Maus and memory
I recently reread the two-volume graphic novel Maus, by Art Spiegelman. It struck me once again, as it did the first time I read these books, that they should not work on any level. And yet, against all odds, they constitute a bona fide masterpiece.
Why should they fail? Let me count the ways. Because of our over-familiarity with the genre, as well as the risk of trivialization, Holocaust stories are inherently difficult to write, especially by people such as Spiegelman who did not directly experience the horrors. He chooses to write in the form of the graphic novel—in other words, a lengthy cartoon. This genre should be especially offensive as a medium for telling so deeply horrific and monumental a tale.
What’s more, Spiegelman decides to depict the protagonists as various animals, which might have served to underline the cartoon aspects as well as dehumanizing the story: the hunted Jews are mice, the Nazis are cats, Poles are pigs, Russians bears, Americans dogs. And he intersperses his own experience of typical and somewhat pedestrian intergenerational angst and parent-child strife with the searing Holocaust sufferings of his parents.
How is it that Spiegelman manages to succeed? He begins slowly, by introducing his father Vladek but concentrating on their present-day post-Holocaust American life (the book was first published in the mid-80s). The man is so crotchety and annoying, so stingy and testy, that the reader shares Spiegelman’s frustration with him. And then the son gets the idea of interviewing his father about his experiences during the war, and the story begins to shift gear into a very different time and place.
Part of the power of the book comes from the idiosyncratic, colorful, and yet laconic way Vladek expresses himself, in accented English that conveys his practical and canny nature. The use of animals to portray the different ethnic and national groups stops seeming strange and becomes powerfully symbolic, keeping the reader from ever forgetting for a moment that these identities were the most salient characteristics of the world in which Vladek and his fellows lived, marking him and his fellow Jews as hunted prey and others as predators, helpers, or neutrals.
The reader learns at the outset that Spiegelman’s mother is dead. Although she came through the Holocaust seemingly intact, she committed suicide when Art was a young adult. As Vladek’s story introduces the reader slowly to the person she was, it becomes more and more apparent that the love between the two was an extraordinarily powerful force, and largely responsible for her wartime survival. Vladek was able to at least temporarily transfer some of his own remarkable gift for endurance to his wife. He was very clever and resourceful. But “clever” and “resourceful” are mild words to describe his stunning ability to find a way out of almost any situation.
Virtually all Holocaust survivor stories involve large elements of both luck and skill. But, having read many such tales, I think I can safely say that Vladek’s history involves more of the latter than any other such story I have read. He is always planning ahead, always thinking, always ingratiating himself with those who might be able to help him in the future. He pretends to have knowledge and training he lacks, and then he makes it his business to learn those skills and to learn them quickly and well (shoemaking, tinsmithing). Although starving, he manages the extraordinary feat of controlling his hunger in order to save food to use as bribes or gifts in ways that can help him in the future.
As Vladek’s past emerges in his own words, the reader—and his son Art—learn the source of many of the man’s maddening quirks. What appears from the perspective of the bountiful America of the 1980s to be a miserly and rather nasty need on the old man’s part to save and hoard seemingly useless things is revealed to be the same impulse that allowed him to live while so many others died. The angry Vladek who is so mean to his second wife (another Holocaust survivor) still mourns the first wife he loved so deeply. The man who maddens son Art with his clinginess and demands is the same person who lost almost every member of his large family, including his first child, in ways that retain their power to horrify even those who are familiar with the Holocaust.
It is said that to know all is to understand all. By the time Art has finished interviewing his father and writing the book, he has come to understand as best he (or any other person who did not directly experience the Holocaust) can what motivates the man, and to respect those very traits of his that originally drove the son nearly crazy. In one of the final panels of the book, Vladek, now very ill and lying in bed, sleepily addresses Art by the name of his deceased first son Richieu who died as a young child in the war. This especially moving moment demonstrates the fusion of the past with the present, and the fact that the dead still exist in the mind, untethered to time.
