Literature has been an important way to grapple with human abhorrence and to better understand people’s experiences of the Holocaust. Since this horrific event, authors have been trying to understand how one human being could be so cruel to another human being through texts such as the “Diary of a Young Girl” by Anne Frank (1947) or “Survival in Auschwitz” by Primo Levi (1947). In doing so, writers have created a new genre of Holocaust Literature. Over time, Holocaust Literature has shifted from the perspective of the first-generation survivor to include that of the second-generation survivor. “Maus” is uniquely placed within the Holocaust Literature genre because it explores both first and second-generation survivor experiences.
This essay seeks to explore how Spiegelman utilises the graphic novel form to convey the overlapping yet discrete experiences of both generations’ survivors. The essay will investigate the different strategies used by Art Spiegelman within his graphic novel to communicate both his reality and his father’s experiences. A graphic novel does not aim to be as realistic as another medium such as a film, which makes the reader concentrate not only on the tragedy of the father’s experiences of the Holocaust but on Art’s relationship with Vladek and the generational trauma. The graphic novel utilises anthropomorphism, lessening the ghastly nature of the depicted events, blurring biography and autobiography, and using intertextuality to convey both first and second generations’ experiences.
Firstly, I will concentrate on the graphic novel as a tool to explore the Holocaust. Secondly, I will investigate how Spiegelman conveys the psychological impact of the Holocaust on the first and second-generation survivors. Finally, I will examine how it not only affects survivors as individuals but also the nature of their relationships.
The Graphic Novel as a Tool to Explore the Holocaust
The graphic novel form enables Spiegelman to put greater emphasis on how the Holocaust has influenced himself and his father as first and second-generation survivors. He uses this literary genre as a way to describe what he and his parents lived through and how he survived the Holocaust without having directly experienced it. Maus is a biography as well as an autobiography in the way that it both details both first and second-generations’ experiences of the Holocaust. These perspectives are connected through temporal distortion which is evident when Vladek describes and tells his story. The reader is transported to 1939-45, Vladek’s biography, but soon after the reader comes back to the “modern” world which then corresponds to Art’s autobiography. Temporal distortion allows Art Spiegelman to communicate what Vladek experienced in the past and to relate it to his own experiences in the present. To quote Spiegelman himself, “one of the themes of Maus is the way the past and present intertwine” .
In comparison to more traditional texts, dialogue of which 90% of Maus is compromised encapsulates the essence of a graphic novel. The dialogue between Art and Vladek, Mala, the Therapist, and Françoise gives the reader an insight into Art’s life and feelings. This enables Spiegelman to let first and second-generation survivors tell their stories directly so that experiences and feelings transmitted to the reader are more authentic. This is demonstrated when Art is talking to his wife, Françoise, and lets the reader understand his perspective on his relationship with his dad. He explains how much he struggles with it and with the generational trauma caused by the Holocaust, saying “I can’t even make any sense out of my relationship with my father… How I am supposed to make any sense out of Auschwitz? … of the Holocaust? …” . This enables the reader to feel like they are present in the moment with the characters rather than accessing the conversation retrospectively.
Furthermore, the use of anthropomorphism enables Spiegelman to delve into the first and second-generation survivors ensuring that the emotional reaction of the audience doesn’t distract from Spiegelman’s key exploration and allows him to push the boundaries of conventional writing. To quote the cartoonist Jeff Smith, “by using animals, Spiegelman allows his reader just enough emotional-safety distance to be able to follow a story that takes place during the Holocaust” . In Maus, mice represent the Jewish people and cats represent the Nazis. Art Spiegelman chose to depict Jews the same way the Nazis saw them, as rats or the “vermin of mankind” . A duality is already displayed as they are natural enemies: the cats kill the mice as the Nazis decimated the Jews. Indeed, Spiegelman reveals that “the animals offer a kind of defamiliarization of the experience” . In doing so, Spiegelman allows the reader to make abstraction of the horror of the war and thus to focus on the story and on Art’s attempt to understand his relationship with his dad.
Additionally, the graphic novel form allows Spiegelman to use intertextuality to draw in artefacts which therefore deepen the reader’s understanding of first and second-generation survivors’ experiences of the Holocaust. This is illustrated with “Prisoner on the Hell Planet”, a comic drawn by the author four years after his mother’s suicide (1972) which appears in the story when Art’s father finds it years later. Although the use of animals as the tellers of the story lessen the ghastly nature of the Holocaust in the majority of Maus, in “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” the protagonists are humans which gives an insight into Art’s despair at the time and Vladek’s difficulty to deal with the trauma of the Holocaust. Furthermore, this intertextuality is also manifested in photographs substituting drawings three times throughout Maus. The first time is in “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” representing Art as child with his mother. The second one displays Richieu and the last one, depicts Vladek. These three photographs represent each member of the Spiegelman family at different moment of time in the book. As Huyssen Andreas explains, the “three family photos […] function not in order to document, but in order to stress the un-assimilability of traumatic memory”. Violence is illustrated throughout the book such as when hanging and starving mouse are depicted . However, these events are drawn, resulting in a reduced sense of realism. Consequently, the reader is less emotionally affected by what he sees which enables him to deal with the complexity of the experiences of the first and second-generations survivors.
