Guilt In Art Spiegelman's Maus

When the dust began to settle after World War 2, the world was confronted with one of the greatest humanitarian crises of all time. Millions of Europeans were displaced and killed, and a tragedy on that great of a scale created a whole generation with the desire to understand how such a tragedy could occur. However, once the war ended, blame continued to be thrown around, in hopes to discover who was guilty of the various war crimes experienced by victims throughout Europe. On some occasions Nazi’s who were guilty of war crimes were found a tried, such as during the Nuremberg trials in 1945-1946, but as blame continued to be assigned to high ranking Nazi officials and Nazi collaborators, those who had not yet been discovered began to work to

In Art Spiegelman’s Maus II, Spiegelman chronicles both his father’s time in Auschwitz and the time he spent with his father before he wrote the book. On the surface, it may not make sense for Spiegelman to have to confront any war time guilt. After all, Spiegelman was even alive by the time World War 2 ended. But Spiegelman does struggle with guilt, and his guilt is something that haunts him during the parts of the book where he is a central character. While the desire to avoid guilt motivates the townspeople in Nasty Girl to accept false narratives, Spiegelman’s desire to avoid guilt makes him afraid to make any narrative at all. It is impossible to fully understand Spiegelman’s motivations for writing the first Maus book, especially because a reporter cuts him off before he can explain, but Spiegelman makes it extremely clear that the commercial success of his first book is weighing on his mind as he works on part two. First, Spiegelman addresses his own guilt by depicting himself at his drawing desk on top of a pile of bodies, an image that is maintained as he bombarded with questions about his first book and ideas how he can make more money from his father’s story. This image is especially captivating, because it shows how Spiegelman’s whole career was essentially built upon the deaths on countless people who he had never met. When he released the first book, it was simply his telling of his father’s story, but once it became a phenomenon and a large amount of money was involved, it became a source of profit with its roots in human suffering, and here is when Spiegelman’s guilt came into play. By working on the second book, he is actively accepting the guilt because he knows the second