The Banality of Evil in Maus

My apologies to Hannah Arendt.  The phrase “banality of evil” is lifted from the title of her book on the infamous Nazi Adolph Eichmann and the climate in Germany during the pre-war and war years.  Arendt’s thesis is that while great evil was done during the Holocaust, much of it was done by ordinary people.  Many of the perpetrators were not sociopaths or monster, but common citizens who acknowledged the German government and the government’s lie that the Jews were the cause of their problems.  German citizens went on to participate in horrible acts with the thought that their actions were those of normal people doing what the state wanted.  They did not think of themselves the way many of us think of them now.

I think this is part of what Spiegelman is saying in “Maus.”  He makes his point by playing down the tale he tells and mixing into it the banality of the everyday life of a man now in his 70s. The main story line is Vladek’s life during the run-up to his imprisonment in the death camps, but other, secondary tales are related; his life as a Lothario, his marriage, and his wife’s depressions and suicide.  His father’s second marriage to Mala and their apparent incompatibility is another theme in the first volume.  His father’s problems with his eyes and his story about how he found the right eye doctor takes up 14 panels. All of these could be part of the story of any person from that generation and Spiegelman uses them give us the impression of ordinariness.

Spiegelman then blends scenes of horrible cruelty and suffering in to this seemingly ordinary tale, but in a way that doesn’t overly shock the reader. In four pages he takes us from the birth of his brother, Richieu, he and his wife’s trip to sanitarium, to the beginning of the pogroms (pp.30 – 33).  This sequence illustrates how, at the beginning of Hitler’s rule, the war “just happened” to ordinary people.  Unlike in America, where one minute there was peace and the next war, in Europe the climate of hate and brutality began to build slowly over a period of years.  Ordinary people became acclimated to what was going on around them; Jews who were once rich became accustom to having food rationed and businesses confiscated.  Many non-Jews bought into the propaganda and became to think of their Jewish neighbors as less than human.

This is unsettling to me.  The terror of the book slowly builds.  Like the insanity of Nazism slowly taking over Europe. I found myself rereading passages, wondering how I got to a particular point in the narrative.