Art Spiegelman's Maus

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Art Spiegelman who hates the term graphic and always put his name in lower case in his books, wrote Maus in memory of his father. Maus is a story written by the son of two holocaust survivors, but more specifically about the father’s story and experiences during that time, and on the nature of the relationship between father and son. Maus is actually written as a comic book, rather than just a straight text, with the author, Art Spiegelman, using mice and other animals to represent the different nationalities and groups in the story. (Though, notably, the Jewish characters are always portrayed as mice.) Maus consists of two primary narratives: one that takes place in World War II Poland, and the other that takes place in late 1970s/early…show more content…
Like the panel which Germans smash the kid to the wall. The Holocaust as a Demonstration of Man's Brutal Nature The history of mankind is replete with episodes of mass destruction and killing. This century produced perhaps the greatest example of such atrocities, the Second World War. It was during this period of unexplainable brutality that both the Jewish Holocaust and the Nagasaki Bombing occurred. These awful events, discussed and regarded in a much different light half a century ago, are analyzed quite divergently now that mankind has had fifty years to ponder on its errors. Not only did millions of people perish during the Holocaust and immediately after the Nagasaki episode, but many more lost their lives some time afterwards, victims of physical deterioration, mental illness created by the tragic events, and depression brought upon by memories of the horrors. Anja Spiegelman is one such case. She found her demise twenty years after surviving the death camps, a victim of their memories. In a sense, she did not survive. Questions: 1. What are your thoughts on the use of animal’s heads and human
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