A mouse that does not feel as a mouse.

Throughout history, human-beings have used violence in order to bolster their power, but the entire world has never observed such a planned and brutal as the Holocaust. This event has been captured in the graphic novel “Maus”, exposing the cruelty of the Nazis and its effects not only on the survivor’s life, but in the following generations.

Maus seems to be just a story about war and anti-Semitism, but it is an analysis about cultural aspects and an introspection that the author does regarding his father and his relationship with him.

The victims, the Jewish, are represented as mice. If we scrutinize what a mouse represents, we would understand that it has two interpretations. The first one, the perspective that was usually shown by the Nazis, is that a mouse is somehow a parasitic. That animal goes over everywhere stealing what they found for eating and carrying infections for their “perfect society”.  The second interpretation could be that, as mice, the Jews have been rejected by the world so that they have been forced to run away from one place to another trying to survive by contributing in their own way in different societies.

 

This situation seems to be changed by the Holocaust, since this event modifies the vision that the entire world had in regards to the Jewish, including themselves. This is maybe one of the aspects that are most thought-provoking about Maus, the fact that Spiegelman and his father elaborate a cooperative autobiography in which the perspective of Vladek is captured in the story itself, but the vision of Artie about his father is expressed in the drawings of their present. The contrast between the old Vladek, loving and brave, and the one from the present, cantankerous and distant, is the most special of the story, how the Holocaust can change your personality and your entire life. It can even change the manner in which you establish relationships with others, especially with Artie. His relationship with his father is based mostly in Vladek’s desperate desire of empowering himself and showing to his son that he is a survivor. The problem is that, unintentionally, Vladek limited Artie during his all life by disparaging Artie’s capacities and skills. Artie was not treated as his son, but as a witness and a proof of his own survival. Vladek seems to be, as Mala said in page 93 from Volume I, more attached to things than to people, and that is one of the most serious consequences of the Holocaust on Vladek, he values more the objects than the relationships with other considering the difficulties and scarcities that he experienced just to survive during the massacre. Because of this, Artie has not been able to construct an personal identity as he expected to have, since the vision of himself that he has developed is result of the circumstances as, for example, the suicide of her mother and his feelings of guilt, his vision of himself as a not complete Jewish since he has not suffered what the previous generation of Jews experienced, or his distant relationship with his father that finds a balance at a late point of their lives and only because of establishing a dialogue as a “journalist”, as Spielgelman declares (Hofstra University, 1998).

It is not possible for Artie Spiegelman to feel as a mouse because of all this events considering that it represents a pain that he has not experienced and that destroyed the lives of a whole generation of Jewish people, and because he was raised in a different world without knowing the complete truth about his origins. 

At the beginning of the first volume, Spiegelman introduced a Hitler's quote that said that the Jews were undoubtly a race, but they were not humans. After the Holocaust, some of the children of the Jewish victims were not even able to completely recognize thelselves as members of a community.

Bibliografía

Hofstra University. (1998). True Relations: Essays on Autobiography and the Postmodern. Greenwood Publishing Group.