Maus (comics)

From Freepedia

Maus: A Survivor's Tale is a graphic novel by Art Spiegelman that recounts his father's struggle to survive the Holocaust as a Polish Jew. 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, as the Pulitzer committee could not decide whether to categorize it as fiction or biography.

Spiegelman portrays different ethnic groups as different species of animals: Jews are depicted as mice (German: Maus), Germans as cats, French as frogs, Poles as pigs, Americans as dogs, Swedes as reindeer, and Gypsies as moths. The use of anthropomorphism, a familiar device from children's cartoons and comic strips, was an ironic nod to Nazi propaganda images that depicted Jews as rats and Poles as pigs. Publication in Poland was delayed because of this artistic device.[1]

Plot

The book alternates the stories told by his father Vladek Spiegelman, about life in Poland before the Second World War (in Radomsko, Czestochowa, Sosnowiec and Bielsko), and during the war (as a war prisoner near Nuremberg, in Lublin, Sosnowiec again, the nearby Srodula ghetto, Auschwitz as prisoner 175113, Gross Rosen, Dachau), with the contemporary life of Art, Vladek and their surroundings in Rego Park, NY and Florida. As in Don Quixote, the second part also deals with the impact of the publication of the first part. Through the book, Spiegelman shows how his father in spite of his experience still shows racial prejudice against black people, or how he is extremely stingy and makes life very difficult for those around, such as his second wife Mala (after the suicide of Art's mother Anja), also a KZ survivor.

Themes

Obviously, the Holocaust is the major theme, although perhaps it would be most precise to say that the effort to articulate the Holocaust is the major theme, giving the book a metabiographical aspect. Spiegelman expresses the apprehension he feels about trying to express the unexpressable at a few points in the second part. The choice to use animals to represent races and nationalities and to show Vladek as he is, even the bad, can be seen as part of this struggle.

Publication

Most of the work was serialized in RAW magazine, which was edited by Spiegelman. 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.

Editions

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

External links

• Teacher's guide at Random House
• Reconstructivist Art: Maus