Maus: A Survivor's Tale, by
Art SpiegelmanArt Spiegelman is an American comics artist, editor, and advocate for the medium of comics, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning comic book memoir, Maus. His works are published with his name in lowercase: art spiegelman.-Biography:Spiegelman was born in Stockholm, Sweden, to Polish Jews...
, is a biography of the author's father, Vladek Spiegelman, a
PolishPoland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
Jew and Holocaust survivor. It alternates between descriptions of Vladek's life in Poland before and during the
Second World WarWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
and Vladek's later life in the Rego Park neighborhood of
New York CityNew York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
. The work is a graphic narrative in which Jews are depicted as mice, while Germans are depicted as cats. It is the only comic book ever to have won a
Pulitzer PrizeThe Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established by American publisher Joseph Pulitzer and is administered by Columbia University in New York City...
.
The complete work was first published in two volumes: the first volume in 1986, and the second in 1991. In 1992, the work won a
Pulitzer Prize Special AwardThe Pulitzer Prize jury has the option of awarding special citations where they consider necessary.-Journalism awards:* 1924: A special prize of $1000 was awarded to the widow of Frank I. Cobb, New York World, in recognition of the distinction of her husband's editorial writing and service.* 1930:...
. In reporting the selection of
Maus for the honor,
The New York TimesThe New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
noted that "the Pulitzer board members ... found the cartoonist's depiction of
Nazi GermanyNazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
hard to classify."
Publication history
Maus (
GermanGerman is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
for 'Mouse') took thirteen years to complete. Spiegelman's first published version of
Maus was a three-page strip, printed in 1972 in
Funny Aminals, an underground comic published by Apex Novelties. In 1977, Spiegelman decided to lengthen the work, publishing most of the work serially in
RAWRAW was a comics anthology edited by Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly and published by Mouly from 1980 to 1991. It was a flagship publication of the 1980s alternative comics movement, serving as a more intellectual counterpoint to Robert Crumb's visceral Weirdo, which followed squarely in the...
magazine, a publication Spiegelman co-edited along with his wife
Françoise MoulyFrançoise Mouly is a Paris-born French artist and designer best known for her work with RAW, a showcase publication for cutting edge comic art, and as art editor of The New Yorker, a position she has held since 1993...
. It was then published in its final form in two parts (Volume I: "My Father Bleeds History" in 1986 and Volume II: "And Here My Troubles Began" in 1991), before eventually being integrated into a single volume.
Overview
Art Spiegelman, wanting to record his father's (Vladek Spiegelman) history as a graphic novel, conducts a series of interviews with him over several years. Vladek tells how German policy towards Jews slowly changed in the late 1930s, and how his well-to-do family came to suffer penury, persecution, and loss of life. Vladek tried to make the most of difficult situations in
RadomskoRadomsko is a town in central Poland with 50,618 inhabitants . It is situated on the Radomka river in the Łódź Voivodeship , having previously been in Piotrków Trybunalski Voivodeship . It is the capital of Radomsko County....
,
CzęstochowaCzęstochowa is a city in south Poland on the Warta River with 240,027 inhabitants . It has been situated in the Silesian Voivodeship since 1999, and was previously the capital of Częstochowa Voivodeship...
,
SosnowiecSosnowiec is a city in Zagłębie Dąbrowskie in southern Poland, near Katowice. It is one of the central districts of the Upper Silesian Metropolitan Union - a metropolis with a combined population of over two million people located in the Silesian Highlands, on the Brynica river .It is situated in...
, and
BielskoBielsko was until 1950 an independent town situated in Cieszyn Silesia, Poland. In 1951 it was joined with Biała Krakowska to form the new town of Bielsko-Biała. Bielsko constitutes the western part of that town....
. Eventually, he was sent to Auschwitz as a prisoner.
