A Visual Analysis of Maus: The Impact of the “Real” Vladek Spiegelman
Photographs are mementos that many people choose to take, save, and cherish for years. Especially in today’s society, the sharing of photographs and obsession that surrounds photography exemplifies the attachment that most people have to photographs. Artists like Max Ernst have revolutionized the use of photographs and other forms of visual media like drawings, by altering them in magnificent ways to create stunning pieces of art for the public to examine and enjoy. Art Spiegelman, the author of the graphic novel that tells his father’s story of surviving the Holocaust, Maus, utilized some of these same practices by piecing together different photographs from different periods of time along with his original drawings. Speigelman pieced all of this together in a way that is similar to the style of “collagism” that fellow artist Max Ernst utilized. This in turn helped to create the breathtaking graphic novel that is Maus.
For almost the entirety of both volumes, Spiegelman draws his characters as animals like mice (the Jews), cats (the Nazis), and pigs (the Polish), leaving out almost any “legitimate” or “real” photographs. However, at the very end of the second installment of Maus, titled “And Here My Troubles Began”, we the readers get to see a “real” photograph of the man whose experience led to the creation of Maus, Art Speigelman’s father, Vladek Spiegelman. Spiegelman. However, just like the mice the rest of the novel, this photograph has been drawn in as well. In this paper I will argue why I believe that Spiegelman chose to draw in and include this specific photograph of Vladek and why Spiegelman chose to in a particular collage-like position: to help establish a certain authenticity to the story that was missing initially from the characters being drawn as mice and not humans.
The photograph (shown below) is of Vladek from after the liberation at Auschwitz, however he is dressed in a traditional camp uniform. The photograph was taken at a “photo place” that produced souvenir photos of people in brand new camp uniforms. The photograph eventually led to Anja (Vladek’s wife and Spiegelman’s mother) and Vladek’s reunion after the liberation, as she received the photograph in a letter from Vladek himself.
Because Spiegelman was tasked with the challenge of writing this epic story of his father’s survival, Spiegelman clearly expressed stress and felt pressured to present his father’s story in the “right” way. In the second installment of Maus, Spiegelman draws himself as a mouse talking to his therapist about this struggle of presenting his father’s story and writes “Some part of me doesn’t want to draw or think about Auschwitz. I can’t visualize it clearly, and I can’t BEGIN to imagine what it felt like” (Spiegelman 46). I believe that incorporating this particular picture this specific way was a way for Spiegelman to represent his father’s story in the “right” way. When Speigelman incorporated this legitimate photograph at the end of the series, he allowed his readers to identify who the actual, living person was that lived through this all. Spiegelman even says in the final panel on the page, “I need that picture in my book!” (Spiegelman 134). Spiegelman could have chosen any picture of his father, however he chose to include a picture in which his father is in an actual camp uniform. Could Spiegelman be using this particular photograph to establish credibility between his father’s story and appeal to reader’s ethos?
Let’s consider the differences between the picture of Vladek and the rest of the graphic novel. The most obvious is that all of the characters are drawn as animals. Obviously, the Holocaust was not a genocide of thousands of mice, cats, and pigs. Spiegelman chose to represent these specific groups that were involved in the Holocaust as animals to symbolize the cat and mouse relationship that the Nazis and the Jews had. Spiegelman also chose to draw these characters instead of using another creative literary outlet like writing a novel or memoir about his father’s story. As a human, I find it hard to look at a drawn picture of a mouse (anthropomorphic or not) and relate to whatever is happening in that piece of work. Spiegelman’s drawings are not “real”, they are not legitimate photographs, and they are not human. For this reason, I believe that this creates a sort of disconnect within the reader, especially when trying to understand that this is a “real story”. This actually happened to a man, not a mouse. The photograph of Vladek, although drawn in, is still a real photograph. He physically went into the souvenir shop, donned this camp uniform, and stood while a photographer captured his image. In the image below, you can see the “real” photograph of Vladek juxtaposed with the comic, mouse version of himself. This ultimiately puts a real face to the legendary name, Vladek Spiegelman. He’s also wearing a camp uniform that is not his own, but still you are able to see with your own eyes what he looked like in the uniform. This was both shocking and intriguing to me as a reader. Why such a clean uniform? Was this popular after the war ended? Seeing Valdek in a camp uniform made the story all the more “real” to me. Obviously, this is a true story, however seeing it told through drawn mouse characters was strange for me, as I didn’t feel that I could picture this all happening in real life. Because this is an authentic photograph, it helps to establish that credibility that is lacking from Spiegelman’s choosing to draw his father as a mouse for the entirety of the novel. I only saw Vladek as a mouse the entire time, never a real human being. But this story and this photograph are real and authentic, and because of this photograph I was finally able to accept that this actually did happen to a real person, not a mouse.
