Genocide In Art Spiegelman's Maus

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In Germany and the countries of the third Reich during the Second World War, a genocide took place when the Nazi regime, as part of its final solution, under took a systemic murder of the Jewish people of Germany and Eastern Europe. In Maus, a graphic novel by Art Spiegelman, the effects of this terrible genocide can be seen. The graphic novel focuses on Vladek Spiegelman, a Polish Jew and survivor of the Holocaust. It tells the story of his pain and suffering and how that has affected his life after the war, especially his relationship with his son, Artie. In his novel, the author uses animals to represent his characters. Spiegelman uses mice to depict the Jewish people and cats to depict the Nazis. This is an analogy for the common “cat and mouse” relationship, in which the cats hunt the mice. Spiegelman chose to represent the Jews as mice not only because of the cat and mouse metaphor, but also as a historical reference to the …show more content…
The Nazis believed that Jews were a threat to the Aryan race. Just as mice are associated with filth and disease, so too were the Jews. This association can be traced back in history to the Black Death when infected rodents infested one third of the European population with the Black Death, which in turn killed them. The Nazis despised them and aimed to exterminate them just as one would exterminate mice, or pests. Throughout World War II, the Nazis posted propaganda posters of Jews portrayed as rats, the relative of the mouse. Spiegelman uses the analogy of the Jewish mice to bring attention to the Nazi ideology and its flaws. During World War II, the Nazi’s used the Jews as test subjects in live human experiments. Rats and Mice have been used throughout history to test and research different theories regarding a myriad of scientifically and physiological questions. Thus, Spiegelman’s analogy was an effective and powerful representation of Jewish people the Nazi
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