Timothy Nolan - The Complete Maus: Text Guide

insight text guide

Timothy Nolan

The Complete Maus

Art Spiegelman

Copyright Insight Publications

First published in 2013, reprinted 2014 (twice), 2015, 2016.

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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Nolan, Timothy, author.

Spiegelmans The complete maus / Timothy Nolan.

9781922243140 (paperback)

Insight text guide.

Includes bibliographical references.

For secondary school age.

Spiegelman, Art. Maus

Spiegelman, ArtCriticism and interpretation.

741.5973

Other ISBNs:

9781925175189 (digital)

9781925175516 (bundle: print + digital)

Cover design: The Modern Art Production Group

Printed in Australia.

contents

CHARACTER MAP

OVERVIEW

About the author

Art Spiegelman was born Itzhak Avraham ben Zeev on 15 February 1948 in Stockholm, Sweden. His parents, Vladek and Anja (nee Zylberberg) Spiegelman, were both survivors of the Jewish Holocaust of World War II (19391945). In 1951, when Art was three years old, the family moved to the United States.

Resisting his parents aspirations for him to become a dentist, Spiegelman started drawing cartoons at the age of twelve by imitating the style of Mad Magazine. As a teenager he was offered work with United Features Syndicate, a commercial comic-strip service, but he turned it down as he believed in art primarily as expression and not as a money-making enterprise. While studying art and philosophy at university, Spiegelman played a prominent role in the underground comix subculture of the 1960s and 1970s. He gained a reputation for being a philosophical and thoughtful artist, who advocated passionately and fervently for cartooning to be regarded as a serious art form. In his work, Spiegelman demonstrated that the graphic form could tell complex and dark stories just as effectively as the light-hearted and heroic stories for which comics had traditionally been known.

Spiegelman has spent much of his professional life providing opportunities for budding cartoonists to publish work and explore the medium. Together with his wife, notable artist and designer Franoise Mouly, Spiegelman founded RAW, a highly praised and celebrated avant-garde comics magazine, in 1980. He has also had a range of jobs in the comics industry. Between 1965 and 1987, Spiegelman was the creative consultant for Topps, an American manufacturer of chewing gum, candy and collectibles, best known for producing baseball cards. Between 1979 and 1986 he taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York. And between 1993 and 2003, he was a staff artist and writer for The New Yorker, where he became lauded as one of the periodicals most sensational artists.

Today, Spiegelman lives in New York City with his wife, with whom he has two children. He has won many awards and is regarded as a highly significant artist and writer. In 2006 he was named one of Times 100 Most Influential People, and in 2011 he was awarded the Grand Prix at the Angoulme International Comics Festival. Spiegelman and Mouly have co-edited three comic anthologies for children, called Big Fat Little Lit, and publish a series of childrens books presented in comic-book format, called Toon Books.

In order to differentiate between Art Spiegelman, the artist/author of Maus, and Artie, the character representation of Art Spiegelman in Maus, we will refer to the author as Spiegelman, and the character in the novel as Artie.

Synopsis

The story begins with a prologue, in which a boy, Artie, falls over while playing with friends. His father, Vladek, dismisses Arties distress, saying, Friends? If you lock them together in a room with no food for a week THEN you could see what it is, friends! (p.6, frame 5).

Part One begins in 1938. Vladek is a Polish Jewish man living in Czstochowa, a city in southern Poland. He works in the textile industry, making enough for a comfortable life. Vladek begins a relationship with a local woman called Lucia, who proposes to him. He refuses, and soon marries Anja Zylberberg, a Jewish woman from a wealthy family. Together, they live in the town of Sosnowiec. Vladek buys a textile factory in Bielsko with the financial assistance of Anjas father. Soon after, Anja and Vladek have a son named Richieu, and Anja falls into postnatal depression, resulting in her spending three months in a sanatorium.

The following year, 1939, the war begins and Vladek is drafted to fight against Germany. He is at the front for mere hours before he is captured and becomes a prisoner of war. Vladek is sent to a camp where he is made to work in cold and gruelling conditions. He is released under the pretence that he and his fellow prisoners will be returned home to Sosnowiec. Instead, Vladek gets taken to Lublin, in the German-occupied section of Poland, where he is placed in another prisoner-of-war camp. He manages to bribe the Germans to release him to a friend of his uncle, Orbach. With Orbachs assistance, Vladek poses as a non-Jewish Pole in order to get back across the border to Sosnowiec.

Once home, Vladek returns to his normal life with his family for a couple of years. Yet the persecution of Jews slowly increases throughout Poland, with stories circulating of Jews going missing, never seen again (p.77, frame 5). Strict curfews are put in place for the remaining Jews. Fear increases in Sosnowiec, as Germans close off streets and take large numbers of Jews away. Things get a little worse, a little worse (p.81, frame 1) day by day, with the Germans, or Aryan managers (p.78, frame 3), taking over Polish businesses and repossessing property simply because they can. Riots begin in the streets, and the Germans arrest, beat and deport Jews (presumably to the concentration camps) for no apparent reason.

In January 1942, all Jews in Sosnowiec are relocated to another German-occupied quarter of Poland, Stara Sosnowiec. This is a ghetto town, where Vladek and his family are made to live in much smaller dwellings. Jews are arrested and beaten for any supposed transgression, and hanged for dealing goods without coupons. One day, Jews are made to gather in their hundreds to be divided between those who will be sent away and those permitted to remain. It is here that the stories of Auschwitz begin to circulate among the Polish Jews.