Woodchucks by Maxine Kumin Analysis

People argue against Goldhagen’s claim, that the German society was anti-Semitic, by pointing out that after World War II, the Germans no longer hated the Jews and made laws to protect them. Goldhagen rebuts this argument by stating, “Germans, after the war, were castigated by the world for committing the greatest crime in history…The Allies denuded Germany’s institutional structures, replaced the dictatorship with democracy and revamped the education system” (Weinstein 2). So after the war, they realized their fallacies and had to change their views.

“Was German ‘Eliminationist Anti-Semitism” Responsible for the Holocaust?” is a fascinating and somewhat discouraging debate that explores the question of whether German anti-Semitism, instilled within citizens outside of the Nazi Party, played a vast role in the extermination of Jews during the Holocaust . Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, author of “The Paradigm Challenged,” believes that it did; and argues quite convincingly that ordinary German citizens were duplicitous either by their actions or inactions due to the deep-seeded nature of anti-Semitic sentiment in the country. On the other hand, Christopher R. Browning, who has extensively researched the Holocaust, argues that the arguments of Goldhagen leaves out significant dynamics which were prevalent throughout most of Western and Eastern Europe during this period of history.

Maxine Kumin?s, Woodchucks provides an interesting and creative perspective into the mind state of those influenced by nazi warfare. What begins as a seemingly humorous cat and mouse hunt, reminiscent of such movie classics as Caddyshack, soon develops into an insatiable lust for blood. Kumin?s descriptive language provides the reader with the insight necessary to understand to the speaker?s psychology as they are driven beyond the boundaries of pacifism.

Consistent with Rossel, Germany has had a past of anti-Semitism, starting in 1542 when the great German Protestant leader Martin Luther wrote a booklet called Against the Jews and Their Lies. Even earlier the Catholic Churches had taught that the Jewish people killed Crist and should therefore be hated (10). Early teachings of anti-Semitism lead to a hating of the Jewish community, but with the German’s calling themselves the “Aryan Race” and the Jewish people calling themselves the “chosen one’s” there was bound to be competition on who was superior.

Maxine Kumin uses metaphor, allusion, and imagery to compare the character in the poem to real life people and to represent historical events. Throughout the poem, it seems that the author was referencing the Holocaust. This is revealed in the last stanza when she uses the word “Nazi”. She compares the killing of the woodchucks to the killing of the Jews during the Holocaust. The woodchucks symbolize the Jews as the gardener in the poem symbolizes the Nazis. The gardener killed the woodchucks just like Nazi party killed the Jews. In the third stanza Maxine Kumin includes the line, “I, a lapsed pacifist fallen from grace puffed with Darwinian pieties for killing”. She uses Charles Darwin’s concept of “survival of the fittest” to support her reason for killing the animals. Maxine Kumin also uses allusion throughout the poem to reference the Holocaust. The last stanza of the poem stated, “If only they’d all consented to die unseen gassed underground the quiet Nazi way.” This line clearly reveals how the poem connects to the Holocaust. The first stanza stated, “But they had a sub-sub-basement out of range.” This also references the Holocaust because the woodchucks had other hiding places just like many Jews did while trying to escape Hitler’s ruthless ways.

     In the fourth stanza, the speaker’s killing instinct has taken over her body. She shows no pity towards the woodchucks as she takes the mother woodchuck and shoots her, watching it fall to its helpless death. She then takes another baby woodchuck, looking in its eyes, and kills it. She continues to kill the rest like a trained assassin, or psycho killer driven by pure frustration.

She admits that a “lapsed pacifist” such as herself can be filled with “Darwinian pieties” to murder, specifically referencing the woodchucks destroying the landscape. Though the narrator may seem to simply realize her obsession with killing the woodchucks, her overall connotation leads readers to consider the possibility of a preoccupation to execute humans as well. This theme continues throughout the remaining stanzas in the poem, as the speaker utilizes phrases such as “the murderer inside me” and “if only they’d consented to die unseen.” These lines insinuate that the speaker represents one who murders people rather than a hunter of rodents. The use of violent, personified vocabulary throughout the entire poem also signifies the speaker’s focus on human violence. The strand of harsh and sometimes humanized words such as “beheading,” “gassing,” “nipping,” “killing,” and “bullets” inflict a negative connotation for the narrator’s actions. These words are not always used when referring to the woodchucks; the “beheading” refers to a patch of carrots, which signifies that this violent connotation is intentional. If the speaker simply aims to reflect an innocent woodchuck hunt, she should not use such violent or personal vocabulary. Therefore, the incorporation of this strand of words along with the narrator’s description of her own actions signifies the overall personification of the rodents in the speaker’s

Germans in the beginning of the Nazi era were campaigning to eliminate any signs of Jewish intellectualism or anti-socialist ideas within the public. This is eminent when the author states in the article “Book Burning” that, “German govt was trying to create support for the Nazi cause, by driving in the nazi ideas in social and cultural groups”(Book Burning, Holocaust

From 1933 to 1945, hiding Jews was a massive event in Germany. Many Germans risked

Larson, Erik. In the garden of beasts: love, terror, and an American family in Hitlers Berlin. 375 pages. New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2011.

“Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor” (Thomas Jefferson). In the graphic novels Maus I: A Survivors Tale & Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began by Art Spiegelman, he uses animal imagery to portray the predator-prey relationship that the Nazi regime shared with the Jewish population. Based on the alienation of the Jewish “race” albeit “not human” and the superiority that the rest of the populations begin to feel, these depictions of races, countries, and ethnicities as animals is both appropriate and effective to illustrate the various groups during the Holocaust. This resembles the Nazi belief that certain populations have a conventional character and will retain their inborn predator or prey status by characterizing the Jewish as Mice and the Nazis as Cats.

In 1965, Jerzy Kosinski wrote his controversial novel “The Painted Bird”, which tells the story of a young six year old unnamed boy’s journey to survive during the violence and horrors of World War II. Kosinski shows readers how war can change people, as well as how barbaric human beings can act during wartime. During this time the Nazi sentiment was spreading like wildfire throughout central Europe. Hitler took great measures to ensure that Nazi’s remained in control by using cruelty and violence in creating fear and terror. Those living in Europe were far too scared to go against the Nazis’. The Jewish were not the only enemies of the Germans “Gypsies followed close behind... having no place in Adolf Hitler’s ideal of a racially pure

This shows that she can’t stop thinking about it until she gets them. Then, she justifies her actions, “The case we had against them was airtight” (Line 4). By saying that they had a strong case against these animals, and that this was just the consequence of the woodchuck’s actions. The poet also talks about how the woodchucks are “taking the food from our mouths” (Line 13). Finally, her guilty conscience arises “If only they’d all consented to die unseen gassed underground the quiet Nazi way” (Lines 29-30). These last two lines show her guilt and how she wishes they had died when she tried gassing them so she wouldn’t feel as guilty. If they had died this way she would have not seen their faces when she killed them so it would have been less personal, but because she shot them one by one she saw each of their faces.

In the present Researched Argument I will study and analyze the poem September 1, 1939 written by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden), considered to be one of the great Anglo-American poets of the 20th century. The poem September 1, 1939 is named after the date that the nazis invaded Poland, the day that World War II started. I will begin this Researched Argument by giving the historical background of the poem. Then I will proceed to analyze some of the most important and interesting verses and stanzas of the poem and give a particular focus on the last verse of the penultimate stanza: “We should love one another or die”. W.H Auden wrote September 1, 1939 as a depiction of the socio-economic problems that the United States of America were going through this period and the rise of Nazism in Germany as a potential menace and threat to the short lived-peace of the interwar period, the lives of the Jewish People and the sovereignty of the neighboring European countries.

In Art Spiegelman’s biographical graphic novel Maus 1: My Father Bleeds History, ethnic groups are portrayed as animals to allow the audience to understand the history behind the discrimination of Jewish people during World War Two, and the reasons behind the holocaust; Spiegelman utilizes this comparison to provide a better understand the mindset of the Germans, Jews, and Poles as the genocide began to unfold. Overall, Maus 1 focuses on the story of Spiegelman’s father, Vladek, who lived through the horror that was the holocaust, and his experiences as he tried to survive in Nazi occupied Poland. Therefore, the reason why Spiegelman portrays Germans as cats, Jews as mice, and Poles as pigs is to express how these groups viewed each other and to provide an understanding into the hostility behind anti-Semitism. As well, by using animals as an analogy, Spiegelman ensures that by creating an inhuman feel, the events could be looked at through a critical lens. Due to the relevance behind Maus, many articles were written, analysing the work. The article “Rhetoric Functions of the Infestation Metaphor in Hitler’s Rhetoric” by Steven Perry, provides insight into the origins of the depiction of Jews as rats or mice, and how it led to anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany. Likewise, Sheng-Mei Ma’s article “Mourning with the (as a) Jew: Metaphor, Ethnicity, and the Holocaust in Art Spiegelman’s Maus,” and “Well Intended Liberals Slop: Allegories of Race in Spiegelman’s Maus” by Andrew Loman