Revenge of the Maus

"Art Spiegelman’s Maus: Graphic Art and the Holocaust" by Thomas Doherty, in American Literature (Mar. 1996), Box 90020, Duke Univ., Durham, N.C. 27708–0020.

A Holocaust comic book seems an unlike-work. In this two-volume cartoon biography ly, if not indeed obscene, conceit, yet Art of his father, a survivor of Auschwitz, Spiegelman’s Maus (1986, 1991), awarded a Spiegelman cast the Nazis as snarling cats, special Pulitzer citation in 1992, made it Jews as forlorn mice, and Poles as stupid pigs.

The language and tone of Spiegelman’s comic book work are tempered and austere.

In a way, contends Doherty, a professor of American studies at Brandeis University, Spiegelman was turning the Nazis’ own view of art against them.

Nazism was not only a force in history but an aesthetic stance, critics such as Hans-Jurgen Syberberg have maintained. The Nazis condemned abstract impressionism and other "degenerate art," and insisted that art should celebrate perfection in form. This vision was expressed most vividly in such films as Triumph of the Will (1935), a documentary of the 1934 Nazi Party Congress at Nuremburg, in which filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl "worshipfully frames the hallowed faces of beatific Hitlerjugend and fanatic Labor Service workers."

The Nazis regularly consigned the Jews to the "lower" visual medium of the cartoon, which they regarded as a valuable propaganda tool. "The pivotal inspiration for Spiegelman’s cat and mouse gamble," Doherty writes, "was the visual stereotypes of Third Reich symbology, the hackwork from the mephistoes at [Joseph] Goebbels’s Reichsministry and Julius Streicher’s venomous weekly Der Stürmer—the anti-Semitic broadsheets and editorial cartoons depicting Jews as hook-nosed, beady-eyed Untermenschen, creatures whose ferret faces and rodent snouts marked them as human vermin." Spiegelman’s anthropomorphized mice carry traces of Der Stürmer’s anti-Semitic Jew-as-rat cartoons, the artist himself has said, "but by being particularized they are invested with personhood; they stand upright and affirm their humanity."

Against the vivid newsreel footage of the Nazi death camps, with their emaciated survivors, heaps of corpses, and children with serial numbers tattooed on their arms, it is all but impossible for the visual artist to compete, Doherty notes. One way is to resurrect "the impressionist techniques censored by the Nazis" and use them to show Nazism’s horrors. "Working from a lowbrow rung of the ladder of art," that is what Spiegelman successfully did.

This article originally appeared in print

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