A in January. Maus is based on interviews with Spiegelman’s father, Vladek Spiegelman, a Polish Jew and Auschwitz survivor, and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for its searing and innovative visual and narrative exploration of the darkest period of German history.
The McMinn County’s Board of Education cited “” and the cartoon drawing of a nude woman as their primary objections.
However, with editions flying off the shelves and , the McMinn County school board has, in fact, .
Graphic novel and historical representation
Maus explores Spiegelman’s parents’ life in Poland and their internment at Auschwitz. Vladek Spiegelman’s experience of the Holocaust and its aftermath — including the of Art Spiegleman’s — is filtered through cartoonist’s narrative and visual account. He portrays the Holocaust as a conflict between cats, mice, and pigs where .
Spiegelman’s use of animals met some controversy , as well as some in the Jewish community who . Yet Spiegelman noted that his anthropomorphized mice intentionally that likened Jews to rats. For example, a teaching guide characterizes Spiegelman’s Jewish mice as “ Hitler’s statement ‘The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human.’” His mice, Spiegelman wrote, “.”
Maus was first published in onward, before the were published in 1986 as and the latter five chapters were published in 1991 as .
The graphic novel’s (in the “Special Citations and Awards” category) .
Now heralded as , Maus successfully established comics as an important feature of contemporary culture and historical representation. It opened the floodgates to comics addressing serious subject matter and .
Ethics of representing the Holocaust
While some may be encountering Maus for the first time in their newsfeeds, comics fans, teachers and literary and cultural studies scholars have known the importance of Maus in teaching and learning for decades.
Maus made comic books visible and legitimate . As my research has explored, Maus also redefined the medium’s potential as Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the history of Nazism. At the same time, Maus .
For example, literature professor Marianne Hirsch in a 1992 essay, providing the scholarly foundation for her subsequent work on .
German and comparative literature professor Andreas Huyssen examined the ethics and esthetics of remembering the Holocaust . In particular, Huyssen turned to Maus as an important example of how to move debates on representing the Holocaust beyond a focus on the “proper” depiction of historical trauma. Instead, Huyssen analyzed Maus’s ability to shock and jar its reader “through ruptures in narrative.” As Huyssen notes:
“[T]he telling of this traumatic past … is interrupted time and again by banal everyday events in the New York present. This cross-cutting of past and present, by which the frame keeps intruding into the narrative … points in a variety of ways to how this past holds the present captive, independently of whether this knotting of past into present is being talked about or repressed.”
Huyssen found that Maus demonstrated the power of modernist Holocaust commemorations that steer clear of “official Holocaust memory” and its rituals while incorporating a critique of representation itself.
Similarly, looked to Maus as a case study in his discussion on the relationship between history and narrative.
White questioned the belief that the uniqueness of Nazism and might set limits on its portrayal, insisting that there are no unacceptable modes of historical narrative. White argued that the destabilizing of the division between fact and fiction as seen in Maus is well-suited to representing namely, the Holocaust as well as the experience of it.
Multi-layered process of ‘witnessing’
Maus’s multi-generational memoir laid the groundwork for comics, and graphic memoir in particular, to become and communicating its legacy of transgenerational trauma. Even today, 30 years after Maus’s Pulitzer award, graphic novelists are turning to comics to explore these issues. For example, German-American illustrator Nora Krug’s 2018 offers new perspectives on German guilt through her graphic novel that is both memoir and scrapbook.
Recently, researchers are looking again to comic art to educate on the Holocaust and genocide more generally. is leading a SSHRC-funded project called .
In an interview, Schallié said this focus was inspired by her son’s discovery of Maus as a reluctant reader at age 11. She explained how comics are foundational in Holocaust education and that Maus is an essential piece of graphic literature for both middle- and high-school curricula. According to Schallié, Spiegelman’s complex esthetic modes of representation complicate the genre of survivor testimony to draw attention to the multi-layered process of witnessing. “To ban Maus in the middle-school curriculum,” she said, “does a great disservice to students.”
However, with the media attention that the recent ban of Maus is receiving, it’s likely that more readers than ever are going to come to regard Spiegelman’s graphic art as .
Biz Nijdam does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
