THEMES (MAUS)

1. THE HOLOCAUST AND THE RESPONSIBILITY OF ITS SURVIVORS

 Art Spiegelman, the author and narrator of Maus, is the child of two Polish Holocaust
survivors: Vladek, his father, and Anja, his mother. Following a long estrangement
from Vladek following Anja’s unexpected death in 1968, Arthur — called Artie by
many close to him — has decided to collect his father’s memories of the Holocaust
and narrate them in a series of cartoons. The Holocaust, which occurred between
1941 and 1945, was a genocide perpetrated by the nation of Germany, then under
the leadership of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. During the five-year period before
their defeat to the Allied Forces, the Nazi Party murdered six million Jewish people,
along with five million others who were deemed “undesirable” in their society (these
victims included Roma people, homosexuals, and non-Jewish religious minorities,
among many others). Artie, whose Jewish family was almost completely annihilated
during the Holocaust, feels compelled to preserve his father’s memories out of
respect for the suffering Vladek endured, and in an effort to ensure that the horrors of
the Holocaust are not forgotten. On a more personal level, he uses Maus to explore
his own troubled relationship to his parents and his Jewish identity.
 Artie understands that narrating his father’s experience of the Holocaust is an
enormous responsibility, and he struggles with the pressures of that responsibility —
and with the sense that he is not fit to tell Vladek’s stories —during hours of
interviews and years of work on the book that will become Maus. The visual
metaphor that defines Maus — Artie’s use of animal heads in place of human faces,
with a different animal representing each nationality or ethnic group — provides Artie
with a platform for investigating his anxieties about his project, acknowledging Artie’s
distance from the events of his father’s story while simultaneously binding him to the
people about whom he writes. Artie has never met many of the people from Vladek’s
life, and lacks sufficient information to create accurate representations of many of the
scenes he describes. Artie does not know, for example, what his paternal grandfather
or aunts looked like, since there are no surviving photographs of them. He struggles
to imagine the layout of the tin shop where Vladek worked during his time in
Auschwitz, and Vladek often draws Artie diagrams when trying to explain the layout
of a bunker or a concentration camp. All these gaps in his knowledge highlight the
limitations of Artie’s imagination and experience.
 At the same time, Artie’s mouse head creates an undeniable connection between
him and all other Jewish people. Artie shares his rodent features with his parents and
other relatives; with the friends and neighbors in Europe who endured the war
alongside them; with Jews he meets in his day-to-day life; and with the hordes of
nameless dead he depicts standing in line in the ghettos, struggling for breath in
overcrowded cattle cars, and dying in torment in the gas chambers and mass graves
of Auschwitz. In drawing them all with the same mouse head, Artie unites the
identities and experiences of all Jewish people, tying them together across continents
and generations. Artie cannot relate to the horror of the Holocaust in the same
intimate way Vladek can, but he has been shaped by those events. He is the inheritor
of a tremendous intergenerational legacy shared by all Jewish people.
 Yet in the moment where Artie struggles most with his decision to publish Vladek’s
story — where he feels overwhelmed by the pressures that accompany professional
success, and afraid of misrepresenting the horrors his parents’ generation endured
— he appears to the reader wearing a mouse mask over a human face, his human
ears and hair visible in profile. Just as the mouse head connects Jewish people
across different nationalities and generations, the notion that Artie is hiding his true
 features — features that are different from those of his parents and other Jews —
shows his anxiety about profiting off a story that is not necessarily his to tell.
 Even as he chronicles his father’s experience, Artie uses Maus to explore problems
about the morality of telling Holocaust stories at all. His therapist, a Czech Holocaust
survivor named Pavel, reminds Artie that “[l]ife always takes the side of life” — that
people always share stories of triumph and survival when talking about the
Holocaust, but in doing so erase the perspectives of the dead. Reverence for the
survivors of the tragedy is inherently disrespectful to those who died, Pavel suggests,
because reverence implies that the people who lived were somehow better or
smarter than those who died, and therefore more deserving of life. Vladek clearly
feels some trepidation around this problem as well. He dislikes the idea of Artie
writing about his life before the war: about his courtship of Anja, or the woman he
dated before meeting her. To write in a Holocaust narrative about things that have
nothing to do with the Holocaust itself “isn’t so proper, so respectful,” he tells Artie.
As a survivor, tied to those who have died through bonds of love and guilt, Vladek
feels compelled to construct a story worthy of what has happened; one that takes
seriously his responsibilities to those who cannot speak for themselves.
 Maus acknowledges that the core narrative of the Holocaust — of rabid persecution
and dehumanizing violence — is morally unambiguous, and Artie clearly portrays the
cruelty of guards and collaborators. But condemning their actions is not the core
project of the book. Instead, Maus explores difficult questions of moral witness, and
considers the responsibilities inherited both by the survivors and the generations that
follow them. Artie and Vladek both hold the power of authorship; in sharing their
stories, they contribute to a larger narrative of the Holocaust, and to the multi-
generational struggle to make sense of that tragedy. However, that power is not
unambiguously good. As Pavel points out, the fact that the dead will never be able to
tell their stories creates a troubling imbalance: the memories of the living persist, but
the dead have no power to influence the narrative those memories create. Through
their collaboration, Artie and Vladek bring forward a story of moral consequence, for
which they must both take responsibility. That burden weighs heavily on both men,
and each struggles throughout the act of telling to navigate his own difficult
relationship with the reality that has shaped him.

