The book Maus has been titled and categorised as many different things. It has been considered a graphic novel, an autobiography, and somewhat paradoxically, both a history and a piece of fiction. But I’d like to focus on it in a more common literary theme and consider Maus a tragedy as well. The story of Valdek is quite similar to the arc of a tragic hero in many senses. He started off as a dashing young Jew that caught the eye of many a young lady in Europe at the beginning of the story and transformed into a cynical old man living in America that lost most of his family in the Holocaust, who was on the verge of losing the rest of it.
A tragic hero needs a tragic flaw, and Valdek’s tragic flaw was his avarice. We can see throughout the book how this greed intensifies and grows. How it was only a character trait of him in the early period of his life and how it slowly grew to consume him towards the end of it. Valdek had always been a thrifty man, he was even complimented by his father-in-law as such for his ability to make money on the black market even as the Germans cracked down upon the Jewish people and forbid them from most legal jobs. Valdek’s spirit of entrepreneurship persists in the concentration camps and he is able to trade and barter enough goods to bribe to guards to visit Anja for one night.
There is a very interesting quote on page 222. While giving the Kapo in charge of his barracks some eggs as a bribe, Valdek comments that “If you want to live, its good to be friendly”. This shows a personality shift Valdek as he begins think of human interaction in a very realist sense.
The Valdek that emerged from the concentration camp at the end of the war and tells his story to his son keeps his avarice but little else of his personality. He is no longer charming but irritable and abrasive. Yet he is tragic in the sense that we cannot attribute his personality change to any fault of its own, it was the experiences of the Holocaust that twisted him in such a way.
It is my belief that the reason for Anja’s suicide was a combination of her initial depression, the psychological stress of the Holocaust, and the inability of Valdek to emphasise with her. The argument that “[He] had to make order with everything” (161) after her death and thus he burnt all her papers makes little sense when you consider that he kept four 1965 copies of a savings bank calendar (95). While his explanation that they held too many memorises holds a bit more merit, but also begs the question of his inexplicable amnesia regarding the contents of the papers. If they did hold so many memories, it seems unlikely that he’d only remember essentially one sentences from all her diaries. In conclusion, I am of the opinion that the burning of the diary was most likely a result of deep-set guilt regarding the suicide of Anja and most likely an inability of dealing.