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Academics far outside the field of comics such as Dominick LaCapra, Linda Hutcheon and Terrence Des Pres took part in the discourse, although few approached Maus who were familiar with comics, largely because of the lack of an academic comics tradition—Maus tended to be approached as Holocaust history or from a film or literary perspective. In 2003, Deborah Geis edited a collection of essays on Maus called Considering Maus: Approaches to Art Spiegelman's "Survivor's Tale" of the Holocaust.^[111]

Maus is credited with being the primary game-changer in comics gaining respect in the world of arts and letters, as well as in getting comics into bookstores. It also helped changed the public's perception that comic books were primarily concerned with superheroes,^[143] and is cited as a primary influence on graphic novels such as Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home.^[44]

Awards and nominations[link]

See also[link]

• Anthropomorphism
• Caricature
• Holocaust literature
• Stereotypes of Jews in literature

References[link]

Notes[link]

Works cited[link]