Historical Context Juho

What is the cultural and educational background of the author and how did this background influence the book?  In what ways do the events in the books reveal evidence of the author’s world view?

First of all, the graphic novel Maus is written by the author, Art Spiegelman. He is an author and this story is mostly based about his father, Vladek Spiegelman. Artie in this story first asks his dad to help him write his story by giving information about what happened his lifetime during the Holocaust. Then Vladek talks about what happened to him during the Holocaust and Artie writes it down which made Maus based on Vladek. So not only did the author's cultural background influence the novel, but it was the story for it, and it also has the reason why it was written. Also, it does influence the novel because Art had a good source, his father, a Holocaust survivor. If his father was not a Holocaust survivor, he might have not written this story in the way he'd written by now, also it would have probably contained bias of an kind.

Secondly, not much of the author's world view isn't known since this story was based by Vladek, the author's father. Mostly the author's father's ideas were revealed but not most of it due to that it was a biography wrote in another way. So this is most likely to be an interview about his father making it almost nothing to show the author's world of view. 

https://trcs.wikispaces.com/Vladek

I chose this picture because this is a picture of Vladek Spiegelman, the reason why this book has no bias containing. Also the book is almost all based on this man so I chose this as an important picture to pick.

Literary Analysis blogpost #4 Juho

1. 
   
    Maus is a racist book?

   
   
   
   This book, Maus, is a lot like to all books many people have read in the past 7 months. The theme is a lot to do with the holocaust which is otherwise communism or facism specifically. The book is about Artie, the writer, writing and hearing a story about his father, Vladek who is a holocaust survivor. Vladek , the protagonist had a wife named Anja who survived during  WWII but died 4 years later from depression. Then after he married another wife named Mala, who also a holocaust survivor. Now that the book has ended readers can see the themes of the book. There are many themes to this book as the reader can see.
   
   

                                                                                
    maus characters
   One theme from the book as readers can see was about race and what the Nazis thought of the jews, homo-sexuals, gypsies, and others. Maus plays on the Nazi’s racist idea that Jews are less than human, “vermin,” by rendering the Jewish characters into mice. Germans, on the other hand, are represented as cats, Americans as dogs, and Poles as pigs. Maus doesn’t use these animal figures to present a simplistic moral tableau where all the Germans are evil and all the Jews are good. Instead, the novel uses these animal figures to show how race is not reducible to one characteristic or another (Maus). There are good mice and bad mice, good pigs and bad pigs, good cats and evil cats, and so forth. In fact, just as the Jews “passed” as Poles or Germans as a way to survive, the novel plays with its own animal allegory, presenting human beings wearing mouse masks or mice wearing pig masks. The novel also considers how racial stereotypes still operate in society today, bringing up the troubling question of whether we as a society have learned anything from the experience of the Holocaust. 
   
   Another theme is about the holocaust which is warfare. Maus presents World War II largely from the perspective of Jewish survivors who were imprisoned in the concentration camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau and Dachau (Spiegelman). From survivor testimony, Maus recreates concentration camp life – from the brutal labor conditions to the infamous gas chambers, where it is estimated that almost a million prisoners died in Auschwitz alone (Maus). Maus also tracks the psychological effect of camp life on the individuals involved. Rather than presenting either the guards as uniformly evil or the prisoners as uniformly good, we get a full range of human behavior – cowardice and sadism, certainly, but also heroism and moral strength.

Line Illuminator : Week #3

"...I don't know how I can stand it! " Mala  

Vladeck walks in

" So... Hi, kids"

" I didn't know you are upstairs here. I as watering the downstairs garden. "

" Mala and I were just talking about my book...  I've already started to sketch out some parts. I'll show you!"

Before Vladek, Artie's father walks in to his house, Mala and Artie are talking about Vladek. They were complaining about him and how he reacts to most of his life to Mala. But when Vladek goes in they stop talking about him. If it were normal people they would still talk so that the person will change their attitude, but seeing that they stopped continuing, I think that Vladek is like the leader of the group and they are the minions that follow them while he is there, but then doesn't like him and complains about him when he isn't seen. They act more like a family when Vladek is there and forgets about the tension and the reason they were mad at him because of the reason he is there. This is also shown in many families where they have a parent divorced but then married again.

Couple about to be divorced

But for this reason that Mala and Vladek don't go along is Vladek had Anja but she died, well suicided because she felt depressed after the war. So she died and after Artie grew, Vladek thought Mala would be another wife instead for Anja but it wasn't right so you can see them fighting over for who is a worse person.

Maus, Week 2.

Having read 2 books and 2 parts of Maus, I can see many connections from Maus to One day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, World War I, and many other books. Maus is a book based on the history of the holocaust, and the life of a Jew during World War II. Maus has to do a lot with equality because Jews weren’t equal to the Aryans during the World War II in the lands German conquered. The Nazi group especially treated Jews, Gypsies, and a whole lot of people who weren’t Aryan as their experiments or the main reason for Germany’s Treaty that they had to pay. But Jews, especially were most killed in the camps of the Nazis. Bringing the reason that Jews in Germany were wealthy while the whole German people weren’t Hitler came up with the idea to make a gigantic army to break the Treaty and to kill the Jews. It was like killing 2 birds with one stone.

                   killing 2 birds with one stone

Connecting to One day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the concentration camps were both harsh. They treated the prisoners as nothing but people who will help the country become better. The differences were that One day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, had a gulag camp for the Russians or prisoners in Russia who had their reason. But the Holocaust was a camp for Jews who didn’t have a reason to be stuck their. Another difference is that the Holocaust killed people on purpose but in One day, the campers were killed by hard work but not on purpose. But the campers for one reason had to work non-stop for hours and hours, day by day, month by month. Germany wanted the campers to help Germany not their own home country. But the Soviet Union government wanted the campers to help Soviet Union and the people.

holocaust jews

Also connecting to World War I and Maus, World War II started from World War I and Hitler. That is not exaggerated, since World War I made a Treaty ( Treaty of Versailles) which made Germany pay loads of money and land to USA, United Kingdom (more like England), and France. But Hitler during that time found out that Jews were still wealthy while the whole country and even USA was suffering from the Great Depression. Hitler lied, more or less exaggerated about Jews and why they had to suffer from the Great Depression, and the Treaty of Versailles. So Hitler secretly made the Nazi army and made the army greater and greater everyday. Then he also made concentration camps known as the Holocaust. Which then started the war.