The strength of Maus is that it tells two tales simultaneously: an almost unimaginably terrifying story of suffering and heroic survival is interspersed with the story of the ordinary middle class life of an American family in which Old World parents give birth to a New World son. No one is spared and no one is glorified, and yet the final message amidst the horror and cynicism is of the power and depth of love.
It strikes me as such a timely book read and post as 10,000 rockets have hit Israel in the past 2 years.
Contrary to ‘pacificists’ rants, Israel has showed remarkable restraint and has sought to end the terror to no success.
There is no end to the matter short of Israel ceasing to exist as proven by the 2000 negotiations where 91% of what the Palestinians wanted were said yes to by Israel.
The other end to the matter would be Palestinians renouncing violence and terror, stop teaching their children the merits (glory) of suicide bombings, stop using the little money they have to purchase rockets.
Maus and Maus II are still some of the most powerful books(sic) I have read. Even today, I can still recall and visualize some of the text/frames.
Indeed, Maus works on many levels: funny (sometimes), stark, horrifying, and tragic. After a while, you start to sympathize with Vladek and his Odyssey. And like Ulysses he does find himself descending into a Hell.
A history teacher colleague uses Maus to teach a unit on the Holocaust. And shows the kids the complete “Triumph of The Will” to give a background to it all…
Inteestingly enough, the students reaction to the movie is along the lines of “They (the Nazis) are so young…I can’t believe they’re young…”.
And so it goes…
Neo,
I’m really glad you wrote this piece; I read Maus back in the eighties and promptly “forgot” it — because I think I found it too painful to contemplate. While I appreciated its excellence and deep humanity, I could never have so eloquently justified, as you have done here, why the book works so well.
Jamie Irons
The graphic-novel format winds up working for Spiegelman; he accomplishes more in a few simple lines- from crotchety gestures to grief to the horror of the sick and the dying- than some people can manage with all the words they can muster. The cartoony format also makes the sometimes horrible imagery all the more jarring for the break with what we expect from funny-animal comics.
And yes, the different animal species thing works really, really well at delineating all the structures of identity that meant life or death.
my family has their stories from that period, and yet, we are not jewish, and not to deny the jewish people their situation, but there were a lot more than just them that suffered similar and even worse fates depending on which group you compare at any moment. yet we rarely even care to know those details at all. not only that, but hitler did his thing in less than a decade, the rest of them were abandoned to their ends to modern times. hitler killed 6 million jews in under a decade, stalin starved 7 million people in one country in one winter.
since i am too wordy… and someone did some of the the work for me, you can go to here, since today is a historical day having to do with your reading.
The Diamond Anniversary of Dehumanization
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/01/the_diamond_anniversary_of_deh.html
The Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseased Offspring came into this world.
everyone knows the diary of anne frank, i bet no one here has read or even heard of “dear god i wanted to live” by ruta U. (can be had in english and latvian, i own both).
During deportations or imprisonment, thousands of Latvians were transported back and forth along Siberia’s mighty Ob river. Working as slave labourers, they died of torture, disease, cold and hunger on the banks of this waterway.
Ruta U. (Upite) whose diary “Dear God, I wanted to live!” was published recently in the West, was deported at the age of 14 together with her younger sisters Maija and Dzidra to the vicinity of the Ob in 1941. Her mother and grandmother died there from the extreme conditions imposed on them through forced exile. Ruta U. was kept in the vicinity of Kolpashevo township until 1946. In 1951, together with her father and sisters, Ruta was sent here again.
back to the main thrust. the truth is that these people went through a meat grinder created by TWO countries (one who switched sides).
they shared ideologies in which they were so close you really couldnt distinguish them. one side was national, the other side international.
that there is more than just the holocaust side that has remained buried.
“The Soviet Story” http://www.sovietstory.com is a documentary film (produced in 2008) directed by Edvins Snore, filmed over a period of two years in Russia, Ukraine, Latvia, Germany, France, UK and Belgium
go over to the site and look at the posters. look at the happy soviet soldier shaking hands as he turns the jews over to the german.
i went to see this documentary when it was in ny. its a good one, not a great one, and it was in a tiny theater in the village when i saw it. (it was interesting to see the few lefties that came and then either had to leave or learn).
want to know what happened to many of the camps? do you think they were destroyed? you saw pictures right? well some of them were destroyed, but many of them were turned over to stalin who continued to use them.
yes, the holocaust didnt end with the german defeat, it continued, we just turned away. and it included more than jews, like the other 6 million we seem to forget to remember also.
