STEPHANIE CERASO

 

Throughout Maus, we are constantly made aware of what is lacking in Spiegelman’s narrative. For instance, in a conversation with his therapist, Art says, “the victims who died can never tell THEIR side of the story, so maybe it’s better not to have any more stories.”[i] In addition to the innumerable lost stories, Spiegelman’s deceased relatives (his mother Anja and brother Richieu), are crucial voices that are also absent from his narrative. I would suggest, however, that the very act of acknowledging these voids gives them a ubiquitous presence. They are at once everywhere and nowhere. As Vladek exclaims in the second volume, “Anja? What is to tell? Everywhere I look I’m seeing Anja…. From my good eye, from my glass eye, if they’re open or they’re closed, always I’m thinking on Anja.”[ii] Although they are physically missing, the presence of the dead and the silence of things left unsaid saturate every page.

         The narrative action, both Vladek’s story and Art’s reconstruction of this story, happens within the borders of the panels. But as Spiegelman himself states, “It’s what takes place between the panels that activates the medium.”[iii] Art is compelled to record his father’s story in an attempt to make sense of his own life, to fill in the silences and voids that disturb him. The gutters, then, embody what Art and the reader do not and cannot know about Art’s personal history and the history of the Holocaust. It is the desire to recover what has been silenced, to restore lost or unknown knowledge, that propels the narrative forward. Michael Levine notes, “Staining these silences and those of his father’s story with the words of his text, Spiegelman screens them in such a way as to allow them all the more powerfully and hauntingly to bleed through.”[iv] This strategic “staining” is apparent from the very first pages of Spiegelman’s text. In the poignant opening scene of Maus, Spiegelman gives the reader a glimpse of what it was like to grow up with a Holocaust survivor: even the most trivial events of Art’s childhood are coloured by his father’s memories of the Holocaust. In this scene, a sobbing young Art is abandoned by his friends, who prove to be more skilful on roller skates. When he explains what happened to his father, Vladek is disgusted that his son would even refer to these kids as “friends.”  He bursts out, “If you lock them together in a room with no food for a week… then you could see what it is, friends!...”[v] The spatial arrangement of the very last panel in the sequence, the one that leads us into the “real” story, is especially significant. The panel is double the size of the others on the page and it provides the reader with a zoomed-out view. We see Art and Vladek standing in their empty front yard, surrounded by empty space. The remarkably large font and capacious text bubble containing Vladek’s words, which are also unique to this panel, call our attention to what is missing. The white space around the words, the starkness of the picture, and the physical space between Art and Vladek all make us more aware of what is not there, of what is not being said. And, while the ellipsis after “friends!” alerts us that words have been omitted or cut off, it also reveals that there are answers and stories within the pregnant silence of the panel. Thus, the silence and space surrounding Vladek’s words incite the reader to turn the page in hopes of filling in the gaps. What is not being said is driving the narrative forward.  

In addition, the silences between the panels also help draw the reader into the story. However, it is important to recognise that the gutters themselves cannot activate the medium or produce meaning without the work of the reader. The gutters provide space for readers to make meaning of the story and to incorporate their own memories and experiences into the text. The meaning that pervades this space, the meaning which the reader must bring to the narrative, is precisely what brings the story into being. Furthermore, the silences within and surrounding the panels do not simply invite the reader into the text. Rather, Spiegelman demands the reader to jump into the silences and fill them up with meaning. The narrative will make no sense unless the reader can navigate through the silences and follow the logic from panel to panel. Disturbingly, in order to make sense of Maus, the reader must first understand and adopt Nazi logic. For example, Spiegelman never explicitly defines the animal symbolism for the reader (the Jews are represented as mice, the Nazis as cats).[vi] The meaning of the symbolism is another one of the text’s silences and it is up to the reader to give that silence meaning. The reader must accept that the Jews are represented as mice because they were viewed as prey, vermin, pests that must be exterminated. The reader’s tacit agreement that this metaphor holds, that it works, is what implicates her into the narrative. Rather than feeling alienated from the horror, then, the reader is actually complicit with the rationale that led to the possibility of the “final solution.” Spiegelman implicates us in the horror by positioning us within the minds of those who were responsible for it.

