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Impact of media in society
Impact of media in society
Impact of media in society
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Opening Line. Comics and cartoons have been using anthropomorphism as a literary device for decades. The Warner Brothers, Hanna-Barbera, and Disney have all produced numerous print and television media filled with walking, talking animals. While these colorful works are usually intended for children, anthropomorphism has made its way into the culture of comics, invading the adult-oriented publications, as well. Comic artist Art Spiegelman is known for creating one of the most famous examples of serious anthropomorphism in the history of comics: a Pulitzer prize-winning graphic novel entitled Maus, wherein a firsthand account of the Holocaust is told by Spiegelman’s father, Vladek, and illustrated within a metaphor of Jews as mice, Nazis as cats, Poles as pigs, and Americans as dogs. Art Spiegelman’s use of pictorial symbolism in Maus …show more content…
In the frontispiece of Maus II, Spiegelman included a quote taken from another 1930s anti-semitic German newspaper, which read: “Mickey Mouse is the most miserable ideal ever revealed. . . . Healthy emotions tell every independent young man and every honorable youth that the dirty and filth-covered vermin, the greatest bacteria carrier in the animal kingdom, cannot be the ideal type of animal. . . . Away with the Jewish brutalization of the people! Down with Mickey Mouse! Wear the Swastika Cross!” (The Complete Maus 164). This quote exhibits, once again, the German media’s obsession with associating so-called “undesirables: with rodents. The persistence of the Nazis at referring to the Jews as vermin manifested in reality when they used Zyklon B, a substance literally used to kill rats, as a method of committing genocide (Hammond, par. 7). Yet, despite its substantial impact on Spiegelman’s work, Nazi propaganda was not his sole influence. Other direct inspirations included Franz Kafka’s “Josephine the Singer, or
Kershaw later depicts a comment made by Hitler discussing the dire need to deport German Jews, away from the ‘Procterate,’ calling them “dangerous ‘fifth columnists’” that threatened the integrity of Germany. In 1941, Hitler discusses, more fervently his anger towards the Jews, claiming them to responsible for the deaths caused by the First World War: “this criminal race has the two million dead of the World War on its conscience…don’t anyone tell me we can’t send them into the marshes (Morast)!” (Kershaw 30). These recorded comments illustrate the deep rooted hatred and resentment Hitler held for the Jewish population that proved ultimately dangerous. Though these anti-Semitic remarks and beliefs existed among the entirety of the Nazi Political party, it didn’t become a nationwide prejudice until Hitler established such ideologies through the use of oral performance and
In Maus, Spiegelman shows how jews were being dehumanized by using mice to represent the Jews and cats to represent the Germans.Cats hunt and attack mice just like Germans killed and attacked many Jews. Like in Night, Spiegelman father went through the same thing, the Germans took Jews to Auschwitz, they took mostly kids some only two or three years old, “ The kids would scream and scream, so the Germans would swing them by the legs against a wall and they never screamed again.” (Spiegelman, 108). The Germans did not care if the Jew was a child they would still hurt them. The Jews would hide from Germans so they would not be taken away, “ A tunnel made from shoes! be prepared on a moments notice, everything was ready here so 15 or 16 people could hide.” (Spiegelman, 121).Just like mice hide to not get killed so did the Jews, they would hide from the Germans so they would not get hurt or killed. The Germans treated the Jews horribly, “ We knew the stories- they will gas us and throw us in the ovens.This was late 1944… we knew everything. And here we were.” (Spiegelman, 157) The Jews were scared because of all the bad stories they heard from others and their experience. The mice were not accepted by the Germans, they did not like them which is why the were seen as
Zusak’s portrayal of discrimination within the book delivered by the Nazis was shown to be extremely blatant and shameless, the author revealing and reinforcing the stereotypical German concept that the Jewish people were treated as bug-eyed cesspools...
According to Welch, “The public’s reaction to anti-Semitic films reveals that propaganda had considerable success in persuading the population that a Jewish ‘problem’ existed, but equally that there was a limit to their tolerance of the type of virulently anti-Semitic propaganda to be found in films like Der Ewige Jude and publications like Der Stuermer.” Even after years of Nazi propaganda, even Goebbels wasn’t convinced that “such propaganda had persuaded Germans to condone open violence against
The format of "Maus" is an effective way of telling a Holocaust narrative because it gives Art Spiegelman the chance to expresses his father's story without disrespecting him at the same time. It shows this through its comic book style drawings on a topic that is difficult to explain. With the illustrations throughout the story, it shows the true meaning of a picture is worth a thousand words. Compared to any other type of Holocaust book, it would be hard for a person who did not go through the Holocaust to understand what was taking place during that time.
Firstly, there were many incidents where the Jewish people were trying to escape the Germans, and so they had to hide their identities. The author represented this disguise by drawing cat masks on his mouse characters (MAUS 1 page 136). These thin masks symbolized how easily they could have been recognized and caught; thus it accurately details how dire the situation was for those who were in hiding. It also helped the reader consciously think about who the oppressor and the oppressed is. Secondly, the animals that represented each race, accurately symbolized what role they played in the events of the Shoah. The Jewish people were represented by a vulnerable animal, mice, and were hunted down by the German people, who were the cats. The Polish people were represented as pigs, because they often sold out the Jewish people (i.e., page 143 MAUS 1). The Americans were drawn as dogs, because they chased cats, and sympathized with the mice. The author’s choice to use mice as the representation of the Jewish people is multifold. The Nazi’s themselves negatively propagated the Jewish people as the “vermin of mankind” who “infected” society. They were treated as subhuman, caged like animals, and forced to live in ghettos where they would be swarming in tight quarters. Its as if the perpetrators, in this symbolic imagery, were
In Maus, Art Spiegelman does not make any apologies about what he includes or leaves out from his story. Maus is not meant to be a story that encompasses World War II or the Holocaust, but rather, a story about the life of his father, Vladek Spiegelman:
The Maus series of books tell a very powerful story about one man’s experience in the Holocaust. They do not tell the story in the conventional novel fashion. Instead, the books take on an approach that uses comic windows as a method of conveying the story. One of the most controversial aspects of this method was the use of animals to portray different races of people. The use of animals as human races shows the reader the ideas of the Holocaust a lot more forcefully than simply using humans as the characters.