To imagine living in a country in which the attrocities and acts to each other were on par with the SAW series of horror movies is hard to express.
the recent recanting and withdrawing of another hit book on a holocaust survivor also shows how much our fetish has gone rather than to all such acts. guy rewrites empire of the sun child at the fence scene to be a nazi camp situation, and a romantic discovery later.
Candy-coating the Holocaust
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/01/candycoating_the_holocaust.html
i draw attention to the article mostly because of the fact they mention Simon Wiesenthal.
In Lithuania, a man forced at gunpoint to shove people into a van used for gassing realized only as the door slammed shut that the last person he had pushed inside was his wife. That is the Holocaust.
In Auschwitz, a member of the Sonderkommando, Jews selected to work in the gas chambers and crematoria, was removing bodies from a gas chamber when he came upon the corpses of his children. That is the Holocaust.
A man was performing slave labor at rail yard where several cattle cars had been parked on a siding and the older women inside left to die of thirst. As the man listened to their screams, he thought, as any normal individual would, of his mother. He later discovered that she had been in one of those cars. And that is the Holocaust.
It happens that the laborer in this case was named Simon Wiesenthal. Even the most fortunate suffered almost beyond bearing.
when i sat there watching that movie.. knowing the REAL history and seeing the images… knowing details…
i saw some of the places where my large and now almost extinct family were all murdered. were some of them in that Riga grave? i know others were in a different area… some survived, like my great grandmothers, who it took us years to get out. my uncle tali drank too much, and arthur, whom my family adopted, who survived years in the camps.
i was born in the 60s… my father is a refugee with his family who fled between hitler and the return of stalin (so in a way, hitler provided the gap that allowed them to leave the grasp of stalin as regimes changes), and the lives of his family, my mothers and many others around me (in what was once a jewish neighborhood in the bronx), were all colored and shaded by the acts so many years before i was born.
and yet, few understand that we are actually skimming the rim of having the exact same thing here… albeit soft at first…. as it is now… and trickier, rather than overt and forceful.
where we no longer can realize that something is what it is no matter what we call it.
in such a tricky world where we no longer can see in absolutes, eugenics is planned parenthood, euthanasia is assisted suicide. soon we will have death by beuracratic rationing and incompetence for the ill and the sickly.
in case anyone hasnt noticed, all that is the same thing as hitlers action 10 (action 14 put the law whose anniversary into action).
in other words, we already have the prior step to what led to the holocaust, yet we cant see it because we didnt paint a sign that says, this way to the holocaust. anything less will not be regarded as a serious attempt at such, and so will not be prevented.
Yep. Maus is a masterpiece. I loved it and love it still.
It’s a shame that Speigelman couldn’t do the math in his recent book, In the Shadow of No Towers,when it comes to the calamitous history that entered his own life: 9-11.
Even though Bin Laden and associates embody fanatical violent hatred of Jews and Americans, Spiegelman drops into the left’s easy moral equivalence pairing Bin Laden with Bush. Spiegelman even does his animal shtick and OBL becomes the lovable brick-throwing mouse, Ignatz of Krazy Kat. Inexcusable.
I truly believe this kind of story can only be written in the United States. There is no other place open enough to reveal this horror safely, without fear. For as long as I live in this increasingly decrepit body, I will cherish knowing that I live in this country. And I hope I can live up to the sacrifice others made and continue to make.
Semper Fi.
Thanks,Neo. You are a gifted critic.
