Of Maus and Men

How does one begin to write about the Holocaust? We're talking about an event (a word that invariably falls flat) so incomprehensibly horrifying and universally traumatic that even the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th generations of its participants are still dealing with the repercussions. It must must be addressed, must be recognized, but how? How can we begin to discuss an experience when it is almost to insulting to claim "an understanding"? 

Art Spiegelman probably knows what I'm trying to say much better then I do. It's clear from the beginning of Maus that he is more then a little conflicted about his relationship to the the tragic legacy he inherited. Although I realize there is much more history, intention, and intricacy to the device then I am insinuating, the fact that all the characters were portrayed as different animals struck me right away as a sort of coping mechanism (Of course, right away I want to throw out some kind of layperson's disclaimer. I have no comprehension, nor experience with something of this enormity, so forgive me if I over-simplify it for the purpose of "page-fillery".). 

Some people have called Maus "hard to read" as it is, I can only what it would be like to author a graphic novel had the characters been portrayed as a human. Even the fact of the medium itself, dealing in iconic drawings, seems to lift the story out our world, therefore making it somehow possible (dare I say easier) to contemplate. I got the sense that the images in Spiegelman's head were so powerful, so pervasive, that to see them reflected on the page would have been too much. 

One thing that struck me in particular was Spiegelman's allusion to what I'd call second-generation survivor guilt, illustrated pretty clearly in the picture below...

Although, once again I am wildly unqualified to evaluate here, the panels suggest that the emotional weight of his "heritage" is ever present, yet here he is, receiving both profit and international acclaim for a retelling of a genocide, although it seems highly unlikely they were motivating factors in his work.  Once again, we're facing the dichotomy housed in a single work of art, a personal experience crucial to the mental health of the artist and all the while a source of guilt and further inner conflicts. 

Below, I've added a selection from an earlier work (if you click the image, you can see the enlarged version) by Horst Rosenthal, Mickey au Camp de Gur, who used Mickey to represent himself in his depictions of daily life in a french concentration camp. The idea of a coping mechanism is much more concrete in this case, as Rosenthal created the work during his imprisonment at the camp. The final panel of this particular page, in which Mickey escapes by erasing himself and is re-drawn in America, is simultaneously charming and incredibly tragic, since Rosenthal died in Aushwitz.