Maus: a Survivor's Tale

A Tennessee school board removed Maus from the eighth-grade English class curriculum in their district, and as a result my Twitter feed is full of people talking about Maus. I saw a link on Twitter to a copy of the first book on the Internet Archive¹, and started re-reading it.

I have read Maus before, around 30 years ago, I'd guess. I remember seeing it in a comic book shop. I don’t recall if I bought it or got it from a library or read a friend’s copy. It’s a long book; I probably didn’t read it in the store. If I bought a copy, it did not make the move with me to Kansas City. I left most of my books (and other possessions) behind in that move. I expect I read it in 1991, when the single-volume collection was first published, but I’m not sure.

One of my memories of the book was that the concentration camps weren’t as bad as I expected. Re-reading it, I thought “holy cow how could Young Me have expected this to be worse???” I'd remembered some details of Vladek's life at Auschwitz but forgotten all of the worst parts.

Another memory, more accurate, was that the book is personal and unflinching. I don’t mean in the depiction of Nazi atrocities (although it is that too), but in its honesty about the flaws of the protagonists. The author depicts not only his father’s story of the camp, but the modern story of his father’s life as his son interviews him about the past. In some ways, the modern story is more heartbreaking than that of the Holocaust. Vladek and his wife Anja survived Auschwitz. Twenty-three years later, Anja committed suicide in America. Vladek remarried, but ruined his relationship with his new wife -- and with his son -- by his miserly ways. They survived so much horror, and lost so many loved ones, and were unable to thrive even once they were past it.

Even Vladek’s miserliness is complicated: you can see extraordinary generosity from him in sections, and places where he spends scarce resources in a profligate fashion, when the need is great enough.

Art Spiegelman devoted several pages in the second volume of Maus to his efforts to grapple with the critical and commercial success of the first volume. “Tell our viewers what message you want them to get from your work,” a reporter demands.

He doesn’t have any idea.

How could he?

This isn’t a carefully-crafted work of fiction, where everything happens for a reason and the hero saves the day at the climax. It is honest, and that honesty, as much as Vladek’s extraordinary and harrowing story of the Holocaust, makes it compelling. It shows the humanity of it all, for good and for ill, the connections between past and present.

It is well worth reading.

¹ The first volume of Maus: A Survivor’s Tale was published in 1986. The second volume came out in 1991. I believe I originally read a single volume that collected both. When I re-read it this week, I read the two parts.