Art Spiegelman - The Complete Maus

A week or so ago the school board in McMinn County, Tennessee in the USA voted unanimously to remove Art Spiegelman's classic book Maus from school libraries. The board argued that this graphic novel was unsuitable because it featured objectionable language and nudity. Given that the subject of Maus is the Jewish Holocaust under the Nazis, these objections seemed strange. Whatever the motivating factors of the board, many people saw the ban as an attempt to limit teaching of the Holocaust in schools. An immediate side effect was the immediate return of Spiegelman's Maus to the bestseller lists as readers around the globe read, re-read or bought the book in a rejection of censorship.

One of those book buyers was me. Despite being aware of Maus, I'd never read it. Graphic novels do not come easy to me. But I think I was perhaps mostly put off because somehow I'd got the impression that Maus, by depicting Jewish people as mice, and their Nazi oppressors as cats, trivialised the events it covered. I was, as generations of readers before me know, completely wrong on this. There is no doubt that Maus is a work of genius that makes the story of the Holocaust accessible in all its horror. It ought to reside in every library in the world.

Maus is the story of Art Spiegelman's father and mother, Vladek and Anja. They were Polish Jews who spent much of World War Two in a Jewish Ghetto and then hiding before their capture and deportation to Auschwitz. Spiegelman's difficult relationship with his aged father, who was obsessive, miserly and prone to anger outbursts towards his second wife, forms the basis for the story. Spiegelman tells his parent's story within the framing of his own interviews with his dad. It makes the story of what happens even more human. The reader learns as Spiegelman tells the story about what happened in Holocaust, why his Dad behaves as he does, at the same time as the Spiegelman in the book learns. 

 

By the time the story reaches Auschwitz, we are utterly invested in the wider family - their lives, loves and relationships. In the Jewish ghetto we see how the Jews are forced to rely on dwindling amounts of money to by food - how violence is a common event and how random selections mean whole families suddenly disappear. Later in the book there are several pages where Vladek shows his son family photos. Some survive, but others don't. "Anja's parents, the grandparents, her big sister Tosha, little Bibi and our Richieu... all what is left, it's the photos." Vladek has no photos of his family: "so only my little brother, Pinek came out from the war alive.. from the rest of my family, it's nothing left, not even a snapshot".

In Auschwitz Vladek survives, in part because of his guile. He is able to teach English to a guard and work as a tinsmith and shoemaker. Spiegelman depicts his own therapist who points out to him though that it wasn't bravery or skill that Vladek and Anja survived, it was ultimately luck. Vladek's description of the death camp and its crematorium are horrific. He only saw them once, but the stories another Jew who works there removing the dead tells him sicken Vladek, even while he is in Auschwitz. But there is even more horror after they leave Auschwitz. Vladek is on a death march and he is one of a few survivors trapped in a train car, able to reach snow on the roof. His survival here is once again down to chance, not anything else.

Its a brutal book. But strangely it is also a book about humanity - the love and solidarity that can keep people going in the hardest of times. Vladek's and Anja's mutual love sustains them - though Spiegelman's mother ultimately killed herself after the war. 

It is impossible to read Maus without being moved, angered, sickened and upset. If the thing that bothers you about it is the language or a bit of nudity in a book about victims in a concentration camp, then I suggest that you have failed to understand what the book is about. I also suspect that you don't care. Preventing people reading books like Maus is a sure way to make sure that the lessons of history are not learnt. If, like me, you've never read this, then take the opportunity to do so. And then encourage others to read it as well. It will help make that old anti-fascist slogan true - "Never Again".

Related Reviews

Browning - The Origins of the Final Solution
Roseman - The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution

Lipstadt - Denying the Holocaust