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by Marie-Luise Stromer

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MURDERED MICE

A comic on the holocaust? The Jews depicted as mice and the most infamous concentration camp as Mauschwitz? I had read positive reviews on the book and had to find out how that worked, if it worked at all for me.

Art Spiegelman hasn't invented the genre but he's certainly expanded it, he's created a unique graphic book by the subject he's chosen. The author (from the cover) a contributing editor and artist for the New Yorker, cofounder/editor of Raw, the acclaimed magazine of avant-garde comics and graphics' has made first and foremost a classical comic, i.e., a story about anthropomorphically depicted animals, told sequentially in a series of square panels six to a page, containing speech balloons and voice-over captions in which all the lettering is in capitals, with onomatopoeic sound-effects to represent rifle-fire, and so on' (I couldn't have said it better than Philipp Pullman in the Guardian 18.10.2003)

The story has three levels, the author shows Art Spiegelman, the narrator (only once, though) when he's overrun and overwhelmed by the success his Maus stories have, ad people urge him to give them the permission to use his mice for their own purposes (which he refuses), he has to see a psychiatrist for help. On the next level we find the cartoonist Art Spiegelman, the author's fictitious alter ego, born in the USA as the son of a Jewish couple, survivors of the holocaust, interviewing his father about his life.

This is the third level, Vladek Spiegelman tells his son about his family's life in Poland before the rise of the Nazis, what happened to his family during the Third Reich, his and his wife's experiences in the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau and their final salvation, inserted photos of Art's younger brother (he died during the war) and father show that this is a real biography; Vladek's story forms the core of the book.

The situation of the son interviewing the father serves as a frame, but it doesn't appear only at the beginning and at the end, Vladek's story is repeatedly interrupted; these interruptions serve several purposes, they show Vladek, the survivor, in his second life in the USA, what the camp has done to him, what kind of man he has become, and we also learn that the son is affected by what his parents went through, he was born in the USA but he's also shown as a mouse just like his father and the other survivors now living in the USA.

I think I'm not the only reader who experiences these interruptions as a kind of relief, too, a possibility to breathe freely and relax a bit so that one can go on reading and contemplating the horrors of Vladek's story. Last but not least we can watch in true post modern fashion how a story is made, Art lets us share his scruples and reflections one of which is the question if a comic is an adequate art form to describe the horrors of the holocaust.

Well, is it? Normally I don't read comics so it took me some time to get into the story. What I don't like is that the captions are not given in print letters but in handwriting, this together with the fact that the text is written in capital letters (with the exception of the part in which the narrator sees his psychiatrist) made for slow reading for me. Maybe the author wants me to read slowly? If so, he's certainly achieved his goal.

Another slight irritation for me is Vladek's way of using the English language. He spoke Yiddish and Polish in Poland and his English is often translated Yiddish. As this language is related to German, I can understand why Vladek forms the sentences the way he does. "Maybe we'll together stay to the end of the summer here" / "Already I've made for a half hour on the porch my gymnastics". Of course, this makes Vladek's story authentic, but I stumble over such constructions, I want to read perfect English only. Maybe someone whose mother tongue is English isn't irritated, I don't know.

I pondered a long time on Spiegelman's decision to depict the characters as animals or rather as human bodies with the heads of animals, Jews are mice, Germans are cats, Poles are pigs, Americans are dogs and a Frenchman is a frog. The book would also have been a comic had he drawn human beings, why animals? For one we see at once who's who, an author can write, "Two Poles came in", a cartoonist doesn't have it that easy, how can a reader know which nationality a character has if the outward appearance is the same?

This leads directly into the story, indeed, from the outside people look the same, but the Nazis classified people and then went further, first there were German Jews, Polish Jew, Hungarian Jews and so on, then these people weren't Germans, Poles or Hungarian citizens any more, just Jews, later they weren't even human beings any more, they were seen as vermin, vermin that had to be extinguished.

So Spiegelman takes up the fascist propaganda and shows Jews as mice and what the cats did to them. All Jews are mice in the book, this I can accept, but that all Germans are cats is hard to swallow. Cats kill mice because it's in their nature, this would mean in Spiegelman's world that it is in the nature of Germans to kill Jews. Has Spiegelman used the animal metaphor for clarification and impact only or is it his conviction that things are like this? I don't know, the book doesn't give an answer.

Another idea that has come to my mind: does the fact that all characters are animals somewhat belittle the holocaust? I can only speak for myself, no, it doesn't, the combination of the gruesome pictures in black and white together with the text have an impact no written text can have, I know that the book will stay in my memory for a long time. Despite the slight irritations I've mentioned (my problems!) I can say that Maus is a true masterpiece, a stroke of genius and has deserved the many prizes (the Pulitzer among them) it has got. Highly recommended.

Learn more about this author, Marie-Luise Stromer.

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