Therefore, as well as the use of anthropomorphism, Art Spiegelman utilises intertextuality to give more depth and meaning to his graphic novel and thus, to more powerfully convey the experiences of first and second-generation survivors of the Holocaust.
Psychological impact
A key way that Art Spiegelman conveys the experiences of the first and the second generations of Holocaust survivors is through expressing the psychological impact that it had on their respective lives in Maus. Through the use of symbolism and detailing his family’s experiences, Spiegelman succeeds in demonstrating how the Holocaust psychologically affected Vladek’s life and his way of socially interacting with his surroundings. The author also depicts the legacy of the trauma on his life and although he never directly experienced the horror of the Holocaust, he exposes how it has influenced him.
Firstly, Maus displays the Holocaust’s impact on Vladek’s life, a first-generation survivor through different aspects of his behaviour. As Spiegelman revealed in an interview in 1991, “I was interested in locating the truth, I was not interested in creating a myth” . Hence, Spiegelman, tried to depict his dad as accurately as possible and thus not as a hero that survived the war. Firstly, the Holocaust created a sense of guilt in Vladek’s life such as the guilt of being alive and guilt for his son and his wife’s death. It is demonstrated throughout Maus that Vladek is haunted by a sense of responsibility towards Richieu ‘s death (his son) and that this culpability remained with him after the Holocaust. This guilt is illustrated when Vladek tries to convince Anja to hide their son with a friend’s son of the same age. However, Anja disagreed with this proposition and screamed “I’ll never give up my baby. Never!” despite this, they will give him to hide a year later as depicted in the last panel of the page. This extract depicts Richieu wearing a striped shirt like prisoners which symbolises this souvenir as trapped in Vladek’s memory but also, Richieu as prisoner of his tragic end. On the last three panels of the same page, Vladek is riding on his stationary bike and gets faster when he reveals that “his [friend’s] son remained alive; ours did not” and then stops riding. These panels represent Vladek’s guilt, pain and feeling of powerlessness to save his son, Richieu. He is condemned to keep this guilt and this memory with him for ever. Although he is trying to get faster to escape them, he eventually stops riding – nothing he can do will change the past. It is important to note that Spiegelman decided to finish his book by representing his father saying “I’m tired from talking, Richieu, and it’s enough stories for now…” exhibiting that Vladek did not forgive himself and was unable to move on further demonstrating that his guilt and his pain remained until his death. Furthermore, this last panel exposes the effect of the trauma on Vladek’s life but also on his son, Art. To quote James E. Young, “the still apparently unassimilated trauma of his first son’s death remains inarticulable and thereby deep and so it represented here only indirectly as a kind of manifest behaviour” . This citation clearly explains the significance of the Holocaust, a war that killed Vladek’s son, on his life as a first-generation survivor of the war.
Furthermore, Spiegelman exposes the long-lasting impact of the trauma on the first generation’s survivors. Like many first-generation Holocaust survivors, Vladek lost people that he loved which made him indifferent towards others’ suffering as horror and pain became part of his everyday life. Indeed, Vladek explains that “Anja’s parents, the grandparents, her big sister Tosha, little Bibi and our Richieu… all what is left, it’s the photos” which demonstrates the heavy loss he experienced during the Holocaust and consequently the impact that this had on his way of dealing with death and pain. Additionally, Auschwitz accentuated Vladek’s frugality with money as Mala, his second wife, repeats throughout Maus, “he [Vladek] grabs paper towels from the rest rooms so he won’t have to buy napkins or tissues” . Furthermore, the war made Vladek continuously on edge and nervous; indeed, Art’s wife, Françoise complains that “it is so claustrophobic being around Vladek. He straightens everything you touch – he’s so anxious” . Moreover, although Vladek was victim of anti-Semitism and racism during the war, he displays the same behavioural traits that pushed him in the camps. Indeed, when Vladek, Art and Françoise pass next to an African American person, Vladek’s first reaction is to check and make sure that he does not steal anything stating that, “I had the whole time to watch out that this Shvartser doesn’t steal us the groceries from the back seat!” . This demonstrates the accuracy of Spiegelman in depicting the experiences of his father as the reader can perceive Vladek’s negative traits and because he is not depicted as a hero.
