Hail Maus

This was the cover of "La segunda" a Chilean paper during the 70s under Pinochet's dictatorship. Perhaps you are asking yourself what has this to do with a literary blog. Well, I could not help myself of thinking about this particular header while I started reading Art Spiegelman's "Maus". A graphic novel which shows the plight which his father Vladek went through for being a Jew during the German Nazi invasion of Poland, however, the story does not deal exclusively with this topic but also with many aspects of his life. 











Since the very beginning of this graphic novel the author uses the own Nazi philosophy to criticize their doings. take a look to the epigraph of it.

“The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human.”

This cite, my dear fellow readers, was written by the very Adolph Hitler in his "Mein Kampf" a book that is considered by many the underpinning of the Nazi ideology, but why?







Chinua Achebe's full interview for CNN African voices.




To my mind, this is liken to what Chinua Achebe does on his writings. He said on an interview for CNN African voices "they were depicted as definitely not European, they were incapable of creating a civilization, of sustaining one"speaking about the stereotype that Europeans had towards African people. Furthermore, he started to use the language of the conquerors to deny this stereotype and probe that African culture was different but still very rich.

Coming back to Maus, I have to say that I am just a layman on the holocaust topic, and a think that really draw my attention was the fact that the own Jewish people acted as the Jew police who helped the Nazis to control and arrest their own fellows. When I read it, I immediately recall a discussion we had in class about "The Harlem Renaissance"  and the uncle Tom concept, which, surprisingly for me, is defined by Webster as:

1: a black who is overeager to win the approval of whites (as by obsequious behavior or uncritical acceptance of white values and goals)

2 :  a member of a low-status group who is overly subservient to or cooperative with authority.

Well, the Jewish police fits pretty well in that definition, but also does it the Chilean soldiers during the dictatorship because most, if not all, of the soldiers were young Chilean men who were part of the same people they were persecuting, whether voluntarily or forced by fear.






Regarding the writing style, I think Spiegelman being a cartoonist had the opportunity to, more or less, convey what his father felt when he survived the holocaust in the Nazi concentration camp. Doing a graphic novel with his father story was the bull-eye that made this work a Pulitzer winner, because language being an arbitrary system of sign cannot reliably depict reality, (do you remember our old pal Saussure signifier/signified). However, having the drawings and the testimony of an actual holocaust survivor helped him to go beyond from just words.

For example, take a look at  the left frame of this extract of the graphic novel, Vladek and his wife Anja had nowhere to go. they where being persecuted by Nazis and no one wanted to help them. The roads forming a swastika convey the meaning that wherever they would go, Nazis will be there,as well, to caught them. Also, I could feel his despair and hopelessness.






Furthermore, for me the allegory of using humans wearing animal masks (oops spoiler), Germans using cat masks and Jews using rat ones, besides Spiegelman keep on ironing the Nazi view of Jews,  is used to depict how naturalized the violence against them was seen since it is natural that the cat kill the mouse.





Finally, despite the fact that Jews went through the holocaust, I do not think that they learned a lesson out of it because what Israel is doing to Palestinian people nowadays is not too different from what the Nazis did to them.





Do you think that humanity after seeing a number of episodes like the holocaust will ever learn a lesson?

References:

-Art Spiegelman. (1986). Maus. New York: Pantheon books.