History

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” said the Spanish-born American philosopher George Santayana, and this is the central reason we study history. History provides us with a chronicle of  moments that help define who we have become. It is a collective narrative of varied “voices,” those of the powerful and influential but also of apparently ordinary people like Vladek Spiegelman. Historians have learned to mine these personal narratives, these “oral histories,” to discover a perspective on the past “from the bottom up,” often very different from the official heroic version. 

The graphic novel Maus offers us a compelling personal narrative of one man's experiences during the Nazi terror. We follow Vladek Spiegelman’s drama from the Nazi takeover into the ghettoes and then his deportation in Maus I, and in Maus II to his actual camp experiences. Art Spiegelman’s own story as the child of his father is told simultaneously in the frames depicting their current interactions. In the manner of a fable, Art Spiegelman presents the story of persecutions through drawings of various animals representing different nationalities: mice; cats; pigs; frogs and for the gypsies, moths. It is one man’s story and therefore not complete. History told in this way allows us to become intimately involved in Vladek and Anja’s daily acts of survival as we follow his memories of the Holocaust in Poland from the mid-1930s, and then in Maus II forward to the days of the "Final Solution" in the early 1940s and finally to the destruction of Nazi Germany’s Third Reich and its war machine in 1945.

The Nazis singled out any group they saw as unfit or non-Aryan: Slavs, gypsies, homosexuals, the infirm, socialists, communists, feminists, and Jehovah Witnesses. We are pulled into the vortex of the terrible choices many faced in trying to come to grips with genocide. Historians’ responsibilities are to reconstruct the political, social, demographic and economic circumstances surrounding these events. Each step along the historical path can seem quite ordinary or unavoidable at the time, especially if one is not immediately affected, though it can ultimately lead to a state of complete totalitarian terror. As historical detectives, we fit together the small and large events---from the days of World War I and its aftermath, the Versailles Treaty, the establishment of the new Weimar Republic of the 1920s to the rise of the Third Reich during the world depression in the early 1930s and the defeat of Nazi Germany at the end of World War II, the Nuremberg Trials and the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. We must also remember that nothing can happen without the assent and cooperation of individuals; their attitudes and emotions are at the center of historical reality.   

Reading Spiegelman's gripping novel, Maus, also gives cause for hope. At the same time it gives one pause to consider the pyschological and sociological effects of the Holocaust on millions of survivors who were forced to come to terms with the death of friends and family and with a racism that continued to exist even after the Holocaust was over and had been fully exposed in the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-1946. Jews and non-Jews alike who faced extermination or something just short of it, had to reconcile themselves to the wreckage of the past and an imperfect future. The United Nations was organized in 1945 to confront new forms of racism and genocide, but totalitarianism had not ended. People living under the Soviet regime in Russia and Eastern Europe were still subject to Stalin’s terror and the Cold War began as soon as the Second World War ended.

Like Art Spiegelman, we need to find and preserve the stories of the past for the sake of all humanity. By immersing ourselves in this richly detailed personal remembrance of the Holocaust we gain greater empathy and concern for other victims of more recent genocides.

Timothy Coogan