Question

In Maus, Art Spiegelman produces what can be seen as a reaction to the Holo caust and its complicated aftermath in a unique way. It is a graphic representation of the various horrors of the Holocaust and he chooses to make his characters anthropomorphic. What is the purpose of Spiegelman's use of anthropomorphic characters?

Answer 1

• First of all the animals function as metaphors. Spiegelman tries to assign stereotyping elements and identities to certain animals and reaches easy identifications. So the reader can identify at first sight the role allocations, while human characters would make it harder to recognize offender and victim.
• In using the animal faces,he is removing starkness of horror,and provides both himself and the readers with a space to explore the story without getting too emotionally disturbed.For people who have not survived Holocaust,it is difficult to imagine the kind of horrors that were imflicted upon them in concentration camps,so he made the story telling possible by creating a detachment and a humour to a very dark and tragic incident.
• In giving Jews mice heads,he is making a sarcastic statement about the treatment of the jews as vermin by the Nazis.It also refers to the resilience of the mice ,which can be seen as a compliment to community for surviving the Holocaust.It can be argued that instead of stereotypying,Spiegelman satirizes them and ultimately influences the readers to question them.
• In deliberately using stereotypes,for example,the portrayal of the French as frogs,he is actually poiniting at the futility and the hollowness of these stereotypes.
• On the one hand he can not depict people who died, because they are dead and whether the survivers would agree is very doubtful. On the other hand it will be morally questionable to draw random people, because similarities to living and dead people can appear. Further on, Spiegelman does not want to publish a historical document, which claims to be objective but put some daylight between himself and the the horrible story of the Holocaust.
• Not only because it is not his own strory but also because of the brutality, which he can not and does not want to illustrate, instead he wants ”to show the events and memory of the Holocaust without showing them.