Post Memory Representation In Maus Novel

Maus, A Survivors Tale, is a graphic novel by Art Spiegelman. He is the second child of two Nazi Holocaust survivors; Vladek and Anja Spiegelman whose story is told through their son in Maus. The text content of the artwork is based on the interview that Art Spiegelman made with his father, Vladek. The interviewing process starts in the year of 1958 and is completed just before Vladek’s death. It consists of two volumes; first, one published in 1986, covers the story until the couple was sent to Auschwitz, and the second one covers the part when they are in Auschwitz, published in 1991, after Vladek Spiegelman’s death. In the first volume, we see in the background Art’s struggles about her mother’s suicide. His desire to find a guilty, to accuse someone, a subject to direct his anger about the echoes of the Holocaust in his life. In the second volume, he focuses more on his relationship with his father, in parallelism with him and his daughter and him and his father, whom he charged with his mother’s suicide, in the first book. The novel is both biographic and autobiographic in the sense that it tells the story of Vladek and Anja Spiegelman, meanwhile, it is also motivated by the personal traumas of the artist, as their son.

The prevailing discourse in the aftermath of the Second World War, about representing, if ever, the Holocaust was centered around Adorno’s statement that “Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”. On the one hand, there was the necessity to remember one’s, or one’s community’s past, and on the other hand, problems arose when it comes to the question of how to stimulate the remembering process. Neither lyrism nor poetry nor mere documentary form could achieve remembering without raising further issues. Poetry would over-dramatize it; thus, it might lead the subject to be commodified, something to consume. And the documentary, says photographs of concentration camps, would induce further traumatic reactions. I wanted to choose an art form that has the least possibility of dramatizing or aestheticizing a hypersensitive, traumatic event. The fragmental, or sequential form of the graphic novel is realistic mimesis of memory, for the remembering process also actualizes fragmentally. Elimination of linearity, through the graphic novel’s sequential form, would give the viewer enough time and space to absorb and digest the content, without any possible emotional manipulation or interference. I believe Maus plays an important role in the field of Holocaust representations, for it does not aim for specific emotional or ideological impacts, but it only conveys, and outpours without further motivations. I believe this outpouring, is only for healing, for Art Spiegelman himself.

As stated below, the book is mainly motivated by Spiegelman’s personal traumas as the son of two Holocaust survivors. It indicates that the book is a work of postmemory, it is, as Mariana Hirsch stated; “the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are displaced by the stories of the previous generation, shaped by traumatic events that can be neither fully understood nor re-created.”REF. That is the pain inflicted upon the second-generation, they do not suffer from their own story but a story that happened and was done before they were even born, thus it is even harder for the postmemory bearer to overcome since he never actively takes part in any related process to the trauma. He does not get the chance to fully understand, nor to re-create the past. He wants to fix things, but he does not have access to them. As in Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of Klee’s angel, Angelus Novus; he, the postmemory bearer, would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed, he is craving to do so. But unlike Angelus Novus, he is not being pushed forward to progress, on the contrary, he is trapped in the memories of his parents. To overcome the impossibility to fix the past is unassimilable. In Maus, we feel Spiegelman’s desire to fix the past to move on, to uncover his parent’s story to create his own. ((CONCLUSION MAYBE?? It is a book that emerges out of the internal conflicts of the author and is an attempt to overcome those conflicts. It is a work of postmemory, aiming to blabla)))

Spiegelman reveals his internal conflicts, unreservedly, attempting to solve them by sharing. He creates a space for discussion, to which he involves himself as well. We see, in the beginnings of the second volume, his reproaches about the sibling rivalry with his “ghost” brother Richieu through a photograph of him hanging in his parents' bedroom.