by Corry Shores
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[Unless otherwise indicated, all boldface and underlining are my own, and I include the speaker names “Chute” and “Spiegelman” for clarity. You will find typos and other transcription errors, so please consult the original text.]
Selected quotations from
MetaMaus
“Why Mice?”
Selected quotations
“So… how did you come across the idea of drawing mice, anyway?”
AH, mice…
My first thought, to do something in the mode of an old EC horror comic like Tales from the Crypt, was kind of a bust. I wanted to do something in that melodramatic pulp illustration mode, complete with venetian blind shadows, but with animal face in which the dénouement would have the protagonist getting crushed to death by a giant mousetrap that snaps shut on his body. I made some sketches but I was floundering when I went into a class that I’d been sitting in on at Harpur College (SUNY Binghamton), the school that had justifiably kicked me out a couple of years earlier (but granted me an Honorary Doctorate in 1995). A filmmaker I had become close friends with, Ken Jacobs, was teaching an introduction to cinema class. On this particular day, Ken showed a bunch of old racist animated cartoons from the silent and early sound era. The blacks were cheerfully represented as subhuman, monekylike creatures with giant minstrel lips – stereotypes stealing chickens, stealing watermelons, playing dice, all singin’ & dancin’, just the daily stock in trade of our racist cartoon heritage. In the same session he showed typical old Farmer Gray cartoons – animals frolicking on a farm, stuff like that, and I think he might have even shown “Steamboat Willie” – the first sound cartoon by Walt Disney. “Steamboat Willie” had come right in the wake of The Jazz Singer and essentially what we’re looking at here is a jazzy Mickey Mouse – not the suburban and staid Mickey Mouse of later decades. He was a jazz age wiseguy – Al Jolson with large round circles on top of his head – and it all led me to my Eureka moment: the notion that I could do a strip about the black experience in America, using an animated cartoon style. I could draw Ku Klux Katz and an underground railroad and some story about racism in America. [112|113] That seemed really exciting for a couple for days until I realized that it could be received as one more example of the trope that Crumb had consistently mined with Angelfood McSpade and other willful racist caricatures: the return of the repressed – all that insulting imagery that had been flushed out of the mainstream culture but existed in the back of everybody’s lizard brain – now brought back in a kind of Lenny Bruce “Is there any body I haven’t insulted yet?” spirit, with the hope that if you say the word “nigger” over and over again, you remove its sting. I had actually drawn some excruciatingly clumsy and embarrassing comics emulating Crumb while looking for my own voice as an underground cartoonist, and it would have been very easy for my notion to come off as one more racist “parody” even if I did bring in Ku Klux Kats and worked with honorable intent. It just felt problematic.
After my self-excoriating doubts settled in, I realized that this cat-mouse metaphor of oppression could actually apply to my more immediate experience. This development took me by surprise – my own childhood was not a subject for me. I hadn’t been thinking about that at all, and my knowledge of what had happened in Hitler’s Germany was actually very modest – and it wasn’t clear to me then that there were echoes and precursors for this kind of imagery of Jews as vermin built into the Nazi project itself. The image of Jews as defenseless scurrying creatures was in thre somewhere – I’d read Kafka’s [113|114] “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk,” but I don’t think I’d even focused on it specifically as a metaphor for the Jewish people back then. It was just one more Kafka fable I’d absorbed. But I did realize that if I shifted from Ku Klux Kats and anthropomorphized “darkies” to the terrain I was more viscerally affected by, the Nazis chasing Jews as they had in my childhood nightmares, I was on to something. It became my three-page contribution to Funny Animals.
Chute:
You’ve said that Hitler was your collaborator on Maus. When did you become aware of the history of anti-Semitic caricature and stereotypes in creating your animals?
Spiegelman:
I began to read what I could about the Nazi genocide, which really was very easy because there was actually rather little available in English. So I did what research I could through interlibrary loans [114|115] and remembered some anecdotes from my father’s life and began to transpose it into this animal form. The most shockingly relevant anti-Semitic work I found was The Eternal Jew, a 1940 German “documentary” that portrayed Jews in a ghetto swarming in tight quarters, bearded caftaned creatures, and then a cut to Jews as mice – or rather rats – swarming in a sewer, with a title card that said “Jews are the rats” or the “vermin of mankind.” This made it clear to me that this dehumanization was at the very heart of the killing project.
