Maus
A Graphic Novel that could be Nothing Else
When Art Spiegelman decided to write about his father’s experience in Auschwitz by using comics, he was embarking on a new way of telling one of the most tragic stories in history. There have been countless movies, fiction and non-fiction novels, textbooks, museums, and other ways of telling about the horrors of the Holocaust, but drawing those horrors in a comic was a new approach, and a risky one at that. However, when asked how he made that choice in an interview back in 1991 regarding Maus, he responded that although a comic might seem like a peculiar choice to most, to him, it was a natural one.
Art Spiegelman was worried about the translation of his father’s tragic experience to comics for multiple reasons, but one was that when most people think of comics, they think of where the word derives from: comedy. Obviously the Holocaust is no laughing matter, so telling a story revolving around the Holocaust via comics was a cause for anxiety for Spiegelman. He wanted to use the medium that he excelled at to tell the story of his father in a way it had never been told before. In an interview with New York Voices’ Rafael Pi Roman, Spiegelman was asked “You pioneered the concept of using comic art to depict serious and even tragic subjects. How did you come to the idea that comic art was appropriate for such subject matter?” to which Art replied that he worked on other “autobiographical confessionals” before, which all lead him to writing Maus. He used his father’s stories, as well as well-known images from World War II to create his graphic novel in a way that is arguably more intense and real to the viewer than a film or traditional novel would be.
How could it be more intense, as an animated story told through the viewpoint of humans-turned-mice? Spiegelman demands his readers to consider his conscious decision to make his father, mother, and all of their fellow Jewish prisoners into animals in his graphic novel. At the beginning of the second addition of Maus, he even goes so far as to draw himself, mouse-a-fied, trying to figure out what animal to draw his wife Francoise as (seeing as she wasn’t born a Jew like all the other mice in his novel) He wants, even insists, that the reader know that his choices were purposeful so much so that he “breaks the forth wall” in a way. The demand for attention on this detail is an aspect that would have been lost in any other medium other than a graphic novel. Important aspects that Spiegelman is able to draw that would have been lost with only words include the animalistic nature of the horrors of the Holocaust, as well as the anonymity it caused among its victims. By drawing Jews as mice and Nazis as cats, readers are forced to see the Holocaust in a different light: as the Nazis preying on the Jews in a way that is almost unconscious and more instinct or primative, like a cat would do to a mouse in the animal kingdom, with no knowledge of anything but those primitive instincts. Spiegelman was so dedicated to telling the most honest story he could by using the mice and cats, that at one point, when his father tells him a story of a prisoner who claimed to be a German, he draws him as both a mouse and a cat to draw attention to the confusion and uncertainty that the prisoners felt about trusting others, as well as to be as accurate as possible.
Due to the time period that the Holocaust took place in, Spiegelman had access to photographs that gave him an accurate idea of what life in Auschwitz looked like for the prisoners there, other than his father. Art Spiegelman’s approach by using comics is his take on not only those photographs, but also his father’s personal accounts, so it delves even more into the experience of Auschwitz’s prisoners. We’ve all seen pictures of the barracks, and maybe even visited them as tourists, but through his father’s stories, Art is able to show us details we could never dream of via maps and diagrams.
By using drawings like these, Maus gives us an inside look at the type of trials, troubles, fears, and innovations that Vladek Spiegelman and others like him had to go through just to survive Auschwitz, in a way we wouldn’t be able to experience if it was simply written out like a traditional novel. In this particular example, the way Art Spiegelman draws this page makes what we are learning all the more real. By skewing the notebook slightly, despite the surrounding straight images, Spiegelman informs the reader that the diagram is different than the rest of the page. He then chooses to show Vladek with the same notebook, drawing that very diagram. By employing this tactic, Spiegelman forces us to consider the fact that he has access to that image because his father, who actually used that bunker, drew it for him. Even though this scene is drawn rather than a picture of real people, this is somehow more effective at getting the reader to understand the realness of what Artie is doing with this comic book in a way that a traditional novel, movie, or even the Holocaust museum, cannot.
The image to the left is another example of how, with the help of his father Vladek, who experienced the Holocaust and Auschwitz first hand, Artie provides his readers with maps and diagrams that can further our understanding of life as a prisoner in World War II. In this image, Vladek is explaining to Art how far his mother’s camp was from his own. Instead of simply reading a distance, and having to imagine what it might have looked like, Spiegelman lays out for us a visual to explain his father’s story better.
In his graphic novel, in addition to his father Vladek’s memories recreated, Spiegelman has some representation of well-known images from the Holocaust present.
For example, on the first page of Spiegelman’s book, we are greeted with this haunting image of many mice, representing Jewish prisoners, standing in rows with the iconic Holocaust striped uniform on. Spiegelman uses detail, but not in the way one would think; each mouse is slightly different, but not enough to distinguish one from the other, which clearly points to the anonymity of the prisoners in the Holocaust that Vladek Spiegelman mentions, and we all know to be true. They were stripped of their home, families, possessions and even names and made to wear the same clothes as everyone around them and even given numbers for identification, so lack of individuality was a big part of being a prisoner at Auschwitz that Art clearly wanted to highlight.The image to the left is an example of a recreation of actual images from the Holocaust. I have chosen to juxtapose this image with the one I assume it is modeled after, an image of many Dutch Jewish prisoners lined up at roll call after their arrival at a concentration camp. Just as is present in Artie’s drawing, there are many men, with little personal space, all lined up in matching striped uniforms, with little ability to be told apart from one another. The hollow, tired eyes of the mice in Spiegelman’s drawing show zoomed-in detail of the low quality photograph from the Holocaust, and the solum, fearful expressions of the prisoners are present in both images. By being able to see images we all are familiar with turned into the comic style Spiegelman uses, readers are reminded that he isn’t just writing a comic with heroes and villains that never actually happened, he’s taking an actual event and drawing it out in a way that he feels best explains and articulates what happened.
Art Spiegelman took on a project that has been criticized, belittled, praised and idolized. He used the merging of text and image to recreate in a new way a story that has had variations of itself told countless times. He faced challenges brought about by how personal this project was to him, as well as the actual act of taking something so tragic and drawing it out frame by frame. But Art Spiegelman believed in the power of comics, sequential art, and history and that when combined, these things could make something great.
Works Cited
Spiegelman, Art. Maus. N.p.: Pantheon, 1986. Print.
The Holocaust through the Eyes of a Maus. Perf. Marsha Alvar, Art Spiegelman. UWTV Classics: Upon Reflection, 1991. Youtube.
“New York Voices: Healing Images.” Interview by Rafeal Pi Roman. Thirteen. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Dec. 2015.
Morning Roll Call. N.d. Http://www.jewishgen.org/ForgottenCamps/Camps/DayEng.html, n.p.
