The Holocaust and the Responsibility of its Survivors Theme Analysis

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.