The haunting filial bond behind Art Spiegelman’s ‘Maus’

In this video, Art Spiegelman, the cartoonist behind the graphic novel ‘Maus’, recalls how his father Vladek’s stories of surviving Holocaust death camps drove the creation of the Pulitzer prize-winning work.

“‘Maus’ is a comic about a father and son, trying to understand each other” more than anything else, Spiegelman explains, adding that the comic’s genesis prompted the only time the two men spent together without arguing. “Oddly enough, the horrors of the 20th century became our sanctuary, where we could actually be together, peaceably.”

Serialised over 1980-91, the graphic novel depicts the artist interviewing the elder Spiegelman about his experiences as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor, and employing postmodernist techniques that portray Jews as mice, Germans as cats, and Poles as pigs.

Critics classified ‘Maus’ as a mix of genres, notably memoir, history and fiction. In 1992, the work became the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize.

View the original video here.

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