Maus Ii A Survivor 39;s Tale And Here My Troubles Began Pdf
James Gillock
Maus,[a] often published as Maus: A Survivor's Tale, is a graphic novel by American cartoonist Art Spiegelman, serialized from 1980 to 1991. It depicts Spiegelman interviewing his father about his experiences as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. The work employs postmodern techniques, and represents Jews as mice and other Germans and Poles as cats and pigs respectively. Critics have classified Maus as memoir, biography, history, fiction, autobiography, or a mix of genres. In 1992 it became the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize.
In the frame-tale timeline in the narrative present that begins in 1978 in New York City, Spiegelman talks with his father Vladek about his Holocaust experiences, gathering material and information for the Maus project he is preparing. In the narrative past, Spiegelman depicts these experiences, from the years leading up to World War II to his parents' liberation from the Nazi concentration camps. Much of the story revolves around Spiegelman's troubled relationship with his father and the absence of his mother, who died by suicide when Spiegelman was 20. Her grief-stricken husband destroyed her written accounts of Auschwitz. The book uses a minimalist drawing style and displays innovation in its pacing, structure, and page layouts.
A three-page strip also called "Maus" that he made in 1972 gave Spiegelman an opportunity to interview his father about his life during World War II. The recorded interviews became the basis for the book, which Spiegelman began in 1978. He serialized Maus from 1980 until 1991 as an insert in Raw, an avant-garde comics and graphics magazine published by Spiegelman and his wife, Franoise Mouly, who also appears in Maus. A collected volume of the first six chapters that appeared in 1986, Maus I: My Father Bleeds History, brought the book mainstream attention; a second volume, Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began, collected the remaining chapters in 1991. Maus was one of the first books in graphic novel format to receive significant academic attention in the English-speaking world.
In Rego Park in 1958,[3] a young Art Spiegelman is skating with his friends when he falls down and hurts himself, but his friends keep going. When he returns home, he finds his father Vladek, who asks him why he is upset, and Art proceeds to tell him that his friends left him behind. His father responds in broken English, "Friends? Your friends? If you lock them together in a room with no food for a week, then you could see what it is, friends!"[5]
As an adult, Art visits his father, from whom he has become estranged.[6] Vladek has remarried to a woman called Mala since the suicide of Art's mother Anja in 1968.[7] Art asks Vladek to recount his Holocaust experiences.[6] Vladek tells of his time in the Polish city of Częstochowa[8] and how he came to marry into Anja's wealthy family in 1937 and move to Sosnowiec to become a manufacturer. Vladek begs Art not to include this in the book and Art reluctantly agrees.[9] Anja suffers a breakdown due to postpartum depression after giving birth to their first son Richieu,[b] and the couple go to a sanitarium in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia for her to recover. After they return, political and anti-Semitic tensions build until Vladek is drafted just before the Nazi invasion of Poland. Vladek is captured at the front and forced to work as a prisoner of war. After his release, he finds Germany has annexed Sosnowiec, and he is dropped off on the other side of the border in the German protectorate. He sneaks across the border and reunites with his family.[12]
During one of Art's visits, he finds that a friend of Mala's has sent the couple one of the underground comix magazines Art contributed to. Mala had tried to hide it, but Vladek finds and reads it. In "Prisoner on the Hell Planet", Art is traumatized by his mother's suicide three months after his release from the mental hospital, and in the end depicts himself behind bars saying, "You murdered me, Mommy, and left me here to take the rap!"[13][14] Though it brings back painful memories, Vladek admits that dealing with the issue in such a way was for the best.[15]
Art asks after Anja's diaries, which Vladek tells him were her account of her Holocaust experiences and the only record of what happened to her after her separation from Vladek at Auschwitz and which Vladek says she had wanted Art to read. Vladek comes to admit that he burned them after she killed herself. Art is enraged and calls Vladek a "murderer".[17]
The story jumps to 1986, after the first six chapters of Maus have appeared in a collected edition. Art is overcome with the unexpected attention the book receives[4] and finds himself "totally blocked". Art talks about the book with his psychiatrist Paul Pavel, a Czech Holocaust survivor.[18] Pavel suggests that, as those who perished in the camps can never tell their stories, "maybe it's better not to have any more stories". Art replies with a quote from Samuel Beckett: "Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness", but then realizes, "on the other hand, he said it".[19]
