Week 7 - Legitimation

For this week I chose to read Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel, Maus. I had read this book a long time ago in middle school but wanted to revisit it because while I do not remember this details of the book I remember the impact it had on me. Much of my family is Jewish and I had relatives who have lived and died during the Holocaust. Just recently I was sitting Shiva after my grandfather passed away and had most of my family come over. One of them happened to be a cousin who had lived through the Holocaust and all my cousins and siblings sat around and listened to him tell his survival story. That is why I wanted to revisit this book and read it again. I love the symbolism of this story how the Nazis are cats, the jews are mice, and the other people who sat by were other animals. Cats obviously pray on mice just like the Nazis did to the jews in a very animalistic way. Portraying jews as mice dehumanizes them more and adds to the effect of the story. I think it also adds in a way that people do not see the atrocities committed against humans but animals so it can be seen as people minimizing the crimes committed by the Nazis. It is a powerful way of portraying the events. I also always have to laugh because Judaism is a religion, a belief system, not a race and people always seem to confuse that and that is included in a quote by Hitler included in the beginning of the novel.