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Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.
Animals
The animating conceit of Maus is its representation of different groups of people as different animals. Spiegelman chose each animal deliberately. Depicting Jewish people as mice and Germans as cats symbolically represents the conflict between those groups during World War II and the Holocaust. Just as cats hunt and kill mice, Nazi soldiers hunted and killed Jewish people. Further, German propaganda repeatedly likened Jewish people to vermin such as mice and rats in order to justify expelling them from Germany and the genocidal campaign conducted at concentration camps and beyond. When the Americans arrive at the end of the war, Maus represents them as dogs. Dogs are loyal and dependable and also enemies to cats. The choice to depict Poles as pigs suggests that even though the Polish people were not direct enemies of the Jewish people, their actions made them complicit and thus deserving of comparison to an animal with often negative connotations.
This conceit breaks down multiple times over the course of Maus, with real dogs and mice interacting with the anthropomorphized mice, cats, and pigs. The presence of these real animals points to the symbolic nature of people being depicted as animals. In other words, we are meant to understand that even though people in the graphic novel are drawn as animals, they are human beings.
Anja’s Diaries
Through the frame story of Maus, Artie asks Vladek to see his mother Anja’s diaries. Anja died by suicide a decade before Artie began interviewing Vladek for material to write Maus. In the graphic novel, Anja’s diaries stand as a symbol for her life and story. Artie repeatedly asks Vladek to tell him more about Anja and says that her diaries would be invaluable to recreating her story alongside Vladek’s. When Vladek finally reveals that he cannot find the diaries because he burned them, Artie calls him a murderer. Artie interprets the destruction of Anja’s diaries as equivalent to killing her a second time.
Comic Book Structure
Maus is a graphic novel, structured as a series of images that tell a story. The frames around the panels in Maus symbolize the relationship between the past and the present. On pages when the frame narrative transitions into Vladek’s story of the past, Maus uses panels with frames to indicate events in the past and panels without frames to indicate events in the present. The frames around the panels in the past behave like picture frames, highlighting that the events within them are artistic creations and pointing to the subjectivity of the story. These transitional pages often alternate panels depicting the past with panels depicting the present, forcing the reader to jump back and forth among these divergent timelines. This symbolizes the way the past and the present are next to each other, sometimes even overlapping or intermingling, reinforcing the theme of how the past influences the present.
Money
Money is never far from mind in Maus and symbolizes care and safety. In Vladek’s story of World War II, his access to money and the resources it buys saves him repeatedly. He is able to buy food when others starve, and he is able to pay people to protect him and his family. In the present-day frame story, Vladek and Mala argue about money constantly, much to Artie’s chagrin. Vladek’s insistence on saving money was so that he would be able to pass it down to Artie, and thus care for and protect him. Money is not just a resource. It is a way of creating safety for loved ones and passing that safety and care down to future generations.
