"When I was your age.."

At this point, you’re probably feeling pretty bad for Art. Born as the child of two bruised and broken holocaust survivors, Art found himself in the mental ward at a young age, traumatized with feelings of guilt over his mother’s suicide.

But Anja’s suicide wasn’t all bad for Art. In a way, it acted as an impetus for Art to write Maus. After she died, he realized that he really didn’t know much about his parent’s, or his own, past. What he does next is perhaps the biggest indicator of his mental incompetence: he asks his father to tell him stories about his past on purpose.



Seems like everyone's grandparents had to walk up the same hill in the snow
every day of their life.

You read that right. On purpose. Art asked his father, Vladek, to sit down for HOURS AT A TIME, and tell him stories about his times in the Holocaust. Meanwhile, you avoid all members of your family at all costs in fear that they’ll utter the dreaded “When I was your age…”.

This task becomes even more unbelievable when you factor in the fact that Vladek is pretty much senile, and I mean that in the nicest way possible. When Art tries to get him to talk, his stories are always scattered, and never in chronological order, making it impossibly hard for Art to get a good idea of what really happened.

And when Art tries to get Vladek to talk about Anja, Vladek is even harder to get information from. At one point he even tells Art, “I can tell you….She went through the same what me: TERRIBLE!” Regardless of the amount of time he spends trying to get information out of Vladek, Art never really gets a good idea about his mother’s life.

In an interview he gave with PBS, Art explained that he was never "overwhelmed by thoughts of a death camp", but that simply that the truth about them had just always been in his life. Additionally, because his parents chose to stay in the company of fellow survivors, he had always been surrounded by the experience of the Holocaust. However, instead of interesting Art, his closeness with the experiences had the opposite effect.

Because he was so used to having the experiences of the Holocaust around him, he never realized that the experience was one that was strange or out of the ordinary. Thus, as he was growing up, the memories of his parents during the dark time never spiked his interest. Unfortunately, he only became interested in their past after Anja was gone, and Vladek was not so forthcoming with information. Had he been interested in the experiences at a younger age, it's possible that his memories would be more rich and fulfilling than they eventually ended up being.

Art’s experiences are a perfect example of a person who is living in “postmemory”, a phrase coined by Marianna Hirsch (You can read more about it here). Postmemory is when a person’s life is “dominated by memories that are not his own”, and specifically applies to the relation of children of survivors to the survivors themselves.

Art’s memories of the Holocaust have been created entirely through postmemory. Everything he knows about it, and about his mother, has come from Vladek. Because the memories are not truly Art’s, they lack authenticity. And because they have only come from Vladek, as Art was only interested in them after his mother’s death, they lack any maternal input from Anja as well.

But for Art, this isn’t a problem, because he knows that his mother has journals that she kept about her experiences, and they’re around here somewhere. Vladek will find them any day, and give them to Art to read, right? Right?

Art's reaction (presumably).

No. Not right.

Those journals, ones filled with Anja’s writing about her time during the Holocaust, the only way Art had of getting reliable information about his mother after her suicide, and Art’s only chance at ever reconciling his emotions were burned by Vladek all because of a bad day.

Just in case you weren’t keeping score, that’s Art-0, Cruelty and Despair- 1,378.

Without Anja’s journals, all Art is left with is whatever stories and memories he can get out of his absent-minded father. It’s not all for naught, as Art was apparently able to get enough out of his father to write two books about, but he is still missing a pretty significant piece of the puzzle. After Anja’s suicide, even though Art exhausted every possible source of information, he was never able to recover the information about his mother specifically that he had been searching for.

 

Mother Dearest

Mommy Problems.

If I could sum up Art’s life in two words, it would be just that. Mommy Problems.

And no, he didn’t have mommy problems in the sense that she wouldn’t buy him the latest edition of the iPhone. I’m talking, serious, emotionally scarring stuff. 

Close, but no.

But the issues aren’t just from Art’s life post-suicide. Obviously, suicide is a difficult thing to deal with for anyone, not just Art in particular. But even before that, it was pretty clear that Art and Anja did not have the best relationship.

