The Complete Maus

Una historia más sobre el holocausto judío durante la II Guerra Mundial. Sin embargo, su formato: cómic, ofrece un enfoque y unos matices muy sugerentes. Los díbujos no son especialmente artísticos, de líneas sencillas, tan monótonos que en ocasiones el contexto o los diálogos son los que facilitan distinguir entre los personajes. Ésta indiferenciación no es casual, sino metáfora de la humillación y el anonimato a que se vieron sometidos los prisioneros en los campos de concentración reducidos a un número grabado en la piel. En cambio, el zoomorfismo de las distintas nacionalidades: gatos alemanes, perros americanos, ratones judíos, cerdos polacos, …; ayuda a la comprensión de las diversas situaciones sociales que se show more produjeron durante el conflicto bélico.
Si los críticos se empeñan en utilizar la extraña palabreja de metaliteratura, ésta obra sería un metacómic, es decir, el cómic dentro del cómic. Realmente “Maus” es la historia de la elaboración del cómic “Maus”: recopilación de testimonios paternos, documentación, búsqueda de fotografías. reflexión sobre la capacidad del cómic para contar el holocausto, la elección de unos animales u otros para representar a los personajes o exposición autobiográfica de los sentimientos que llevan al autor a escribir la historia: culpa, confrontación paterno-filial, ausencia materna,…
Pero es tal la fuerza de la historia contada por el padre que prevalece sobre cualquier consideración intelectual y literaria. Un relato duro, cruel, en el que los gestos de aparente generosidad esconden un pragmático interés, donde los sentimientos se ven anegados por la realidad de la supervivencia y en fin, donde los supervivientes se plantean si en el fondo han sido ganadores viendo las secuelas que les han acompañado a lo largo de su vida. show less

Well, I started writing comments the day after I'd finished reading The Complete Maus, and while I think I'm over my initial distress, there's no denying it's brought back plenty of bad memories. I'd only gotten as far as the following: "I think [Maus II] has traumatized me all over again. My shrink and I have come to the conclusion some years back that I've long suffered from PTSD for a range of traumatic episodes in my life, one of which was having been exposed to the horrors of WWII at a young age. I don't know why they thought it was a good idea to show 10 or 12-years olds all that footage and those photos, and bone and tooth fragments and tattered concentration camp uniforms and stories about Jews being turned into lampshades and show more soap, and I don't know what else when I was living in Israel. Shouldn't children be innocent of such horrors? Isn't that what childhood is about??!"

In any case, yes, when I lived in Israel as a child, we were repeatedly "reminded" of these horrors of the holocaust and taken to various holocaust museums and shown footage in the classroom, especially on Yom HaShoah, which is a commemoration day held in Israel and abroad. I remember being horror stricken, yet completely fascinated by those images of hundreds of skeletal naked bodies heaped into piles, which have never left my mind. I've always known of course that the better part of my Jewish father's side of the family had ended up killed in the camps, and how my father himself remained alive, although he was born in Siberia in 1940 is entirely owing to my grandmother who apparently had nerves of steel and was endlessly resourceful, which of course is the first thing you find out about any Jew who came out of WWII and lived to tell about it, though luck also plays a large role in a great many of those stories. If anything, Spiegelman's book has reminded me once again that I need to sit down and record my father's stories about the past before they are gone along with him.

So, those are my overall random impressions about the Holocaust. Now what about the book itself? I remember well when the first book was published in the mid-80s and I saw it displayed at my favourite book shop, which held all kinds of nifty titles which were hard to find everywhere else, and where graphic novels and comics held a place of honour. I wanted badly to buy it, but there was the price, which was steep for one like me who's income came for occasional babysitting gigs. But beyond that, I was terrified to find out what Art Spiegelman's version of the Holocaust was, having been exposed to a great many already, none of which were pretty or joyful affairs (which goes without saying). But about a week or so ago, I finally got my courage up to pick up the omnibus version containing both volumes, which I had finally purchased a number of years ago, yet didn't have the nerve to actually read until then.

