What more could I say about this classic work of the Shoah? I’ll start with when and how I obtained my copy. I won it as part of a Goodreads giveaway in 2022, when Maus was hitting its school/library book ban (to date) and the book was featured in all sorts of news media, for better or worse, and copies of it were whizzing off online and physical booksellers’ shelves (a good thing!)
I was thrilled to get a copy as I had never read it, though of course, I know and teach the Holocaust in my classroom.
Reading it humbled me, as all novels and non-fiction of the Holocaust does and should, but the visual aspect of the graphic novel did it in ways I had not expected. As one can guess from its iconic and unforgettable cover, Maus is populated with mice, cats, and dogs rather than humans. The dehumanization of the Jewish people by the Nazi regime was no less poignant for this swap. Perhaps it is even more powerful; animals are an obvious metaphor: the hunters and the hunted, the obedient and the illicit.
Aside from the personal, intimate view into the Holocaust experience, I deeply appreciated Spiegelman’s portrayal of adjustment to emigration, and the struggle of the following generation to understand the depth and pain of those who had suffered through it. What happens afterward is equally worthy of attention as the event(s) of the Holocaust itself; really, these are not discrete events. These scenes made it clear the Holocaust is not a finished incident, but a deep intergenerational open wound spanning decades.
Fatherland: A Memoir of War, Conscience, and Family Secrets by Burkhard Bilger
Fatherland: A Memoir is a must-read for readers who gravitate to histories of the European theater of WWII. The book is a case study, illuminating aspects of the human side of these histories which are often left in the dark: here, what happened to those millions of Germans who were caught up in the Nazi machine, willingly or otherwise? Significant numbers of the German citizenry did not support the Nazi party, but as the regime gained power Germans were pressured into adopting or participating in its politics in both minor and significant ways. Thousands were caught between survival and their beliefs, others benefited from the regime’s policies, witnessing no ill-effects as so many millions of others did.
War and ideological divides produce so much more intimate conflicts and consequences than politics would suggest. Fatherland makes this complexity abundantly clear, and more importantly, without being apologetic or sympathetic to Nazism. Indeed, it highlights the different between Nazi party members, Germans, and the Nazi state, forcing the reader to see beyond the inaccurate and unjustified conflation of these constituents with one another.
Bilger dives into their own family history to produce a prosopography, one which explores the complicated consequences of surviving the Nazi regime before, during, and after the war, especially for those who were forced or otherwise minor participants in state operations. Their family derives from a region of Europe straddling the often fluctuating boundary between France and Germany, Alsace and the region around the Black Forest. This geography has — and continues — to produce a culturally and politically fluid community. Bilger also looks beyond their own family, including the personal war-time histories of other German and French citizens in their proximity: for example, mayors of the myriad of French-German towns who were caught in the Nazi and French crossfire, and women who were forced to interact (in platonic and other ways) with German soldiers or Nazi officials.
During the interwar and WWII years, citizens found themselves dispossessed of either their French or German identities, subject to changes in language, dress, and culture as politics blew one way or the other. After the war Germans and French alike found themselves needed to pick up the pieces of their lives, and grapple with former enemies living in their midst. Questions of culpability rent communities and families apart in the aftermath of WWII as war crimes were being prosecuted; to what degree was Life and the Need to Survive responsible for the choices that people made? To what degree was circumvention of Nazi policies a resistance against Nazism? Did local officials and citizens pander to Nazis out of genuine belief in the regime or were their actions made under duress? Did neutrality absolve people from being responsible for war crimes that occurred?
Indeed, the years following the end of war were some of the hardest, perhaps even harder than during the war for some Germans and French. This aspect of Fatherland is, to this reader, its most poignant and significant contribution; war does not begin with a declaration, nor does it end with a surrender and a treaty. War begins so much earlier, the combat and physical destruction being only its peak, and it lingers on for years, even decades, afterward. Bilger reveals that in the case of Germans, the effects of WWII remain today; it is a scar stretched across multiple generations.
Dr JoAnn LoSavio 