Maus Part I: My Father Bleeds History By Art Spiegelman

Maus Part I: My Father Bleeds History

By Art Spiegelman

Art Spiegelman was born in Stockholm, Sweden in February of 1948. His parents moved to Sweden from Poland after World War II, and in 1951 they relocated to the United States of America. Art began drawing cartoons in 1960 and was earning money for his work while in high school. After graduating in 1965, his parents encouraged him to consider something financially sound, like dentistry, but he choose to enroll instead at Harpur's College to study Art and Philosophy. He attended from 1965 to 1968, working at the college paper while going to classes. In 1968 he suffered a nervous breakdown, to pile it on his mother committed suicide a month after he was released from Binghamton State Mental Hospital. He moved to San Francisco and threw himself into the underground comix movement (which deserves a discussion on a later date). It's in 1972 he produced his first comic about the holocaust showing Jews as mice being persecuted by Nazi Cats. He would return to this but first he moved back to New York in 1975 as the underground comix movement hit a slow down. Here he met his future wife but I'll cover more of this next week.

Maus is an odd graphic novel. It's part history, part biography, part autobiography and part meta commentary on the work of creating the graphic novel. The comic was originally published in Raw, a magazine that Art was editing and his wife was publishing. A new chapter would appear in Raw until 1991 which published every chapter but the very last one. Maus was released at a time when comics were seen as either childish power fantasy with the mass market neatly divided between Marvel and DC or with a stalled and stale underground comix movement that seemed to be running out of gas. Unlike today, there weren't many comics that weren't superhero comics (although I'll admit even today superhero comics dominate in North America). The graphic novel was able to reach a wide audience because it was sold in bookstores instead of just comic shops and helped change the perception of what a comic book could be in the English speaking world. It won enough awards to fill a bookcase, among them the Pulitzer, the Eisner, and the Harvey award; and a small academic industry has grown up around the graphic novel as it is taught in schools across the world. As of 2011 it has been translated into 30 different languages, including German and Polish. It's not without its critics as its depictions of the Polish people is less than flattering (given that Mr. Spiegelman draws them as pigs just to start with), but let's discuss the comic.

Maus is focused on Vladek Speigelman, a Polish Jew (or as some would insist a Jew living in Poland but if a man whose father and grandfather were born there isn't a Pole than who is? (That’s an interesting question. It would depend largely on whether the Jews living in Poland considered themselves Poles, and whether the Poles considered said Jews to be Poles. Remember, these are ethnic concepts of nationality, not ones where place of birth--even after multiple generations--necessarily matters.{I'm aware of this as an anthropologist, but the thing is Vladek has enough Polish cultural traits that if he was a Catholic, everyone would call him a Pole} I would hazard, given the history of the Jewish people and the depths of antisemitism that existed--and still exists--within the country, that the answer is probably closer to Jews Living in Poland, though mileage may vary! You have to remember that while Poland produced IIRC the most Righteous Among the Nations acting as individuals, resistance to the Shoah was not organized like it was in Denmark, and collaboration by the Poles in the Shoah was absolutely rife, as much as the modern Polish government tries to deny and even criminalize acknowledgement of that fact. The reality was, Jews in Poland were associated with Bolshevism and seeing as there had been a war with Soviet Russia in 1920 and the USSR had invaded and annexed half of Poland in 1939...yeah. Note: I am using the Shoah to distinguish between the mass murder of Jews, and Holocaust which I tend to use for the whole Nazi program of slaughtering all Untermenschen und Mindervertige. There otherwise wouldn’t really be a word to describe that because both are often used only to refer to the killing of Jews. The other six million people who were worked to death or crammed into gas chambers are often little more than a footnote. Gay men were killed by the tens of thousands and to this day that’s pretty much ignored in the media and school curricula. Gay survivors were also kept in prison after the war because our existence was still criminalized. Anyway, I’m rambling and I’ll stop.)) who in the ending years of the 1930s has become an adult started a business, married, and started a family. Vladek as you might have guessed is Mr. Spiegelman's father and the book also includes scenes set in the late 1970s/early 1980s of him discussing what happened to him with his now adult son. As such we see the young Vladek and the old one at times right next to each other. We learn that Father and son have a rather complicated relationship, part of this is driven by Vladek's personality. He's quarrelsome, miserly in a lot of ways and suspicious of people (Gee, I wonder why…). Meanwhile Art Spiegelman is not without his own personality flaws and the writing addresses his own frustrations with his father and their relationship. That said our writer is not the only person having a strained relationship with Vladek, as the book also features Mala, Vladek's second wife. Frankly given what I've seen in this book, Vladek and Mala have one of those marriages you sometimes see where you're constantly asking yourself why they stay together or why they got together in the first place. That said most of the characters we are introduced to are in the past.