Spiegelman's approach is unique not only for the obvious reason that he chose to tell his father's story in a comic strip format, but also because, instead of simply relating his father's story as a simple observer, he chose to include himself in it too, describing his misgivings about his approach to writing and illustrating the book and his anxieties as to whether he would manage to convey the story in a convincing way yet be respectful too. What I found especially touching was that the book delves just as much into his own relationship with his father as it does into his father's past. Like countless other survivors, Spiegelman senior carried deep emotional scars which gave expression to a full range of neurotic behaviour. Far from glossing over the old man's maddening personality traits, Art Spiegelman shared with us even those aspects which gave truth to the anti-semitic and stereotypical view that Jews are miserly to the extreme, though he did so with trepidation, which he also shared with the reader. His father was so strongly attached to his money and possessions that he was not beyond rationing out wood matches, returning half-eaten cereal boxes to the supermarket, and refusing to pay for his second wife's basic personal expenses, though it was given to us to understand that he had plenty of money in the bank. I could only too well sympathize with the author's overbearing guilt about how difficult it was for him to spend time with the old man, even if only on rare occasions and for short amounts of time. Seen from the outside, a Jewish man's neuroses can be seen as funny in the extreme, which is something Woody Allen has capitalized on during his whole career to often hilarious effect. At one point in the book, his father, who had been in ill health for some time, got extremely sick and evidently needed constant care. His wife had left him at the point, unwilling to continue living with the generally ill-tempered, close-fisted man. Yet one can completely understand Art's categorical refusal—which he had to express repeatedly—of living in the same household with his father, who, as he was all too realistically described, must have been impossible to live with. I've often heard, that children of Holocaust survivors are victims and survivors themselves, as was confirmed to me by one such daughter I had many conversations with, a woman who had become a psychologist and therefore had plenty of interesting insights to share. It seems inevitable that parents who have suffered great trauma, as have Holocaust survivors, often make their children feel that their trials and tribulations can never equal that which they experienced. And perhaps as a consequence, the survivor's guilt the parents are plagued with is all too often shared by their children, an aspect also presented in Maus very convincingly, though in Art Spiegelman's case this guilt was augmented by the fact that his mother had taken her own life without leaving a note when he was a young man.

The first book covers a period from the mid-1930s and into the early 40s, and describes how Spiegelman Sr., living in Poland, met his wife, and his relationship with her extremely wealthy family, the fruit of which they generously shared with the young and attractive man he had been. Then soon enough came the oppressive restriction which continued increasing over the years until they lost all their possessions and liberty. Art's father was an amazing resourceful man, and he shows how he was able to avoid capture for he and his wife, even as the rest of the family were taken one by one. I was absolutely engrossed with this first part, which in many ways is pure action adventure, though mixed in with the author's own existential questioning, which creates a very unique context for a Holocaust story. The illustrations are fairly simply rendered with plenty of amusing details. Here, I should probably mention that one of the most important aspects of the book, which also explains the title, is that Spiegelman chose to represent the Jews at mice, and the Nazis as cats, and I suppose the anthropomorphism was meant to create an emotional remove from the horrors beings described. In many ways this is an effective device, but my experience was that I did not see the animals and couldn't simply stay on the page and the illustrations without imagining the actual people and settings. This is probably part of the reason I found book II: And Here my Troubles Began, so very difficult, because in this volume, we witness the concentration camps, particularly Auschwitz, where the living conditions and the daily struggle to survive, as so many are put to death in a variety of ways, are described in quite some detail. Yet, there is also the incredible story of resilience and survival against the odds, all of which makes for a powerful experience. No wonder this comic book won a Pulitzer prize, this is most definitely deep stuff and very original in it's presentation. A must. show less

I went into Art Spiegelman's celebrated Maus with my usual scepticism regarding comic books, and even the prestigious gongs thrown its way – such as the Pulitzer Prize – hadn't softened it. But reading the book did. If there's plenty more Holocaust literature that actually delves deeper and darker into that incomprehensible nightmare, the main power of Maus is that it gets you to drop your guard. The recasting of Jews as mice and Germans as cats is more than mere allegory, and certainly more than a reader-friendly gimmick; what it does is open up something more intuitive in our brains. It prompts that trusting, effortless comprehension that we feel as children when reading stories such as Aesop's fables.