Spiegelman conveys the experiences of his father as a first-generation survivor of the Holocaust by revealing the long-lasting impact it had on Vladek’s life. As Art’s therapist, also a first-generation survivor of Auschwitz, acknowledged in Maus, “Maybe your father needed to show that he was always right – that he could always survive – because he felt guilty about surviving” .
Secondly, Spiegelman, as a second-generation Holocaust survivor, conveys his experience of the Holocaust by revealing its impact on his everyday life. Indeed, “Maus” confirm Puneet Kohli’s view that, “many of the second-generation construct their identity in relation to the Holocaust” . Similarly to the first-generation survivors, the genesis of a guilt was the biggest impact on victims’ lives. Although, Vladek’s feeling of culpability comes from surviving the war, Art’s sense of culpability comes from not having experienced Auschwitz and not being able to fully understand what his parents lived through. Spiegelman reveals his feeling of inadequacy when he reflects that “I somehow wish that I had been in Auschwitz with my parents, so I could really know what they [experienced]” . Indeed, he believes that the pain endured in Auschwitz would be lesser than the feeling of inadequacy he lives with. This guilt is recurrent throughout his life. Indeed, after the publication of the first part of “Maus”, and his new notoriety, Spiegelman felt that he does not deserve his life when others died in Auschwitz. Throughout his life and throughout his book, he compares what he experiences with his parents and therefore, what the first-generation Holocaust survivors as a whole, lived through. This idea of not deserving his “good” life is clearly demonstrated when Art Spiegelman announces “Vladek started working as a tinman in Auschwitz in the spring of 1944…” juxtaposed with “I started working on this page at the very end of February 1987” . Already, there is a duality with what his dad experienced in 1944 and what Art is doing at the same time of the year 1987. Art Spiegelman is wearing a mouse mask which symbolises the effort made by Art to put himself in his parents’ shoes, to understand their world during the war, and that he will never be them and fully understand their experiences. Likewise, when in May 1987, Françoise and Art are expecting a baby, he compares it to the genocide of 100 000 Hungarian Jews in May 1944 in Auschwitz. He is contrasting his fame and his easy life with first-generation survivors’ experiences which one more time demonstrates how the Holocaust psychologically impacted Art despite not having directly experienced it, as Art reveals, “No matter what I accomplish, it doesn’t seem like much compared to surviving Auschwitz” .
Art Spiegelman further conveys how the Holocaust has influenced him as a first-generation survivor, by giving the reader an insight of what he felt with the intertextuality of “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” in “Maus”. “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” has a black background which contrast with the rest of Maus and which emphasises Art’s guilt, his inadequacy and his feeling of being unable to control what happened in his life. The author represents himself as a prisoner wearing a striped shirt symbolising his feeling of being trapped of his memory, his mother’s action the Holocaust. Indeed, in the last panels of “Prisoner on the Hell Planet”, Art speaks directly to his dead mother, “Well, mom, if you’re listening…Congratulations! You’ve committed the perfect crime… […] You murdered me, mommy, and you left me here to take the rap!!!” . This sentence demonstrates the resentment he feels, but also that he will never be able to escape to his guilt and to move on. Art explains that there is a real irony, “in the course of this book, I called my mother a murderer, I called my father a murderer […] so in the middle of all of this family murderer we are the situation where the real murderer is the pussy cat” . (analysis)
Relationships
As well as exploring the psychological impact of the first and second-generation survivors as individuals, Spiegelman also examines the way it affects their relationships. The remembrance (first generation survivors) and the image (second generation survivors) of the Holocaust, affected people’s behaviour and consequently had an impact on the way they communicated with others. As James Young explains, “instead of trying to remember events, they recall their relationship to the memory of events…It becomes memory of a witness’s memory” . Therefore, the legacy of the trauma of the Holocaust has significant impact on the way direct and indirect survivors relate to each other.
Firstly, the trauma of the Holocaust accentuated controlling behavioural traits in Art and Vladek’s ways of interacting to each other. There is a constant duality between Vladek’s views of the world which were influenced by his experiences of the Holocaust, and Art’s which are affected by his need to deal with the generational trauma. The need to control is evident when Vladek threw Art’s coat out because he judged it too old and not warm enough and then gave him another one in return, “a warmer one […] a Naugahyde windbreaker” . The freezing winters which led to glacial and horrific living conditions during the war, influenced Vladek’s priorities, which in this case is to make every clothes be totally effective and consonant with their initial purpose. This emphasises the “emotional difficulty faced by survivors of the Holocaust as they integrated back into society” . However, this behavioural trait forces Art to remain considered as a child and therefore demonstrates how “the past invades the present” . Art’s feeling of being belittled, undervalued and downgraded by his father, is illustrated by his response of “You can’t do this to me. I’m over 30 years old”.
