Janika Carey

“Happy, happy ever after:” The Absence of the Mother in Art Spiegelman's Maus II

In Art Spiegelman's autobiographical comic book Maus II, the narrator is trying to make sense of his parents' experience during the Holocaust. Although Spiegelman himself was born years after the war, he grew up surrounded and absorbed by his parents' past: Maus II is his attempt at telling their story,  and it is also, to a certain extent, Spiegelman's search for his own identity. Problems with the author's self-seeking and with his textual and visual representation of his parents' trauma arise because he only has access to his father's account, while his mother Anja is almost completely absent throughout. But besides complicating Spiegelman's understanding of his own roots, Anja's absence becomes representative of the absence of other victims as well. Thus, Maus II is not only the story of one family, but that of a collective trauma, and the question: how do we represent those who are gone? How can absence become presence? This essay seeks to explore the ways in which Spiegelman's mother Anja is absent from the story, both literally and metaphorically, and the effects her absence has on the story in general, and on the narrator's sense of identity in particular.

Much of Maus II is dominated by the father-son relationship between Artie and Vladek. Artie makes his father remember Auschwitz because his parents' past is clearly a crucial part of Artie's identity as well: obsessed with the Holocaust, Artie imagines gas coming out of the shower, or that all the Jewish children at school are suddenly deported (Spiegelman 16). In short, Artie imagines himself in Auschwitz. He tries to understand what it was like to be in a death camp, and whether he could have survived, too. All his life, he has felt that nothing he accomplished could measure up to his parents' heroism of surviving the concentration camps (44). In a way, he is trying to compete with his parents, as well as with their memory of his brother Richieu, who was killed in the Holocaust. All of this is important when trying to understand Spiegelman's motivation in writing this book: first of all, he is telling his father's story; then, he is trying to find out about his mother as well as understand his parents' experience; furthermore, he is writing the book because his mother wanted to tell her story. Of course it is ironic that the Maus books are primarily about his father's experience, simply because his mother's accounts are gone. On another level, however, Spiegelman is writing these books because he is trying to find his roots; because he identifies so strongly with his family's experience, he is trying to construct a sense of self out of their trauma. Maus II is a search for answers to his mother's suicide, to the question of what happened to her in Auschwitz, and whether Artie is just a kind of substitute for the idealized, dead son. Writing and illustrating his parents' story is a way for Spiegelman to gain control over it; by understanding their troubles he is hoping to understand himself.

At the time Spiegelman began writing this book, his mother had already passed away:  Anja commits suicide in 1968 by slashing her wrists in the family's bathtub, leaving no note that might explain her action. Although this image of the dead mother is not part of Maus II, Spiegelman decided to include it in Maus I. (Interestingly, he did not portray humans as animals in this particular part of the comic.) But here, too, we only see part of her body and her head from behind, while Vladek is shown full-size, standing in her blood looking horrified. Clearly, Vladek's reaction is the focal point of the frame, while Anja's dead, faceless body in the right bottom corner takes up only a fraction of the picture (Maus I, “Prisoner on the Hell Planet”).

The mother's early death is one way in which she is physically absent from the story. The book alternates between three different time periods, thus creating multiple narrative frames: the time when Spiegelman is writing it, the time when he is interviewing his father Vladek, and the time of Vladek's narrative, namely the early to mid-1940s. Anja is, of course, completely absent from the first two frames, but we see her sporadically during Vladek's narrative. Therefore, we can say that she is  part of the third frame at least in a literal sense, but it is important to note that what we see of her is merely a representation that is filtered first through Vladek's story, and then through Spiegelman's illustration of his father's account. Whatever Anja says or writes in this narrative is mediated through Vladek's memory of the events, and the accuracy of her words is blurred not only by Vladek's specific viewpoint, but also by the fact that he may not remember it correctly. Thus, the picture we get of Anja is itself a multiply mediated image. In addition, Vladek has only limited contact with her during their imprisonment at Auschwitz, which is why the majority of her experience is just not there at all. Repeatedly, Artie questions Vladek about his mother, but all Vladek can tell him is something like “she probably went through the same things I did,” which is his helpless attempt at filling in the gaps, but it also denies her a unique experience. Not knowing specifics about Anja makes her one of millions of faceless victims, and it emphasizes that her story is not only a representation of her own life, but it  represents the stories of all the other silenced victims as well.