For thousands of years, the Jewish People have endured negative stereotypes such as the "insects of humanity." As Sander Gilman pointed out, the Nazi Party labeled Jews as "insects like lice and cockroaches, that generate general disgust among all humanity" (Gilman 80).1 These derogative stereotypes, although championed by the Nazis, have their origins many centuries earlier and have appeared throughout Western culture for thousands of years. This fierce anti-Semitism specifically surfaced in Europe’s large cities in the early twentieth century, partially in conjunction with the growing tide of nationalism, patriotism, and xenophobia that sparked the First World War in 1914. Today, one often learns the history of this critical, pre-WWI era from the perspective of Europe’s anti-Semitic population, while the opposite perspective—that of the Jews in early twentieth-century European society—is largely ignored. Questions like: "How did the Jews view and respond to their mistreatment?" and "How were the Jews affected mentally and psychologically by the prejudices against them?" remain largely unanswered. Insight into these perplexing social questions, while not found in most history books, may be discovered in a complex and highly symbolic story of this era: "The Metamorphosis" by Franz Kafka. Through the use of an extended metaphor, "The Metamorphosis" provides both a basic summary of the common views held against Jews and offers an insight as to what may be the ultimate result of Europe’s anti-Semitism. This work serves as a social commentary and criticism of early twentieth-century Europe. It fulfills two main functions: first, it provides an outline of the s...
The author illustrated his characters as different types of animals where in the Jews are represented as mice and the Germans as cats. This representation proposes how the Jews facing the Nazis are as helpless as a mouse caught by a cat. The first part for instance, is introduced by a quotation from Hitler in which he deprives the Jewish race of human qualities by reducing them to a mere vermin: “The Jews are undoubtedly a race but they are not human: (Spiegelman I, 4).
By means of comic illustration and parody, Art Spiegelman wrote a graphic novel about the lives of his parents, Vladek and Anja, before and during the Holocaust. Spiegelman’s Maus Volumes I and II delves into the emotional struggle he faced as a result of his father’s failure to recover from the trauma he suffered during the Holocaust. In the novel, Vladek’s inability to cope with the horrors he faced while imprisoned, along with his wife’s tragic death, causes him to become emotionally detached from his son, Art. Consequently, Vladek hinders Art’s emotional growth. However, Art overcomes the emotional trauma his father instilled in him through his writing.
First, Art Spiegelman represents humans as animals to show how the Nazis categorized the world by race which is of historical importance to the Holocaust narrative. In Book II, pg. 11, panel 1, Art drew a sketch of different animals to represent characters for his father’s story. In Maus, each animal represents a different community. As an example, mice portrayed Jews, cats represented the German Nazis and pigs represented the Polish. With this representation in mind, the choice of Jews drawn as mice demonstrated that the Nazis view of them as vermin. According to the Nazis, the Jews were pests because they were everywhere and acted secretly to harm the Germans. In addition, Jews were portrayed in Nazi propaganda as sneaky people who would steal your food and money. For these reasons, the author chose to represent the Jewish community as mice in order to show the Nazis point of view at that time. Additionally, the symbolism of the cats as predators and the mice as prey is depicted. Overall, mice symbolize victims because they can’t defend themselves.
When reading a traditional book, it is up to the reader to imagine the faces and landscapes that are described within. A well written story will describe the images clearly so that you can easily picture the details. In Art Spiegelman’s The Complete Maus, the use of the animals in place of the humans offers a rather comical view in its simplistic relation to the subject and at the same time develops a cryptic mood within the story. His drawings of living conditions in Auschwitz; expressions on the faces of people enduring torture, starvation, and despair; his experience with the mental institution and his mother’s suicide; and occasional snapshots of certain individuals, create a new dynamic between book and reader. By using the form of the graphic novel, Art Spiegelman created a narrative accompanied by pictures instead of needing to use immense worded detail.
Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus unfolds the story about his father Vladek Spiegleman, and his life during the WWII. Since Vladek and Art are both the narrators of the story, the story not only focuses on Vladek's survival, but also the writing process and the organization of the book itself. Through these two narrators, the book explores various themes such as identity, perspective, survival and guilt. More specifically, Maus suggests that surviving an atrocity results in survivor’s guilt, which wrecks one’s everyday life and their relationships with those around them. It accomplishes this through symbolism and through characterization of Vladek and Anja.
The books Maus I and Maus II, written by Art Spiegelman over a thirteen-year period from 1978-1991, are books that on the surface are written about the Holocaust. The books specifically relate to the author’s father’s experiences pre and post-war as well as his experiences in Auschwitz. The book also explores the author’s very complex relationship between himself and his father, and how the Holocaust further complicates this relationship. On a deeper level the book also dances around the idea of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders. The two books are presented in a very interesting way; they are shown in comic form, which provides the ability for Spiegelman to incorporate numerous ideas and complexities to his work.