"Maus" Reviewed: The Award-Winner That Got Banned

Content Warning: Violence, Anti Semitism and Adult Themes

Art Speigleman’s Maus is an artfully crafted story where he recreates his father’s Holocaust (or the Shoah in Hebrew) experience. Having won a Pulitzer Prize, this comic portrays the brutality of Nazi regime with the use of mice, cats, pigs and dogs, a visual manifestation of Speigleman’s quote “Maybe vulgar, semiliterate, unsubtle comic books are an appropriate form for speaking of the unspeakable.”

The Complete Maus is comprised of two books; Maus I: My Father Bleeds History and Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began. The first book follows Vladek Spiegleman, Art Spiegleman’s father, through his life from the mid 1930s to winter 1944. Spiegleman weaves the interactions he has with his father into the story using a dual timeline, allowing readers to interact with Vladek’s younger self and the person he is at the time of conveying the story to Spiegleman. This alternation between current events, where Spiegleman is interacting with this father to learn more about his life during the war, lets us learn about Vladek and his life at the same time as Spiegleman, making the reader feel as if they are part of the audience, sitting right there, listening to Vladek speak.

Having only read Maus I: My Father Bleeds History, I got to know about how Maus came into being and the struggles Art goes through to bring his comic to life. His father, Vladek, has an invasive parenting style which continues to frustrate Spiegleman throughout (Vladek even throws one of Spiegleman’s coats out because he thought it was too old, much to Spiegleman’s despair). These interactions surely make what would otherwise be an emotionally taxing text more lighthearted. Maus is an ode to the impermanence of life, as the characters, especially Vladek, show immense resilience to events that are horrifying enough to stand the test of time, and are still widely talked about today. Hearing about Vladek’s life from a time that was not so long ago made the whole experience of reading the comic quite special to me.

Spiegleman beautifully captures his family dynamics through words and pictures, and I could not help feeling as if I had personally met Vladek. Spiegleman recreates his father by portraying bits of his interaction with him, which helps bring this person to life. We get to see his movements and speech patterns - a part that I found particularly entertaining, as Spiegleman decided to recreate his father’s words realistically, instead of choosing to make them more grammatically correct. The word order of Vladek’s speech would seem quite odd, but I thought that this was vital in recreating his father’s speech mannerisms in realistic terms.

The portrayal of Jewish culture and customs, along with Vladek’s tough (and often misinterpreted) love is captivating. I especially loved the part where Vladek’s dream of freedom comes true on the day of Parshas Truma, which I think is a surreal slice of Vladek’s life that we get to get a glimpse at. 
The ways in which Vladek manages to earn some zlotys to keep the family afloat is admirable. The part where he hid jewellery in a baby stroller to trade in the city felt like a little secret that I was let in on. Vladek is unsparing when it comes to sharing stories with a little humour, and these anecdotes are a reminder that no matter how hard, life can be a little funny sometimes. One part that I loved was when Spiegleman was trying to provide for his over-spending family by delivering items “under the counter” for his friend Poldek, and one day he faked ownership of the shop so as to appear as if he was working legally, thoroughly confusing Poldek.

The complicated father-son relationship was particularly entertaining as well because of the rather unexpected but comical nature of the novel. Vladek tells Spiegleman the story of how his father took extreme measures to get out of the army by taking out 14 of his teeth so that he would be let go. Vladek gestures to his mouth and his teeth are visible in the panel. 

Interview with Professor Sheehan
When we think of comics, most of us tend to think of superheroes and pop art and wacky letters; however, Maus is a very toned-down, humble, yet deceivingly enthralling book about our lived experience. Maus is much more than a “generic” comic, as Professor Sheehan, an Associate Professor of Macquarie University, said, “[There is an} undercurrent of comics that deal with history, sociology, people’s lives and not fantasy at all”. Maus is a realistic representation of the Holocaust, but does so cleverly; using anthropomorphised animals. Professor Sheehan also added that Maus was more effective in the reconstruction of Vladek’s life because of the use of anthropomorphised animals instead of human characters. This seems to be more successful in lessening the severity of the atrocities of the Nazi regime, as opposed to many other works based on the Holocaust. This also helps recreate the Holocaust through the eyes of a survivor, and emphasises that it is only a drop in the ocean when all the people’s collective experiences of the Holocaust and the war is taken into account.
Postmemory was also a point brought up by Professor Sheehan, which is the generational trauma passed down from an affected generation to the next. In the case of Maus , this would make the Holocaust a “postmemorial” experience for Spiegleman, as the stories along with the traumas of Vladek are passed down to him by means of anecdotes and habitual behaviours that have been picked up as a result of tragic and scarring experiences.

Extras
The use of comical anthropomorphised characters in the novel definitely takes down the unpleasantness and gore down a notch; however, the horrors of the Holocaust are still very real, much like in the illustration of the hanging mice. 

The almost realistic illustrations of the Holocaust resulted in a book ban in February 2022 by a school in McMinn County, Tennessee, citing violence, nudity and traumatic incidents. However, this only resulted in an increased awareness and popularity of the book. 

Spiegleman’s depiction of Poles as pigs also garnered distaste among the Polish community, although there is no apparent reason as to why Speigleman represented the Poles as pigs and the Americans as dogs. Personally, I feel as if the Jews as mice and the Germans as cats could be a more obvious play on the phrase of a cat and mouse game; however, there is some obscurity when it comes to the Poles and Americans.

When Professor Sheehan said that Maus should be read by everyone, I couldn’t agree more. The reader may be far removed from what the victims and survivors went through in the Holocaust, yet I believe that it is still very much relatable and relevant regardless of which part of the world we are from. The complexity of relationships, tough decisions and the mere uncertainty and fragility of life are all experiences that we can relate to, which gives us more reason to appreciate Maus , and the life we have the chance to live.