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Maus Racism Quotes

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Maus by Art Spiegelman is a comic book about Holocaust. Even though it is hard to relate comics and Holocaust, Maus is widely considered as one of the best and most influential Holocaust-inspired works. Unsurprisingly, with Holocaust as the subject for the whole book, issues of races and classes are traced heavily in the themes and structures of Maus. Racism is drawn and described in all its efficiency. Here is a quote from Adolf Hitler: “The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human.” Children are taught to be racists at the early stage of their lives, and this is happening at their homes. “The mothers always told so: ‘Be careful! A Jew will catch you to a bag and eat you!’ So they taught to their children.” (Spiegelman, p.151) …show more content…

In fact, there are good mice and bad mice, good cats, and bad cats, and so on. The book reveals a relatively real society at that time to its readers, and it also considers how racial stereotypes still exists today, questioning that if we as a society learned something from the Holocaust. With this being said, cats/mice is not the only form of racism exhibited in the book. Vladek was a racist himself as well. When Francoise picked up an African American on the way back from the grocery store, Vladek thought she was unbelievable that she had let a "shvartser" into the car. And he kept his eye on this African American to make sure that his stuff was not stolen. This reminds us that racism of the Holocaust survives in other forms, besides what we discussed above. Although Maus is a comic book, it has much greater impact and complexity than other works in this genre. And I feel that it really does a great job on story telling with the aspect of truth. It does not describe people as good or bad. To me, it is more likely to show those characters as a cat wearing a mask of the mouse, a mouse wearing a mask of pig, or a dog wearing a mask of the cat, etc. Therefore, I think that Maus has done well enough for its reader on one of its

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