 

 

 

 

 

Stephen C. Feinstein
Co-curator of Witness and Legacy
University of Wisconsin at River Falls
 

 The Golgotha of modern mankind is Auschwitz.
The cross, the Roman gallows, was replaced by
the gas chamber.

Ignasz Maybaum

All is not vanity, all is horror.

Rico LeBrun

Why this determination to show "everything" in pictures? A word, a glance, silence itself communicates more and better.....the Holocaust is not a subject like all others. It imposes certain limits. [1]

Elie Wiesel

 

 

The Holocaust is a subject that on the surface seems to defy artistic representation. The dehumanization, humiliation and mass murder of European Jewry by the Nazis was an event of unparalleled proportions. Other groups such as Romani and Sinti peoples (Gypsies), Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, political prisoners and opponents to the Nazi regime became part of the world of the concentration and death camps. However, in the diabolical world of Nazi race theory, only the Jews and most of the Gypsies were chosen for genocide.
     Art had a lot to do with the Nazi regime and has a logical relationship with the Holocaust, despite the aesthetic and ethical problems that are raised for artists in the aftermath of such horror. Hitler himself aspired to become an artist but failed admission to art school. Mein Kampf, Hitler's l923 plan for himself and the world, denounced modernism, abstract and Dadaist art as an affront to civilization. Hitler's artistic tastes can be judged by his favorite work of art, a realistic, military World War I painting by Elk Eber, The Last Hand Grenade.
     Six hundred works of art representing such heroic themes were hung for the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung ("Great German Art Exhibition"), which opened in Munich on July l8, l937. A day later, the first of many "degenerate" (Entartete Kunst) art shows was opened just across the from the Great German Art Exhibition. These shows, which may have drawn the largest crowds in museum history, juxtaposed "degenerate" art, "influenced by the Jews," to the Aryan ideal as expressed in painting and sculpture. Many important avant-garde works from the Weimar period were destroyed as part of the war on culture. In l942, Hitler even had three of his own paintings seized from private collections and destroyed.
     These actions in Munich signaled the start of the Nazi attack on culture, an attack that ultimately could be considered a war against imagination. The attack on imagination was a prelude to what mutated into genocide on a massive scale. The scale of Jewish death was so great that the aftermath of World War II left the Jews and others searching for a word to describe it. The preferred Hebrew word was Shoah, meaning calamity, but having a special reference to earlier attempts to destroy the Jews during the biblical period. The word Holocaust came into use during the late l950s. It too is laden with religious implications, as its Greek origins suggest a "burnt offering." More and more, Shoah is the preferred descriptive word among Jews, as Holocaust has been used in reference to non-Jewish victims as well as to other horrible events in the post-1945 period.
     Attempts by artists to grapple with the catastrophe that would become the Shoah began in the earliest days of the Nazi regime. It was a movement that became visible during Hitler's rise and concentration of power. Marc Chagall's White Crucifixion, a response to Kristallnacht — "The Night of Broken Glass," remains the icon among many paintings that described Jewish suffering before l939. Chagall used the theme of a crucified "Jewish" Jesus set against vignettes of Jewish persecution that unfolded in the Nazi era. Artists like Yankel Adler and Ben Shahn produced strong responses to Jewish and other persecution during World War II. Both Jewish and non-Jewish artists who were interned in concentration camps and perished produced artistic legacies of their victimization. A strong postwar response appeared from the palette of many important artists. Among postwar abstractionists, Rico LeBrun, a non-Jew, insisted that "the Holocaust was a subject that no serious artist could neglect....." The American painter Leonard Baskin, LeBrun's colleague and friend, described his approach to the subject as confronting "the mind curdling reality of the least human of human endeavors, and in paintings and drawings of dissolution, dismemberment and incineration he is saying, all is not vanity, all is horror."
     In the 1960s the subject of the Holocaust was not avoided, but appeared infrequently in art, except in the realm of building public memorials, principally at the sites of destruction in Europe. Artists responded very much like survivors themselves who decided against talking about the event. During the l970s and l980s, a new generation of artists emerged who, with a sensitivity toward the subject, attempted to grapple with the difficulties of art after such a monstrous period of destruction. There can be many conundrums and taboos. One is when, as Elie Wiesel has said, "merchants of images and the brokers of language would set themselves up to speak for the victims."  Another was described by Frank Rich when he noted that the numerous Holocaust memorials in Europe and the United States share one common trait: impermanence.  Raul Hilberg has gone even further and has described much of the memorial architecture as "kitsch" or "done without taste, without awareness.
     Despite such conditions, especially the issue of artists simply trying to "reproduce" a memory of an event they did not experience and competition with the archival photographic record, the quest for a visual language and a means to convey memory continues. Like early Christian artists who tried to imagine the Crucifixion of Jesus, contemporary artists are trying to artistically convey the horror and memory of the Holocaust.
     The quest, in a certain sense, is for a new language with new symbols and new metaphors. Primo Levi understood this well, when writing about his experiences he said: "Daily language is for the description of daily experience, but here is another world, here one would need a language 'of the other world'."