2. FAMILY, IDENTITY, AND JEWISHNESS

 While his interviews with Vladek keep a tight focus on the war, Artie’s parallel

narrative of recording those interviews and writing Maus considers the multitude of
ways in which the war continues to influence Vladek in his old age, and shapes
Artie’s relationship both with his father and with his own Jewish identity.
 Reverberations of the Holocaust are visible in almost every aspect of Vladek’s life
and character, and so have a profound impact on his relationship with his son. From
the novel’s first scene — in which Vladek scoffs to hear his young son refer to
neighborhood boys as “friends,” and advises Artie to test the sincerity of their
friendship by “lock[ing] them together in a room with no food for a week” — it is clear
that Artie’s whole life has been colored by the catastrophes his father faced during
the war. Nevertheless, Artie sees the Holocaust as an impenetrable barrier between
him and his parents. He admits to his wife Françoise that he sometimes wishes he
had been in Auschwitz with them, so he could better understand what they lived
through and how it impacted them.
 Because Anja and Vladek’s experiences during the war are inextricably intertwined
with their membership in a Jewish community — a network of family members,
neighbors, business partners, and friends who all suffer and struggle together during
the war — his own freedom from such suffering seems to undermine Artie’s own
sense of membership in that community. With the exception of Françoise, a convert,
every Jewish person Artie meets is a Holocaust survivor: Pavel, Mala, even the
couple living next door to Vladek in his bungalow in the Catskills. Jewishness, as
Artie understands it, is linked to the experience of survival. His inability to relate to
that experience compromises his sense of his own Jewish identity, and creates
distance between him and the family members about whom he writes.
 Though Artie feels a tenuous connection to his family, it is clear that family
relationships are central to the moral universe in which Vladek and Anja operate
throughout the war. Their bonds with parents, siblings, and cousins sustain them
materially — since relatives, even distant relatives, are more willing to extend help to
one another amidst the chaos and privation of the ghettos — and play an even more
important role in sustaining their sprits. In a letter from Birkenau, Anja tells Vladek
that knowing he is alive is the only thing that keeps her from throwing herself on the
electric fence and ending her life. Likewise, Vladek’s father chooses to follow his
daughter and grandchildren to the death camps rather than abandon them. Bonds of
love and kinship are a source of meaning that persists even when many reasons to
live have been stripped away. This makes Artie’s alienation from his Jewish roots
even more disconcerting to him; he lacks an intimate understanding, not only of his
parents’ lived experiences, but of the values that shaped their lives. Through
writing Maus — a project that coincides with the birth of his own daughter, Nadja —
Artie begins to address those feelings of alienation, cultivating deeper and more
complete understanding of the connections that held his family together during the
war, and the ways in which those connections have had repercussions for his own
life.