As I brought up in my last post, the things that happened to Vladek and Anja in the Holocaust are the things that would set the tone for the rest of their lives. For Anja, the loss of her first son, Richieu was the one that set the crazy train rolling. Richieu’s death leaves a hole in Anja’s heart. And who does she rely on to fill that hole? You guessed it: Art.

As it turns out, Anja is a stage five clinger. She lavishes Art with copious amounts of attention, and as can be expected, Art does not respond well. Instead of accepting and reciprocating to attention (which, in his defense, may have been pretty hard to do), he instead feels smothered, and pulls away from Anja.

Art becomes so fed up with his mother’s constant need for validation, that one night, when Anja comes into Art’s room and asks if he loves her, he responds with “sure.” That was the last time Art saw her before she killed herself.

 

 

And here's a picture of you reading that.

According to webMD, a person who loses someone to suicide is “more at risk for becoming preoccupied with the reason for the suicide while wanting to deny or hide the cause of death, wondering if they could have prevented it, feeling blamed for the problems that preceded the suicide,” and may feel “a great range of conflicting emotions about the deceased …and anger at the deceased for taking their own life.”

 

Art definitely becomes preoccupied with Anja after her death. Her suicide eventually acts as the impetus for Art to begin writing Maus, and as he writes it, he never loses sight of his mother. Even when Vladek is telling Art about his experiences, Art will try to steer him towards stories about his mother instead.

And though he would never take the blame, he does feel blamed for her suicide. The way in which Art showcases his last interaction with his mother before her suicide in his publications, as well as his efforts throughout the rest of the novel to come to terms with her death, show a sense of underlying guilt about it.

But instead of accepting or taking fault for her suicide, he does what most people do best: blame someone else. In “Prisoner on the Hell Planet”, he writes “You’ve committed the perfect crime…You murdered me, Mommy, and you left me here to take the rap!!!” By deflecting the fault back onto Anja, Art makes himself out as the victim instead of her.

This is a pretty recurring theme in their relationship though. When Anja is giving him too much attention, Art feels victimized, and when she kills herself, he displays himself as the victim instead of realistically looking at the reasons for her suicide.

Going back to the flower metaphor, Art’s bad relationship with Anja coupled with her suicide is a horde of flower eating insects, all coming to chomp down on the already suffering flower. Considering the fact that Art was already in the mental ward, his mother’s suicide did not do much to help him out, though it did have significant impact on him.

After her suicide, he became almost obsessed with finding out about her past, probably caused by his guilt over the matter. His intense emotions about Anja’s suicide are what drive him to write Maus, an experience that defines him in his adult life.

So next time your mom won’t get off your back about doing your dishes (why doesn’t she just do them?) or coming to visit her (didn’t you just see her two months ago?), just stop for a moment and be glad. At least your mom didn’t tragically commit suicide and leave you with years’ worth of baggage to sort out yourself.  

 

It Gets Worse

Sometimes, life is really hard. Like when you’ve already poured your bowl of cereal, and then you realize there’s no milk and you have to awkwardly pour it back in the bag. Or when you have three classes in a row in the one building on campus that doesn’t have Wi-Fi. It’s situations like these that make life incredibly hard to handle.

That's rough too.

But it always gets worse. Trust me. And not just in the sense that you could be living somewhere terrible like Syria or New Jersey, or have nothing to eat but grass, but in the sense that there are always people who have it worse than you.

Like Art Spiegelman. 

I mean, sure, there are people who live really tragic, horrible, terrible lives, but as compared to normal people standards, Art’s got it pretty bad. Fresh out of a stint in the psych ward, his mother killed herself, and he was left go on with his life practically on his own, thanks to his poor relationship with his father. If that’s not enough to put someone in a bit of a depression then I couldn’t tell you what is.



Sorry Art. Maybe Someday.

It’s not really Art’s fault though. In a lot of ways, his parents are more to blame than himself. Art’s bad luck goes all the way back to the holocaust, the time that his parents lived in. If it hadn’t been for the destruction caused in the Holocaust, there’s a pretty good chance that Art would be living in the suburbs, in a nice house with a picket fence with both his parents, one and a half siblings, and a golden retriever. But he’s not, and there are a lot of different reasons why that didn’t work out for him.

