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A review by lectrixnoctis
The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
informative
sad
tense
medium-paced
5.0
Graphic, personal real-life deposition of the holocaust from a Polish survivor and the trauma of second-generation Holocaust survivors. (The children of the Shoah survivor are known as second-generation survivors.) This second generation has tried to make sense of their experiences, which are frequently obscured, especially where their parents have been incapable of talking about their backgrounds.
Maus is two parallel stories, not one story. It hops back and forth between the two storylines, one set in the past (Poland) and the other location in the present time (New York City).
Story One: It is set in Poland in the 1940s. Vladek Spiegelman relates how he endured the Shoah as a Polish Jewish Man, from the attack to the spreading of the Nazi ideology during his Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp as a tin employee at the gas chambers. His father is one of the only surviving camp survivors with secret knowledge of how the gas chamber installations worked because he operated there and lived to tell the story. Vladek saw how pesticide (Zyklon B) was dropped into the hollow columns to gas crying victims and how they burned in crematoriums afterwards. Most Jewish prisoners who worked close to the gas chambers and crematoriums were killed, so they could not give their stories of the trauma they endured.
Story 2: It is set in New York City around the 1980s. Art documents his creative approach to writing his book about his dad's Shoah ventures. Artie has a bizarre and challenging relationship with his father, Vledeck. We see Artie trying to question his hesitant father, forcing his father to narrate his experiences. The Shoah permeates every detail of Spiegelman's daily life, even though it occurred numerous years ago.
There is a need in our civilisation to push the Shoah into the past. Keep it there, but this is impossible throughout this novel. Survivors and their children do not have the luxury of forgetting about it and moving on. You can stop talking about it and try to act like it never happened, but the memories of those horrible incidents never go away. You cannot erase and unsee them. They torment their victims to this day.
A dominant topic in the novel is how traumatic occasions like the Shoah continue to distort and shape people's generations even after they are over. Children of Shoah survivors are also affected by the Shoah, secondhand, through their parental figures. They frequently regret leading pampered lives compared to their parent's terrible experiences. Vledeck's parenting technique is twisted by the long-term psychological effects the holocaust has on his behaviour. In turn, Art's childhood is distorted by Vledeck's post-shoah worldview, a secondary repercussion of the Shoah.
The graphics add fuel, context, and style to the text, delivering more profound insight into the mixed feelings and opinions of the people. You can read a person say one thing in the text, but you might even see them thinking/doing something very unlike, expressed in graphics.
Most of the text in the book is direct quotes from Art Spiegelman's father, Vladik. Sometimes the graphics will reflect the same happening or story simultaneously.
Artie Spiegelman also uses animals to portray different races and nationalities. It is a very effective metaphor. Jews are drawn as mice, reflecting the anti-Semitic stereotype of Jewish people being subhuman rats. Germans are cats; who prey on mice. Americans are dogs; they oppose cats. The French are frogs. The Polish are pigs; Nazis thought the Polish people to be pigs. Jewish Mice sometimes even pretend to be Polish pigs to disguise themselves from the German Cats. They do this by wearing pig masks.
While making the book, Artie struggles to draw his French wife. She converted to Judaism to please his father. It encourages the reader to think about the roles of race, ethnicity, nationality, and religion.
I understand that the holocaust can sometimes seem like a ghastly but impersonal genocide of countless, faceless victims. The magnitude and horror of it all can be so hard to stomach. But each of those six million people was an individual with their own story. Individual stories may not seem as important compared to famous historical figures like Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt, but learning about each unique story is critical to understanding the magnitude of the holocaust. Recorded memories are the only way Holocaust survivors can maintain a connection to the stolen lives of those who were erased from the face of the earth by the Shoah.
Maus is two parallel stories, not one story. It hops back and forth between the two storylines, one set in the past (Poland) and the other location in the present time (New York City).
Story One: It is set in Poland in the 1940s. Vladek Spiegelman relates how he endured the Shoah as a Polish Jewish Man, from the attack to the spreading of the Nazi ideology during his Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp as a tin employee at the gas chambers. His father is one of the only surviving camp survivors with secret knowledge of how the gas chamber installations worked because he operated there and lived to tell the story. Vladek saw how pesticide (Zyklon B) was dropped into the hollow columns to gas crying victims and how they burned in crematoriums afterwards. Most Jewish prisoners who worked close to the gas chambers and crematoriums were killed, so they could not give their stories of the trauma they endured.
Story 2: It is set in New York City around the 1980s. Art documents his creative approach to writing his book about his dad's Shoah ventures. Artie has a bizarre and challenging relationship with his father, Vledeck. We see Artie trying to question his hesitant father, forcing his father to narrate his experiences. The Shoah permeates every detail of Spiegelman's daily life, even though it occurred numerous years ago.
There is a need in our civilisation to push the Shoah into the past. Keep it there, but this is impossible throughout this novel. Survivors and their children do not have the luxury of forgetting about it and moving on. You can stop talking about it and try to act like it never happened, but the memories of those horrible incidents never go away. You cannot erase and unsee them. They torment their victims to this day.
A dominant topic in the novel is how traumatic occasions like the Shoah continue to distort and shape people's generations even after they are over. Children of Shoah survivors are also affected by the Shoah, secondhand, through their parental figures. They frequently regret leading pampered lives compared to their parent's terrible experiences. Vledeck's parenting technique is twisted by the long-term psychological effects the holocaust has on his behaviour. In turn, Art's childhood is distorted by Vledeck's post-shoah worldview, a secondary repercussion of the Shoah.
The graphics add fuel, context, and style to the text, delivering more profound insight into the mixed feelings and opinions of the people. You can read a person say one thing in the text, but you might even see them thinking/doing something very unlike, expressed in graphics.
Most of the text in the book is direct quotes from Art Spiegelman's father, Vladik. Sometimes the graphics will reflect the same happening or story simultaneously.
Artie Spiegelman also uses animals to portray different races and nationalities. It is a very effective metaphor. Jews are drawn as mice, reflecting the anti-Semitic stereotype of Jewish people being subhuman rats. Germans are cats; who prey on mice. Americans are dogs; they oppose cats. The French are frogs. The Polish are pigs; Nazis thought the Polish people to be pigs. Jewish Mice sometimes even pretend to be Polish pigs to disguise themselves from the German Cats. They do this by wearing pig masks.
While making the book, Artie struggles to draw his French wife. She converted to Judaism to please his father. It encourages the reader to think about the roles of race, ethnicity, nationality, and religion.
I understand that the holocaust can sometimes seem like a ghastly but impersonal genocide of countless, faceless victims. The magnitude and horror of it all can be so hard to stomach. But each of those six million people was an individual with their own story. Individual stories may not seem as important compared to famous historical figures like Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt, but learning about each unique story is critical to understanding the magnitude of the holocaust. Recorded memories are the only way Holocaust survivors can maintain a connection to the stolen lives of those who were erased from the face of the earth by the Shoah.