3. GRIEF, MEMORY, AND LOVE

 Vladek tells Artie that he has spent years trying to rid himself of memories of the war
and the Holocaust, but he recounts his story in remarkable detail, recalling the names
and eventual fates of almost every person who crossed his path during those years.
Though his descriptions are straightforward and unflinching, he has clear emotional
reactions to many of the events about which he speaks — he cries when he
remembers four of his friends being hanged in Sosnowiec for dealing goods on the
black market, and talks with passionate sadness about his dead son, Richieu. Love
and compassion are what make Vladek’s memories of the war so painful. But, just as
he and Anja keep the photograph of Richieu hanging in their bedroom, he keeps
those memories as tokens of the people he has lost, even when they prove to be a
heartbreaking burden.
 The memory of Artie’s mother, Anja, hovers over every conversation between Artie
and Vladek, as does their mutual uncertainty about how best to deal with the reality
of her death. Anja committed suicide in 1968, when Artie was a young man. Though
 Vladek’s stories suggest that Anja struggled with depression throughout her life, her
death seems to have been completely unexpected. She does not leave a suicide
note, and so Artie has very little insight into her reasons for choosing to end her life.
While Artie tries to confront the complex feelings attached to his grief — to represent
the anger he feels about his mother’s suicide, as well as his continued love for her —
Vladek does everything he can to preserve the best possible version of his wife,
ignoring all the difficult and painful aspects of their relationship in the story he
presents for Artie. He covers his desk with photographs of Anja, which
prompts Mala to compare the desk to a shrine, and he tells Artie: “Everywhere I look
I’m seeing Anja … always I’m thinking on Anja.” Vladek’s displays of uncomplicated
devotion contrast with the Artie’s tense silence on the subject of his mother. Except in
“Prisoner on the Hell Planet” — a comic he drew and published shortly after her
suicide, which resurfaces during his interviews with Vladek many years later — Artie
avoids talking about his relationship with Anja. He treats her as simply another
character in the long narrative of Vladek’s survival, albeit a more important one than
many.
 Vladek’s desire to protect Anja’s memory sometimes has disastrous consequences.
Artie learns partway through his interviews with Vladek that Anja left a series of
diaries telling her side of their story, and that Vladek burned these diaries shortly
after her death. When Artie learns what his father has done, he calls Vladek a
“murderer” — he equates the destruction of Anja’s voice and memories with an act of
violence. Though Artie’s anger seems justified, it is also clear that burning Anja’s
diaries was a way for Vladek to shield her from unsympathetic scrutiny. By seizing
control of her narrative, he guarantees that his gentler-than-life version of Anja and
their relationship will be the one to survive; that her legacy is in the hands of
someone who loves her and has her best interest at heart.
 While scholars and activists often treat remembrance as a moral imperative —
arguing that to forget the Holocaust would be an additional act of violence against
those who suffered and died — Maus interests itself in the idea of remembrance also
as an act of generosity and compassion.

4. GUILT, ANGER, AND REDEMPTION

 In addition to being a narrative of war and survival, Maus is, in large part, a chronicle

