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Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.
Inheritance
Fights about money and Vladek’s inheritance occur repeatedly throughout the frame story. Historically, Jewish people served as money lenders because Christianity forbade lending with interest. In fact, moneylending was one of few professions allowed to Jewish people. This historical circumstance led to the antisemitic stereotype of Jewish people being greedy, capitalist, and exploitative. This stereotype makes the fights about money in Maus particularly difficult. On the surface, Vladek appears to match the stereotype of the miserly Jew because he pinches pennies, makes his wife Mala justify every dollar she spends, and fights about how much of his inheritance he should leave to her. However, Maus suggests he sees his inheritance as more than just money. Vladek states repeatedly that he wants to leave his money to Artie. This desire mirrors his father-in-law’s decision to help fund Vladek’s business in order to support his future grandchild. In this light, passing down money is a symbol of providing care to future generations.
Masks and Disguises
Maus is preoccupied with questions of identity, as seen in its depiction of different ethnic groups as different animals. Frequently in Maus, the Jewish characters hide their mouse features under pig masks in order to disguise themselves as Poles. The regular success of these disguises suggests that pretending to be a different ethnic group is not that hard, depending on the specific group. After all, Jews and Gentiles in Poland and Germany did not usually look much different from each other. Passing is not as easy for everyone, however, as seen when Anja dons a pig mask only to have her mouse tail stick out from under her jacket. Maus suggests that with a cursory glance, it is easy to disguise yourself as someone else because people are not very different from one another. But closer inspection may reveal your true identity.
In Book Two, Artie appears as a man wearing a mouse mask. This mask is fundamentally different than the pig masks that Anja and Vladek wear throughout World War II. By depicting himself as a human in a mouse mask, Artie suggests that his true identity is not Jewish but rather that his Jewish identity is a disguise he wears. Ultimately, Maus implies that identity is complicated, encompassing characteristics both inherent and adopted.
Food and Hunger
As Vladek’s story of World War II and the Holocaust progresses, access to food grows more and more limited. Indeed, starving the Jewish people was specifically a part of Hitler’s plan for their genocide. We see in Vladek’s story how the Nazis limited the rations available to Jewish people, leading Vladek to trade his family’s gold and other resources for food on the black market. Once in the ghetto, they have even less food. Often, as Anja and Vladek hide in bunkers, they find themselves slowly starving because hiding is more important than leaving the bunker for food. In the concentration camps, Jewish prisoners were intentionally given starvation rations. Vladek comments that the tiny amount of food led people to behave like animals, fighting for literal drops of soup. The illustrations show skeletally thin Jewish prisoners, both alive and dead. When Vladek occasionally gets his hands on some chocolate, he treats it as though it is as good as gold. The question of food and hunger bleeds into the present day, too, with Vladek and Mala acutely aware of never wasting a crumb.
