History ComicBook / Maus

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[[caption-width-right:300:BeastFable [[DoesThisRemindYouOfAnything indeed]]...]]

* FragileFlower: Anja is depressed and emotionally fragile, and the loss of her entire family outside of her husband and son only makes it worse. It falls to Vladek to give her a reason to continue living, but she continues to suffer from depression for decades afterwards and eventually commits suicide because of it.

* DirtyCommunists: Anja and her friends from her student days, before she got married to Vladek. Also, Yidl, the chief tinman in Auschwitz - he's unpleasant to Vladek personally for being rich but isn't remarkably immoral. Nonetheless, Vladek says he's always shunned reds.

* WomenAreDelicate: Anja is emotionally fragile. It falls to Vladek to give her a reason to continue living. Even still, she kills herself years afterward.

** Poles are pigs. Speigelman is ambivalent about the Poles, many of whom oppressed the Jews, but some also helped those in need. Pigs were intended to be neutral animals, one not associated with the mouse-cat-dog hierarchy. Despite this, many Poles found the association highly offensive.

* KarmicDeath: Vladek sees or finds out that several people who betrayed him to the Nazis were themselves killed by Nazis, usually because [[YouHaveOutlivedYourUsefulness they had become useless]] to their benefactors at some point.

* CantKillYouStillNeedYou: In Auschwitz, a Polish kapo gives special privileges to Vladek and keeps him from being selected for slave labor and/or certain death, as Vladek is able to speak Polish, German, and English. Seeing the approaching defeat of Nazi Germany, the kapo wants to learn English to increase his own chances of survival post-war.

* DeathMarch: Vladek is forced to participate in the Auschwitz death march after an aborted attempt to hide in the camp, which the Nazis threatened to firebomb. One of his fellow prisoners tries to bribe the guards into letting them escape into the woods, who take the bribe but then shoot him anyway.

* GoneHorriblyRight: Art wrote/drew ''Maus'' in hopes of having his parents' harrowing pasts during the Holocaust be known. In the second book, he recounts how ''Maus'' did indeed gain commercial and critical success, but now he was being overwhelmed with endless interviews and offers to merchandise his work and haunted by guilt as he felt he was profiteering off of his father and people's suffering.

* GoneHorriblyRight: Art wrote/drew ''Maus'' in hopes of having his parents' harrowing pasts during the Holocaust be known. In the second book, he recounts how ''Maus'' did indeed gain commercial and critical success, but now he was being overwhelmed with endless interviews and offers to merchandise his work.

** One particular case that stands out when Vladek, Anja, her parents, and her nephew are hiding in a secret bunker in the ghetto. They are discovered by a Jew who claims he was searching for food; initially, Vladek wants him killed as to [[HeKnowsTooMuch not expose the family's hiding place]], but the others convince him to let the man go. The same man turns out to be an informant, and arrives the next day with the SS to expose the bunker, leading to the family's capture. Little over a week later, the informant is killed by the Germans, and Vladek, while on work detail, ''is the one who buries his corpse''.

** One particular case that stands out when Vladek, Anja, her parents, and her nephew are hiding in a secret bunker in the ghetto. They are discovered by a Jew who claims he was searching for food; initially, Vladek wants him killed as to [[HeKnowsTooMuch not expose the family's hiding place]], but the others convince him to let the man go. The next day, the same man turns out to be an informant, and arrives with the SS to expose the bunker, leading to the family's capture. Little over a week later, the informant is killed by the Germans, and Vladek, while on work detail, ''is the one who buries his corpse''.

* NominalHero: When Vladek and a large group of prisoners are lined up along the edge of a lake to be executed by gunfire in the morning, they discover that all the guards fled. The head officer's girlfriend convinced them to abandon the execution and flee the approaching Americans instead, not out of any kindness towards Jews, but because they'd probably be executed for their war crimes.

* LastDayOfNormalcy: The first few chapters of Maus feature Vladek's life in interwar Poland, his courtship with Anja, and his early family life with Richieu.

%%* ReleasedToElsewhere

* UnreliableNarrator: In the end, the tired, sick and depressed Vladek says that he and Anja lived HappilyEverAfter. However, we know that Anja suffered from mental problems and killed herself about twenty years later.

* WhatTheHellHero: Vladek's stingy behavior gets him this multiple times. A truly stand-out case is when Art ''explodes'' at Vladek for burning Anja's memoirs, even yelling to his face that by doing so he killed her more finally than anything else ever could.

** The first thing Vladek does when Art first visits his home is to yell at Mala for using a ''wire'' coathanger to hang up Art's coat rather than a nice ''wooden'' one. This establishes Vladek's merciless complaining, his rocky second marriage, and his meticulous attention to detail.
** In his story, Vladek begins with his courtship of Anja. During his first visit to her house, he sneaks away to inspect her housekeeping skills and go through her medicine cabinet to ensure that she's worth pursuing. This shows Vladek's rather callous practicality and attention to detail that would serve him well through his trials.
* EvilOldFolks: Anja was nearly exposed as a Jew by a mean old lady. Thankfully for her, everyone disregarded her as a senile old bat.