Our armour and artifice show more removed, the raw, banal horror of the Holocaust strikes us all the more violently when reading Maus. Whether it's small moments of wretched humanity like a grateful prisoner bursting into tears when Vladek gifts him a pair of wooden clogs that actually fit him, only for the reader to be told matter-of-factly in the following few panes that he was gassed soon after, or the broader tragic notes such as the funnelling of exhausted, meek victims towards the ovens, the highly visual and uncompromising, matter-of-fact telling of it hits us in a way that genuine novels and even film cannot.

Maus has other merits, not least its distinctive art style, its innovative meta-fictional approach and its highlighting of the ways in which survivors (and their children) carried the guilt and weight and trauma for decades after the camps, but it's this quality – the mere existence of Maus in the medium of a comic book – that gives it its force. Film presents a story starkly and with 'realism'; novels require our attentive engagement. Both approaches we can rationalise and protect ourselves against to some extent, and are adept at doing so throughout our lives, often unconsciously. But for a reader there's no road map for navigating your way through this disturbing topic in the comic book medium, and so when you read it, it's as though you're learning it for the first time, unvarnished and unsanitised. Your brain actually has to process it, rather than routinely file it away with assumptions and its safeguards. It's a deeply unusual feeling, and one of the more singular reading experiences I've had in quite some time. show less

I’ve had Maus for months only reading a few pages at a time. It is a non-fiction graphic novel about a young New Yorker interviewing his father about his time in the Holocaust. It’s hard to explain why reading about the ghettos, Auschwitz and the marches come across even more horrific in comic book form, but I had a harder time with this than most WWII books. The portions in the present show the complications of relationships in terms of survivor’s guilt and the stress that caused for Art as a son. I completely understand why this book is listed as a must-read of the 20th century. I did read the many critiques from as basic as if the holocaust should ever be in comic book form to the fact that by portraying the different groups as show more animals (Jews-mice, Germans-cats, poles-pigs) it reinforces the Nazi beliefs of major differences in genetics. All points I didn’t think about as I was reading. I think just the fact that this book has received so many reviews and criticisms shows how powerful it is. show less

Vladek is the protagonist of this story just as much as his cartoonist son, Art. A conversation must be had about the simplicity of Art's portrayal, neatly making each demographic within the story a different sort of animal to represent their struggle or inherent political friction with another. In this story, Jews are mice while Germans are cats, yet Art is admittedly using this as a story-telling element rather than a hard rule. His fiance, after all, converts to his father's beliefs and thus is drawn as a mouse—a conversation had within the comic itself—yet Vladek the father frequently "impersonates" a Polish man for his own survival by meta-visually donning a pig face despite being born and bred a Pole.

A conversation about show more identity exists here, about the transient nature of grimly gripping your ethnicity alongside your community, and about the awkward place that Jews inhabit within the World Wars / post-WW2 America. While not a topic brushed over in MAUS, the concept of the Jewish immigrant being considered "white" for a time quickly shifted as new waves of immigrants arrived in the US and posed a [nonexistent, but feared] threat to "good ol' economics" as they stood. It is in this odd place the Jew which is Vladek, and his son, and those of their community now exist. A race? A belief? A religion? A cadre of victims? MAUS does not need to tackle this complicated history, because it has bigger fish to fry, namely the matter of being a Holocaust survivor.

In MAUS, we are treated to a stylized account of Vladek Spiegelman, a young man in the 1940s who was a conscripted Polish soldier as tensions with Germany and Europe became heated and later a Jewish prisoner of war passed from death camp to death camp. He survives, in his account, through bartering. Modern day Jewish caricatures outline the idea of the thieving fiend who seeks to make a deal for money, for riches, and Art the cartoonist grapples with this antisemitic idea that his father exemplifies. It is a frequent point of contention between the two, the fact that Vladek refuses even now to relax or part with the thousands of dollars he has to his name after years working post-war, that everything comes down to money and bartering. But through his personal account, we can understand his reasoning.

For Vladek, survival was predicated on being useful. "It is good to know how to do everything," he remarks, as he details a series of duties that he was able to perform in exchange for his relative safety. He knew multiple languages, such as Polish / German / English in addition to Yiddish, and he worked in proximity to many useful jobs when cousins would issue him false tinman work permits to prevent his capture by German occupation or when he would watch shoemakers repair the boots of Nazi soldiers after trading rationed bread for their expertise. He uses these skills in the modern day, bartering with and cheating people he does not know for the benefit of himself and his family. But these are habits he learned in hard times, and MAUS makes no excuse for that behavior. Rather, we see how it came to pass, how it kept Vladek and his first wife alive, and understand that it was necessary.