In case anyone hasn’t seen it: The Hitchcock documentary.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6Z9v24bpeE&feature=related
an aside to this, or rather the ongoing continuing story from the german period to now…
fun.mivzakon.co.il/flash/video/2664/2664.html
this explains the history of the jewish state.
but as i was talking to a jewish scholar yesterday, we discussed the situation. i pointed out that the situat6ion will never resolve since they are not linking up with all the other things that happene,d that are ALSO born of the SAME ideology,.
marx was a luthran, who became an athiest, who was born to two jewish parents.
it was HIS ideology that came aroudn and proceeded through hitler AND stalin to eradicate the jewish people. hitler worked with the mullahs, and he also rewrote the koran (you have to do some deep reseatrch to finc this out. the originals were thought to have been lost in the bombings, but turns out that they were stashed and wer foudn last year, but no one wants to release them, since they are older than the current korans!)
hitler was a socialist
lenin was a socialist, and stalin, and they had little love of the jews, killing and persecuting them before hitler even was around. hitler was the front fall guy. but the truth is that the ideology has been plinking away scine its birth, and one thing it has plinked on is the removal of the religions, and jewish people, live their religion as part of their life, not as an aside to it. (from the elevators where i work, to getting home before sundown on friday). so they are the first targets as they are the ones who have resisted reformation applied to the others.
but even the jewish state was partially born of the same ideology, kibbutzim.
Read the definition..
A kibbutz (Hebrew: קיבוץ, קִבּוּץ, lit. “gathering, clustering”; plural kibbutzim) is a collective community in Israel that was traditionally based on agriculture. The kibbutz is a form of communal living that combines socialism and Zionism. Kibbutzim began as utopian communities, but have gradually embraced a more “scientific” Socialist approach.
Then look up “scientific socialism”, and what do you get?
Scientific Socialism is the term used by Friedrich Engels to describe the social-political-economic theory pioneered by Karl Marx. The reason why this socialism is “scientific socialism” (as opposed to “utopian socialism”) is because, like science, observation is essential in this theory. Although Marx denounced “utopian socialism”, he never referred to his own ideas as “scientific socialism”.
COMMUNISM…
so trying to work this thing from some moral basis that horrors should not happen, or who is right or wrong, will not solve anything.
who supplies the weapons, expertise, nuclear materials, etc? who was part of the isreali arab war? who was partner to hitler till hitler turned and they too turned sides? what country took over the camps and kept them running after the war? who has never been properly blamed as well for their part in all of this?
the holocaust of the jews is a small part of the holocaust of the proletariat!!!
failure to fight the root, leaves us to an endless treadmill of trimming the hedges every few years.
Reading your fine piece on Maus, it occurred to me that the Holocaust-surviving generation that founded Israel has bequeathed to their less hard-nosed descendants a situation they will find increasingly difficult to manage. I wonder if history will show that just as Israel could only have been founded by the Jews who survived WWII, it could also only be maintained and defended by them. For Israel seems to be wavering and losing her way, unable to close with any finality on the wars being brought to her. I can imagine a time decades hence when the Arabs are celebrating a victory brought not so much by their own efforts as by the dilution of resolve brought by generational distance from the Holocaust.
“Hitler rewrote the qur’an..”
Not hardly. The “originals” you claim were found last year were actually discovered in 1972 in Sana’a, Yemen. These fragments (from thousands of qur’ans) were being studied for authenticity by a German named Gerd Puin back in the ’90’s. While they are older than other known qur’ans (the fragments are dated to within 100 years of Muhammed’s life), “modern” qur’ans generally follow the same text as the so-called Uthman Qur’an, allegedly endorsed by the third Caliph (Uthman) after Muhammed, and have been with us for 1200 or more years.
Hitler didn’t rewrite the Qur’an. However, he did base Mein Kampf and the political religious doctrine of National Socialism on Islam. For evidence, read “Prophet of Doom” by Craig Winn. Also, Melanie Phillips has done some great work in this area.
American liberals don’t mind if Jews get murdered. But Jews who defend themselves are “worse than Nazis.”
I hope there really is a Hell.
Israel seems to be wavering and losing her way, unable to close with any finality on the wars being brought to her. I can imagine a time decades hence when the Arabs are celebrating a victory brought not so much by their own efforts as by the dilution of resolve brought by generational distance from the Holocaust.
Don – I have the same concern. However, I’m not so sure there is a simple victory ahead for the Arabs, as along as Israel possesses 150-200 nuclear weapons.