In fact, Zyklon B, the gas used in Auschwitz and elsewhere as the killing agent, was a pesticide manufactured to kill vermin like fleas and roaches. “Genocide” is a term that was invented after World War II to refer specifically to what had happened to the Jews because there was no label for that scale of crime: trying to kill an entire ethnic group. To accomplish that required totally dehumanizing one’s neighbors – one murders people; one commits genocide on subhumans. I remember reading that most aboriginal tribes’ name for themselves was synonymous with “the humans.” In Rwanda, for example, Hutus referred to Tutsis as cockroaches.
Dehumanization is just basic to the whole killing project – America demonized the Japanese during World War II (it’s what primed us for dropping the bomb on Hiroshima) and the Abu Ghraib torture photos suggest that the beat goes on. The idea of Jews as toxic, as disease carriers, as dangerous subhuman creatures, was a necessary prerequisite for killing my family. [115|116]
As I began to do more detailed and more finely grained research for the longer Maus project, I found how regularly Jews were represented literally as rats. Caricatures by Fips (the pen name of Philippe Rupprecht) filled the pages of Der Stürmer: a grubby, swarthy, Jewish apelike creatures in one drawing, ratlike creatures in the next. Posters of killing the vermin and making them flee were part of the overarching metaphor. It’s amazing how often the image still comes up in anti-Semitic cartoons in Arab countries today. [116. The following question on this page is skipped, along with the other material up to page 118.]
Chute:
How did you decide to draw cats specifically and create the cat/mouse metaphor?
Spiegelman:
Chute:
Spiegelman:
If I think of Hitler as my collaborator, in his plan for the Thousand Year Reich, the Slavic races, including the Poles, were not meant to be exterminated like the Jews but rather worked to death. They were slated to be the master race’s work force [121|122] of slaves. In my bestiary, pigs on a farm are used for meat. You raise them, you kill them, you eat them. If you have mice or rats on the farm, there’s only one thing to do which is kill them before they eat all your grain. So my metaphor was somehow able to hold that particular vantage point while still somehow acknowledging my father’s dubious opinion of Poles as a group.
There’s one page, 138, in which the central image – the large image on the lower left – shows Vladek and Anja disguised as Poles by wearing Woolworth-like pig masks over their more convincing mouse masks. Anja’s seen with a long rat tail hanging out because it wasn’t as easy for her with her Semitic features to pass for Polish as it might have been for Vladek.
Chute:
Spiegelman:
But dogs were easy; it’s almost the Family Feud answer to what animals come to mind and how do you perceive them. The dogs were heroic vanquisher of cats, so there was that. besides, as soon as you’re a cartoonist drawing a dog, you’ve got lots of different kinds of dogs to draw. You’ve got Collies and Dachshunds and Cocker Spaniels and Chihuahuas and their [129|130] species or sub-species are much more clearly delineated than cats, even though cat fanciers will say otherwise. Here, the fact that there were so many possible dogs got me to actually verbalize to myself: “Oh, I get it. Americans are a mongrel race, a bunch of mutts.” Bill Mauldin’s panel cartoons of Willie and Joe – the “dogfaces” of World War II as GIs were called – came to mind as soon as I started trying to figure out what it might mean to draw a dog in an army uniform.
Chute:
Spiegelman:
In a way I started reaching for the absurd to make sure one didn’t take the ruling metaphor at, um, “face” value. When Vladek looks for Anja after the war, he goes to a large displaced persons center at Belsen. The British are in charge of that camp. I guess I could have avoided the whole issue since they just appear in the mise-en-scène for a panel or two, but I decided to give the Brits a walk-on part – or, as it finally resolved itself, a swim-on part. I thought about fish and chips, an island culture, fish out of water. All those things just seemed to lead me toward drawing fish without bicycles but with jeeps.
