Art Spiegelman’s Maus is the work of comics art that did more than any other to bring the Holocaust into a graphic narrative form. The two volumes (My Father Bleeds History, 1986, and And Here My Troubles Began, 1991) tell the story of Vladek Spiegelman’s survival of Auschwitz and his post-war life in New York, framed by the author’s own difficult relationship with his father and with the family inheritance of the camps. The book was the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 (under a special citation rather than under any of the existing Pulitzer categories) and remains the most-cited single graphic-form treatment of the Holocaust.
Vladek and Anja
Vladek Spiegelman was born in Częstochowa, Poland in 1906 and lived in Sosnowiec from the late 1920s. He married Anja Zylberberg in 1937. Their first son Richieu was born in 1937. The German occupation of Poland from September 1939 caught the Spiegelmans in Sosnowiec; the city’s 30,000 Jews were ghettoised, then deported. Vladek and Anja survived by hiding, by working as forced labour, by buying false papers, and by paying smugglers who in some cases took the money and disappeared and in some cases delivered as agreed. Richieu was sent for protection to relatives in another part of Poland in 1942 and was poisoned along with his cousin and aunt, on the aunt’s decision, when their hiding place was about to be discovered.
Vladek and Anja were arrested in March 1944 and deported to Auschwitz separately. Vladek was sent to Auschwitz I and worked as a tinsmith and as a shoe repairer, both skilled trades that bought him relative protection in the camp economy. Anja was sent to Birkenau, then transferred to Ravensbrück, then to Malchow. They survived through the death marches at the end of the war and were reunited in Sosnowiec in mid-1945. They emigrated to Sweden in 1946, then to the United States in 1951.
Their second son Arthur was born in Stockholm in 1948. Anja, who had been clinically depressed since the war, killed herself in 1968 when Arthur was twenty. Vladek lived until 1982. The book is the record of Arthur’s interviews with his father in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the book’s drafting in parallel with the interviews, and the difficult emotional negotiation between the two men over the form of the telling.
The artistic decision
Spiegelman’s decision to draw the characters as animals, with Jews as mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs, Americans as dogs and others as further animal categories, was the most-discussed formal choice in the book. The decision had several roots. The metaphor of Jews as mice and Germans as cats was a Nazi propaganda trope that Spiegelman was deliberately appropriating. The animal categories allowed Spiegelman to handle racial classification (a central operating principle of the regime) without having to draw individual humans as racial types, a problem the realist comic-strip form would have made unworkable. The decision also gave the work a formal distance that allowed the reader to follow material that, drawn realistically, might have been unbearable.
The Polish-as-pigs decision was the most criticised. The Polish government attempted to block publication of the Polish translation in 2001, and the use of pigs as a Polish racial category, alongside the Nazi cats, was attacked as itself a racial slur. Spiegelman’s defence was that the categories were not racial in the racist sense but representational, that pigs in Polish folk culture were not a uniquely degrading symbol, and that the book consistently humanised its Polish characters within the metaphor. The argument continues; the Polish translation was eventually published.
The frame story
The book’s most distinctive narrative move is the frame story. The narrative of Vladek’s wartime experience is interleaved with scenes of Arthur interviewing him in his Queens apartment in the late 1970s. The frame allows the book to handle several questions that a straightforward survivor narrative cannot. It shows the unreliable, repetitive, sometimes evasive quality of survivor testimony as it actually emerges in family conversation. It documents Vladek’s emotional and behavioural difficulties (his obsessive thrift, his racial prejudice against Black Americans, his relationship with his second wife Mala) without softening them. It shows Arthur’s own failure to be a satisfactory son, his inability to write the book he is writing, his fear that the book will fail his father’s experience. The frame story is at least as much the subject of the book as the wartime story.
The second volume, And Here My Troubles Began, opens with the famous and painful “Time Flies” sequence in which Spiegelman, depicted as an adult mouse wearing a mouse mask, sits in his New York studio surrounded by piles of dead mice. He is unable to draw. He has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship for the second volume but cannot begin work; he is exhausted by his father, by his mother’s suicide, by his own celebrity, by the photographers and journalists who want to interview him. The sequence is the book’s most direct engagement with what the inheritance of the Holocaust does to its second-generation carriers, and what the production of Holocaust art does to the artist who produces it.
Reception and afterwards
The first volume was published in 1986 by Pantheon Books and was an immediate critical and commercial success. The second volume followed in 1991. The Pulitzer special citation in 1992 was the first such recognition for a comic-form work and remains the most-cited single moment in the institutional acceptance of the graphic novel as a serious literary form. Maus has been translated into around thirty languages and is now standard reading in American secondary-school Holocaust courses.
The book’s reception in 2026 is shadowed by the controversy of January 2022, when the McMinn County school board in Tennessee voted to remove Maus from its eighth-grade curriculum, citing nudity (the depiction of Anja’s suicide in a bathtub) and profanity. The decision was widely reported and led to a sharp rise in the book’s sales as a result of public objection to the removal. The episode is now part of the book’s reception history and is a recurring point of reference in American debates over the teaching of the Holocaust and the wider question of which books are made available in school libraries.
Spiegelman has continued to work as a comics artist and as a public commentator on free expression in the comics form. His In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) is his book-length response to the destruction of the World Trade Center, which he and his family witnessed from their apartment in lower Manhattan. The MetaMaus volume of 2011 is his book-length set of materials, interviews and source documents on the making of Maus; it is the principal scholarly companion to the work.
See also
- Sweden
- Anne Frank
- The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
- Art and Literature of the Holocaust
- Night by Elie Wiesel
Sources
- Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Volume I: My Father Bleeds History, Pantheon Books, 1986
- Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Volume II: And Here My Troubles Began, Pantheon Books, 1991
- Art Spiegelman, MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic, Pantheon Books, 2011 (with the Maus archive on accompanying DVD-ROM)
- Joshua Brown, “Of Mice and Memory”, in Oral History Review, vol 16 no 1, 1988
- Hillary Chute, Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form, Harvard University Press, 2016
- James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture, Yale University Press, 2000
- Joseph Witek, Comic Books as History, University Press of Mississippi, 1989
- Andrea Liss, Trespassing Through Shadows: Memory, Photography, and the Holocaust, University of Minnesota Press, 1998
- USHMM, “Maus” curriculum materials, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org