Teaching Resources for Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale

One Book / One Bucks County 2005

• About the One Book One Bucks County Project
• About graphic novels and the selection of Maus for the One Book Project
• About this resource guide
• About Art Spiegelman
• About Maus
  • Background Notes
  • Chapter Summaries
  • Main characters
  • Themes/Issues
• Maus in the classroom
  • Resource Guide (Grades K-6)
  • Unit One: Literature Circles (Grades 7-10)
  • Unit Two: Interdisciplinary Webquest(Gr. 11-12) (Teacher Edition)
  • Student Edition
    (http://www.buckslib.org/ OneBook/Maus/unit2student.htm)

Bucks County Free Library

Themes/Issues

Maus is a complex work with multiple levels of meaning. It can be read as a fable with a moral for the future, as a personal account of the Holocaust, and as a story in which the tensions and conflicts of a family parallel those in the public world. The animal characters are metaphors for the racial and political conflicts of Germany and Poland in the 1930s and 1940s,

• Family conflict (between Art and Vladek, between Vladek and Mala, between Art and his dead brother Richlieu)
• Racism (German racism, Vladek's racism, Art's possible racism in portraying races and nationalities as animals))
• Guilt (Art's - about surviving when his brother did not; about not being worthy as the child of parents who went through so much; about putting Vladek's personal stories in print when Vladek had asked him not to; about not treating his father as well as he should; about how he treated his mother when she turned to him for love just before committing suicide)
• Survival (Vladek's, Anja's, Mala's, Art's)
• Dominance, racial and personal (Vladek is as dominant to Mala and Art as the Germans were to him; dominance of favored prisoners over those less fortunate; dominance of cats over mice)
• Depression, suicide (Art's, Vladek's, Anja's)
• Prisons and prisoners (including POW camp, concentration camp, and more figurative experiences in which characters feel like prisoners)
• Artistic process (Art's various struggles with telling this story both in words and pictures)
• Irony (Anja survives the Holocaust only to commit suicide; Vladek dominates everyone just as the Germans dominated him; Richieu is sent to a relative to be safe, but the relative poisons him so he won't be taken by the Germans; Vladek makes racial comments about an African-American though he was the victim of racism; the success of Maus makes Art feel guilty)