Mice are not humans

When I started to read Maus from Art Spielgelman which is a story based on the World War II –it's unnecessary explain you what happen in this horrible war, we already know that– it was very entertain for me that the characters on this story are not humans, there are animals which represent humans. Each country has a special animal that represents them, for instance, German people are cats while Jews are mice, the Americans are dogs and the French are frogs.

It’s quite obvious that cats and mice don’t have a good relationship, because mice are at the end of the food chain in this story and we all know that mice are eaten by cats. The same thing happens with dogs and cats, we all know that dogs don’t like cats, and we all know that USA was against Germany. Also, Poles are pigs which was actually the term used by Nazis to refer to them –as an extra information, the bug spray “Zyklon-B” used by the mice couple when they are in the Catskills is the name of the gas used in concentration camp prisoners, so Art used many real references in the comic–.

Ok! It’s pretty evident everything that I explained before. But Spiegelman play with this idea at the point that mice are not an animal that all people like. He chose mice to represents Jews because in that time, they actually were as that for Anti- Semite people. They were less than human, they were seems as plague for the Nazi ideology, a plague that had to disappear just as mice.

But also the thing that makes connection with what has been explained and the reason why the characters are animals is the epigraph: “The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human”, which is a quote that was said for nothing more and nothing less than Adolf Hitler, the man that lit the flame of this war, the person who convince a whole country that this Semite group was bad at the point to kill them, to commit genocide against them. When Art Spiegelman drew this comic, he wanted to refute this quote with the story, he showed cats, dogs, frogs, pigs and mice, all are animals as a contradiction to the quote in the sense that Jews are also humans, they are humans as Germans, Americans, French, Poles and so on and so forth. I don’t see any difference, not as Hitler saw it and the opposite idea to this quote fix very well with the story.

Spiegelman wanted to fight against anti- Semite idea with the story, showing animals as characters and also with the tittle of the comic: Maus, which not only is how mouse is pronounced. The word maus is the first four letters of a German verb mauscheln which means “to talk like a Jew” or “to swindle like a Jew”, of course, the word was used in a derogatory way in that time.

These three aspects: animals, epigraph and tittle are ones of the many ways to show his discontent with what happens in the Second World War.

As a personal opinion, I had to say that the Second World War happened many years ago, but as we are living an era in which the word “war” is seems so far away that we see the history as a story, almost a fairy tale that makes us blind and makes us think as it wasn’t happened, but it was real. The history is forgotten by many people, so this stories as Maus, makes people don’t forget our past, as a constant reminder that it cannot happen again.