How the son of Jews who escaped Auschwitz created a Holocaust comic book and got a Pulitzer for it

Art Spiegelman's Maus is the only graphic novel in history to win a Pulitzer Prize. This work was created by a descendant of Jews who survived the Holocaust. He wanted to perpetuate the memory of the tragedy and show it through the prism of the modern world. The edition told in more detail "Afisha.Daily".

Long story

For all its uniqueness "Maus" It didn't come out of the blue - behind it is a long history of independent comics, in which Art Spiegelman himself participated for two decades.

In the early 1970s, he came to San Francisco (California), where for several years he was an important figure in the art underground, worked with the author of comics about the cat Fritz Robert Crumb, filmed "Ghost World" by Terry Zwigoff and other equally famous people.

Later, Spiegelman went to live in New York, where he founded the countercultural comic book magazine Raw with his wife. Each issue of it was practically an art object - they either printed it on cardboard, then made a plastic cover, or tore random pages so that each edition number was unique. This taught readers that comics can deal with very serious topics, not just adventures. The first excerpts of Maus began to appear in the same magazine.

“Comic book writers at that time simply had nowhere to go. So I thought: you can do everything yourself. From the thirst for creation, Raw was born. I bought a printing press, which was rare in 1977. With Raw, we showed people what it was possible to do in comics - that there is no one common style, that everyone can find their own voice. It was such a Potemkin village, we pretended that there was a whole world community of independent artists drawing comics. And then this community became a reality,” said the artist and Art Spiegelman’s wife Françoise Mouly.

Special letters

The letters in Maus are practically a continuation of the drawing. Spiegelman has a special relationship with them in general: he sends a special letter to publishers who publish Maus in foreign languages, where he explains what the font should be like, why it differs at the beginning of the book from what it is at the end, and even advises what tools to use for better reproduction of the original.

Drawing and graphics

Spiegelman himself does not often say where he drew inspiration for his drawings. But if you look closely, in "Maus" you can find the influence of both horror stories of the 50s and underground comics.

The author himself often says that he does not draw very well, but this imperfection is partly the artistic power of his unique comic book.

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“My drawing style grew out of my physical handicaps – I have amblyopia, a lazy eye, which makes it difficult for me to see perspective and volume. That's probably why I became an artist and not a baseball player. However, I don't immediately grab a pen to draw when ideas come to mind. It takes me a lot of strength to express myself in a drawing, it's easier to write words. I first come up with the text, and then cut the thoughts into pictures. Comics are the art of brevity and conciseness. We need to condense thoughts within one frame as much as possible,” says Spiegelman.

Pulitzer Prize

In 1992, for the first time in history, a graphic novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and it was the unsurpassed Maus. Such a breakthrough literally overnight brought the entire genre out of the literary "ghetto" and forever removed the stigma of "frivolous art" from comics.

And although initially they tried to present such an event as an exception, in the end everyone accepted the fact that this genre is something more than entertainment.

“People still ask me why I made Maus into a comic book. Well, how else? I draw comics, this is my language. At that moment, it seemed natural to tell this story in this way. As a result, Maus changed the entire cultural paradigm. Comics have ceased to be frivolous entertainment for children. Me and the rest of the artists are still dealing with the aftermath. After 1992, all more or less serious comics are compared with "Maus". At the same time, most do not understand at all what's what - people believe that the book received Pulitzer solely because it was written about the Holocaust. Of course, I raised a serious topic - but this does not mean that from now on you need to write only heavyweight comics on big topics, ”the author of Maus himself noted.

English language and speech of heroes

Language plays a key role in the comic: knowledge of English several times saves the main character - Spiegelman's father, Vladek; Polish, unknown to Spiegelman, once again emphasizes the difference between generations. Finally, Vladek speaks English with obvious errors, and for the sake of reliability, the author carefully preserves each one in the text.

By the way, the name "Maus" in addition to being obviously consonant with the English mouse, also refers to the German mauscheln ("talk like a Jew").

