Maus

Maus

I take the greatness of Maus as a work of literature for granted, and you should, too: the story is well-told, the frame story heightens what is happening in the narrative and adds much to it (the trip to the therapist to discuss the success of the first volume at the beginning of the second would be twee self-aware autofiction if done in today's style, but it's instead itself also a way of trying to understand what happened), and the stylistic choices of the graphic novel form add to the overall impact. It's a classic, and even in my most graphic novel hating days I would never have claimed it does not deserve all the praise it gets, and then some.

It hit a little different this time than when I first read it, ~20 years or so ago. My oldest child has developed an interest in WWI and WWII, and a correct hatred of all things Nazi, and I reread it to see if they are mature enough to handle what's in the book (they are).

But I also spent ~10 years of the intervening period writing and thinking about human rights crises, the Holocaust very much included. That period of my life is definitively over, and its been nigh onto ten years I've been thinking about other things.

And also, you know, look at the news.

Friends, it was a hard read. It was hard in the first part to watch the characters delude themselves about what was going on and what was going to happen, to believe in keeping everything normal for as long as possible, to not see the endpoint of it all. Hard to watch them make split-second decisions that were wrong. Hard watch them not see the noose being tightened. And harder still knowing that the hope is in some way essential for their survival.

As it flows into the second book, it's hard to look, really look, at the senselessness of it all. I don't claim to be a model anti-racist, but I will say that I've never felt the racist impulse--to lump all people into one group, assign that group some characteristics, and to love or hate or fear them because of that group identity. On some literal level I cannot even understand how it works. I have hated or been mad at individual people before, but even in my younger and more emotionally fraught days that hatred never lasted especially long, and it never extended to doing anything to them. So it's a mental world I can construct from its pieces but which remains foreign to me. 

(I do also wonder, being older now, how much of this violence depends on young men hopped up on drugs who are perhaps too young to know better or be able to think through the consequences of their behavior. This is, I note, not in any way an excuse, and probably instead increases their culpability.)

And so you're left with: none of this had to happen. At a certain point, it does: there's someone with a gun making you do something, and that person is doing it because there is someone with a gun making them do it, and so on back through the chain. But at some point, people had the option to do nothing (not even asking them to do the right thing), and chose the wrong thing instead.