Anthropomorphism In Art Spiegelman

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

is simultaneously an extremely deliberate metaphor for the Holocaust and an astute commentary on anti-semitic culture itself.
The specific decision to depict Jews as mice is deeply rooted in the anti-semitism of Nazi Germany. Some of Spiegelman’s predominant influences were works of actual Nazi propaganda referring to Jews as “vermin” (MetaMaus 115). One example of this propaganda is the infamous Nazi film The Eternal Jew, which likened a Jewish ghetto to a swarm of rats (MetaMaus 115). Other examples filled the pages of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer, in which “anti-Semitic broadsheets and editorial cartoons depicting Jews as hook-nosed, beady-eyed Untermenschen, creatures whose ferret faces and rodent snouts marked them as human vermin” (“Revenge of the Maus,” par. 3). Spiegelman was particularly struck by Philippe Ruprecht’s contributions to Der Stürmer: horrific Jewish caricatures that somehow appear to be both rodent-like and monstrous at once (MetaMaus 116).

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

the Mouse Folk” in addition to cartoons of the new comics school, such as Mad Comics' "Mickey Rodent" and the strips of Robert Crumb (MetaMaus 113-114; Hammond, par. 10). Nevertheless, with Nazi Germany as his principal muse, Spiegelman initially feared that other modern Jews would be offended by the reference to Nazi propaganda or by a perceived insinuation that Jews are in reality “pathetic” or “defenseless;” fortunately, reception from the Jewish community turned out to be largely positive (MetaMaus 125). As explained in a review of Maus by The Wilson Quarterly, “Spiegelman’s anthropomorphized mice carry traces of Der Stürmer’s anti-Semitic Jew-as-rat cartoons, the artist himself has said, ‘but by being particularized they are invested with personhood; they stand upright and affirm their humanity’” (“Revenge of the Maus,” par. 3). Yet, while the Jewish mice may stand tall on their own, they seem to shrink in the presence of their captors: the German cats.
The use of mice as Jews is based upon Nazi precedent, but Spiegelman’s use of cats as Nazis is an only slightly more original concept. Cats and mice seem to go along together in the American media, especially in the cartoons that Spiegelman grew up watching, such as Tom and Jerry (MetaMaus 118). Spiegelman set his work apart, however, by equalizing the sizes of the cats and mice in order to use a more overt mask metaphor (MetaMaus 118). This decision necessitated historical accuracy, so Spiegelman also changed more generalized, sugarcoated aspects from the original, three page “Maus” to align with reality - for example, he changed a reference to a “kitty litter factory” into the actuality of a shoe factory (MetaMaus 118). Interestingly, there are those who object to Spiegelman’s use of cats as Nazis because cats are more well-liked than either mice or pigs, thus softening the actions of the Nazis themselves. Yet this, too, is an intentional measure on Spiegelman’s behalf to make the readers almost complicit with the murders, insofar as they would rather be a cat than a mouse or a pig (MetaMaus 128).
In addition to the core metaphor of cats and mice, Spiegelman was faced with the task of portraying characters other than Jews and Nazis, such as the Christian Poles, who played an undeniably crucial role in Vladek’s story. As Spiegelman elaborates, “I couldn’t make Poles mice and I couldn’t make them cats . . . Poles suffered terribly under the Nazis, but they were also often victimizers of Jews . . . In earlier centuries, the Poles were the Jews’ salvation, so I wasn’t necessarily trying to find a pejorative - but trying to find an animal outside of the cat-mouse food chain” (MetaMaus 121). Spiegelman looked to his “animated cartoon lexicon,” which included some endearing depictions of pigs, such as Porky Pig from the Looney Tunes and Wilbur from Charlotte’s Web; he was intrigued by, as he puts it, “the dualities of piggy/swine and mousie/rodent, ” which he also credited to George Orwell’s Animal Farm (MetaMaus 121). Spiegelman believes that Hitler had altogether different intentions for the Polish and the Jews. The Polish, along with other Slavic races, were to be worked to death, while the Jews had no other purpose but to be exterminated; similarly, pigs on a farm have the purpose of being raised and slaughtered for meat, while rodents serve no purpose and therefore must be killed before they destroy the food stores (MetaMaus 122). Still, although the Jews and the Poles both suffered greatly at the hands of Hitler, who referred to the Jews as vermin and the Poles as swine, Spiegelman was not entirely unaware of the implications of using a non-kosher animal to illustrate the pervasive anti-semitism of the Poles (MetaMaus 125). Thus, when Maus was finally released in Polish, it received a mixed reaction: the Poles who expressed great offense and those who were eager to read it for themselves (MetaMaus 123-124). However, the Poles characters were not the only ones who needed to be drawn as something other than a cat or a mouse.