While Vladek probably tries his best to re-construct the parts in which he talks about Anja, for example the memorable episode of her visit to the fortune teller, which has undeniable aspects of fairy-tale storytelling (133) – a further means by which her experience is generalized – , he actively suppresses her side of the story: out of a desire to forget his trauma, and  to deal with her tragic suicide, Vladek burns her diaries. It is ironic that while Vladek himself never felt the need to put his suffering into words, but survives and is able to tell his story, Anja, to whom telling her story was so important, is deprived of expressing herself. More precisely, we learn that she wrote those journals in the hopes that one day, Artie could turn them into art, and Artie was desperate to read them. The importance of Anja's diaries to his story becomes apparent in Maus I, when Artie calls his father a “murderer” for destroying his wife's memoirs (Maus I 159). Of course Artie is overreacting, but in a metaphorical sense he is right: while Vladek has of course not literally murdered his wife, he has murdered her symbolically by silencing her story. All that is left of her are a few photos, but Spiegelman decides not to include them in this book. In the “Prisoner on the Hell Planet”-section of Maus I, we see the only real photograph of Anja, together with Spiegelman/Artie. The fact that it shows both of them together emphasizes the impact Anja's suicide had on her son. In Maus II, the only real photographs Spiegelman uses are those of his dead brother Richieu, and of his father. This stylistic decision further stresses the absence of the mother from the story, and from Artie's life. The fact that there is no real photo of Anja in the volume that contains the source of her troubles, namely that time of her life which she spent in Auschwitz, almost renders her experience surreal: it only exists in Vladek's account and thus, only in drawings, but not in the 'real world,' because there are no actual photographs of her. 

The few images we get of Anja are, as mentioned earlier, part of Vladek's narrative, but in a strange way, they do not really make a difference, that is, they do not contribute to a more individualistic, more realistic portrait of her. All of the (mice-)women in Vladek's story, or at least in Spiegelman's illustration of that story, look exactly the same. For example, when Anja is shown carrying the pot of soup with another woman, we do not know which of the two is her (53). By making her look like any other woman in Auschwitz, Spiegelman emphasizes the absence of her personal experience from the story. Because her account does not exist, we can only imagine her as one of many, and her story becomes interchangeable with other stories. As Artie's therapist notes, “the victims who died can never tell their side of the story” (45). His connection between Anja's trauma and that of others further illustrates the representative nature of her story: Anja's mediated experience symbolizes the millions of fragmented, generalized stories, or even the complete lack of a story, about other victims who did not live to explain themselves. Her voicelessness reflects the silence of all the other victims as well. One of them is of course her son Richieu, of whom we know even less. To Artie, he is merely a photo on the wall, an image of the ideal son who died too soon.

While Anja survived the Holocaust itself, her suicide several years later nevertheless makes her one of those victims. Of course we do not know for certain why she killed herself, but it is not unlikely that it happened because she never got over her experience in Auschwitz. It is interesting that by omitting any information about her life after World War II, Spiegelman does not give us any other choice but to relate her suicide directly to the Holocaust. It is as if her whole life is boiled down to those few horrible years, and whatever happened before or after has no meaning. In Maus II, the short period of time that defines our understanding of who she was (and perhaps Artie's as well) is further reduced precisely by Vladek's lack of information, which is then translated into not only the kinds of pictures we see of her, but the sheer number of them: while there are hundreds of illustrations of Vladek, only a few show Anja. Thus, it is as if Anja exists mainly in the blank, tight spaces in between the frames, but there is hardly any room within the frames, meaning in the story, for her at all. Anja's story is the white space, the blanks, it is everything that is not represented, and perhaps not representable at all.

Along with Artie, the reader is nagged by the question of why it is that Vladek is able to live, while Anja cannot: what happened to her in the camp that may have been worse than what happened to Vladek, and could there be anything worse at all? While on the one hand, the fact that there is no information about Anja's life during Artie's childhood  may be a way for Spiegelman to express how little he himself really knows about her, it is, on the other hand, also indicative not only of how defining Spiegelman thinks, and wants us to think, the Holocaust must have been for Anja, but of how influential it probably really was. Charlotte Delbo's Auschwitz and After and Elie Wiesel's Night  assert that Auschwitz rendered everything that happened before or after it meaningless, and it often served as the one source of identity, or rather non-identity, to its survivors. About his arrival at Auschwitz, Wiesel writes: “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed...Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live” (Wiesel 32). Delbo expresses similar emotions in one of her many unnamed poems:

I've come back from another world

to this world

I had not left

and I know not

which one is real

tell me did I really come back

from the other world?

As far as I'm concerned

I'm still there

dying there

a little more each day

dying over again...(Delbo 224)

“I died in Auschwitz but no one knows it” (Delbo 267), she writes elsewhere. As if to further de-personalize Anja's story, we can only try to make sense of her experience by consulting other Holocaust accounts.