This part of the novel covers Vladek meeting Anja, his wife and Mr. Spiegelman's mother. We see their courtship and early family life. Here we learn that Anja actually came from a wealthy family and marrying her helped Vladek in setting up his business. That said, we also see a bit of Vladek's true feelings for his wife as he is willing to go to lengths to help her deal with postpartum depression after the birth of their first son, Richleu. We see that even without the Nazis there was a great deal of anti-semitism in Poland before the war, as Vladek and his family have to worry about riots and other actions by the Poles against them. I would like to note for the record here that this wasn't unique to Germany or Poland, there were many nations in East and Central Europe where Jewish people weren't safe (Read: All of it). Nor were they immune from discrimination and attack even in Western Europe. We also see a bit of the German invasion of Poland, as Vladek is called up into the Polish army and sent to fight and finds his first experience with Nazism as a POW. The book covers Vladek's actions to keep his family out of the concentration camps; hiding in bunkers or the homes of local Poles, some of whom are willing to hide Jews as long as those Jews could pay (See what I mean?). Mr. Spiegelman also gives us a look at the extent to which some Jews cooperated with the Nazis or at least tried to enrich themselves at others expense. Whether it be the Jewish councils who were put in a situation where they could give up part of their people or all of their people, black market profiteers or Jewish men who choose to work as enforcers in the ghettos for the Nazis. We are given a look at how the extreme situations gnaws at people's bonds to one another and to what extremes people will go in desperation to protect themselves and the people they love (If I go into complexity of this and how it was part of a complex Nazi scheme to both dehumanize their victims and keep them divided among themselves to prevent resistance...more than I already have...I won’t stop. If you can’t tell dear readers, the editor gets a bit worked up over the Holocaust.). Part I ends as every scheme, tactic and hidden place that Vladek can conjure up to protect his ever shrinking family finally fails and he and Anja are taken by the Nazis to perhaps the most dread place in Nazi occupied Europe in 1944. Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Vladek himself interestingly enough doesn't express a lot of anger or judgment at the people in these situations with him. Even mentioning being on good terms with a man who took advantage of his family in some ways but in doing so likely saved his life. His view is those were the times they were living in, where people did what they had to do to survive and that's really the stakes they were playing for. It's hard for me to condemn someone who trying to avoid being gassed and shoveled into oven, knowing that the people in charge of their fate viewed them as less than human and were happy to do so. The book pulls no punches when it comes to how Jews were treated. We see a nightmare through the eyes of a man who survived it. It's only through Vladek eyes that we see this nightmare, his wife Anja did leave between written records of her experiences but they were destroyed after her suicide by Vladek while he was in mourning. Mr. Spiegelman himself shows no interest in the experiences of Vladek's second wife, Mala within the book for that matter, focusing entirely on his father. Which suggests to me that among other things, this was Mr. Spiegelman's attempt to try and understand his father and make some sort of peace with him by traveling with him through the most traumatic time of his life and one of the great traumas of the 20th century even if it was only in memory.

Maus is a very small scale story in a lot of ways. You don't get discussion of what was going on in Europe or the world at the time. You don't see the great sweeping battles or the decisions made by the powerful that would dictate the fate of entire continents; and it's a stronger and better story for it. Instead you see the very human effects of those battles and decisions. This isn't the story of Europe or even the story of European Jews. There's no great action scenes here or epic intrigue. It's the story of a Jewish businessman trying to keep his wife and son alive while the entire world around him loses its damn mind and decides to try and kill him and his people over their heritage. It's a stronger story for maintaining it's low to the ground view and focus on a single person and his family because if nothing else it gives a face to those statistics we have drilled into us at school. Learning six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis for daring to exist is just a set of numbers, reading a man watching his father-in-law being send to his death or having to speak about the death of family members makes it something that happened to a person (There’s a reason why I periodically rewatch a multi-part documentary series called Auschwitz:The Nazis and the Final Solution, and watch other interviews with survivors. It has a lot of interviews with survivors. The Shoah, and the larger Holocaust, are not something we can afford to forget. Already the words Never Again ring hollow because as a global society, we have failed to prevent genocide in the post war period. In part, I think, because it has been reduced to numbers and it’s hard for humans to care about those.). Mr. Spiegelman does a good job of telling a human story set in an inhuman time. Maus Part I: My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman gets an A. As for why I'm using this story to talk about World War II... Well, I'll speak on that to.

Red text is our editor Dr. Ben Allen, dark text is me, your own reviewer.

Next week Maus Part II: And here my troubles began. This Sunday, Sidebar why start here? Keep Reading.