Maus

Maus is an interesting story about a Jewish survivor of the Nazi invasion and the Holocaust.  In this graphic novel, Nazis are portrayed as cats, and the Jews are seen as mice.  The story is told from the perspective of Vladek Spiegelman's perspective and his son Artie.  The book jumps back and forth in between the past and present, jumping from Vladek Spiegelman's past and the present time with Artie.  Despite the characters being displayed as animals, the overall story feels very human and real. 

Apparently Maus was a graphic novel that brought the whole genre into the mainstream, which contributed to the legitimacy of the medium overall. The overall aesthetic of the novel seems to appear as though it was drawn by an amateur artist. So the thing that set this book apart from the other must have been the subject matter rather than the actual art itself, not that it undermines the artistic value of drawings themselves.  The mature and “real” telling of the story kept readers tied to the life of Vladek Spiegelman. 

In general when a story is told with its characters being portrayed as animals, there has to be a good reason for it, otherwise the author is just doing it because they look cute, which is in my opinion not good story telling.  In this case though, Maus uses the animals as a metaphor for the way they behave with one another.  Cats hunting down mice, in the same way that cats are used to hunt down mice, which as considered pests and vermin.  In fact Nazis often compared Jews to rats in the dirt during the Holocaust and WW2. 

When thinking about the choice of animals used to portray Jews, I often thought back to the movie Inglorious Bastards, when Colonel Landa visits the farmer Perrier. However, in this case the movie uses hawks instead of cats to compare with the Nazis.  Colonel Landa says, “Where does the hawk look?(…) he looks everywhere he would hide.  But there are many places it would never occur to a hawk to hide. However, the reason the Fuhrer brought me off my Alps in Austria and placed me in French cow country today is because it does occur to me. Because I am aware what tremendous feats human beings are capable of once they abandon dignity.”  Thinking about this moment in the movie only enhanced my relation to the use of mice as the characterization of Jews in this graphic novel.  Because they did have to abandon dignity in order to survive at any cost.