* WartsAndAll: Called out by name in ''[=MetaMaus=]'', where Spiegelman comments that it was very important to him to try to be as honest as possible in the comic's depiction of Vladek, himself, and their complicated father-son relationship, even if it means that some of Vladek and Spiegelman's own uglier personality traits is on display at times. He noted that he didn't want to "sentimentalize" Vladek by depicting him as "a survivor who's ennobled by his suffering"; rather, Spiegelman, explained, that one of the main messages he was trying to get across with the comic was "Look, suffering doesn't make you better, it just makes you suffer!"

-->--'''Vladek Spiegelman'''

* SinglSpeciesNations: Every species represents a different ethnic group: Mice are Jews, Poles are pigs, Nazis are cats, etc. When using fake papers that identify them as Polish, the (mice) characters wear pig masks.

* AbuseOfReturnPolicy: During the present, Vladek attempts to return a half-eaten, nearly empty, box of cereal to the grocery store. He succeeds after using his backstory as a Holocaust survivor to elicit pity from the store manager (and actually manages to get ''more'' than the value of the cereal back), but his son realizes in shame that they can never return to that store ever again.
* AbusiveParents: Vladek at his worst is emotionally abusive towards his only living son, showing NoSympathy for him as a child and always trying to show him up on house repairs. Art admits that Vladek was difficult to live with, but also understands his father has his own ghosts and demons.
* AllJewsAreCheapskates: Vladek is extremely frugal, which helped him survive the Holocaust. Art worries that in portraying his father honestly, he'll come across as an [[GreedyJew ugly stereotype]].

* AmbiguousDisorder: Anja suffered a host of psychological issues; postpartum depression and a generally fragile mental state that eventually drove her to suicide. Her last moment with Art was her asking him a ''very'' loaded question about love, implying that she may have had an emotional dependency.
* ArmorPiercingQuestion: When Art is in therapy, he mentions that after hearing all of his father's stories, he gained some respect for him and considered him a "winner" for surviving the Holocaust. This leads the shrink to ask him if he therefore thinks everyone who didn't make it was a ''loser'', which catches him off guard. In the end, he adjusts his stance to say that there weren't any "winners" or "losers" in that era, just people whose lives were left to pure luck.

** There's another one - though not as drastic - in the chapter where Art draws himself in the present and goes to talk with his psychiatrist. Everyone has a human body but is wearing animal masks. Later we see the psychiatrist's mantle, with a picture of a cat on it. In recognition of our mental gear-shift, there's a note saying "Framed photo of pet cat - really!"
** A more shocking one when Anja is presented of a photo of Vladek for the first time since exiting the camps, proving he's alive. When the photo is shown to the reader, ''it's the actual (human) Vladek'' (who was right: he ''was'' pretty handsome). The photo was taken at a place that had gotten hold of some concentration camp uniforms, and offered ''souvenir photos from the person's time in the camps.'' The fact that the only photo of Vladek from the camps is a staged facsimile also ties in with Art's repeatedly expressed difficulties in trying to represent the Holocaust.

* AwfulWeddedLife: From the outset Mala and Vladek's marriage is incredibly dysfunctional, to the point that Mala temporarily leaves Vladek during the second book, taking half their assets with her. Nevertheless they still get back together by the end, with Mala taking care of Vladek as he slips into increasingly worse physical health and dementia.
* AxCrazy: One SS guard called "the shooter", who takes pleasure in summarily executing one unlucky Jew every night for the offense of stumbling across him on patrol. Vladek is lucky enough to [[ScrewTheRulesIHaveConnections have a cousin that's well-liked by the guards]] and avoid this fate.

** Vladek and his cousin have a debate in Yiddish over whether or not to trust a pair of Polish smugglers and how to make sure they're trustworthy by having the cousin go ahead and send a letter with an all-clear. The smugglers turn out to know Yiddish and be German collaborators to boot, which leads to the plan being foiled and Vladek ending up in Auschwitz as a result.
* BitterSweetEnding: Vladek and Anja survive the Holocaust and reunite after the war. But they lose their first child and most of their family, Anja will kill herself years later and Vladek will never be able to put the terrible experiences he suffered behind him.

** During his visit to Dr. Pavel he wonders if mentioning the doctor's love of dogs and cats will mess up the comic's symbolism.

** At one point, Vladek rambles about how his father used to ''starve'' him just to keep him out of the army. This serves some explanation as to why Vladek has some experience with being starved.

