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The Holocaust

Ian Buruma has drawn attention to the tendency of peoples to 'define themselves as historic victims', politicising memory itself and the representation of the past. Post-Holocaust Jewish identity has been formed upon the collective memory of the Holocaust and its tragedies, although many survivors still refuse to speak openly about their experiences. Indeed, as time passes and there are fewer and fewer survivors living, it is through their children and surviving family that their memory survives. Art Spiegelman's Maus, a graphic novel depicting his father Vladek's survival of war-time Poland and Auschwitz, also explore his own troubled relationship with his father and the complex position of the second-generation survivor. As Saul Friedlander says,

Whether commentary . is built into a structure of a history or developed as a separate, superimposed text is a matter of choice, but the voice of the commentator must be clearly heard. The commentary should disrupt the facile linear progression of the narration, introduce alternative interpretations, question any partial conclusion, withstand the need for closure . Such commentary may introduce splintered or constantly recurring refractions of a traumatic past by using any number of different vantage points (Friedlander, 40)

Texts of second-generation survivors, by presenting multiple narratives, clearly reveal the effect and impact of the Holocaust not only on collective cultural memory, but on personal relationships as well. The problem of narrative and identity in works by second-generation survivors is the attempt to write the self into a family from whose founding trauma they were absent.

Iris Milner explores literature produced by second-generation survivors whose lives are shaped and defined by the trauma that happened before they were born. Milner asserts that second-generation narratives do not lead to a redemption or 'breaking out' of the trauma, but rather a return to and reliving of the repressed experience. Milner believes that there is always a crisis point at which the attempt at repression fails, which she terms the 'return of the repressed'. This is the point at which the lost identity of the survivor is revealed to the second-generation survivor, and they discover the parent's 'true' identity, that is, their identity pre-Holocaust. This leads to the second-generation survivor, often a son or daughter, seeking out his or her family history as an attempt to understand both their parents and themselves.

Survivors of the Holocaust exhibited a range of psychological effects which shaped and affected their personal relationships. Survivors, clinical studies concluded, would forever have difficulty establishing any close relationships. Some studies reported a 'psychic closing off', a term used to describe survivors' inaccessibility to feelings. During the overwhelming losses and stresses, fear and anger, survivors blocked out capacity for emotion, an adaptive trait which lingered after they were no longer in the environment of trauma (Hass 8). Children of survivors, therefore, would clearly exhibit similar trauma-related reactions, and one psychologist noted that given children of survivors' unique interaction with their parents' history, the development of alternative feelings and an altered view of social life is to be expected. The survivors' Holocaust experiences are evidence of an unprecedented distortion of human social relations, and therefore it would follow that both survivors and their children would have difficulty expressing their emotions about their experience as well as bonding with each other (Barocas and Barocas 821). Although a few survivors chose to speak about their Holocaust experience in public forums such as lectures or the famous Shoah project, survivors' relations to their children were often fragmentary and occurred years. Therefore, the second-generation survivor's difficulty in understanding and remembering his parents' story is in part a result of the fragmentary transmission of the narrative and the reluctance of the parent to present a coherent history (Hass 71). Children of survivors often had to piece together narratives from bits told by their parents, heard from friends, and read in diaries or other accounts.

Art Spiegelman's narrative complicates his father's by presenting a portrayal of the struggles of the second-generation survivor whose identity is bound up in the Holocaust, despite never having experienced it himself. Maus, in contrast to other survival stories such as Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz or Elie Wiesel's Night trilogy, offers dual perceptions of the collective memory of the Holocaust. Indeed, it is only through his son's narrative that we are allowed into Vladek's. Spiegelman's pain and suffering gives greater meaning to Vladek's, suggesting cultural and personal ramifications of the Holocaust. Berel Lang has argued that only certain ways of representing the Holocaust are accepted and portrayed, and that therefore the Holocaust requires an 'elevated' genre to communicate the experience: the autobiography, the tragic novel, poetry, scholarly essays or books. Spiegelman, by using the form of the graphic novel, a culturally 'low' genre, breaks what Lang has coined the 'ritualized fixity' of communicating the Holocaust. Spiegelman, by presenting a historical narrative in a medium subverts the traditional survivor narrative and opens up the reader to a new interpretation of a collective experience. His biography of his father's experience seeks to narrow the schism between himself and his father, as well as between himself and his deceased mother. By listening to his father's story, then shaping it and giving it his own representation, Spiegelman creates a balance between his own voice and that of his father and is able to narrate himself into the family experience without claiming the Holocaust trauma as his own.

Maus is only secondarily concerned with portraying a Holocaust narrative, instead focusing on the impact of the parental experience on the next generation. Indeed, the survivor in Maus is not only Vladek, but his son as well, as evidenced in the subtitle to the first book, 'A Survivor's Tale'. "The survivor in Maus I's subtitle is a reference to both Vladek, who survives Auschwitz and his wife's suicide, and Art, who, by surviving the trauma of his youth, his mother's death, and his relationship with the 'maddeningly intransigent, stingy, and manipulative' Vladek . . . has become 'the real survivor'" (Shannon 6). Maus bears witness to the act of bearing witness, and Art's process of recovering his father's story in the novel itself represents the production of a narrative of trauma, an act of self-healing and self-generation. Spiegelman's narrative, in transmitting the experience of the father through the son, enacts the difficulty of working through a traumatic historical past, as well as the struggle of the individual to come to terms not only with this wounded history, but his own role in it. At the end of the sequel to Maus, Vladek tells Artie he is tired of talking. 'I'm tired from talking, Richieu, and it is enough stories for now.' Calling his living son by the name of his son who died in the Holocaust points to the ongoing trauma of both the survivor and the second-generation survivor. The survivor can never let go of the past, and their children can never live up to the image of those lost. Maus documents the refusal to ignore this intrusion of the past onto the present, fully exploring the trauma of both father and son. Indeed, Spiegelman focuses more on the recovery of the past than the past itself, emphasising the importance of memory and experience over the historical event.

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