Maus: A Unique and Insider’s Way of Narrating the Holocaust
Maus: A Unique and Insider’s Way of Narrating the Holocaust
It is not even easy to discuss the experience of writing about the Holocaust. There are many works born from the testimonies and pens of those who directly lived through this phenomenon. Their children and grandchildren continue to keep this legacy alive, whether through academic studies or other forms of creation. Today, even with a vast literature on this subject, which has now become a field in its own right, there can still be points that have not yet been sufficiently addressed or brought to consciousness on an emotional level. Moreover, the debates have lost little of their intensity, as current political developments constantly require the historical to be remembered and debated anew.
I feel my consciousness and my spirit are profoundly inadequate in understanding the mass persecution people have endured and its effects and consequences. This feeling of inadequacy has been the most significant obstacle preventing me from writing on this subject. From a personal perspective, perhaps I only have the right to say this: even engaging with a small part of the Holocaust literature creates a deep sense of pain, woundedness, and weariness in the human soul. For example, even a slight contact with testimonies written in the simplest language caused an emotional disconnection, reaction, and blockage in me. It must be said that in such moments, I sometimes felt breathless and desired to escape from those pages.
During my personal Holocaust research in the winter of 2025, which was a very limited and modest study, I encountered works that I struggled to complete. I put the book down many times. On cold winter days, I had moments where I frequently stared blankly at the snow-covered surroundings, felt no desire to do anything from within, and was ashamed of being human. The reason I express these so concretely is to convey how heavily even witnessing this experience through extremely indirect ways can impact the human spirit. I do not think people who have not researched the subject are very aware of this, which is why it needs to be written about. Witnessing violence at this level, even decades later, can be considered a form of trauma. To my knowledge, these are referred to as "secondary trauma" in the literature. Therefore, I can say that Holocaust historians and researchers are under a significant psychological burden. This is a special kind of violence, and the dehumanizing violence we encounter in the Holocaust, the rationalization of violence to make it a part of the routine, is a very different level that the human mind and spirit cannot accept. Nevertheless, it is a necessity to carry this experience into the future by incorporating it into today's reality and to keep the "memory" alive. This is of vital importance both for coping with the trauma and for being able to give the right responses when faced with the political projections of this phenomenon, which belongs to history but remains alive with its effects today.
In a previous article, I had penned a critique of Peter Weiss's play "The Investigation." In his work, Weiss aimed to touch upon memory and convey documentary-historical reality to society in an original and creative way. However, Art Spiegelman's Maus constitutes, as far as I know, a unique exception in this field. This difference, in my opinion, stems not only from the author's mindset and method but also from other factors. Spiegelman conveys what is perhaps the most horrific and difficult-to-put-into-words event in human history using a powerful allegorical narrative. The originality of Maus comes from its extraordinary naivety and simple honesty in its way of telling the untellable, like the Holocaust, and this approach, in my view, has created a new methodology that is a candidate to become a fundamental reference point in the field of Holocaust education.
Spiegelman's narrative begins with him in America, asking his father to tell him about their family history and the reality of the Holocaust. The author's father is portrayed as a cantankerous old man who, after the early death of his wife, has remarried but cannot hide his unhappiness and disappointment. In this respect, he resembles many father figures in our society at first glance and does not seem to have any remarkable features. However, as the author begins to talk about his mother, Anja, whom he never knew, and his brother, we too are slowly drawn into this unbearable tragedy. The Spiegelman family is one of thousands of Jewish families who lived in the Czech Republic and Poland until the 1930s. Vladek Spiegelman had a successful and happy marriage with Anja, the daughter of a wealthy family, and had established his own future and family. His business in the textile industry was doing well, and he had a child. This ordinary family picture is shattered when the horrific changes in Nazi Germany reach Poland.
This change begins to rapidly transform all layers of social life and to separate people who previously lived together, step by step. The two separate ethnic groups, Jews and Poles, are gradually segregated by invisible and sharp lines. In this process, people become alienated from each other, and hatred and intolerance become commonplace. So much so that these feelings seep even into the lives of the youngest children. Eventually, the Spiegelman family is also affected by this process. First, they lose their businesses and assets, becoming progressively excluded from social life. During the German occupation of Poland, Vladek Spiegelman is captured by the Germans. When he returns, his father-in-law tells him that his factory has been confiscated. Dispossession was the first step in the exclusion from social and economic life in this process. The purpose of this capital transfer, implemented by the Nazis within the framework of Nazifying the society in the countries they occupied, was to push the Jews completely outside the political and legal superstructure. This situation left the Jews vulnerable, disconnected, isolated, and powerless. It was clear that this first step would be followed by other processes that would slowly lead them to the concentration camps.
Today, there is a common misconception that the National Socialists sent the Jews directly to concentration camps. However, this was a long and extremely painful process. The concentration camp was the final and most terrible stage of this process. This is also seen in the story of the Spiegelman family. Before the Auschwitz-Birkenau camps, Polish, Hungarian, and other European Jewish families were subjected to great persecution. They were torn from their homes and families and had to live for long periods as homeless people in hiding. Their lives before being sent to the concentration camps were spent in constant fear and poverty.
The most fundamental problem was the lack of any legal guarantee for their lives. In countries where people were encouraged to inform on one another, they hid their identities and appearances under various guises. The Spiegelman family went through a similar process before being taken to the concentration camps. A large part of the family perished in the camps. Although the author's parents survived the Holocaust, their emotional and social relationships were never the same again. Indeed, it is a known fact today that the families of Holocaust survivors often struggle with numerous emotional disorders. Post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, and fear of abandonment are just a few of these conditions. These problems are passed down through generations and can be triggered by external factors such as wars, major social events, or political conflicts.
In his work, Spiegelman used a highly symbolic visual representation by depicting Germans as cats, Poles as pigs, and Jews as mice. This choice is deliberate. Nazi propaganda likened Jews to disease-carrying "rats" to exclude them from society and legitimize their extermination. Spiegelman reverses this hateful propaganda by drawing the Jews as hunted, defenseless, and small "mice." This is a powerful artistic counter-stance that emphasizes the innocence and helplessness of the individuals they sought to dehumanize. The depiction of Germans as "cats" is not an attempt to make them endearing, but rather a metaphor that reveals the ruthless and natural power imbalance between predator and prey. The cat's absolute dominance over the mouse and its toying with it before killing it symbolizes the Nazis' arbitrary and cruel domination over the groups they targeted. The cat mask represents not cuteness, but predation and power. The success of Maus lies precisely at this point, in its most striking conveyance of the social roles and brutal reality behind the masks.
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