One of the more chilling accounts of that crimson stain on humanity comes in the form of a comic book. Maus was written and illustrated just over two decades ago by Art Spiegelman, the son of Holocaust survivors. In his two-volume graphic novel, Art (pun intended?) depicts the Jews as mice and the Germans as cats.
If you are unfamiliar with this literary work and, understandably, think that a comic book on the mass murder of Jews seems unseemly and inappropriate for the enormity of the subject matter, I assure you that it very successfully conveys the monstrosities with haunting realism. Ironically, in many ways I found volume 1, which chronicles the events just up to the Holocaust, far more horrific than volume 2.
One scene sticks out in my mind: young Art asks his father to explain how it felt to live during that time. His father suddenly bellows out Boo! at him and Art, startled, jumps back. His father tells him to imagine that every single moment of your existence is like that. What is so effective about this explanation is that it wisely forgoes any attempt to directly describe the non-describable and instead uses analogy to give a sense of the terror.
One day, a few years after its publication, during the period in which I lived in Boston, I learned that Art had been invited to give a lecture on Maus at Harvard, and that the lecture would be open to the public. The opportunity to hear the author of this arresting book speak in person promised to be an intensely powerful experience, and I of course attended. The talk was held in a lecture hall of considerable size, and there were no empty seats. Hundreds were in attendance.
It was the most bizarre lecture I've ever been to in my life.
For the next 90 minutes, I sat dumbfounded as Art spoke exclusively on his choice of presenting the work in comic book format, as opposed to the more traditional textual format. He discussed such utterly technical topics as the use of shadow, closeups, the positioning of the dialog balloons relative to the characters, his decision of how to depict non-German non-Jews (dogs) and similar minutiae. Art employed an overhead projector, which displayed panels from the book on a large screen as Art discussed them.
In the most surrealistic part of the lecture, in response to a question from the audience during the Q & A portion, a panel depicting the most carnal scene of torture and murder blazed on the screen from the overhead projector while Art dryly expounded on orientation, perspective, vertical lines and contours. To my mind, it was as if a group of fashion designers were to come upon a person lying bleeding on the street, shot to death, and were to begin reviewing his sartorial ensemble.
Not the slightest mention throughout the entire speech of Art's relationship with his father, what it was like growing up as the child of Holocaust survivors, his mother's suicide, the experience of depicting such cruel barbarity, how the Holocaust colored his own view of the world, his belief in God, the nature of good and evil, man's inhumanity to man, or any of the myriad spiritual, emotional and philosophical concerns that, one thinks, would inhabit his mind during the process of producing a portrayal of disease, torture, starvation and genocide.
So divorced from the content of his art was Art that it was as if the subject material he had chosen for his book was completely irrelevant to him, and only the art form mattered. As if the decision-making process that had led to his embarking on the project had gone something like this:
Hmmm. What topic shall I choose for my graphic novel? Superheroes? Nah, been done to death. Movie satires? Uh-uh. Too derivative. Something political? Nope, too narrow. Ah, I've got it -- the Holocaust!I wish to stress very firmly that the above was simply a mental image that entered my head in my surprised reaction to the nature of Art's lecture. I am not suggesting that Art's thinking actually went along those flippant lines.
Nevertheless, it does remain an interesting question whether Art's primary goal was to document the Holocaust, and decided that the graphic novel would best serve that purpose, or whether Art's main objective was to produce a graphic novel, and decided that the Holocaust would be a suitable subject matter. Probably there is no either-or answer, and for Art, the form and the content are both paramount and inextricably linked.
At any rate, my experience at another lecture on the Holocaust which I attended at roughly the same time seems germane.
Around the time that Maus was published, Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List was released, a film about Oskar Schindler, a German businessman who saved over a thousand Jews during the Holocaust by employing them in his factories.
And around the time that Art delivered his lecture on Maus in Cambridge, one of the so-called "Schindler Jews" gave a talk in nearby Brookline, about her experiences from that period. This lecture too was widely attended, mostly by the Jewish community.
Although I remember little of the specific content of that sixty-ish woman's talk, I do remember that the entire audience, myself included, was spellbound by her reminiscences, and I likewise recall that she did speak of the searingly personal.
There is, however, one specific detail of that talk which I remember vividly: the tone of her delivery, which can best be described as flat in affect. This is not to say that her voice was meek or listless. Quite the contrary, it was strong like copper, reflecting a person with a vibrant spirit. But she delivered her speech in a dispassionate monotone, as if she were reading from a phone book, or conjugating a verb.
The jarring contrast between the deeply personal and sensitive content of her words and the emotionless tone of her inflection, which people I spoke with almost invariably mentioned, was explained as the method which she had adopted in order to allow herself to speak of such horribly raw events of her life without losing composure and breaking down. This dry schoolmarm intonation allowed her to create the emotional distance that was necessary for her to be able to calmly describe the inhumane barbarities she had personally witnessed.
And I wonder if Art's exclusive focus on the technical elements of the work during his speech was a similar mechanism which he had adopted to allow himself the requisite emotional detachment from the unspeakable atrocities which would otherwise be too unbearable to relate.
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