MAUS: A SURVIVOR�S TALE
art spiegelman
Penguin Books
When I was a kid, we studied the Holocaust in some depth. We looked at the inexorable rise of Hitler and his kind, out of a larger base of Anti-Semitism. We studied the propaganda, and the pogroms, and the purges. We walked through the pages of history, and saw a people brought to its knees by terror and murder.
While the dry facts of the Holocaust were all quite terrifying on an intellectual level (the Nazis were defeated, but there�s always a fresh supply of bastards), none of it affected me quite so deeply as the more personal accounts. To read or listen to the accounts of people like Kitty Hart (interred at Auschwitz-Birkenau) is to discover, first hand, what horror is all about.
Of course, by their very nature, stories like that of Kitty Hart, or even Schindler�s List, are about survival. About real people getting through extreme situations by the skin of their teeth. Survivor stories are all the more amazing for their almost oxymoron nature, being both very real and almost surreal at the same time. These aren�t soldiers. These aren�t supermen. These are ordinary people, like you and me. How many of us, if faced with the same harsh conditions, could say unequivocally that we would come out intact?
art spiegelman�s Maus, of course, reinforces the notion that ordinary people, not heroes, came through the Holocaust.
Maus centres around spiegelman�s parents, Anja and Vladek. As the book opens, spiegelman�s mother has been dead for nearly ten years, having committed suicide during a powerful bout of depression. spiegelman�s father is a crotchety pensioner, tormenting his new wife (another survivor) with his old man�s ways. spiegelman himself is, by this point, a successful underground comics artist (two years away from launching Raw, the revolutionary alternative comics magazine that carried the original Maus strips). Alienated from his father, by the death of his mother as much as anything else, spiegelman finds that, in order to tell his father�s story, he has to get a little more involved with the old man than really makes him comfortable.
I suspect that, if spiegelman had just stuck to the facts of his parent�s courtship, marriage, and ordeal at the hands of the Nazis, Maus would still have won as many awards as it has. It would still, more than likely, rank high on people�s all-time great comics lists. But the exploration of the relationship between Spiegelman Sr. and spiegelman Jr., tainted as it is by the weight of history and ghosts (the Spiegelmans had an older son, who died during the war), personalises the story in a way that a dry biography could not. Despite the extreme subject matter, spiegelman�s frustration with his father, as he strays from the storytelling, and starts fussing over his son, is both understandable and reassuring. As the book progresses, and the author begins to address the reader (and his shrink, and the press), it becomes clear that Maus is as much about art spiegelman as it is his father.
spiegelman�s art style is a curious mix of deliberate cartoon, for the people (calling them �characters� would be wrong, I think), and careful realism, for the world around them. The Jews may be played by cartoon mice, but when they die, you�ll still feel a shiver down your back.
Playing the Jews as anthropomorphic mice and the Germans as cats may make an apposite, if slightly heavy-handed point � cf. Tom and Jerry�s eternal chase, the Nazi assertion that the Jews were vermin � but it also aids with reader identification. This extends to the wartime cast, as well as the modern-day Spiegelmans. When the author appears, as a man wearing a mouse mask, he�s laying his cards on the table, and saying �the Holocaust helped make me what I am, even though I didn�t experience it directly.� There�s also an element of subversion, too: by tying on other masks throughout the story (Polish pig, German cat), the elder Spiegelman is able to go places that the overt Jew might not. This plays contrary to many of the nastier physical stereotypes of the time, and points to the tragic absurdity of the thing.
spiegelman opens himself to as much scrutiny as his father. He includes a 1973 short comic examining his feelings about his mother�s suicide that makes him look, to be frank, a bit of a dickhead. But his refreshing honesty about the subject matter, his curious near-envy of his family�s history, and about his feelings towards his father (especially his fear that he was portraying his father as a miserly Jewish stereotype � absolute tosh, of course, but you get where he�s coming from) mollifies that greatly.
Maus is, on one level, a harrowing story of survival against ridiculous odds, and on another, an examination of a family with noticeable, unavoidable holes in it. It is also a frank and touching account of the relationship between a father and his son, and an acknowledgment of how the act of observing an event or person changes both the observed and the observer.
If you only read one comic book, based on one of my reviews, then make sure that it�s Maus. The rarest of comics � one that transcends boundaries of taste and preconception � Maus is one of the best biographies that this writer has ever read. In any medium.
The Complete Maus, a new hardcover edition of the story, is on sale now.
Review text (C) Matthew Craig
Originally published in the pop culture magazine Robot Fist