     It is also a form of memory that treads on sacred soil: "In the Jewish tradition, death is a private, intimate matter, and we are forbidden to transform it into a spectacle. If that is true for an individual, it is six million times more true for one of the largest communities of the dead in history." The Holocaust, as Witness and Legacy tries to demonstrate, need not necessarily produce a type of artistic response connected with horror. Horror is a familiar subject in art. Medieval and Renaissance artists portrayed the grim face of the Black Death and a landscape of horror caused by war. Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece, a masterpiece of the Northern Renaissance, has been referred to by many artists as "a Holocaust work of art," in the way it depicts the horror of the Crucifixion of Jesus. Goya depicted massacres of civilians and atrocities of war. World War I provided an impetus for artists to become involved in burning political questions. George Grosz, Otto Dix, Max Ernst, Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso, to name a few, made incomparable political statements and reflected on the violence of the century in many of their works. Picasso's Guernica, with its specific reference to the civil war in Spain, later became a metaphor for the entire century's violence. The contemporary world's exceptional focus on politics and rights for minorities, with the lurking fear of brutalization close to the surface, has produced a substantial number of exhibitions that deal with subjects such as feminism, AIDS, homosexuality, black consciousness and the new specter of genocide as seen in Bosnia. Installation art has served as a particularly responsive bridge between the artistic community and political issues. These shows, however, may not solve the question of permanence.
     Permanence is part of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which opened in Washington, D.C., in April 1993. Here the architect, James T. Freed, created a major interior space dedicated to telling the story of the Holocaust, a space where art plays a role. Outside the building is Joel Shapiro's abstract bronze sculpture Loss and Regeneration, suggesting a house turned upside down. Ellsworth Kelly's white on white Memorial installation creates a silent space between scenes of horror for the museum visitor. Sol LeWitt's Consequence is a large work applied directly to the museum walls with a theme of variations on black and colored squares. Richard Serra's Gravity, a 10-inch-thick, 10-foot-square standing slab of Cor-ten steel, is an interior sculpture in the Hall of Witnesses.
     These works have all received mixed reviews. They are all abstract and according to Paul Richard, art critic for the Washington Post, were "unnecessary, distorted and misguided," as they could suggest violence anywhere. Ken Johnson, writing in Art in America, described the museum's approach to art as "so much less daring," especially given the cutting edge work by artists like Robert Morris, Christian Boltanski, Jonathan Borofsky, Anselm Kiefer, Sue Coe and others. The debate will continue.
     Witness and Legacy examines a spectrum of Holocaust related art produced by some American artists during the last twenty years. The mediums include painting, sculpture, photography, graphic design, needlepoint and multimedia installation art. The wide variety of work that has been produced is exceptional in scope, but untested in thematic presentation.
     In addition to division by medium, Witness and Legacy deals with what might be called "different generations" of the Holocaust-artists from different backgrounds who bring to the subject their unique perspectives because of their relationship to the event.
     One-third of the artists represented are Holocaust survivors themselves who have worked as professional artists. Children of survivors, sometimes called "the second generation," make up the second group. The third group are artists not directly connected with the Holocaust who have developed a sensitivity toward the subject because of their humanitarianism and empathy and attempt to understand the event and convey it to others through art.
     Survivors all share a special vision of having been victims during the Holocaust. The other artists cannot claim the same vision. Survivors possess memories that other artists can comprehend only in indirect ways. In some respect, the only "authentic" Holocaust art may be the art of survivors. Artists such as Judith Goldstein, Samuel Bak, Kitty Klaidman and Netty Vanderpol experienced the terror of the ghettos and the death camps. Their art is somewhere between visual memoir and metaphoric memory.
     Sometimes art is created as a coping mechanism. Questions of aesthetics may exist, creating a tension between memory and witnessing versus a purely artistic approach to the subject. Edith Altman, Gabrielle Rossmer and Gerda Meyer-Bernstein fall into a category between survivors and second generation artists. Coming to the United States as children just before the war, they escaped extended ghettoization and later horrors, but carry with them some of the burdens of survivors and certainly part of the trauma of their parents' victimization and near destruction.
     For many members of the second generation, art and literature are mediums for expressing their special relationship to the Holocaust and to their parents. The second generation does not have a direct memory of ghettos and death camps. But they may carry the memory and burdens of their parents' trauma, conveyed directly or indirectly. After the camps were liberated, many survivors made new lives for themselves in Israel, Western Europe or the United States. Some bore no outward traces of their dehumanization. Others suffered a great deal in a way that was conveyed directly or indirectly to their children. Some things could not disappear: numbers tattooed on parents' forearms, screams in the night, the absence of grandparents, uncles, aunts and other family members and dark shadows in a family past that would not be talked about.
     For the second generation, art provided an appropriate entry for questions of memory, absence, presence and identity. The visual representations of the second generation mark the continued impact of the terrible period of the Holocaust on a generation that did not directly experience it. These are children who cannot conceive of their existence without the vast imprint of the Holocaust upon it. In this exhibition, Joyce Lyon, Pier Marton, Gabrielle Rossmer, Art Spiegelman, Debbie Teicholz and Mindy Weisel are representative of this group. Their mediums of expression represent the breadth of the art: painting, photography, video, installation art and the comic strip.
 