Moreover, the relationship between Art and Vladek Spiegelman exposed the Holocaust’s impact on the ability of the first and second-generation survivors to empathise with each-other. In “Maus”, Art Spiegelman does not depict Vladek as a hero, a survivor of the holocaust, but tries to depict him as objectively as possible. Likewise, Art reveals his real behaviour and way to communicate with Vladek even if it makes him look resentful and sometimes insensitive towards his dad. As Emily Brincks stated, initially, “Vladek seems unconcerned with Artie’s suffering; likewise, later in the work, Artie seems unconcerned with Vladek’s suffering” . This complex relationship between father and son, and Spiegelman’s will to tell his dad story “the way it really happened”, is presented throughout “Maus”. This is evident when Art comes back from a session with a therapist; during three panels we can see him growing from the size of a child to the one of an adult . It aims to symbolise Art’s understanding of his relationship with his dad and his acceptance of it but also his understanding that he can finally stop comparing himself with Vladek’s life. Therefore, it represents Art as being able to finally grow up and move on from his father being “a towering figure” . But, on the next four panels, we can see Art going back to his child’s size after he listens to a recording and hear his insensitivity towards his dad, which symbolises the resurgence of his guilt, “Enough! Tell me about Auschwitz”28. It seems that since his early life, Spiegelman featured his parents and the Holocaust as inseparable, that one does not exist without the other, and that the legacy of the trauma will never leave him. Furthermore, the lack of empathy is also illustrated in a family dinner between Art, Mala and Vladek. Art explains to Mala, Vladek’s second wife, that “sometimes he’d [Vladek] even save [the food Art didn’t eat] to serve again and again until I’d eat it or starve” displaying the lack of empathy Vladek demonstrated during Art’s childhood. We understand a few pages later that Vladek’s dad starved him for two months when he was 21 years old, so the army would not take him as a soldier at the start of the war. As a result of Vladek’s starvation experience in his early life, he became more attentive to food waste in his later life which therefore influenced his way of parenting Art. Vladek “learned that everything is of value and that waste would be starve and die” which thus affected Vladek’s empathy towards his son. Furthermore, Vladek did not demonstrate any affection or tenderness to his son during his childhood as Art depicts in the prologue of Maus. Indeed, in the prologue, Art is coming to his dad crying after his friends ran away without him but Vladek makes Art’s pain look ridiculous and minor compared to what he experienced during the Holocaust. This short scene at the beginning of Maus summarises the complexity of the relationship between Vladek and Art which will be recurrent throughout the book as well as the legacy of the Holocaust trauma into the second-generation survivors.
However, even for those relationships where both had direct experiences of the Holocaust, the different ways they respond to the trauma can create challenges in their interactions. This is illustrated by Vladek continuously blaming Mala of being egocentric and greedy of his money, he says, “she wants everything only for her […] she screamed, “I want the money! The money. The money!”” . On the other hand, Mala describes her husband as avaricious and insensitive, stating that “he is more attached to things than to people” . The hostility between Mala and Vladek, two first-generation survivors, is constant and comes back throughout Maus. Their relationship exhibits that although the Holocaust impacted on every survivors, it affected them in different ways and developed pre-existing behavioural traits in each of them, such as the miserliness for Vladek, and the self-centredness for Mala. Vladek eventually compares Mala with the horror of the Holocaust, “I have one more time an unnecessary suffering in my life”. Therefore, through Maus, Spiegelman explores how the individual psychological trauma experienced by survivors of the Holocaust has significantly influenced the way they relate to one another, whether between first and second-generation survivors or between direct survivors of the Holocaust.
Conclusion
Art Spiegelman utilises the Graphic Novel as a tool to explore the experiences of first and second-generation Holocaust survivors in “Maus”. Spiegelman exposes how the Holocaust impacted on the psychology and the relationships of direct and indirect survivors. Furthermore, he explores how the graphic novel genre is unique in the way it conveys the experiences of Vladek (a first-generation survivor) and the generational trauma on Art (a second-generation survivor). Through Maus, Spiegelman highlights the strength of survivors, but also exposed how the Holocaust infiltrated every part of survivors’ identity such as the creation of long-lasting behavioural traits. Furthermore, the graphic novel enables the authentic representation of the overlapping experiences of first and second-generation survivors. Whilst it was beyond the scope of this essay, it would be interesting to explore how other authors have grappled with representing the complexity of first and second-generation survivors in the decades following the ground-breaking publication of Maus.