Graphic novels are usually ignored when it comes to academic discussions of literature, however Art Spiegelman’s Maus, the only graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize, deserves particular attention. Reviews of Maus that praised it tried to distance the novel from ‘comics’, which, as the Village Voice said in their 1991 review of the MOMA exhibition on Maus, ‘are for children’. The fact that there are no ‘people’ in Maus gave ‘serious’ critics pause. In Maus anthropomorphised animals represent different racial, ethnic, and national groups. As clearly seen on the cover, Jews are presented as mice, Germans as cats, etc. Yet Maus is a very serious book, in which Art — Spiegelman’s literary double — strives to understand the impact of the Holocaust on his parents, but also the impact of these experiences on his own life.
Whilst obviously quickly establishing the predator-prey metaphor, the presentation of all the characters as animals serve other purposes. It plays on the way that Jews were dehumanised in German propaganda. It also allows Spiegelman to show how his Holocaust surviving father, Vladek, viewed other racial, ethnic, and national groups. Poles, for instance, are presented as pigs — an insulting animal, as well as unkosher according to Jewish religious law. Vladek had fought with the Polish army, yet, at the end of Maus, did not feel safe to return home due to the anti-Semitic violence that Jews faced in Poland at the end of the war. The choice of animals shows the distance that Vladek felt towards his fellow Poles and his former homeland after the war. Vladek was not just a Pole but a Polish Jew, ninety percent of whom were killed during the Holocaust. The Holocaust caused Vladek to leave Poland and destroyed the community in which he had made his home. Vladek did not only lose his personal community but experienced the betrayal of the wider Polish community that he had fought for.
Maus is not just an account of Vladek’s experience during the Holocaust. The novel also contains Art’s account of the process of creating Maus. In the present-day scenes we observe Art trying to make sense of the effect the Holocaust had on his father and therefore on his own childhood. From a psychological perspective, we might view this as Art’s attempt to understand his generational trauma.
Spiegelman was born in Stockholm as the child of refugees. There are signs in his life in the USA of the continued effects of Vladek’s precarious existence during the Holocaust, such as the sense of stability Vladek’s home provides him. We see this when Vladek is reluctant to leave his home despite medical issues. In the chapter ‘Mousehole’, Spiegelman plays again on animal imagery, this time to refer to the ‘hole in the wall’ hideouts Jews sheltered in to avoid being rounded up. The ability to see those places through the illustrations perhaps makes it more “real” to the reader than if it had been merely described.
An obvious missing piece in the novel’s present day is Art’s mother, Anja, who also survived the Holocaust. The novel initially tells us that she took her own life in the 1960s. Later we learn that Anja’s suicide happened in the Spiegelman family home. Anja had written an account of her experiences of the Holocaust, but Vladek destroyed it after her death. After finding this out, Art refers to his father as a ‘murderer’. His mother’s story and memories have been wiped out as if they are too painful for Vladek to share and for anyone to know. Vladek himself is reluctant to remember.
Art knows about the Holocaust through the effects it had on his home life, but his understanding remains incomplete because his parents refuse to discuss their experiences with him. Marianne Hirsch, writing on Maus, uses the term ‘postmemory’ to describe something ‘distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection’, which can be used to show memory as something ‘equally mediated by the processes of narration and imagination’. In combining his father’s story with his own story, Spiegelman highlights the interaction of memory and postmemory. By trying to understand the life of his parents, Art begins to understand his own.
Memory of the Holocaust is not just important to the survivors and their families, but to the perpetrators and their descendants as well. Germany’s staatsraison — reason for state — is, as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said in 2023, Israel’s security. Conceiving of staatsraison in this way links Germany’s responsibility for the Holocaust to unconditional support for Israel. This has recently been challenged during the Israel-Hamas war, as many German protestors from immigrant backgrounds have no familial connections to the Nazi era. The staatraison also reflects on the historiographical debate around Germany, and particularly the post-WW2 use of Sonderweg — special path — put simply, whether the crimes against humanity committed by Nazi Germany come as a result of German culture and its institutional development.
Of course, this leads to difficulties regarding German national identity, especially when it comes to the sentiment of heimat. Heimat is a German term that has no direct English translation but is often translated as ‘home’ or ‘homeland’, with heimat seemingly less problematic than the Nazi-associated vaterland — fatherland. Heimat is also the name of a graphic novel by Nora Krug, a German woman born decades after the war who lived in the USA for a decade before returning to her heimat in order to explore her family’s connections to Nazi Germany. Krug’s Heimat is described as a ‘German family album’. It fulfils the criteria of a graphic novel, mixing traditional comic strips with what is best described as a picture book, combining extended pieces of text with both illustrated and photographed images. It looks like a scrap book, but functions like a family album that seeks to capture the true history of the family, buried under generations of shame and consequently wilful ignorance.
Krug is connected to the crimes of the Nazi Germany, not just because of her family’s actions, but as a ‘German’ — the association of Germany with the Nazi period is not just made within German academia and politics, but in the way people around the world associate Germany with this historical period. This has been increasingly challenged on the macro-political level by the populist Alternative für Deutschland party (AfD), such as in 2018 when the party’s leader downplayed the Nazi era by saying ‘Hitler and the Nazis are just bird poo in over 1,000 years of successful German history.’ As Germany moves temporally further away from World War 2, AfD labels Holocaust memorials ‘monuments of shame’, reflecting the views of 60 percent of Germans who say the crimes of the German past should finally be left alone.
On a personal level, Krug struggles in her relationship with her homeland. As a child she is afraid to ask her mother about concentration camps. It feels more comfortable to discuss German identity in its most banal, homely forms, such as a particular German brand of bandage. These uniquely German items are associated with memories of her childhood and of being home; it is more comfortable to remember her heimat than the vaterland.
Heimat can be understood as the sense of cultural belonging to a community, and that sense of belonging can come from those nostalgic items, but also more abstract childhood memories such as the landscape and folktales. Yet these seemingly banal understandings of heimat can be connected to a more sinister German nationalism – for example, the link of the land to the Nazi phrase ‘blood and soil’ or Krug’s discovery of her great uncle’s antisemitic fairytales. Krug’s work provides another example of postmemory, with the damaging effects of the Holocaust on German national identity, even in its mundane forms, affecting Krug’s own struggles with ‘home’. Indeed, it is her attempt to build a home with her Jewish American husband that provides the impetus for her investigation.
Whilst Maus is less explicit in its connections to home and belonging, it seems obvious to the reader the effects the trauma of the Holocaust had not just on his father but on Art himself. Art does not ‘belong’ to the generation of Holocaust survivors that his parents and their friends do, yet his fellow Americans may struggle to understand his particular experience of ‘home’. Heimat explores the issues of someone in the German diaspora trying to personally understand their heimat, with the rose-tinted heimat of her childhood stained by her adult knowledge of the past, and her attempts to reconcile them. Whilst serious historical investigations, both works are deeply personal and emotional explorations into how the trauma of the past can cause a huge psychological toll today. The graphic novel opens opportunities for combining non-fictional aspects (e.g. photographs) with the explicit, inherently subjective aspects of memory, especially when discussing issues which people would rather not remember or would rather forget.