What is the difference between maus 1 and maus 2

The relationships between past and present are often illustrated graphically within the context of the story. The most vivid representation of this concept occurs at the beginning of Chapter Two of Book II, in which Art is sitting at his drawing board above a sprawling pile of dead and emaciated Jewish mice.

The primary motivation amongst Jews in the Holocaust is survival. Vladek sums up the process succinctly while consoling his wife after the death of his first son, Richieu: "to die, it's easy And as the struggle intensifies, the will to survive begins to break the strong bonds of family, friendship, and a common Jewish identity.

In the initial stages of German occupation, these measures are relatively small - buying food on the black market, for example - and strengthened by strong family ties, a unified Jewish identity, and even altruism. When Vladek arrives home from the prisoner of war camp, for example, an old business acquaintance, Mr.

Ilzecki , helps him earn money and acquire the proper work papers that will allow him to walk the streets in relative safety. As the situation continues to deteriorate, however, Vladek, his family, and his friends are forced to resort to increasingly extreme measures in order to survive.

Here, the bonds of Jewish identity begin to break under the pressing instinct to survive. The first sign of this comes in the form of Jews serving on a Jewish Police force, like the ones who came to Vladek's apartment to escort his wife's grandparents to the concentration camps. According to Vladek, these Jews thought that by helping the Nazis in taking some of the Jews, perhaps they could help save others - and of course they could also save themselves.

Soon after, the bonds of family also begin to break, as illustrated by Vladek's cousin Haskel's refusal to save them from transport to Auschwitz without some form of payment.

Though Haskel eventually does help Vladek and Anja escape, he ultimately decides not to help Anja's parents, and they are sent off to their deaths. The bond between Vladek and Anja remains solid throughout most of the story, as they first hide together in the barns and back rooms of Sosnowiec and are ultimately sent to neighboring concentration camps.

In the camps, Vladek and Anja are both preoccupied with their own survival, but Vladek is also able to help his wife by giving her extra food and emotional support.

Soon, though, the Russians advance upon Auschwitz and Birkenau, and the couple is unavoidably separated. Vladek is hurried on a long, forced march through snow-covered woods to packed railway cars where there is no food or water for days. In telling this story to his son, Vladek does not mention Anja again until right before their eventual reunification in Sosnowiec. Unable to help those around him, and unable to help his wife, he is left only with his own stubborn will to survive.

The importance of luck is closely related to discussions of survival and guilt see above. Vladek is blessed with many skills and qualities - including the ability to speak multiple languages - that provide him with opportunities to survive within the confines of Auschwitz.

Ultimately, however, Vladek's survival and the survival of all other Holocaust survivors hinges upon luck. On countless occasions throughout Vladek's Holocaust ordeals, his life is spared only by the narrowest of margins: the near-miss bullet at the prisoner-of-war camp in Lublin; the run-in with the Gestapo while carrying ten kilograms of illegal sugar; the night Mrs. Motonowa forces him and Anja out of her house; the case of typhus at Dachau; and many, many other incidents.

No matter how resourceful Vladek is, no matter how many languages he knows or jobs he can perform, he cannot ultimately save himself from the horrors of the Holocaust.

Rather, the matter of his life and death ultimately depends upon a long line of chance outcomes, most of which happen to fall his way. The rest of his family, including his parents and five siblings, are not so lucky. Pavel, Art's psychiatrist, suggests that this idea may have contributed to a strong sense of guilt in Vladek for having survived the Holocaust while so many of his friends and family did not. Unsurprisingly, given the subject matter, issues of race and class figure heavily in the plot, themes, and structure of Maus.

The author mostly makes up a story, which is actually impossible and the story is often very short. According to Gerhard Kurz an allegory has both a literal and an allegorical meaning.

Only when the level of meaning is known one could understand the text. This aspect will be discussed detailed in the course of the work. The work can not exactly categorize, because there is no clear dividing line. At first view Spiegelman's choice to use certain animals as protagonists is inappropriate, particularly with regard to such a difficult topic like the Holocaust.

At a closer look the reader may realize that the animal figures have many advantages and Spiegelman dodges some conflicts, which I will discuss in the following. First of all the animals function as metaphors. Spiegelman tries to assign stereotyping elements and identities to certain animals and reaches easy identifications. So the reader can identify at first sight the role allocations, while human characters would make it harder to recognize offender and victim. In this way it is easier to see if a person is Jewish or not.

On the other hand it would not be possible to reconstruct everything and everyone, who is mentioned in the book and Spiegelman could not claim to tell an authentic story. So he works around this problem by using abstract characters. Further on, the use of such characters has another important advantage, namely that abstract figures raise the willingness to identify with them.

Especially Holocaust survivors can incorporate their own experience better than with the use of human characters. Through this effect Spiegelman works around the problem of depicting human figures in his book.

On the one hand he can not depict people who died, because they are dead and whether the survivers would agree is very doubtful. On the other hand it will be morally questionable to draw random people, because similarities to living and dead people can appear. Further on, Spiegelman does not want to publish a historical document, which claims to be objective but put some daylight between himself and the the horrible story of the Holocaust.

Firstly he attracts attention, because he is the first one, who deals with that topic in such a difficult way and secondly he does not have to compete with the already countless available Holocaust literature, because he uses a completely different genre. The question is whether a person is responsible for his action even when he can not prevent the execution.

With the use of the cat-and-mouse metaphor the question of moral responsibility does not even arise, because it is in the nature of cats to kill mice. One might imagine that Jews are prey by nature and that it is not a racial discrimination through the Nazis.

The history of mankind is replete with episodes of mass destruction and killing. This century produced perhaps the greatest example of such atrocities, the Second World War. It was during this period of unexplainable brutality that both the Jewish Holocaust and the Nagasaki Bombing occurred. These awful events, discussed and regarded in a much different light half a century ago, are analyzed quite divergently now that mankind has had fifty years to ponder on its errors.

Although enacted on Japan instead of Germany, it symbolized much of the anger and desire to finish a long, bloody war. The initial joy that followed the devastating detonation of the bomb disappeared in time with the public's realization of the grave mistake that had been committed.

Not only did millions of people perish during the Holocaust and immediately after the Nagasaki episode, but many more lost their lives some time afterwards, victims of physical deterioration, mental illness created by the tragic events, and depression brought upon by memories of the horrors.

Anja Spiegelman is one such case. She found her demise twenty years after surviving the death camps, a victim of their memories. In a sense, she did not survive. The estimate of six million Jews is ever-increasing, so the memories continue.

Ironically, these two events, executed by opposite sides of the war, are linked by more than an inmeasurable amount of deaths. Many of the people alive during this time period are in possession of vivid recollections fo the historical occurrences, reflecting a near-unanimous disgust towards the brutalities occurred. Some of the Nagasaki accounts can be accessed at the Remembering Nagasaki web site , while the Jewish ones can be read in reviews of Holocaust literature.

While the Holocaust is one of the most horrible episodes of history, it is not one that could or should be forgotten. Not only does the book narrate the horrors of the concentration camps located in Poland, it also displays the enormous difficulties of second generation Holocaust survivors to find a way to come to terms with the horrendous plight of their ancestors.

Richard Rhodes. The Mascot. Resistance and Betrayal. Patrick Marnham. Death of a Princess. Scott MacLeod and Tom Sancton. The File. Timothy Garton Ash. Siegfried Knappe. Eva Braun. Heike B. The Book Thieves. Anders Rydell. Letters from Nuremberg. Christopher Dodd and Lary Bloom. The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials. Telford Taylor. The Patriarch. Norman Mailer. Hunter S.