** Discussed and zigzagged. Anja is long dead before Art starts trying to tell her and Vladek's story, and he seems to hold her in a good light because she served as a buffer between him and Vladek. The ''Prisoner on Hell Planet'' comic, however, reveals that he resented how Anja killed herself and that they didn't really understand each other while she was alive, and her last moment with Art was her engaging in a bit of emotional manipulation. When Vladek dies mid-story, Art is left to deal with his grief and suffers serious WritersBlock along with doubt about if he's the best person to tell the story. He admits at the end that Vladek was doing his best as a parent but was very flawed.
** Inverted in Vladek's relationship with Art. Art feels that he is TheUnfavorite, and has lived his entire life in the shadow of his fathers idealized memories and fantasies of Richieu, Art's brother who died in the Holocaust. [[spoiler: Given that Vladek calls Art "Richieu" on his deathbed, Art is probably not wrong.]]

* DeusExMachina: Arguably, one of the more disturbing elements of the Holocaust that the book depicts is how often Vladek managed to survive by sheer ''luck''.
* DirtyCommunists: Anja and her friends from her student days, before she got married to Vladek. Also, Yidl, the chief tinman in Auschwitz: he's unpleasant to Vladek personally for being rich, but isn't remarkably immoral. Nonetheless, Vladek says he's always shunned reds.
* DraftDodging: Vladek's father often went through desperate lengths to avoid being drafted into the Tsarist army, [[note]]Since being drafted into the army meant spending up to ''25 years'' and antisemitic abuse if you were a Jewish draftee, it is understandable why he wanted to avoid such a fate[[/note]] including removing over a dozen of his teeth. Vladek's father also put his son through physical and emotional hell so he would be too sickly to be drafted into the Polish army.

* FunnyAnimal: Aside from a re-published comic from real-life and a chapter from part two where everyone just wears animal masks, this is how the characters are represented.

* GoodStepmother: He was already an adult when Vladek married her, but Art gets along better with Mala than with his own father. Whatever demons that Mala has from surviving the Holocaust, she's more open about her problems and flaws. Art says he thinks she'd be happier away from his father.

* GreaterScopeVillain: UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler, of course. Despite what the Hitler cat logo implies, [[TheGhost Hitler as well as his inner circle]] are never seen in the story but their influence through the Nazis can be felt. In fact, the closest high ranking Nazi official that Vladek ever encountered was [[MadDoctor Josef Mengele, aka the Angel of Death himself]].
* GreedyJew: It's implied that Anja's wealthy background was a big influence on Vladek's decision to court her, and in modern times he's an obnoxious miser who argues with cashiers over pennies. Art is [[StopBeingStereotypical constantly frustrated]] by how much Vladek conforms to the GreedyJew stereotype and {{discuss|edTrope}}es it at one point with Mala, explaining that he feels awkward and very uneasy about portraying that part of his father's behavior honestly, as he fears what will happen from perpetuating the stereotype.
* HadToBeSharp: Thoroughly deconstructed. Vladek's stinginess and ingenuity in squeezing something out of every cent he has is what enabled him to survive many situations during the Holocaust that another person would have died to, but his portrayal in the modern day expressly outlines that ''those traits are not desirable in a normal person in an average situation,'' and that Vladek continuing to be "sharp" regardless of what is going on makes him into an abrasive and unpleasant old man. Also, Art's therapist points out how respecting one's "strength" in a horrifying situation spits on the memory of those who died.
* HappyEndingOverride: In a sense: while Vladek and Anja both survive the war, the former grew into a miserable cheapskate, while Anja killed herself.

** To a certain degree, Anja. We never discover her version of the story and what has happened to her between leaving Auschwitz and reuniting with Vladek in Poland after the war, as [[spoiler: Vladek has destroyed all her diaries after her suicide]].

** Mancie, an Hungarian Jewish woman who has been appointed as a Kapo at Birkenau uses her position to help other prisoners (risking her life in the process). She is instrumental in securing Anja's survival and is one of the very few people who help the main characters for genuinely altruistic reasons, refusing to accept Vladek's offer of food to reward her. Vladek tries to find her after the war, but he never discovers what happened to her.

** Poles are pigs. Speigelman is ambivalent to the Poles, many of whom oppressed the Jews, but some also helped those in need. Pigs were intended to be a neutral animal, one not associated with the mouse-cat-dog hierarchy. Despite this, many Poles found the association highly offensive.

** Art's therapist, Pavel, points out that Art's great respect for his father's ability to survive the Holocaust makes him dangerously susceptible to the eugenecist mindset that caused it in the first place.

* WhatTheHellHero: Vladek's stingy behavior gets him this multiple times. A truly stand out case is when Art ''explodes'' at Vladek for burning Anja's memoirs, even yelling to his face that by doing so he killed her more finally than anything else ever could.