Art Spiegelman’s widely acclaimed graphic novels, Maus I & II, depict a father’s retelling of his experiences in the Holocaust to his son. Art’s father Vladek, a Polish Jew, begins his story with how he met Art’s mother, Anja, shortly before the outbreak of WWII. Vladek’s story spans two volumes, more than ten years, and ends with his and Anja’s reunion after the war. Simultaneously, Maus visually depicts Vladek’s recounting of his Holocaust experience in the late 1970s, as Art documents his father’s story in graphic form. Many critical responses to Spiegelman’s chosen genre (or some would argue medium) of Maus have examined the productive connection between the visual and the verbal aspects of the text, as readers are confronted with and are forced to negotiate both dimensions. The connections and disjoints between the comic and textual forms provide ample opportunities to mine Spiegelman’s work. However, Marianne Hirsch explores Spiegelman’s use of three black-and-white photographs that mark the only visual departure from the comic form in Maus.

In “Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning and Post-Memory,” Hirsch examines how photographs function within Spiegelman’s text and the ways in which documentary (photos) differ from aesthetic (comic form) in the context of Maus. She explores these visual representations as documenting both memory and “post-memory,” which belongs to a survivor’s child “whose life is dominated by memories of what preceded his/her birth” (Hirsch 8). To illuminate the power of photographs, Hirsch draws on Susan Sontag’s assertion that photographs “state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction” (Sontag qtd. in Hirsch 5). As photographs capture the visual essence of living, in the most realistic detail possible, they also serve to remind viewers of what will be, or has been, lost. Hirsch argues that this ability of photographs to capture life in a moment, and then remind us of loss and death, is particularly haunting.

Hirsch also highlights the specific characteristics of Holocaust photographs, emphasizing that their context is equally important to our reception of them as their content. She claims that our knowledge of their place within the Holocaust experience “increases the horror, as we add to the bodies, or the hair, or the shoes depicted the millions which remain unrepresented” (Hirsch 7). Examining family pictures within this context, Hirsch argues that the viewer “fills in what the picture leaves out: The horror of looking is not necessarily in the image but in the story we provide to fill in what’s left out of the image” (7). As viewers encounter family photos of Holocaust victims, those who were lost during and after, they encounter a disjoint between a perhaps ‘happy’ image and the knowledge they possess about the trauma of the Holocaust. Hirsch analyzes the photo of Anja and Art in smiles and swimsuits on page 100 of Maus I. As Hirsch observes, this photo is directly opposite a panel showing a desolate Art; his speech bubble reads, “In 1968 my mother killed herself…She left no note!” (Spiegelman 100). Here we can see how Spiegelman draws out the potential of photographs to unsettle the viewer, as a full-of-life image is paired with a textual death.

Hirsch’s claim that Holocaust photographs invite, or rather force, viewers to visually ‘fill in the blanks’ is an intriguing one. I would like to extend this analysis to encompass the medium of the graphic novel more generally. As the comic form is visually rudimentary, in that it lacks colour and intricate detail, (a conscious choice, no doubt), I wonder if viewers encounter this same disjoint between comic renderings of the Holocaust and their knowledge of the horrific trauma that occurred. For example, on page 72 of Maus II, Spiegelman has drawn the burning of prisoner mice – some alive among the already dead. The visual in somewhat abstract and not-intricate, the large flames engulf most of the picture, obscuring the piled bodies. The faces of the mice which we can see are obviously in agony, though they are still the faces of mice. In this particular example, viewers encounter an abstract, unfocused, very unreal representation of one horror of the concentration camps. This abstraction and departure from reality may be Spiegelman’s attempt to emphasize the inability to capture, and for readers to interpret, such an unspeakable trauma. It may also be Spiegelman’s attempt to evoke the imaginations of viewers as they “fill in” the realistic details that the image lacks. Perhaps this is one way in which the medium of the graphic novel is so effective in communicating horror; it forces viewers to imagine the unimaginable.

Works Cited

Hirsch, Marianne. “Family Pictures: “Maus”, Mourning, and Post-Memory.” Discourse 15.2 (1992): 3. Print.

Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986. Print.