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An account of the horrors of the Holocaust, Art Spiegelman’s Maus is also a trauma narrative, detailing trauma as passed down through generations.
Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale is a foundational work of comic book and literature history. This work of nonfiction tells the story of Spiegelman’s own father – holocaust survivor Vladek Spiegelman, as told through a series of interviews between the pair. Depicting Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats, the book is an unflinching account of the Holocaust and one family’s traumatic experiences during and since.
Maus now tops the Amazon bestsellers’ list, after being banned by a Tennessee school board, reportedly for its strong language, nudity and harrowing imagery. Indeed, the book is a stark reminder of what humanity can be at its worst, yet essential reading for all ages – perhaps now more than ever. As well as being a heartbreaking and brutal account of the Holocaust, Maus is also a story about trauma, passed down through generations.
Through a series of interviews, readers meet Spiegelman’s father – survivor and Polish Jew, Vladek. The relationship between father and son is presented as being a deeply fractured one – although Vladek is honest and open with his son, Art is frequently frustrated by the man, and can barely seem to tolerate his company outside of their interviews. Art also blames Vladek for burning the diaries of his mother, Anja – who killed herself by slitting her wrists when Art was younger.
The elderly Vladek is grumpy, miserly and mean – taking out his unhappiness on the long-suffering Mala – his second wife, who struggles to live up to the memory of Anja – the love of Vladek’s life. In Vladek and Anja (seen only in Vladek’s story, and Art’s tortured memories) we see the trauma which followed them after their release from Auschwitz. It’s a trauma which, ultimately, kills Anja – an already nervous, anxious woman, haunted by her memories of the concentration camps and the death of her firstborn child, Richieu.
While symptoms of Vladek’s trauma may seem obvious to readers, Art – as the book’s secondary protagonist – frequently seems blind, or at least unsympathetic to it. What are clearly a series of learned behaviors and coping mechanisms frustrate Art and Mala – particularly the latter (herself a Holocaust survivor), who Vladek pushes away through his constant nagging and bullying. Later, Art resentfully describes his father as a “murderer” upon learning that Vladek burned Anja’s diaries. Overwhelmed by grief and unable to live with the painful memories evoked by the diaries, Vladek didn’t burn them out of malice – but this is not something Art can comprehend. Struggling with his own grief, Art also suffers from his parents’ traumatic experiences.
With this less-than sympathetic depiction of himself, Spiegelman opens the book up to an exploration of a very different kind of trauma – that which is inherited from his parents. In the book’s second volume, we learn of the writer’s own struggle with depression and mental illness, and the immense guilt following his mother’s suicide.
Spiegelman embarks upon the Maus project as a way of understanding his father. But the pictures and illustrations within are just that – pictures, drawn from the experience of another. Although we can see what Vladek and Anja lived through, can anyone ever truly understand it? Every character within Maus is grappling with some kind of trauma, struggling to understand, while simultaneously pushing away others. To know what happened is one thing, but to truly understand is another.
As well as a historical account of the rise of Nazism and the concentration camps, Maus is an incredibly affecting trauma narrative, detailing its intergenerational effect upon the survivors and their children. Difficult as its lessons may be to truly or fully comprehend, we have a duty to learn them.
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