To explain the reasons why it’s unlikely that Art would have been able to grow up with all the drama he did and still come out unscathed, I’ll present a brief metaphor. Think of planting a flower. It’s a pretty nice flower, there’s not really anything wrong with it. But it got planted in terrible soil. Just horrible. It’s from somewhere really bad, with poor soil quality, probably New Jersey. The bad soil destroys the roots of the flower, and it starts to wilt. Eventually, the bad soil works its way up the roots, through the stem, and to the leaves. By no fault of its own, the flower dies.

Art Spiegelman is that flower. Even though he wasn’t alive during the holocaust, he got planted in its soil because of his parent’s involvement. Given how chaotic the times were (seven million deaths are good indicators of the chaos), the effects of the Holocaust on Art’s parents were so strong that they continued an entire generation down to affect Art himself.

Within the stories of the millions of lives lost during the holocaust are some that affected Art’s parents, Vladek and Anja, very intimately. During their times in the ghetto, Vladek would trade illegal goods with others in the ghetto. It may not sound too hardcore, but it was actually pretty gangster for the time. So gangster in fact, that when the Nazis caught some of Vladek’s friends doing it, they hung them. In the streets. For days.



Generally, walking through the streets and seeing some of your friends hanging dead in the street for doing something that you’ve been doing too certainly trumps running out of milk.

Hitting even closer to home, Vladek and Anja’s son, Richieu is one of the seven million killed. His death is not for lack of trying on behalf of his parents. Vladek and Anja sent Richieu away to live with someone in a place that they though he would be safe. However, even with their strongest efforts, Richieu is eventually poisoned by the woman watching over him when faced with the threat of the gas chamber.

Losing a child is a pretty serious thing to deal with. Losing a child that you tried so hard to protect in such a time as the Holocaust is another thing entirely. The loss of Richieu is a failure to Vladek and Anja, one that they take to heart, and for Anja, one that kicks of the series of events that eventually lead to her suicide.

For both Vladek and Anja, it was their experiences of loss in the Holocaust that shaped them into what they were going to be in the future. Being surrounded by death left them with memories and experiences that compromised their futures, as well as Art’s.

The pretty flower was doomed from the start. It can’t grow in bad soil. Art had a rough start right of the bat. The death, fear, and heartache experienced by his parents, contaminated the “soil” that he was given to grow in. It changed his parents, giving each of them some type of complex that Art would eventually have to deal with.

So next time you’re having a bad day, or life is getting you down, just think: It could be worse. You could be Art Spiegelman.

Or you could live in New Jersey.

 

As I was reading Maus in my college English class, I couldn't really help but think, "Man, this Art Spiegelman guy has it pretty bad." I mean, just the fact that I was reading one of several books published by him probably indicates that he's rolling in cash, but money can't buy happiness right?

The entire book chronicles his struggles, mainly with trying "to come to terms with his father's story and history itself", as I've so kindly been told by the book's Amazon page. But aside from that, Art's gotten so many short sticks that it's almost hard to count. Almost. Here's just a few.

1) Parents plagued with their experiences in the Holocaust.
2) Dead brother.
3) Mother kills herself.
4) Left with years of guilt and stress.
5) Poor relationship with father.
6) Loss of connection with family history.
7) Etcetera, etcetera.

But as I was reading the story, I noticed that there were other things in the book that were chronological besides just the stories Vladek was telling (well, sometimes those were chronological...) In the ways that Art shares his past, and his experiences, they all play out in a way that everything that happens to him influences what happens next. Unfortunately for Art, those things in his life mostly just all happened to be negative.

His parent's bad experiences in the Holocaust caused them to have conflicts within themselves. Anja's complexes in particular, lead to her eventual suicide. At some point along the road, Art ends up in the psych ward. Anja's suicide leads to Art's feelings of guilt and distress, and with her death, dies a large portion of Art's knowledge about his family history. All of these things overall result in Art having a very poor connection with his family's history, and have somehow shaped him into the person he is today.

This development through Art's life was very interesting to me, interesting enough apparently that I decided to write an entire paper about it. And without further ado, I bring to you, my blog translation.