Art Spiegelman was born on February 15, 1948, in Sweden to Polish Jews and Holocaust survivors Vladek and Anja Spiegelman. An aunt poisoned his parents' first son Richieu to avoid capture by the Nazis, four years before Spiegelman's birth.[41] He and his parents emigrated to the United States in 1951.[42] During his youth his mother occasionally talked about Auschwitz, but his father did not want him to know about it.[27]
Spiegelman developed an interest in comics early and began drawing professionally at 16.[43] He spent a month in Binghamton State Mental Hospital in 1968 after a nervous breakdown. Shortly after he got out, his mother died by suicide.[2] Spiegelman's father was not happy with his son's involvement in the hippie subculture. Spiegelman said that when he bought himself a German Volkswagen it damaged their already-strained relationship "beyond repair".[44] Around this time, Spiegelman read in fanzines about such graphic artists as Frans Masereel who had made wordless novels. The discussions in those fanzines about making the Great American Novel in comics inspired him.[45]
Spiegelman became a key figure in the underground comix movement of the 1970s, both as cartoonist and editor.[46] In 1972 Justin Green produced the semi-autobiographical comic book Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, which inspired other underground cartoonists to produce more personal and revealing work.[47] The same year, Green asked Spiegelman to contribute a three-page strip for the first issue of Funny Aminals, which Green edited.[46] Spiegelman wanted to do a strip about racism, and at first considered focusing on African Americans,[48] with cats as Ku Klux Klan members chasing African-American mice.[49] Instead, he turned to the Holocaust and depicted Nazi cats persecuting Jewish mice in a strip he titled "Maus". The tale was narrated to a mouse named "Mickey".[46] After finishing the strip, Spiegelman visited his father to show him the finished work, which he had based in part on an anecdote he had heard about his father's Auschwitz experience. His father gave him further background information, which piqued Spiegelman's interest. Spiegelman recorded a series of interviews over four days with his father, which was to provide the basis of the longer Maus.[50] Spiegelman followed up with extensive research, reading survivors' accounts and talking to friends and family who had also survived. He got detailed information about Sosnowiec from a series of Polish pamphlets published after the war which detailed what happened to the Jews by region.[51]
In 1973, Spiegelman produced a strip for Short Order Comix #1[52] about his mother's suicide called "Prisoner on the Hell Planet". The same year, he edited a pornographic, psychedelic book of quotations, and dedicated it to his mother.[37] He spent the rest of the 1970s building his reputation making short avant-garde comics. He moved back to New York from San Francisco in 1975, which he admitted to his father only in 1977, by which time he had decided to work on a "very long comic book".[15] He began another series of interviews with his father in 1978,[44] and visited Auschwitz in 1979.[53] He serialized the story in a comics and graphics magazine he and his wife Mouly began in 1980 called Raw.[54]
American comic books were big business with a diversity of genres in the 1940s and 1950s, but had reached a low ebb by the late 1970s. [55][56] By the time Maus began serialization, the "Big Two" comics publishers, Marvel and DC Comics, dominated the industry with mostly superhero titles.[57] The underground comix movement that had flourished in the late 1960s and early 1970s also seemed moribund.[58] The public perception of comic books was as adolescent power fantasies, inherently incapable of mature artistic or literary expression.[59] Most discussion focused on comics as a genre rather than as a medium.[60]
Maus came to prominence when the term "graphic novel" was beginning to gain currency. Will Eisner popularized the term with the publication in 1978 of A Contract with God. The term was used partly to rise above the low cultural status that comics had in the English-speaking world, and partly because the term "comic book" was being used to refer to short-form periodicals, leaving no accepted vocabulary with which to talk about book-form comics.[61]
The first chapter of Maus appeared in December 1980 in the second issue of Raw[45] as a small insert; a new chapter appeared in each issue until the magazine came to an end in 1991. Every chapter but the last appeared in Raw.[62]
Spiegelman struggled to find a publisher for a book edition of Maus,[41] but after a rave New York Times review of the serial in August 1986, Pantheon Books published the first six chapters in a volume[63] called Maus: A Survivor's Tale and subtitled My Father Bleeds History. Spiegelman was relieved that the book's publication preceded the theatrical release of the animated film An American Tail by three months, as he believed that the film, produced by Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, was inspired by Maus and wished to avoid comparisons with it.[64]
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