Humans as Livestock
by Paul Bonneau
http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2009/tle500-20090104-03.html
Humans as Livestock
by Paul Bonneau
http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2009/tle500-20090104-03.html
Stefan Molyneux has put out a remarkable video that takes a look at the human condition. It explains why many of us have been feeling like we are being treated like livestock lately. Human society is a farm, with the ruling class as the farmers and the rest of us as cattle.
Lee said … please listen to LEE!!!
“For evidence, read “Prophet of Doom” by Craig Winn.”
… or Tea With Terrorists at
teawithterrorists.com/ (free online version)
Historians jeer: Hitler’s Mein Kampf used to be one of the highest-circulation books in history … and one of the least read.
Well, some read, and they knew, what he was up to. They were prepared for hellfire.
Tea With Terrorists is connecting the dots (as they call it in there): Mohammed’s message and style of waging his wars – Terrorism today… and what to expect.
It might not be the most classy piece of literature you ever encountered, but the dialogues in there are highly informative and as far as I can see well researched.
The novel-approach makes it a thrilling read at times (even though it could be shorter)
But it’s important!!!
If you disagree with how they decribe Islam: object with good reason! Do some research on your own. Start with the Quran and the most trusted Hadith, then move on with some history-volumes …
Disagree fruitfully! But be prepared that your efforts will convert you to the thesis of the book.
“Lee says:” … please listen to LEE – Part 2
“maus and memory” is the headline, so learn a little lesson for from yesterday for tomorrow @
teawithterrorists.com/Tea_with_Terrorists_20_The_Message.Terrorism
comparing Hitler’s deathmarch-movement with Mohammed’s:
“Because Hitler and Muhammad are similar, mankind is in similar peril. The signposts along the road to oblivion are hauntingly familiar….”
… read on. Find out what Islam is really about. It’s the future of our children … (might sound preachy, but it’s right.)
“Lee says:” … please listen to LEE – Part 3
a little tidbid:
Sarah …: “We didn’t tell the General a fraction of the similarities between Muhammad and Hitler.”
Thor looked at her. “Like what?”
“Like they both told the world they were peace-loving right up to the moment they butchered everybody in sight. Hitler said, ‘My only great task is to secure peace in the world. I have a deep respect for the rights of other nations,’ saying, ‘from our innermost heart, National Socialist Germany wishes to live in peace and friendship.’”
“The friendship of blitzkrieg – death came so fast, it was relatively painless, I suppose. But did you know that the ‘land-for-peace’ terminology used in describing today’s ‘peace process’ with the Arabs was usurped from Hitler? He said, ‘The German minority in the Sudetenland must be autonomous.’”
“Germans in Czechoslovakia were corrupted by Nazism, just as the Palestinians are by Islam. Both comprised twenty-two percent of the population, and both were determined to undermine their democracy from within on behalf of neighboring dictatorships.”
“Israel and Czechoslovakia: wealthy states with world class military defenses – defenses rendered useless by giving the high ground to a treasonous minority,” Thor explained as he scanned the engine instruments.
“When Chamberlain gave Czechoslovakia to Hitler, he unwittingly unified Germany behind der Fuhrer. It was a stunning diplomatic coup. Awarding the Islamic terrorists with the heart of Israel will similarly galvanize their resolve and inflame their lust for war, won’t it, Thor?”
“Yes. The ‘peace process’ is the most direct path to war. Giving Hitler Czechoslovakia ignited World War II; giving the Arabs Israel will be the opening salvo of World War III.”
“Muslims say Islam doesn’t support terror, yet the faithful terrorize. Muhammad even told them to lie to us.”
“Unfortunately, the media has bought into the delusion. How many times have you heard them say Islam’s a peace-loving religion?”
“A few thousand. They’ve spewed the garbage so often, folks have come to believe it. Makes us look crazy when we say it’s untrue.”
“Do you think it’s purposeful, or merely foolish? Are the folks with the microphones lying, or just too lazy to figure it out?”
http://teawithterrorists.com/Tea_with_Terrorists_22_Out_of_the_Blue.Terrorism