Racism is a central point of MAUS. It stands to reason that some readers may be disgusted by Vladek for expressing anti-Black opinions about a hitchhiker his son's fiance stops to help, confused by his opinions when his own life was predicated on this very concept of othering. This is how the story outlines that there is no perfection in the Jewish survivor, that they are not exempt from criticism in larger society or by their children, and it conveys the staunch refusal to "move on" that permeates everything about Vladek's current life—even down to the effects it has on his second marriage. The Nazis did not care who bore the blame for their country's economic failure; it just mattered that someone paid the price of fascism.

[A key point here, referring to Art's usage of animal characters, is a scene in which a prisoner at Auschwitz is depicted as a mouse but claims to be a German with a Nazi soldier son and medals from the Fuhrer. Art interrogates his father: asking was this man really German? And his father replies that it did not matter, for he was a Jew to the Nazis and that is why they kept him in Auschwitz. This too is part of the story, the point that fascism is a cannibalistic belief that eats itself in order to exist.]

This is a heavy-hitter of a story. The only comic to win a Pulitzer and while I've read some profound comics, I can certainly see why this is one so highly acclaimed. A hard read, full of unlucky moments and unlikely hope and heartbreak. I felt for the people whom Vladek was forced to leave behind, and I felt for the people who put their lives on the line to save the few people they could. The depictions are graphic at times, but I would argue that any story about genocide must include the parts that make your stomach turn. show less

A grim and powerful memoir told through the voice of the comic artist's father who survived the holocaust. Charmingly illustrated as animals, the tale of Vladak and Anja is played out as best as it can be recalled. Interspersed throughout are episodes from the author's life as he struggles to deal with his aging father's increasing eccentricities. Although Vladak has been through tremendous tragedy and suffering in his life, the author (and the reader) have difficulty having patience with the man's bundle of neurosis. Art is overwhelmed by his father's life story and equally overwhelmed by frustration by Vladak's many character flaws. Of course he is flawed after what he has endured, but that doesn't necessarily make him easier to deal show more with.

This type of thing reminded me very much of how I relate to my own father. Although the situations are vastly different, that same tension exists in many households. A book of horrors and beauty that will doubtless haunt me for the rest of my life. show less

No quisiera sonar controvertido, pero el nazismo fue una cosa horripilante. Espero que hasta ahí todos de acuerdo. Maus lleva la crónica de un superviviente del Holocausto a un medio considerado a veces inmaduro e infantil como es el cómic/novela gráfica. El arte es crudo y rápido, en muchas ocasiones, lo que nos ayuda a no desenfocarnos de la historia que se nos cuenta. Que por otro lado, por muchas veces que se hayan contado historias similares, nunca esta de más repetirla.

En el argumento hay poca tensión: sabes que Vladek sobrevive porque está contando la historia, y sabes también que lo hace Anja. Pero eso no significa que no sea una lectura absorbente: dividida en dos partes, la vida en los guetos y la vida en los campos show more de concentración, la trama es una sucesión de eventos terribles, crueldad y sinsentidos, pero siempre con la esperanza de ver a Vladek y Anja reencontrarse (el conocido y desdichado final de Anja solo lo hace todo más amargo cuando finalmente ocurre). Tan importante como todo esto es la suerte y la perspicacia que acompaña a Vladek, siempre buscando la manera de sobrevivir guiado por la luz que es Anja para él.

En cualquier caso, en mi opinión, y aunque el flashback de Vladek está fabulosamente contado, el verdadero significado de la trama está en el Vladek que cuenta la historia. Un Vladek considerablemente afectado por los sucesos de la guerra y por el suicidio de su mujer, que detesta a su segunda esposa y que demuestra unos prejuicios raciales que sorprenden a Art viniendo de una persona que ha sufrido lo que ha sufrido. Y supongo que es ahí donde radica el sentido de Maus. O no, no sé. Ratones, gatos, cerdos o perros, somos todos iguales, en lo bueno y por desgracia en lo malo.

Qué depresión de repente. Pondría una foto de un gatito pero igual no es apropiado. show less