Of Mice and Murder: Art Spiegelman's 'Maus'

Of Mice and Murder: Art Spiegelman’s Maus
Maus: A Survivor’s Tale by Pantheon Books of New York
Volume 1: My Father Bleeds History © 1986 and Volume 2: And Here My Troubles Began © 1991

Around mid-January I read with great absorption Art Spiegelman’s Maus. (Thanks to colleague Chong Ardivilla who lent his copies!) These are comic books comprising two volumes on the plight of the Jews in Nazi Europe. For quite a long time now I have been preoccupied with Jewish history. It is difficult to depict the viciousness that they went through; much more explain the specific ideological and political underpinnings of their oppression. Many who are concerned with the past and its representation take the Holocaust as the historical subject par excellence. There are scores of documents and millions had witnessed the genocidal campaign. Yet how can such a phenomenon be narrated and re-presented to the present generation when the suffering is said to be ‘unspeakable’ and ‘unexplainable’? This is compounded by the realization that a lot of those who witnessed were accomplices to the crime, ‘Hitler’s willing executioners’ according to Daniel Goldhagen. The Jews’ dogged persistence to survive bears out man’s constitution of bare life.

Maus is the story of Polish Jews who survived Nazi persecution. Vladek the survivor tells his family’s story to his son Artie, also the cartoonist (but not quite) Spiegelman. Artie/Art visits his father and conducts an interview for the comic book project that he is making. Oral history is rendered visual through comics.

Comic Representation and Suffering

The first problem a project such as Spiegelman’s encounters, and this is where conscious and erudite readers (as opposed to the mass) initially react to, is the representation of a serious and complex phenomenon as the Holocaust in a usually funny and flippant art form that is the comics. Here, drawings and text convolute to offer the reader an ‘honest-to-goodness storytelling’ of what happened to particular people during the most destructive war of recent history. I think a ‘high’ and complex history as that of the Holocaust rendered by an art form historically considered ‘low’ is sure to encounter disapproval. But the brilliance of Maus is precisely this: it struggles to tell a harrowing story (‘an epic story told in tiny pictures’ – new york times) in a form that reaches people who are averse to harrowing experiences. Comics and cartoons are usually for entertainment, almost exclusively tied to fun and leisure. It comes out of this challenge resolutely and critically affective.

It is indeed comic to see people imaged in animal forms: the Jews are mice, the Germans are cats, and the Poles are pigs and the others equally amusing (Americans as dogs, the French as frogs, Swedes as reindeers and the gypsy as a moth). Particular attention is given to the mice characterization. A Nazi-era German newspaper article given as an epigraph of Maus’s second volume refers to Mickey Mouse as the “most miserable ideal ever revealed” connected to the “Jewish brutalization of the [German] people.” The disease-carrying filthy vermin embodies the Jew, mankind’s plague according to Nazi anti-Semitism. A Jew is also a mouse in a sense that it is able to sneak out and steal food and fall prey to the carnivorous cats. Yet recall that the mouse type has always been used to lampoon people and criticize society. Remember Disney. Remember our Ikabod, Nonoy Marcelo’s naughty rat.

Another cool idea is the use of mask every time the characters assume another race’s identity. Whenever they are compelled to hide their Jewish identity, Vladek and his fellows wear Pole (pig) or German (cat) masks or even mouse masks. One perplexing example is the part when the cartoonist Artie is being interviewed on the success of Maus I, he and the people around him wear masks. Does the well-conditioned set-up of an interview reveal the artificiality of their identities? Are they pressured to perform racial categories as people see it fit? Why does this happen during the media interview, when the demands of commerce all the more inflect the reception of a very traumatic experience? (vol 2, 41-46) On page 41 of the second volume, one sees Artie atop so many dead bodies, his current success and predicament literally resting on the deaths of his fellow Jews. This is the burden of his history.