It echoed some panels in the first book when I first realized there are more than just Poles, Germans, and Jews in the world. When Vladek accompanies Anja to a sanatorium, there are other animals there. There was a goat, rabbits, reindeers [130|131] or moose … I don’t know, I think there was a giraffe in the background. It illustrated the possibility of that peaceable kingdom of different animals living side by side.
I vividly remember drawing the sequence where my mother went to see a fortune-teller – I was in a small cabin, deep in the woods of Connecticut that summer. I prefer to work at night when I can, and these giant moths kept flinging themselves against the glass, trying to get in. Most of them looked like casting calls for Mothra. They were insane and enormous. I got really fascinated by what their faces looked like. And it was at precisely the moment I was trying to figure out how to draw the gypsy, so it was preordained that I’d use gypsy moths.
After the war, Vladek went to Poland, and from Poland to Sweden as a displaced person with Anja. Sweden was quite welcoming to refugees after the war. I thought of the Swedes as somehow far outside the loop of my Eastern European narrative and finding an animal so totally out of the scale with mice, cats, and mutts – those large galumphing and gentle reindeer – struck me as amusing.
There’s a point in the later part of the book (page 291) where, after they are free of their captors, Vladek and his friend, Shivek, go to visit Shivek’s brother in Hannover. Vladek said that they had kids, and the brother, who is Jewish, was kept safe by his wife during the war. This was definitely a mixed marriage, so in my book that meant a cat and a mouse coupling. One of the many problems wit visualizing Hitler’s racist thinking by casting groups as different specie, is that different species cannot, of course, reproduce. In fact, Nazi propaganda often depicted the Jew as the wicked seducer of German maidenhod, defiling the Aryan race. So here a Jew and a German have kids. At first I didn’t know quite what to do, but drawing some creature that looked like something in [p131|132] between a cat and a mouse highlighted the speciousness of demarcating groups of people as separate species.
Chute:
Spiegelman:
Chute:
Spiegelman:
It has become sort of a given that one of the badges of Jewish identity is pride in one’s lox and bagels, and the other given is the fact that they tried to wipe us out and, by God, it’ll never happen again! The problem for me is that I have an uncomfortable relationship with all this, because the only parts of Jewishness that I can embrace easily are the parts that are unembraceable. In other words, I am happy being a rootless cosmopolitan, alienated in most environments that I fall into. And I’m proud of being somebody who synthesized different kinds of culture – it is a fundamental aspect of the Diaspora Jew. I’m uneasy with the notion of the Jew as fighting machine, the two-fisted Israeli. I’m a wimp. But I must insist, as Woody Allen once put it, “I’m not a self-hating Jew. I just hate myself!”
Chute:
Spiegelman:
When he told me that anecdote, he certainly wasn’t thinking about me telling his story with animal surrogates – but I instantly knew this would become a key page in the story. I worked hard to make the transition between human/mouse and animal/dog as clear as I could. My father describes how “the dog rolled around and around, kicking before he lay quiet,” and that is worked out visually as a roll across the page. I didn’t try to present it cinematically, which would have been a bit corny, but I took advantage of the way the eye assimilates a page; it was analogous to showing a human rolling around, fading into a dog rolling around, and fading back into a human as it does.
Chute:
My father told me this anecdote two or three times. And one of the things I kept trying to figure out was how not to queer my representational system and deal with what he was telling me. At first I assumed [134|135] I should just show him talking in the present so it wouldn’t bring “the rat thing” too much to the foreground. The fact that Vladek and Art are mice – you just don’t notice that anymore – and they’re just conversing. For a moment I figured, “Maybe I can turn the rat into cockroaches or spiders or something else lower on the evolutionary scale!” but that was totally dumb, even if it did feel like the only way to keep my conceit from collapsing.
What came to the rescue was my comic book reading as a kid, especially Carl Barks’ Donald Duck. In that whole universe of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck comics, one is expected to embrace the ducks and Mickey Mouse as human, but accept that Mickey has a pet dog, Pluto, as well as a pal named Goofy. They’re both dogs. And it really was almost like a Zen koan for me as a kid: does a dog have a Goofy nature? And Donald Duck with his nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louie, would go off to Grandma Duck’s farm for turkey dinner on Thanksgiving and Christmas – it was kind of horrifying to me, but a useful literary reference point when I had to solve that particular piece of my father’s story. So the whole page was build around showing as “rodentized” a rat as possible, showing Vladek and Anja on a page anchored by as unpleasant a rat as I could draw.