Between interviews, the novel records the contemporary (1970s-1980s) life of the Spiegelman family in the Rego Park neighborhood of
New York CityNew York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
. In particular, it depicts Vladek's difficult personality and Art's attempt to make sense of it. He is exceedingly stingy and makes life very difficult for his first wife Anja (Art's mother, a concentration camp survivor who committed suicide) and his second wife Mala (also a concentration camp survivor). Art contrasts the contemporary Vladek with the historical Vladek, whom he only knows indirectly through his research. He also points out that while Vladek was himself a victim of bigotry that he was known to hold bigoted views against
African AmericanAfrican Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have at least partial ancestry from any of the native populations of Sub-Saharan Africa and are the direct descendants of enslaved Africans within the boundaries of the present United States...
s and homosexuals himself. He comments about the difficulties of presenting Vladek's story accurately.
Use of animals
Throughout
Maus, Jews are represented as
miceA mouse is a small mammal belonging to the order of rodents. The best known mouse species is the common house mouse . It is also a popular pet. In some places, certain kinds of field mice are also common. This rodent is eaten by large birds such as hawks and eagles...
, while non-jewish
GermansThe Germans are a Germanic ethnic group native to Central Europe. The English term Germans has referred to the German-speaking population of the Holy Roman Empire since the Late Middle Ages....
are represented as
catThe cat , also known as the domestic cat or housecat to distinguish it from other felids and felines, is a small, usually furry, domesticated, carnivorous mammal that is valued by humans for its companionship and for its ability to hunt vermin and household pests...
s. Other animals are used to represent other nationalities, religions, and races. Almost all the characters of a single "nationality" were drawn identically, with only their clothing or other details helping to distinguish between them. In making people of a single nationality look "all alike", Spiegelman hoped to show the absurdity of dividing people by these lines. In a 1991 interview, Spiegelman noted that "these metaphors... are meant to self-destruct in my book — and I think they do self-destruct."
Impact
Since its publication,
Maus has been the subject of numerous essays. Deborah R. Geis published a collection of essays involving
Maus titled
Considering Maus
: Approaches to Art Spiegelman's "Survivor's Tale" of the Holocaust.
Alan MooreAlan Oswald Moore is an English writer primarily known for his work in comic books, a medium where he has produced a number of critically acclaimed and popular series, including Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and From Hell...
praised
Maus, saying "I have been convinced that Art Spiegelman is perhaps the single most important comic creator working within the field and in my opinion
Maus represents his most accomplished work to date."
Maus has also been studied in schools and universities. It is used in courses dedicated to the study of modern English literature, European History, and Jewish culture. It has been translated into 18 languages.
In 2008,
Entertainment WeeklyEntertainment Weekly is an American magazine, published by the Time division of Time Warner, that covers film, television, music, broadway theatre, books and popular culture...
listed
Maus as #7 on their list of
The New Classics: Books - The 100 best reads from 1983 to 2008, making it the highest ranking graphic narrative on the list.
Maus has been classified both as fiction and as history. When the second volume of Maus was published in hardcover, it made its way onto the
New York Times best-seller list in fiction. In a letter to the
New York Times Book Review Spiegelman disagreed with classifying it among fiction, writing, “I shudder to think how David Duke … would respond to seeing a carefully researched work based closely on my father’s memories of life in Hitler’s Europe and in the death camps classified as fiction.” One editor reportedly responded, “Let’s go out to Spiegelman’s house and if a giant mouse answers the door, we’ll move it to the nonfiction side of the list!” But the Times, following Pantheon (which had listed it as both history and memoir), ruled with Spiegelman.
Collected editions
The series has been collected into a number of
volumesIn comics, a trade paperback is a collection of stories originally published in comic books, reprinted in book format, usually capturing one story arc from a single title or a series of stories with a connected story arc or common theme from one or more titles...
published by companies like
Pantheon BooksPantheon Books is an American imprint with editorial independence that is part of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.The current editor-in-chief at Pantheon Books is Dan Frank.-Overview:...
:
| Volume |
Binding |
ISBN |
| Volume I |
paperback |
|
| hardcover |
|
| Volume II |
paperback |
|
| hardcover |
|
| Hardcover boxed set |
two-volume hardcover set with slipcase |
|
| Paperback boxed set |
two-volume paperback set with slipcase |
|
| Complete Maus |
paperback containing both volumes in one book |
|
| hardcover containing both volumes in one book |
|
In 1995, The Voyager Company released
The Complete Maus on
CD-RomA CD-ROM is a pre-pressed compact disc that contains data accessible to, but not writable by, a computer for data storage and music playback. The 1985 “Yellow Book” standard developed by Sony and Philips adapted the format to hold any form of binary data....