Maus is centered on Vladek’s survival but in each turn we set our eyes on sufferings from the people who have made the Jews’ extermination an unbreakable part of the campaign for European domination. In The War of the World, British historian Niall Ferguson pithily points out that one shocking atrocity of the Holocaust is that the Jews suffered from the hands of the very people who they grew up with, lived as neighbors, attended school and played with. It was as if the war ignited the hatred seething beneath the surface all along. Early in the story the Polish governess of Vladek’s household protested on the comment that Poles don’t need to be incited for anti-Semitism (37), later on this same governess rejected the Spiegelmans when they were looking for a place to stay (136). Spiegelman’s narrative art does not present Jewish condition in terms of the traditional rising and fall actions, with the climax at the middle; he imparts it to us in a fitful manner. We first learn of horror as an impending event, just round the corner, when Vladek relates the first time he saw the swastika (32) and hears stories of Jewish suffering in Germany, the pogroms, how they are forced to ‘sell’ their business and are insulted in public and how whole towns push them out (33). These are merely rumors that eventually befall their lives as unbelievably real as the renascent German nation conquers the east. People are licensed to kill Jews in the Reich, many were marched to the forest and there they were killed (61) and we also watched, as in movies, how creative the abuses were by making them sing, laughing at them (65). There was massive Aryan takeover of Jewish businesses (76) and they were relocated, with the spaces they vacated used by non-Jews for free (82); some, like those who engaged in the black market, were hanged in public to set example (83). Vladek’s wealthy friend Mandelbaum singularly exhibits the disparity from pre-war Jewish life as ‘but now, in Auschwitz, Mandelbaum was a mess’ with his uniform clothes and shoes too big for him and the beatings received from lost utensils (II: 29) Vladek also shares his observation of how one reacts like a dog when being shot – ‘how amazing it is that a human being reacts the same like this neighbor’s dog’ (II: 82) One feels sorrow combined with horror as the terror of punishment is revealed in the cut-out images of the chimney (II: 69, 25) and the details—discussed as though on a field trip to a heritage site—of gas chambers, the ovens (II: 70-71). Two graphic renditions of Vladek’s predicament were crafted creatively by Spiegelman, both dealing with directions, of how to move across space that rapidly encloses upon them: one night when going out to meet his friend, he sees Jews being beaten and he is confused whether to walk slowly or to run, whatever he does he will be attacked – he is shown standing on the star of David; past surviving in a bunker, Vladek and his wife Anja return to their town Sosnowiec only to ask, in a swastika-shaped road, ‘but where to go?!’ (125).

Racial Caricatures

Through Artie’s depiction of his father the reader’s pity on the Jewish condition is disturbed by Vladek’s attitude, the latter being the ‘racist caricature of a miserly old Jew’ (131). Similar to the old people of today who were hardened by war, Vladek saves on almost everything. He picks up the telephone wires he sees on the street (116), he saves the matches (II: 20) and gets tissues from and cheats on entering the hotel and the most embarrassing thing is when he returns groceries and buys out a refund by telling his sad condition (II: 89-90). Vladek gets to like his first wife Anja because she comes from a rich family and is always neat and clean with her stuff. He disapproves of Anja’s relation with a communist and insists that his wife must go her way (29). Oftentimes his second wife Mala, also a Jew survivor, is unfairly compared with Anja. In the concentration camp he is also averse to his Russian communist Jew supervisor. And to present the complicated character of racial tolerance, Vladek refuses to let a black guy hitch on their car, arguing that the colored man is a thief (II: 98-99). This merits the comment from Artie’s wife that Vladek’s behavior is similar to the Nazis’ treatment of Jews. When Germany was destroyed, Vladek and his friend are ‘happy’ to see Germans suffering – ‘let the Germans have a little what they did to the Jews’ (II: 130). The common portrayal of Germans as systematic and orderly is also evident in Maus. They account their prisoners very well (59) and they want everything neat and in good order, even the details of straw beds (II: 67). Again, from War of the World the incredible thing about Nazism, the paradigmatic modern political system of our time, is that it was a democratically elected regime using the most scientific methods in carrying out its criminal program. The Frankfurt School would criticize this Hitlerian legacy as an inextricable component of Enlightenment, sort of a pessimistic stance of a civilization gone wild because barbaric at its core and leads on to degeneracy and destruction.

Bleeding History: Reflexivity, Historical Consciousness

This must never happen again! To me the most perspicacious aspect of Spiegelman’s attempt to tell the tale of his father’s survival is his reflexive mode. He even discusses his wife Francoise’s image, whether she should be a frog by virtue of being a French, but is drawn as a mouse because she converted, to please Vladek (II: 12-13). Vladek had initially remarked that his life would take many books to draw, to tell (12) and when the story progresses he cautioned Artie that his relation with Lucia, his flirtatious and not rich girlfriend, should not be included in the book – ‘it has nothing to do with Hitler, with the Holocaust!...and isn’t so proper, so respectful’ (23). Artie said that it would make ‘everything more real – more human’ but relented to his father’s request. One can grasp here that the problems of choice, selection, inclusion and exclusion in a historical reconstruction are the problems of history itself. In raising the universality of the Jewish question in the Third Reich, even those who suffered the most want to cut down the anti-Semitism issue to the ‘proper and respectful’ matters of Hitler and the Holocaust. Granted that Vladek’s ‘unserious’ relation with Lucia does not concern the theme and subject of the tale, his insistence on his own view of things makes the story a black and white issue of the good guys versus them the evil ones. The survivor’s tale is in danger of being a co-conspirator to/collaborator of an oppressive victor’s history. One does not cease to be triumphant because the other’s defeat is his sustenance. Nazism was defeated but the racist ideology it embodies still lives, not less in its own victims who, today, many of them, use their suffering to exact the same violence on hapless Palestines and Arabs. And they are being used by Christians who are themselves as much anti-Jew as they are anti-Arab and anti-Muslim.