I should also point out that once I chose mice, I was sure that some Nazi somewhere would mutter, “Yeah, Spiegelman is just trying to whitewash the Jewish people. They’re not mice – they’re rats!” I think it’s implicit in the choices I made – like that page where Anja’s tail is so jarringly ratlike. Here’s one place where the rodent is made very clearly ratlike to call their disguise masks into question, even if you’d managed to fall into the dream state all narrative provides. [135, skipping the next question on the page and following pages up to the second question on p.145]
Chute:
Spiegelman:
Chute:
Spiegelman:
Chute:
Spiegelman:
Chute:
Spiegelman:
Chute:
Spiegelman:
Chute:
Spiegelman:
I still puzzle over what fiction and nonfiction really are. Reality is too complex to be threaded out into the narrow channels and confines of narrative and Maus, like all other narrative work including memoir, biography, and history presented in narrative form, is streamlined and, at least on that level, a fiction. There are fictions that usefully steer you back directly to reality and fictions that beckon you off into the author’s dream life [150|151] and only reflect back onto events obliquely. I figured that Maus belonged on the nonfiction side of the Times’ system of divvying up books. Still, when Maus was offered an award by the L.A. Times for best work of fiction in 1992, my editor convinced me to shut up and accept it gratefully. [151, skipping the next question, to p.153]
Chute:
Spiegelman:
I’m talking a little bit past my pay grade here, but it seems to me that the ways the Holocaust has been mythologized and used in Israel are different than the ways it gets mythologized and used in America. Perhaps it’s because I don’t show Vladek as a more heroic character, perhaps it’s because of the implied insult in using rodents for humans, perhaps it’s because Israel doesn’t figure in the work, or maybe it’s just because they have a surfeit of their own Holocaust narratives and comics have been alien to them till the day before yesterday.
One change I had to make in the first Israeli volume is worth noting. I had to agree to redraw Pesach Spiegelman’s hat as a fedora and not refer to him, as Vladek had, as a Jewish policeman on pages 121 and 126 of Maus. Though under Haskel’s protection in the ghetto, he evidently wasn’t a member of the Nazi-installed Jewish police like Haskel. Menachem, Pesach’s son (who was adopted by Haskel after they both survived the war), lives in Israel and threatened to sue the publisher for libel. Being called a Jewish policeman collaborating with the Nazis is no small change. Pesach died during the war, but only in Germany and Israel, interestingly, do libel laws extend past the grave.
So I begrudgingly changed Pesach’s hat, indicated that Pesach was Haskel’s older brother (not, as Vladek misremembered, his younger one), corrected Pesach’s wife’s name to Bluma (I had arbitrarily called her Rifka, needing a first name in one balloon), and appended an author’s note at the end of the volume summarizing Menachem’s understanding of the past, including the fact that Haskel was cleared of war crimes charges in a postwar trial in Poland. I wrote that I had made minor revisions in my art and text but found them [the following is blockquoted. Brackets around “Vladek’s” below are Spiegelman’s]
an intrusion into the process of trying to visualize and inhabit my father’s specific memory and understanding of what happened. That process is indeed the story inside of Maus… What is being portrayed is, specifically, his [Vladek’s] story, based on his memories. the kind of reconstruction is fraught with dangers. My father could only remember/understand a part of what he lived through. He could only tell a part of that. I, in turn, could only understand a part of what he was [154|155] able to tell, and could only communicate a part of that. What remains are ghosts of ghosts, standing on the fragile foundations of memory. The issue of memory is central to the sequel to Maus that I’m currently working on: From Mauswitz to the Catskills and Beyond…
I did consider incorporating my cousin’s competing memories of Haskel and Pesach into what became the second volume of Maus but just couldn’t find a way to do it. [153, Skipping next question and all the remaining ones in this chapter.]
Spiegelman, Art [with Hillary Chute (interviewer)]. MetaMaus. New York: Pantheon/Random House, 2011.
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