of Artie’s efforts to understand his father despite the fractured bonds between them.
Their difficult relationship bears marks of tragedies that have shaped them — the
devastation wrought by the Holocaust, and the trauma of Anja’s suicide — but their
troubles are also a product of their basic human shortcomings, their native
selfishness and neuroticism. Artie strives to be as honest as possible about his
relationship with Vladek, and about his father’s many shortcomings. He knows that
Vladek, for all the strength, resourcefulness, and courage he displayed during the
war, is not an uncomplicated hero, and that it would be misleading to depict him as
such — especially given his own lingering feelings of resentment toward Vladek,
which an unambiguously positive portrait would disguise.
 Though the most difficult aspects of this relationship never resolve themselves
entirely — in the second volume of Maus, written after Vladek dies from congestive
heart failure, Artie confesses that “[m]y father’s ghost still hangs over me” — Artie’s
interviews with Vladek help bring to light the deep love at the center of all their
family’s troubles. Vladek showers Artie with warmth and affection, even as he stifles
him with unsolicited advice and manipulative demands for attention. He expresses
unwavering love for Anja, and on multiple occasions insists that their love for each
other gave them strength to survive the most difficult moments of the war.
 Artie gains some deeper understanding of his father through their interviews, but the
loss of his mother’s diaries means that he cannot use the book to explore or resolve
the deeply conflicted feelings he feels toward her. In his comic “Prisoner on the Hell
Planet” — which Mala, and later Vladek, finds and reads — Artie describes the
overwhelming mix of anger and guilt that possessed him after his mother’s suicide:
he knows that friends and neighbors blame him for Anja’s death, and admits that he
has turned his back on his mother in moments when she desperately needed to feel
loved, but nevertheless feels that Anja is the one who has “murdered” him, turning
his life upside down and trapping him in a prison of guilt. His inability to sort through
these conflicted feelings in the same way he examines his difficult relationship with
Vladek leaves Artie in a state of unresolved tension, even after hundreds of pages
and panels.
 The final image in the book, of the gravestone that bears both Vladek and Anja’s
names, suggests Artie has relinquished his anger and is ready to let his parents’
memories rest peacefully. Though his story does not have a neat or satisfying
ending, Artie must release his pain before he can finish his work and move forward
with his life. Yet it’s important to note that his gesture of love and forgiveness does
not completely heal Artie’s suffering, or that of his parents. A difficult story like theirs
cannot be redeemed easily, and given the scope and magnitude of the disasters that
shaped them, may not be redeemable at all. To carry on in the face of all that has
happened, Artie must settle for “good-enough” resolutions and learn to live with pain
and uneasiness where he cannot overcome it.

5. DEATH, CHANCE, AND HUMAN INTERDEPENDENCE

 The ghettos, cattle cars, and concentration camps through

which Vladek and Anja move during the war are filled with death, most of which is a
result of random and senseless violence. Though the Nazi regime is sometimes
calculating about which people it will murder — as when Vladek’s sister Fela, whose
four children are considered an unnecessary drain on the state’s resources, is sent to
her death during a mass registration of Jewish families in Sosnowiec — soldiers also
deal out death sentences for minor infractions, or for no reason at all. Likewise,
illness and privation ravage the bodies of those in concentration camps completely
indiscriminately; frail, skinny Anja survives Birkenau against all odds, while strong,
healthy Vladek nearly dies of typhus in Dachau. Though Vladek is, as Artie puts it in
his conversation with Pavel, “incredibly present-minded and resourceful” in his efforts
to keep himself and Anja safe, their survival is a matter of luck much more than
 intelligence or merit. Pavel reminds Artie soberly of this fact, and warns him against
thinking about the Holocaust as a contest that the living have won and the dead have
lost.
 While chance is the most powerful force determining Anja and Vladek’s survival, they
also depend on the compassion and humanity of those around them — people who
share their knowledge and resources, sacrifice some of their own wellbeing, and on
occasion even risk their lives to help Vladek and Anja. From the nameless priest who
gives Vladek hope with an auspicious interpretation of the identification number on
his arm; to the French man who shares food from his Red Cross packages;
to Mancie, who carries Vladek’s letters to Anja in Birkenau, the kindness of strangers
gives the Spiegelmans both the emotional strength and the material resources they
need to survive. Likewise, random indifference and undeserved cruelty — the
unpredictable aggression of guards, or the fear of Jewish collaborators trying to save
themselves at the expense of others — compromise the safety of innocent people,
and trap some in deadly situations. Nearly all the men and women of Maus,
regardless of their ethnicity or social position, are forced to make decisions that will
determine whether others live or die. Though Vladek is pessimistic about human
nature — he encourages Anja to think only of her own wellbeing, assuring her that
her friends won’t have her best interest at heart — many such people prove
themselves generous and humane even in the worst of circumstances.