Spiegelman encountered various other groups of people throughout his father’s story, forcing him to create a menagerie of corresponding animals. Dogs were used to depict Americans because dogs are known to chase cats and, analogously, America is known to have helped orchestrate the defeat Nazi Germany. American infantrymen themselves were often referred to as “dogfaces” during the war due to their notoriously stubborn and optimistic attitudes (MetaMaus 129-130). Additionally, Spiegelman was able to use different breeds of dogs in order to represent the ethnic diversity of America. British soldiers make an appearance in Maus, as well, in which they are drawn as fish (The Complete Maus 291). According to Spiegelman, the British could be pictured as fish because of both their island culture and their “fish out of water” presence in the displaced persons camps Vladek visited (MetaMaus 130). The gypsy’s appearance as a moth occurred simply because he was intrigued by several large moths outside of his window as he was sketching the sequence (MetaMaus 131). Swedes were pictured as large reindeer because they were almost entirely outside of the narrative of the story, and Spiegelman hoped to emphasize the massive disparity (MetaMaus 131). Altogether, the British fish, Romani moths, and Swedish reindeer were somewhat absurd for the purpose of ensuring that readers were not compelled to take the ruling metaphor at face value (MetaMaus 130). Transition.
At some points, the metaphor within Maus intentionally falls apart. This metaphorical breakdown serves to indicate the arbitrary of relegating groups of people into separate species. For example, Spiegelman was confronted with the question of how to draw the child of a German and a Jew, which he answered by simply incorporating aspects of both (The Complete Maus 291). In another instance, there is an exchange in which Spiegelman’s mother spots a rat in the cellar and Vladek soothes her by claiming, “Those aren’t rats. They’re very small. One just ran over my hand before. They’re just mice!” (The Complete Maus 149). Finally, Maus depicts the specific imagery in which Vladek compares the body of someone who has been shot to that of a rabid dog (The Complete Maus 242). All of these contradictory occurrences within the context of Maus were utilized by Spiegelman with the purpose of emphasizing the true humanity of his characters, as well as the ridiculousness of categorizing groups of humans as if they are different species. Spiegelman admits that he “always thought it was strange to watch Donald Duck go over to Daisy Duck's house for turkey dinner . . . It is a way for the cartoonist to let the audience know that the metaphor isn't to be taken literally” (qtd. in Hammond, par. 6). Transition.
Despite the controversy, the pictorial symbolism in Art Spiegelman’s Maus was essential. The difficult story that needed to be told wouldn’t have worked with human figures. According to Spiegelman, “[I] tried it once, and it wasn't nearly as good . . . It hurt too much” (qtd. in Teitelbaum, par. 5). Using animal masks to obscure his subjects’ faces spared Spiegelman some of the misery that would accompany reliving the trauma of his family’s past in such painstaking detail. Many of the characters Spiegelman never met while they were alive, and few photographs remained after the war; using animal faces “liberated Spiegelman from a compulsion to bear witness literally, a task he believes was impossible from the outset” (Teitelbaum, par. 6). There is a pervasive idea that the anthropomorphism in Maus somehow trivializes the Holocaust, but, in fact, the opposite is true: use of the so-called “childlike device” transforms the narrative, giving it more power than it would have had in any other form (Blincoe, par. 5). The animal faces allow readers to project themselves on the characters, giving them incredible human dimension and expression (Hammond, par. 5). Closing Sentence.