One of the interesting bits of background about Spiegelman's text is that the mice were not originally drawn quite so cartoonishly. Instead, Spiegelman drew them in a manner that was more realistic/ human-like, clearly based in part on the famous photographs of concentration camp survivors taken by photographers such as Margaret Bourke-White.
With this in mind, it's interesting to speculate about just why Spiegelman chose to revise his original mice into something more cartoonish. As Jennifer D. said in her response, does it have something to do with the icon and identification, as McCloud would have them? Is his decision to portray the Jews as mice problematic because it fundamentally essentializes race and trades in stereotype? Or, as we will see more clearly in Book II of Maus, is he trying to suggest something more subversive about race and national identity--and the combined ridiculousness and danger of racism? Does Spiegelman's choice to use animals in Maus encourage or forestall identification, in your opinion? Would you have responded differently to the mice if they were drawn in the manner of the more realistic, anthropomorphic sketch above?
Another important aspect of the Jews-as-mice, Germans-as-cats, Poles-as-pigs metaphor, as many of you have noted, is its historical accuracy in terms of the stereotypes in currency before and during the war, as well as the preoccupation that many Germans had with whether the Jews were a race.
Beginning during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, roughly coterminous with the Enlightenment's investment in creating scientific and racial taxonomies, anxiety about Jewish racial difference came to center around the Jewish body. Many Europeans became obsessed with the idea that Jews were members of an inferior, non-white race. Part of this obsession centered around the idea that Jews had distinguishable physical characteristics that rendered them decidedly other.
Sadly, many stereotypes found their way into caricature.
Above, you can see early examples of Jewish caricature that focus on supposed physical differences of Jews, including large noses and ears, oversized feet, and talon-like nails.
Later Nazi caricature traded in similar stereotypes of Jewish physical difference. (see below)
During this period of anti-Semitic propaganda, as some of you have noted, Jews were often likened to vermin, particularly mice and rats.
The Nazi film, Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal, or Wandering, Jew), one of the most disturbing anti-Semitic propaganda pieces, featured scenes that juxtaposed "typical" wandering Jew with images of rats and mice overrunning various parts of the globe. This image (a still of the rats can be seen below) suggested that, like vermin, Jews spread chaos and disease, literal and metaphorical, wherever they went.
For more on anti-Semitic stereotypes, you might check out resources such as Sander Gilman's work on The Jew's Body, this book on Racial Science in Hitler's New Europe, or this book on Nazi propaganda.
For more early sketches and background on the creation of Maus, take a look at Meta-Maus, Spiegelman's behind-the-scenes account of the creation of his work.
All I can say is WOW! What you covered was exactly what I was getting at in my last few blog posts and I'm very happy to hear it is talked about in some form inside of book 2. While I've heard the likening of Jews to rats or mice plenty of times the propaganda you listed was a bit more visual than I'd seen prior. I'll say I'm excited to start on the second book to understand why this distancing improves the book rather than play into the dehumanizing propaganda.
ReplyDeleteI understood why the choices were made for the animals representing each group of people. The propaganda's association with rats as part of the stereotype make it even more relevant. I understand why the illustration style was made less realistic. I think a basic iconography allows the reader to think in terms of universally applicable visual metaphor. This makes the story a fable for more potential readers to experience a compassion for the characters and a creates a more digestible dynamic between their roles. Simplifying the characters also allowed the pace and flow of the story to remain consistent. This helped to make the story seem more natural and familiar despite its shocking and tragic events. The simplicity and ease of reading Maus creates a certain level of detachment that makes the reader feel comfortably removed from the events, which in turn simultaneously makes the reader consider what happened from a reactionary standpoint that is more than pure repulsion, disgust, or shock.
ReplyDelete"Schindler's List", a film masterpiece, and another story about the Holocaust, relied heavily on the use of black and white with only a few occurrences of color. This film was released in 1993, seven years after Maus. I thought this was interesting and wondered if Spielberg was inspired by Maus.
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ReplyDelete... stupid blogger
I basically said that I've never seen the original drawings of the mice and think that they definitely do make the animal factor come off too strong to where we are just seeing an almost human do almost human things instead of having a more ambiguous icon character that we can more relate to and associate more freely with humans. McCloud's icon theory in Making Comics depicts this very well when he talks about the development stage and when you need to decide how you want your viewer to see your characters and feel about them.
Also in terms of the stereotype, I don't think Spiegelman meant anything racist with his animal choices. In fact in volume 2 he outright talks about it as he decides how to draw the French. This reminds me of Will Eisner's black comic relief character from the Spirit, who was meant to be a joke back in the day, but seems to be a terribly racist and politically incorrect shame of existence now. Though a different realm of example, my point is that when creating these characters and illustrating them the way he did, I think Spiegelman merely wanted the Jews to appear to be the obvious prey to their natural hunters the Nazis. From there he had to assign animals to different races. Otherwise we would have normal people alongside these animals, which in my head, is far more racist then assigning animals to people.
I really didn't understand why he used the animals he did use, but I do think he gave us a very different idea of how to view different races. In that time, and even nowadays, people still battle racisim and discrimination and it is interesting to see how different people channel that, Spiegelman seemed to channel his need in comics, and did a marvelous job doing so!
ReplyDeleteI liked the animal choices he chose, because in many ways especially how we continue to see/learn the Jews continually had to run and hide in their little holes, from the Nazis, and this game of cat and mouse, marked the vast majority of the jew/nazi conflict. Then to make the analogy even more apt, once the cats captured the mice, they don't (always) just kill them, but rather often times they play with them, and brutalize them, and give them hopes of escape, and THEN kill them, much the same as how nazi's treated the jews. The best example i can think of from the story is when Vladek had to sign a release form to be let out of the prison camp in the beginning, only to be put into a closed off little community, like he had been given the hope of escape, only to be caught up in the cat's paws yet again. I think the animals chosen were very apt, and were a really great metaphor/analogy. I am glad the he address this a little more directly in the second part though because it at first sort of bothered me that he would characterize his father who he keeps referring to as a survivor, and the other survivors, as a scurrying little rodent that isnt much more than a toy for the cats aggression. It sort of angered me to see that he didnt really develop a greater respect and appreciation for his father's being a survivor and having that survivor spirit.
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