Besides the obvious silencing of Anja's voice through his burning of her diaries, Vladek unconsciously drives a final nail through her coffin on the very last page of the book: after telling Artie how he found Anja after the war, he ends his story with the words: “We were both very happy, and lived happy, happy ever after” (136). Of course we know that this is not true; Anja's suicide is evidence that she was not happy, and so are Vladek's anxiety and nervousness. Vladek picks a fairy tale phrase to end his tragic story, perhaps because he thinks that a happy ending is expected of him, or because he so desperately wants it to be true.  After all, they survived, so why would they not be happy? While one may interpret his ending as the harmless wish of a dying man for peace and harmony, it really has a much more serious effect: by pretending that Anja lived “happy ever after,” Vladek is silencing her once more; his happy ending denies any suffering on her part, and it also seems to say that, of course, one must be happy after so much tragedy, that not being happy would be unnatural. Furthermore, the “we” emphasizes that he does not respect Anja's individuality and the fact that her experience may have been different from his, or that she dealt with it differently. Vladek's 'happy' ending leaves no room for her troubles.

Artie has to realize at the end of Maus II that Vladek's and Anja's experiences cannot serve as sufficient sources for his own sense of self. He is unable to comprehend what his parents went through, not only because something as horrible as the Holocaust is beyond his imagination, but also because the story he gets is fragmented. His mother's suicide remains a big question mark, as does her entire side of the story. Artie has no access to her experience, and because he cannot connect with his mother's trauma, he is not able to construct an identity for himself based on the past. The information he receives about his mother is not enough to learn what she went through, and it is only, as mentioned above, Vladek's version of tiny fragments of her story anyway: Anja's story is not only distorted, it barely exists at all. Of course one could argue that Artie, as a man, probably identifies with his father anyway, and that the mother's experience is of minor concern to him, but there are several indicators that reject such an interpretation. First of all, Artie's repeated questions about his mother suggest that his father's account alone is not enough for him to gain an understanding of his family's experience. Secondly, there is an important moment when Artie tells Francoise that whenever he asks himself which parent he would have saved from the crematorium, he usually picks his mother (14). Clearly, Artie feels a strong connection to her, and it is obvious that without getting her account as well, neither the book, nor Artie himself can be complete. In effect, Anja's physical and metaphorical absence from the narrative, along with Artie's lack of understanding of his parents' Holocaust experience, becomes a source of non-identity for Artie. The tombstone at the end is quite fitting for a book about Auschwitz, because what else did it produce besides death? If Auschwitz left its survivors with a sense of non-existence, how could it ever provide anything else to the survivor's children? How could Artie draw meaning from an event that deprived his parents, and especially his mother, of all meaning? And, would his story have been a different one had he had his mother's diaries? Would there have been more closure and reconciliation at the end?

As suggested earlier, Anja's absence is also an extension of Richieu's absence, and of the deaths of so many others during the Holocaust. Artie's difficulty in telling and comprehending his mother's story is indicative of the problem of representing any of the dead victims' stories, or of representing absence in general.vThis shift away from relating his parents' trauma directly to his own life is apparent in Spiegelman's increasing focus on their story and away from reflecting on his own progress in writing the story, as he does in Maus I and in the first half of Maus II. By changing focus, Spiegelman is also creating a distance between himself and his parents' trauma. Perhaps his parents' tombstone at the end is the most significant indicator of this development: while there are of course many unanswered questions, Spiegelman is closing his parents' story in order to go on with his own life. His signature below the gravestone implies that Spiegelman has created an identity for himself; the years “1978-1991” mark the time it took him to write this book, which shows that his sense of self is closely tied to his identity as a writer, and precisely as a writer of his parents' story. Ending the book, along with the fact that his parents are deceased, allows him to overcome the feeling that his own life is defined by what happened to them: Spiegelman the person is no longer 'made' by the content of the story, but by his representation of it. Thus, while his parents' story itself is open-ended because it is fragmented and leaves Artie with more questions than answers, Spiegelman's visual and textual representation of their story ends with closure (symbolized by the tombstone and his signature). Finally, it is the separation he establishes between actual experience and represented experience that enables him to create an identity for himself.

Works Cited

Delbo, Charlotte. Auschwitz and After. New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1995.

Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor's Tale. My Father Bleeds History. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986

Spiegelman, Art. Maus II: A Survivor's Tale. And Here My Troubles Began. New York: Pantheon Books, 1991.

Wiesel, Elie. Night. Toronto/New York: Bantam Books, 1986