Maus

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For other uses, see Maus (disambiguation)}}}.

Maus: A Survivor's Tale is a memoir presented as a graphic novel by Art Spiegelman. It recounts Spiegelman's father's struggle to survive the Holocaust as a Polish Jew and draws largely on his father's recollections of events he personally experienced. The book also follows the author's troubled relationship with his father and the way the effects of war reverberate through generations of a family. In 1992 it won a Pulitzer Prize Special Award. The New York Times described the selection of Maus for the honor: "The Pulitzer board members ... found the cartoonist's depiction of Nazi Germany hard to classify."

Overview

The book alternates the stories told by Spiegelman's father Vladek Spiegelman about life in Poland before and during the Second World War, with the contemporary life of Art, Vladek and their loved ones in the Rego Park neighborhood of New York City and in Florida. The book recounts the struggle of Vladek Spiegelman living with his family in Radomsko, Czestochowa, Sosnowiec and Bielsko in the late 1930s and his tragic odyssey during the war which ultimately led him to Auschwitz as prisoner 175113. Throughout the book, Art Spiegelman also confronts his complex and often conflictual relationship with his father. Vladek is depicted as still exhibiting racial prejudice against blacks despite his own life experience. He is also presented as extremely stingy and making life very difficult for those around him, such as his first wife Anja (Art's mother who committed suicide) and his second wife Mala, also a concentration camp survivor.

Themes

The author's articulation of the Holocaust is the central theme of the two graphic novels, giving the book a metabiographical aspect. Spiegelman often mentions the apprehension he feels related to trying to express the unexpressable. The novel adopts both a survivor's point of view of the Holocaust and the point of view of those who did not live it, but are still deeply connected to it. The author makes a unique choice to depict the varying nationalities and races in the novel with animals. At one point the author questions his own choice in doing so, and at that point he begins drawing characters as humans wearing animal masks.

Animals used

• The Jews are represented by mice.
• The Germans are represented by cats.
• The Americans are represented by dogs.
• The Polish are represented by pigs.
• The Roma (Gypsies) are represented as gypsy moths.
• The French are represented by frogs
• The Swedes are represented by deer.
• The British are represented by fish.
• The child of a Jew and a German is shown as a mouse with cat stripes.

The animals are presumably chosen based on the characteristics of the nation/racial group chosen, and some obvious allegories can be seen[link]:

• The Jews, as mice, can be seen as weak and helpless victims, as well as satirizing the Nazi portrayal of Jews.
• The Germans, as cats, suggest power over the Jews, as well as malevolence (cats often play with mice before killing them).
• Dogs for the Americans suggest power (the USA was arguably the most powerful of the WW2 nations) as well as friendliness, loyalty and many other positive values. The stereotypical dog also dislikes cats and may attack them.
• The use of pigs as Polish suggests more negative views: as well as greed, the Poles/pigs are brutal (Spiegelman makes mention of a Jew who survives the war, only to be murdered by Poles when he returns home.)
• The only encounter with a gypsy is when she tells the fortune of Anja, Vladek's wife: the moth allegory would seem to be the magical and mystic nature of this event.
• The French being frogs would appear to be a direct reference to an oft-used nickname, itself a lampoon of the fact that the French are supposedly renowned for eating frogs: it is also, however, suggested that Spiegelman wanted a certain amount of sliminess about the French, as he says to his wife: "Bunnies are too innocent for the French... Think of the years of anti-Semitism."
• The Swedish as deer suggests reindeer.
• The British as fish suggests an aquatic creature, a metaphor of British Naval supremacy.

The use of animals in the graphic novel is misleading: instead of creating social stereotypes, Spiegelman attempts to lampoon them and show how stupid it is to classify a human being based on their nation, or ethnicity.[link] His images are not his: they were "borrowed from the Germans... Ultimately what the book's about is the commonality of human beings. It's crazy to divide things down along nationalistic or racial or religious lines... These metaphors, which are meant to self-destruct in my book - and I think they do self-destruct - still have a residual force and still get people worked up over them."

Publication

Maus was originally published as a three page strip for Funny Aminals, an underground comic published by Apex Novelties in 1972. In 1977, Spiegelman decided to lengthen the work, publishing most of the work serially in RAW magazine, a publication Spiegelman co-edited along with his wife Françoise Mouly. It was then published in its final form in two parts (Volume I: "My Father Bleeds History" and Volume II: "And Here My Troubles Began"), before eventually being integrated into a single volume. A CD-ROM edition also exists, although it is no longer in print.

Awards and nominations

Awards

• 1988 Angoulême International Comics Festival Awards - Religious Award: Christian Testimony & Prize for Best Comic Book: Foreign Comic Award (Maus: un survivant raconte).
• 1988 Urhunden Prize - Foreign Album (Maus).
• 1990 Max & Moritz Prizes - Special Prize (Maus).
• 1992 Pulitzer Prize - Special Awards and Citations - Letters (Maus). [link]
• 1992 Eisner Award - Best Graphic Album: Reprint (Maus II).
• 1992 Harvey Award - Best Graphic Album of Previously Published Work (Maus II). [link]
• 1993 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction (Maus II, A Survivor's Tale). [link]
• 1993 Angoulême International Comics Festival Awards - Prize for Best Comic Book: Foreign comic (Maus: un survivant raconte, part II).
• 1993 Urhunden Prize - Foreign Album (Maus II).

Nominations

• 1986 National Book Critics Circle Award
• 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award

Editions

• ISBN 0394747232 - Volume One (paperback)
• ISBN 0679729771 - Volume Two (paperback)
• ISBN 0679748407 - Paperback boxed set
• ISBN 0141014083 - Paperback containing both volumes in one book
• ISBN 0679406417 - Hardcover containing both volumes in one book

Notes

Reference

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External links

[Listen to this article] · [(info)]

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• [Teacher's guide] at Random House
• [Reconstructivist Art]: Maus
• [Art Spiegelman's MAUS: Working Through the Trauma of the Holocaust]. In Responses to the Holocaust, U. Virginia

 

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