Maus: Why Spiegelman Used Animals

Maus: Why Spiegelman used animals to depict humans during the holocaust and why the different animals for specific nationalities?

There are many suggestions and comments that presume why Spiegelman used animals in depicting the characters in his Maus. Most of which, if analysed carefully, reveals the enveloped feelings and emotions of Art Spiegelman particularly with regards to the Holocaust. Spiegelman's Maus, however, was in fact a recollection of his father's experiences in the Holocaust. Nevertheless, the story pertains to the history of the Holocaust and similarly serves as a commentary on the traumatic experiences of the Jews as caused by the Nazis.

Being a Jew, it is no doubt that the Holocaust may have caused traumatic experiences to Spiegelman, more so to his father who struggled to survive from the evil that reigned in the Holocaust. Aside from trauma, it will also be no doubt that Spiegelman may have had a mixed feeling of anger and sorrow, despising the inhumanity brought upon the Jews. Because of this, Spiegelman may not have the strength of heart to write in a serious manner about the mournful events during the Holocaust. Hence, to be able to write and comment on the horror of the Holocaust, without causing too much pain in him, and also perhaps to make his writings comprehensible even to the youth and children, as well as for Spiegelman to be able to easily reach the people's understanding and open their mind on the evils of the Holocaust, he made use of animals to depict the different nationalities in the Holocaust history.

Moreover, due to the nature of brutality and violence in the Holocaust, the use of animals was perhaps Spiegelman's way of commentating against the malevolence of the Holocaust without making his story restricted for reading to adult readers. As similarly suggested by Wally Hastings (1998), in his online article about Maus,

By distancing the reader from the experience, the talking animals enable us to bear the horror implicit in the Holocaust memory."

Art Spiegelman made use of different animals to depict the different nationalities in the story because he perhaps found that the use of animals is the easiest and simplest way to characterize the people in the Holocaust. For instance, he made use of the mice to represent the Jews. The Jews, similar to mice, can become weak and vulnerable victims. The Germans, who without heart had massacred the Jews during the Holocaust, was represented by Spiegelman as the cats; for the cats' malevolence characteristic, in which after capturing a mouse plays with it first then brutally killing it, is similar to what the Germans did to the Jews.