Forgetting Maus

I recently had a female student from Germany who had gone through the German pubic school system where it is required that students be taught about the Holocaust.  She had read volumes I and II of Maus in the 10^th and 11^th grades and was clearly exasperated by the experience.  Like the reporter wearing the cat/Nazi mask at the beginning of chapter 2 “Auschwitz (time flies)”, she asked why she should feel guilty for something that happened before she was born and expressed dismay at her country’s inability to move beyond the past, or at least allow her generation to move beyond it.

Should time and our removal from events mitigate the horrible things done by “us”?  My student regretted the Holocaust and “felt bad” about it, but didn’t feel a part of it.  Children of Holocaust survivors, like children of American Indians or children of slaves, do remember; as Chute discusses in her references to postmemory, remembering is the burden survivors of collective trauma must carry.  The difference, it seems, depends on which side of the prison fence we view the situation from.

Artie is on the inside looking out.  He didn’t perpetrate the horrors of the Holocaust, nor was he a victim in the camps, but unlike my student, he doesn’t have the luxury of forgetting. Writing in 1978, with Holocaust victims piled at his feet and a prison camp guard tower outside his window, Artie is as much of a victim and prisoner as his father, only his prison is his guilt.(41) Pavel tells him that, although he is in Rego Park and not Auschwitz, he is the real survivor. (44)

On pages 42 – 46, Spiegelman draws himself as a child, implying that he is unable, like Vladek, to extricate himself from his prison.  Artie is compelled by his father’s story; he is as trapped in it as his father was in Auschwitz and Dachau. Vladek’s survival mode is to be as useful as possible to his captors; to be an English teacher, a tin smith, a cobbler.  Most of all he credits he strength and good health for his ability to survive the beatings and anguish inflected on him by his captors.  Artie’s survival mode is to be as useful as possible to his father while surviving  the slights being heaped upon him.  When Francoise suggests staying in “Mauschwitz” a little longer to help Vladek, Artie says he doesn’t think they’d survive.

Artie’s survival mode is also to create “Maus” and to not let the Holocaust become part of the past. Those who wish unpleasant facts to go away, as my student did, need to understand that they are now part of a collective worldview, which is why Maus is required reading in German school systems. As Chute mentions, the trauma Maus represents is unending; there is no closure or finality. Maus is a tale that adds the future to the past and present as Speigleman suggests in his proposed title for a Holocaust Museum exhibit: Never Again and Again and Again.