Cat and Maus: A Difference in Viewpoints

The images above are drastically different in their portrayal of the Jews. In Maus, they are furtive mice, entirely at the mercy of the Nazis. Spiegelman's father, a Jew, attracts the reader's sympathy because, while everybody throughout the novel is trying to save himself, he is shown protecting Anja. Furthermore, the constant threat of death hangs over the mice in the form of a trap that is ready to spring at any moment. The shadows that stretch in front of them resemble hanging bodies, with the trap outline as the gallows: one wrong step, and they die. Moreover, there is no cheese or other bait on the trap; in essence, the Jews are not being killed justly, or for any reason that is obvious to the viewer. The large spotlight behind shows the magnitude of the Nazi power that they are up against, as well as the idea that there is nowhere for them to hide, because everywhere there are people watching. Also, the trap is suspended in the air, isolated like the countries that were conquered by Hitler: the only way to save oneself from death in the camps is to die by stepping off of the edge of the trap.

In the rightmost image, the Jew's ugly features, such as his very large nose, thick eyebrows, and eyes that are very close together, leave the embittered viewer to infer that the Jew is as ugly inside as out. He looks more like a monster than a man. Furthermore, the Nazi perspective shows the German civilians as small, helpless victims, entirely at the mercy of the Jew. This is ironic because, in reality, the Nazis decided the fate of the Jews, as shown in the picture at left. The Star of David on the Jew's forehead is there to show that his religion directs his actions, just as today, people blame terrorism on Islam: this surface detail gives the viewer a way to differentiate between a person who may be a risk and one who is not. The image will have made the Nazi viewer feel threatened, and the most common way to deal with a threat is to fight it. Hitler's propaganda is made more effective by the huge toll that World War 1 took on Germany's people; they needed a place to channel their anger, and he successfully united them by giving them an easy target. Because of his manipulation, the image's caption is ironic in that it was, in fact, Hitler's goal to "eat the whole world".

Both images have a dark background, showing that both parties recognized the darkness of the situation, though they did so for drastically different reasons. While one party felt like it was being stifled, the other actually was, in a way that is rather difficult for today's generation to grasp; perhaps this is why Spiegelman draws mice and cats instead of humans. This metaphor distances us from those who lived through the war, while effectively showing the deadly relationship between Jews and Nazis. Spiegelman partly embraces cultural stereotypes, in that that he shows the Jews as mice instead of closely similar rats, to show how hatred could easily warp the harmless into the enemy.