Portraying Life in a Death Camp

The Crimson recently spoke with Art Spiegelman, author of Maus and the recently released Maus II, cartoon books which chronicle his father's experiences in the Auschwitz concentration camp. The following are excerpts from that conversation:

Q: I was wondering which cartoonists have influenced you the most.

A: Harvey Kurtzman is somebody who comes to mind all the time. Harvey Kurtzman was the guy who did Mad comics, created Mad. And I remember being kind of 10 years old and seeing this paperback reprint of some of the early Mad comics--it included something called Micky Rodent. And I know that this created a deep scar and I spent the rest of my adult life working it out.... That there was something sinister beneath the surface was made clear in this Micky Rodent Strip, in which the Disney Police are dragging off Horace Horsecollar in panel one because he's not wearing the regulation white gloves, and so on.

So, Kurtzman for sure. For Maus specifically, I'd say Little Orphan Annie was really important, because of the kind of totemic quality of the drawings, the fact that... you can look deep into the blank eyes, find a sheet of paper and project an expression onto them. And that was kind of a part... of drawing Maus, having these kind of blank Maus heads to project onto.

Q: There've been a lot of personal narratives of the Holocaust. I know that you did a fair amount of research for your book. I was wondering what personal accounts you might have examined in researching history?

A:... If there's one that was more important than others, I would say it was a book called This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski. Again, I've read so many of these survivor's accounts that they melt a little bit in my head, unfortunately.

But that particular book I read at a time when I was trying to figure out the unfigure-outable, which was what does it mean to portray life in a death camp. And I can't think of another book that so specifically got to the problem of the texture of daily life in an unliveable situation. I get annoyed when people ask questions like "I've read so many holocaust stories, and then there's this one," as if it was a genre like Western and Mystery and Holocaust.

But they do all have one structural commonality, which is, they start out before the war, where people have real lives. And then they go through this nightmare and then obviously they're around to tell something about it after and they tell a little bit about coming out. What was special for me about the Borrows stories is that for the most part they exist within the barbed wire and nowhere else, there's hardly a before or after. There's only the concentration camp universe, and as a writer, even in translation--I can't read it in Polish--this guy really writes. I mean, by any standards one doesn't have to make any dispensation for the fact that this person survived something to appreciate it as writing.

And I've tried to explain it to people who didn't know the book. What it's like is if Philip Marlowe wasn't such a stupid lush and a romantic but got stuck in Auschwitz, maybe [Raymond] Chandler [author of the Marlowe detective novels] would have been able to write This Way For the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. In that it's kind of like writing as camera, you know--without affectation, without telling us what one feels but only what one sees and hears. And that helped me to understand something very important.

Q: Although this is an account of what your father went through in the Holocaust, it seems that the book is also very much about exploring your own family, understanding your own family.

A: I'd agree. Well, I'd say that if anything, the book probably grew out of the impulse to understand my father and by extension, by following that tale back into the mousetrap, that [writing the book] was a way of finding out what happened to him and thereby what happened in history. I was trying to understand where history and his story overlapped.

So, yes. For me it was experiential to the extent that I was trying to deal with my family and family life.

Interview conducted by Liam T.A. Ford