Art Spiegelman's use of the comic book is both an innovative and problematic form of art and literary conveyance. Many survivors found Maus something that came close to blasphemy. The depiction of Jews as mice and Germans as cats seemed to be a somewhat unfitting reminder of German propaganda through films such as Hippler's The Eternal Jew (l940).
     Spiegelman was the product of a thoroughly American environment of the late l950s and l960s, dominated by his interest in comic books and the untold story of his parents' survival. His mother, Anja, committed suicide in 1968. Subsequently, Spiegelman's father, Vladek, burned Anja's diaries. The loss of his mother as well as Anja's story was the stimulus for researching the true story of his parents' involvement in the Holocaust. The result was Art Spiegelman's more than forty hours of audio taping with Vladek Spiegelman, substantial technical and artistic research and the translating of that story into Maus.
     Is Maus art? The art critic Adam Gopnik has tried to answer this interesting question:

If you ask educated people to tell you everything they know about the history and psychology of cartooning, they will robably offer something like this: cartoons (taking caricature, political cartooning, and comic strips all together as a single form) are a relic of the infancy of art, one of the earliest forms of visual communication (and therefore, by implication, especially well-suited to children); they are naturally funny and popular; and their gift is above all for the diminutive.

 

     Gopnik goes on to suggest the truth is actually the opposite and that cartoons represent "a relatively novel offspring of an extremely sophisticated visual culture."
     Previous exhibitions of Spiegelman's drawings have made it clear that he first utilized the format of Maus in Prisoner on the Hell Planet in l972. His first idea for the mouse metaphor was to apply it to the history of African Americans, but he soon applied it to the Jews. As Spiegelman progressed into the drawing of Maus, he became concerned with various aesthetic aspects that were important from the point of view of the visual artist. "He was becoming increasingly concerned with deconstructing the basic narrative and visual elements of the comic strip: How does one panel on a page relate to others? How do a strip's artificial cropping and use of pictorial illusion manipulate reality?...How do words and pictures combine in the human brain."In this quest, the artist rejected photo-realism, elaborate detailing and shading, and ultimately developed a particular reduction process in which text was reduced to fit the artistic space.