Though the events happened in central and eastern Europe, the tale is told from the peace and quiet of America, where many survivors immigrated after the war. This is the reason why children of survivors, and other people who approach the Jewish predicament with a historical and/or artistic intent, now learn and understand Holocaust helped by perspective (distance). Artie struggles to be fair, perhaps reflective of the post-war (he was born in 1948) democratic campaigns in the US and elsewhere in the world and butts in question to make his father’s account more complete and consistent. Some Poles hid Jews at their own risk. One time he clarifies by citing historical research that there was an orchestra playing music while the prisoners were being marched, his father does not remember this (II: 54). Another, he asks why the Jews did not resist, his father responded by saying that then they were starving and frightened and unbelieving of what’s happening and that ‘the Jews lived always with hope’ (II: 73). On page 82 of the first volume, he checks his dad’s telling by maintaining that it must be chronological or else ‘I’ll never get it straight’. When he and his father are arguing about serious things, they decide to affirm forgetting, like the case of Vladek’s prejudice against the blacks (II: 100). He grapples with the difficulty of presenting their reality as comics: ‘so much has to be left out or distorted’ (II: 16). When pressed about his intention, he answers that he doesn’t want to reduce the work to a message and/yet later on says that people should have guilt; then he becomes smaller and smaller and ends up as a child (II: 42), probably as a way of showing how he shrinks from the responsibility of such a tremendous artistic and historical task. Artie talks with his psychiatrist Pavel and they wear mouse masks, here patently assuming a ‘Jewish’ identity under pressure and he intimates his father’s guilt of surviving (many survivors, not only of Holocaust, but also civilians who suffered from anti-terror campaigns committed suicide), his accomplishment as lesser than surviving (II: 43-46). Foregrounding the pain of telling the truth about oppression, he quotes Samuel Beckett: ‘every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness’ (II: 45). Vladek, in a later passage, notes that ‘nobody can understand Auschwitz’ (II: 64). Many have declared that the Holocaust is unrepresentable, that Auschwitz is the zero degree of silence and the dead-end of storytelling and history, yet we must struggle that such suffering must be re-presented. Only through an account of the crime in ‘all’ its dimensions can we arrive at not only a just punishment for the perpetrators but a defining judgment on history.

In a deeply sad evocation of Artie’s psychological problem, a case history titled Prisoner on the Hell Planet (100-103) was inserted in the first volume. This is a comic book Artie made on his mother’s suicide. With a strict and thick delineation of black and white colors and characters emanating like shadows, this particular work (which appeared in ‘an obscure underground comic book’, reflecting the repressed underside of history in the comics market system) punctuates, through an intensely personal approach, the tensions of Jewish collective memory and the private realm of forgetting. Artie blames himself for his mother’s fate. We see him being approached by his mother for the last time, asking for the confirmation of his love and later on Artie is seen in a prison/sanatorium accusing his mother of murdering (psychologically? emotionally?) him by committing the perfect crime (of suicide).

Maus symbolically moves violently against this murder and death. In some ways Vladek did not survive, Artie rants when his father’s returning Mala’s groceries (II: 90). Volume 1 ends with Artie calling Vladek a ‘murderer’ for burning his mother’s records. This we happen to know was a false claim, his father thought he lost it (II: 113). Volume 2 ends with Vladek bidding goodbye to Artie and calls him Richieu! (II: 136), his first son with Anja who died in the war. Tired from talking of their stories, Vladek resurrects Richieu and transposes the living memory of his dead son on to the still living, historically conscious and death-indebted Artie, Art Spiegelman.

To bleed history is to loose by taking out what is in you that carries life. From the vermin that carries death and disease, Art Spiegelman’s Maus is a supreme creative effort to circulate this life – from the father to the son, from one generation to the next, from the survivor to the challenger, from the Jew to non-Jews. On and on until the next catastrophe boils our blood and discharges our emancipatory intervention in history.

8 February 2008