Holocaust Frame Narratives Are Important

Holocaust Frame narratives are important literary tools. They engage the audience by providing an anchor in the contemporary universe, a perspective to which the audience can instantly relate. In both Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus, and in Yael Hersonski's Film Unfinished, a frame narrative is used and it serves a distinct structural and semantic function. The frame narratives in these respective works about the Holocaust help the creators represent traumatic events on individual personal, and on social and collective levels.

The events depicted in both Maus and Film Unfinished are challenging to comprehend on a conceptual level, which is why their media formats are also nuanced and complex. Furthermore, both Maus and Film Unfinished challenge the audience to be engaged with history on a level that is beyond documentary evidence. Human memory is mingled with impressions, emotions, and other subjective material. This allows for the two works of art to resemble traditional memoirs and narratives even though they are not.

A traditional narrative such as Ruth Kluger's Still Alive is simply another form of media, but the end result is the same: to help the audience come to terms with the varied experiences and perceptions of the Holocaust. In Maus, the reader encounters illustrations that are not pretending to be documentary evidence at all. Although Maus is autobiographical, it is rendered in graphic novel format.

This creates a dreamlike world for the audience, and can convey the trauma in ways that Art and his father, as well as other characters, could not do if they were forced to rely on photographs alone. There is other scenes in Maus, however, that do resemble the actual documentary evidence many readers will have already encountered or can encounter when viewing Film Unfinished. The scene in Maus is of the Nazis (cats) in a massive crowd for a Nazi rally.

The scene invokes the mass consciousness of the German public at the time of the Holocaust. It asks readers to contemplate uncomfortable issues such as the willingness and readiness of the anti-Semitic populace to accept the Final Solution along with their party leaders. A similar scene, almost identical, takes place in Film Unfinished. Although unlike in Maus, this Film Unfinished scene of the crowd of followers is a piece of actual documentary evidence.

Juxtaposing the real with the imaginary is a primary way that Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus is so successful; and displaying the real imagery of Nazism by showcasing the unbelievable complacency of the German people. Yael Hersonski does show that documentary evidence is fallible, however, which is ironic. The documentary evidence that the Nazis had was used to present an unrealistic and categorically false picture of the conditions of the Warsaw ghetto.

Therefore, both Maus and Film Unfinished are framing the Holocaust "outside of the purview of traditional academic scholarship." Their respective media are different, but the end result is the same. Moreover, these works of art can be viewed alongside personal memoirs of the Holocaust like Still Alive. Sometimes, the media is the message. When it comes to Film Unfinished, this is certainly the case. The media of the film the Nazis used is the message that Hersonski is delivering the audience.

It is the way propaganda film is created that is part of the story. Graphic novels use art to depict the "real" world. Just as a viewer does not mistake a Hollywood movie for reality, the viewer usually does not mistake a graphic novel as depicting real life. However, Maus is meant to be taken as a substitute for photos, films, and other primary source material.

The audience is expected to read Maus for what it is, an autobiographical report of what it is like to be the son of a survivor. As a graphic novel, Maus fuses different modes of communication to allow the audience to connect with the reality of trauma. Both Maus and Film Unfinished use frame narratives as a means to reconnect with the audience periodically. This allows the audience to remain emotionally and intellectually engaged. The frame narrative of Maus functions differently from that of Film Unfinished.

In Film Unfinished, the frame narrative is about discovering the hidden film reel, which provides a genuine portrayal of the Nazi propaganda machine. The frame narrative shows that the present continually recreates the past, as new material is discovered or new voices are heard. Thus, Maus and other modern stories related to the Holocaust are relevant and will continue to be so. It is important to retell stories, because then, the audience will never forget.

Frame narratives like those used in Maus and in Film Unfinished also show how the past has a continual influence on the present as well as vice-versa. The past, the Nazi trauma and Holocaust, continues to shape Jewish consciousness and identity. Spiegelman.