Added 17.3.12
I’ve now read Maus, having found it in the local library -what a deeply personal work of incredible honesty, lacking in sentimentality and demonization. I can see why it won the Pulitzer Prize.
Art Spiegelman started the story just before his parents met and skilfully portrays the gradual deterioration in the treatment and living conditions of the Jewish people as the Nazis gained power, and how they gradually adapted to this. I gained a powerful sense of their growing impotence and peril.
The interplay between the images of the domestic/ narrative situation and those of the extreme degradations of his father’s past served to keep reminding me that it was a personal story and stopped the graphic depiction of the horrors becoming numbingly overwhelming.
I think the animal metaphor for the various ‘tribes’ worked beautifully, I was instantly able to recognise the races (if not the individual characters, which sometimes took a bit longer to place). For instance, in a concentration camp crowd scene there were a few Polish gentiles (represented by pigs) amongst the Jewish people. As the author stated in the interview I heard, it didn’t in the least diminish the emotional impact of the tale.
The sheer number of drawings is astonishing; most of them are simple, with a few, e.g. the ones depicting the camp layout, being much more technical and complex.
I agree with the author that colour would have been a distraction.
Questions I kept asking myself were ‘Why did it happen?’ and ‘What makes people so cruel?’
These questions were very skilfully dealt with in ‘Introducing the Holocaust’ with a careful breakdown of the steps to anti-Semitism and racism in general, illustrated incredibly forcefully, skilfully and clearly.
The two books in tandem give an invaluable insight into this hideous period of European history from personal and more general perspectives.
I will never understand why it happened or why history is doomed to repeat itself.
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