Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History in 100+ Books in 2025

Mar 24, 2012 Manda rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

"The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human"- Adolf Hitler. Before I even began reading the small but articulate Maus, I looked at this quote that Spiegelman decided to incorporate instead of a dedication. And I can't think or really perceive what I feel about it. I don't want to say much on the subject, and I don't want to mumble about Hitler. But it's a terrible feat to live in a world where someone such as himself did or to think that this could happen again. The Holocaust is a Maus

"The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human"- Adolf Hitler. Before I even began reading the small but articulate Maus, I looked at this quote that Spiegelman decided to incorporate instead of a dedication. And I can't think or really perceive what I feel about it. I don't want to say much on the subject, and I don't want to mumble about Hitler. But it's a terrible feat to live in a world where someone such as himself did or to think that this could happen again. The Holocaust is a very repetitive and overwhelming subject but I shouldn't call it a subject. I shouldn't call it an event, I shouldn't call it a period of time. It's a disgrace, and he's a terrible person.
What I loved about Spiegelman's work is that he left in his father's grammatical touch. The words are in broken-down smidgy English and it's a warming feeling. Although finding the novel in a teenage graphical section sort of made me wonder who will appreciate it. Who will see it as another account of death and despair or who will look at it's tiny details.
Here's the breakdown:
The cat's are the Nazi officials and the Germans. The Jewish are the mice and the Germans who help the Jewish are the pigs. Easy pick and choose, frankly Spiegleman may of just chosen them at random. But again here's the easy translation of what we would normally perceive it as. Cats chase mice and they like to nibble on their fragile skeletons. Mice are small and they take chances when they run, run from humans, run from everything that is huge. What I found to be refined would be that Spiegelman's father could be seen with the mask of the cat, being taken for German. This is not a hard book to understand and it shouldn't be. It's a critical take on an unbearable situation, with images. Frankly at some points (it's not very long) but I felt like I was holding a typical picture book. No, it's not a picture book, I'd rather refer to it as a comic or graphic novel because it's sophisticated.
It's just very different, and I am so glad Spiegelman decided to write about his father. Beauty of a story teller.
Maus