Leonard Gaya's Reviews > The Complete Maus
The Complete Maus
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The young Adolf Hitler applied twice for admission to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and each time was rejected. One may dream, though: had he been successful, he might have had a different fate, and, as a result, Europe’s history might have taken some other shape… Sixty years later, on another continent, the young Art Spiegelman applied to the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan and passed the exam. His parents, Vladek and Anja Spiegelman, were two Jews from Poland who survived through the Nazi ghetto of Sosnowiec and the extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Maus, a massive graphic novel, thirteen years in the making, depicts the complicated relationship between Art and his father, the very process of creating Maus, and, in an interlocked way, Vladek’s experience, living in Poland during the rise and fall of the Third Reich.
In those days, Hollywood was producing some of its most celebrated films, and Mickey Mouse was quickly becoming the cutest little mascot on the silver screen. At that very same moment, the Allied troops carried movie cameras into the concentration camps. The films that remain from that time —the ones shown during the Nuremberg trial — are tough to watch, haunting, almost impossible to put into words. Art Spiegelman has managed to blend both pictures (Disney and the Red Army file footage) poetically, through flat, condensed and straightforward drawings. His old father, a bit soft in the head and speaking in a funny broken English, provides a deeply personal, honest, at times slightly Kafkaesque or Chaplinesque account of these dreadful years, of that constant fear and deprivation, such that we could make some sense of this inhuman, world-changing experience.
There’s a quote by Samuel Beckett somewhere in this book: “Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness”. This visual masterpiece is a refutation of this sentence. And it has left me both moved and dumbfounded.
Edit: Watched Roman Polanski's film The Pianist, based on Wladyslaw Szpilman’s harrowing experience, during the war, in the Warsaw Ghetto. Both Maus and Polanski’s movie share this sense of gradually rising horror and convey the same utter stupefaction.
In those days, Hollywood was producing some of its most celebrated films, and Mickey Mouse was quickly becoming the cutest little mascot on the silver screen. At that very same moment, the Allied troops carried movie cameras into the concentration camps. The films that remain from that time —the ones shown during the Nuremberg trial — are tough to watch, haunting, almost impossible to put into words. Art Spiegelman has managed to blend both pictures (Disney and the Red Army file footage) poetically, through flat, condensed and straightforward drawings. His old father, a bit soft in the head and speaking in a funny broken English, provides a deeply personal, honest, at times slightly Kafkaesque or Chaplinesque account of these dreadful years, of that constant fear and deprivation, such that we could make some sense of this inhuman, world-changing experience.
There’s a quote by Samuel Beckett somewhere in this book: “Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness”. This visual masterpiece is a refutation of this sentence. And it has left me both moved and dumbfounded.
Edit: Watched Roman Polanski's film The Pianist, based on Wladyslaw Szpilman’s harrowing experience, during the war, in the Warsaw Ghetto. Both Maus and Polanski’s movie share this sense of gradually rising horror and convey the same utter stupefaction.
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