, a collection which, in addition to the comic itself, contained taped transcripts of Vladek, filmed interviews with Art, sketches etc.
In the fall of 2011,
Pantheon BooksPantheon Books is an American imprint with editorial independence that is part of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.The current editor-in-chief at Pantheon Books is Dan Frank.-Overview:...
published a companion to
The Complete Maus entitled
Meta Maus. It contains the explanation why Spiegelman wrote
Maus, why he chose certain animals, and how he was able to get his father to open up about his life and experiences. It features illustrations, photos, and a DVD that includes video footage of conversations and interviews with his father.
Awards and nominations
| Year |
Organisation |
Award |
Result |
| 1986 |
National Book Critics Circle The National Book Critics Circle is an American tax-exempt organization for active book reviewers. Its flagship is the National Book Critics Circle Award....
|
National Book Critics Circle Award The National Book Critics Circle Award is an annual award given by the National Book Critics Circle to promote the finest books and reviews published in English....
|
|
| 1988 |
Angoulême International Comics Festival Awards The Angoulême International Comics Festival is the largest comics festival in Europe. It has occurred every year since 1974 in Angoulême, France, in the month of January.The four-day festival is notable for awarding several prestigious prizes in cartooning...
|
Religious Award A variety of religious awards has been presented to comics at the Angoulême International Comics Festival between 1985 and 2003.-1980s:* 1985: Christian testimony award: Le transperceneige by Rochette and Jacques Lob, Casterman...
: Christian Testimony |
|
| Prize for Best Comic Book The Prize for Best Album , also known as the Golden Wildcat , is awarded to comics authors at the Angoulême International Comics Festival....
: Foreign Comic Award (Maus: un survivant raconte) |
|
| Urhunden Prize Urhunden Prizes have been given out each year by the Svenska Seriefrämjandet since 1987. There are three categories, Best Swedish Album of the Year , Best Foreign Album of the Year , and the "Unghunden" for best children's comics .The award is named after the comic strip "Urhunden" by...
|
Foreign Album |
|
| 1990 |
Max & Moritz Prizes The Max & Moritz Prize is a prize for comic books, comic strips, and other similar materials which has been awarded at each of the biennial International Comics Shows of Erlangen since 1984...
|
Special Prize |
|
| 1992 |
Pulitzer PrizeThe Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established by American publisher Joseph Pulitzer and is administered by Columbia University in New York City...
|
Special Awards and Citations - Letters The Pulitzer Prize jury has the option of awarding special citations where they consider necessary.-Journalism awards:* 1924: A special prize of $1000 was awarded to the widow of Frank I. Cobb, New York World, in recognition of the distinction of her husband's editorial writing and service.* 1930:...
|
|
| Eisner Award The Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, commonly shortened to the Eisner Awards, and sometimes referred to as the Oscar Awards of the Comics Industry, are prizes given for creative achievement in American comic books. The Eisner Awards were first conferred in 1988, created in response to the...
|
Best Graphic Album: Reprint (Maus II). |
|
| Harvey Award The Harvey Awards, named for writer-artist Harvey Kurtzman and founded by Gary Groth, President of the publisher Fantagraphics, are given for achievement in comic books. The Harveys were created as part of a successor to the Kirby Awards which were discontinued after 1987.The Harvey Awards are...
|
Best Graphic Album of Previously Published Work (Maus II) |
|
| National Book Critics Circle |
National Book Critics Circle Award |
|
| 1993 |
Los Angeles TimesThe Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
|
Book Prize for Fiction (Maus II, A Survivor's Tale) |
|
| Angoulême International Comics Festival Awards |
Prize for Best Comic Book: Foreign comic (Maus: un survivant raconte, part II). |
|
| Urhunden Prize |
Foreign Album (Maus II). |
|
External links