Parents

"Maus" is a classic example of a story within a story; in its center is the story of Spiegelman's father, Vladek, told to his son; around - their conversations in the 1980s. Naturally, one of the main themes of the book is the relationship between generations and the problem of memory.

Art feels guilty about not experiencing what his father did; for second-generation Holocaust literature, that is, written by the children of concentration camp victims, this feeling of guilt is the main motive. Spiegelman's mother committed suicide in 1968; her point of view is not in the book, as her father destroyed her diaries.

“The book has three layers. The most obvious is that this is the story of Wladek Spiegelman from the 1930s in Poland to his liberation from Auschwitz in 1945. A little deeper - the relationship of father and son in America in the 1980s. The father tells the story, the son tries to convey it with the help of the closest and most familiar language to him - comics. Finally, at the deepest level, this is the story of Art Spiegelman himself, a man who lives under the burden of someone else's experience and someone else's memory, the memory of his parents. The whole story is told by Vladek's voice. This is the story of the survival of the father, told by the son through his own interpretation, through his artistic decisions,” says literary critic Marianne Hirsch.

Mice

Spiegelman came up with the idea of ​​talking about racism in the most unexpected way - by showing people in the form of animals. His Jews became mice, the Germans became cats, the Poles became pigs, and so on. This is both the most controversial and the strongest side of the Maus.

The animal metaphor has often been accused of being too simplistic, but it only highlights the stratification that the Nazis were trying to impose.

Spiegelman not only understands the limitations of this technique, he uses it to enhance the effect: for example, in the book there is a moment when a Jew who claims to be a German gets into a concentration camp, and the author cannot decide whether to draw him as a mouse or a cat.

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“Like any obsession, the idea of ​​drawing people as animals came to me by accident. In the early 1970s, I was asked to draw something for the underground magazine Funny Animals. I couldn't think of anything for a long time, and then I watched some cartoon about Mickey Mouse, from the early ones, you know, where he still looks like a jazzman. I suddenly decided to do a comic about black people in America with black mice and ku klux cats. It took me one day to realize that I know absolutely nothing about the fate of African Americans. Then this metaphor spread to the history of the oppression of an entire people close to me. When I started working on Maus in earnest, I started reading a lot about the Nazis and World War II. What struck me was that in the anti-Semitic propaganda of the 1940s, Jews were portrayed as rats, rodents. In cartoons, on posters, even in some documentaries. Dehumanization is an important moment for any genocide. And this was done not only in Nazi Germany, ”said Spiegelman.

The Holocaust

Maus is not the first Holocaust-themed book, but it is the first comic book to help place this tragedy in a pop culture context. The comics, of course, immediately had a lot of opponents - they accused him of trivializing the tragedy, they protested against him in Poland, at first publishing houses were even afraid to print him. But in the end, "Maus" became a classic.

“When I took up Maus, there was almost no literature on the Holocaust. While I was making the book, my father was alive and he told me everything. I remember that I was able to read all the available books about the Holocaust in English, simply by ordering them from the library, and spent quite a bit of time on it - now it would take a lifetime. After Mouse, the world changed - Steven Spielberg and Roberto Benigni came and made their films about concentration camps, the Holocaust entered popular culture. When I wrote the book, this was unimaginable,” said Spiegelman.

Parents Spiegelman were Polish Jews, prisoners of Nazi concentration camps (Auschwitz and Auschwitz-2 Birkenau), released in 1944, moved to Sweden, then to the USA. Many of Art's relatives were also victims of the Holocaust: his aunt, her children, and Art's brother, who lived with his aunt. Art grew up in Queens and graduated from the Manhattan High School of Art and Design. In 1968, he experienced a severe nervous breakdown and ended up in a psychiatric clinic. He has compiled several anthologies of comics and gives public lectures on this art form. In 2005, Time magazine named Art Spiegelman one of the XNUMX most influential people in the world.