CPB: Maus

I know I’m a few days behind, but just stick with me and I will fill in the other entries as I go along for the next few days.

Maus is an incredibly interesting graphic novel to me. It portrays very serious, very adult topics in a cartoonish manner. It reminds me of dark art. I’m surprised that it would be taught to young adults, but then again I do remember being in junior high and being taught about the Holocaust. At that young age, we were being taught the atrocities of war in order to teach us what not to repeat in our future. It’t important to understand cultural events so that we can know what other people around the world have experience. It teaches us gratitude for what we have in our lives. Plus, survival stories are very popular in this day in age.

The first book is centered on Vladek telling his son about his life during the Third Reich. Already the relationship between Artie and his father is put in an interesting light. Vladek thinks that his story would be considered a trifle. He also looks down on Artie’s career as a cartoonist and a writer because he thinks it’s not productive to society. This does make sense since Vladek has had to do manual labor for most of his life in order to survive. But it doesn’t take long for Artie to convince his father to give his story for documentation.
Vladek was extremely lucky to survive the events leading up to the rise of the Nazis and Auschwitz itself. This is in part due to the status that his family and his in-laws held with the Jewish communities. He had friends around the city of Sosnoweic that hid him as well as having jobs that could give him leverage during selection processes.

The animalistic representations are worth taking a look at as well. The Jews are mice being chased and oppressed by the Nazis, which are cats. Cats are taught by their parents to work on their natural predatorial instincts, just as the Germans were taught that they were a master race and taught to look at the Jews as inferior, like prey. The pigs are the Polish, which may or may not be a commentary on their mannerisms in Spiegalman’s perspective. Pigs are not natural prey for cats and the Polish are treated a tiny bit better by the Nazis in the novel. Whenever the animals are wearing different animal masks, they are trying to act like something they are not in order to survive.

The Americans are dogs that come in and fight the cats, throwing them out of power and rescuing the mice. This harkens to the days of Looney Toons (at least in my mind), when a bull dog would save and protect mice like Jerry from cats like Tom. This could be an artistic technique to more accurately demonstrate the international relationships during WWII as well as alluding to the dehumanizing environment that surrounded the unfortunate events of the Holocaust.