Moving Mouths and Open Ears

Spiegelman utilizes Maus as an attempt to undermine the Nazi's antisemitic images. The picture on the left is one of many Nazi propaganda from the Holocaust. This image in particular features a couple that is likely Jewish, similar to Vladeck and Anja from Maus, looking for a place to hide. The Germans were rounding up all the Jewish people in order to imprison them in the concentration camps. In the background you can see a sinister-looking, black bird looming over the pair of escapees. It is accompanied by a swastika flag, expressing the feeling of Nazi power and control over all of the people. Spiegelman's art on the right (volume one, page 129) extends his cat and mouse metaphor to manipulate the propaganda in a way that supports his intentions of sympathizing with the fearful Jewish and to highlight the inhumane treatment towards fellow people. He changes the couple's appearance into mice, which in his graphic novel represent Jews, and exchanges the evil fowl for a mouse trap. This new depiction connotes the trapped and suffocating feeling of the victimized Jewish population at the time, and instead of representing the Nazi's as almighty and powerful, the image points to them as the antagonists.