Spiegelman (for the most part) stays pretty consistent throughout the graphic novel with his panels and the way they are situated on the page. However, sometimes Spiegelman chooses to incorporate non-traditional techniques, such as tipping certain panels out, drawing panels with no borders, or drawing panels in which the reader can see Spiegelman drawing the page he or she is currently reading (which is positively mind-bending.) As seen in the picture above, Spiegelman strategically drew in this photograph of Vladek. The photograph is tipped out of the panel’s frames, even though all of the rest of the panels are flush with the page’s borders. Some people, including myself, consider this particular page to be collage-like. The photograph was drawn in slanted, however Spiegelman made the choice to shade in where the photograph or another panel was supposed to be. This in turn makes it look like the photograph of Vladek look three dimensional, almost like it has been placed on top of this comic page in “real life”. It’s almost as if this piece of the puzzle doesn’t quite fit. I believe this is to create a so called “stop sign” at the end of the story to interrupt the normalcies seen throughout the rest of the novel (the people being drawn as animals.) While reading the novel, I grew used to picturing the human characters as the animals they were drawn as. The panels flowed like words on a page, and there was no real spot where I found that I “stumbled” in my mind. However, when I turned to page 134 and saw the photograph of Vladek, I was stopped in my tracks. It does not fit in literally as in it does not fit in the panel boarders and metaphorically in that it is a human, not an animal. Another artist who utilized this same form of shocking, collage like practices is Max Ernst (1891–1976), a twentieth century artist who is known for his surrealist pieces of art created after World War I (“Max Ernst”).
Pictured above is one of Max Ernst’s collages from La Femme 100 têtes (The Hundred Headless Woman). You can see that Ernst decided to combine a landscape scene and a hand, with what looks like clouds and sun rays in the background. All of these things do not go together, which is quite confounding. Spiegelman (although not as blatantly) utilized this same collage technique, and I found that it had the same affect on me. Why did Spiegelman draw in the photograph of Vladek like that? This period of reflection allowed me to reevaluate how I saw and read the story. I was confronted with this real photograph of Vladek, which looked like it was placed on top of this page so carefully as if Spiegelman was looking at this photograph in this position in “real life”, and decided it must be drawn that way. I instantly flipped through both installments and saw Vladek’s human face on every one of his mouse figures. Being confronted with this photograph made the story “come to life” for me, and I don’t know if I would have had the same reaction if it had fit in perfectly flush to the boarders like the other panels.
There is no doubt that Maus is an epic piece of both literature and art. The symbolism in the characters being drawn as animals, the sheer brilliance that went into creating almost 300 pages of original drawings, and of course the inclusion of real photographs all attribute to this graphic novel’s success. Vladek’s photograph and the way it was positioned in the novel are what I believe to be the key factors to establishing the authenticity that Spiegelman was so nervous about capturing. There will most likely be artists (and probably are currently) who are inspired by Spiegelman’s work, and choose to mirror his techniques like he may have with Max Ernst. Although not all of the pieces of the puzzle may fit perfectly in Maus, it is a profoundly moving story about survival as well as a beautiful way to pay homage to the person who survived it all.
Works Cited:
- “Max Ernst.” Collection Online. Guggenheim, n.d. Web. 08 Dec. 2015.
- Spiegelman, Art. Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale : and Here My Troubles Began. , 1991. Print.
