Maus

P.S- Excuse the French in the Pic.

Artie Spigelman spent years working on his work Maus and used every bit of that time to make the details and symbolism as accurate and meaningful as possible. The characters had to be portrayed as animals due in part to the detailed and often violent images that would be unsuitable for many publishers to work with. After to decision to use animals was completed Spigelman had to carefully choose what creature would represent who.
The stereotypical appearance of Jews from Nazi propaganda is part of the reason that mice were chosen to represent the Jewish people. Mice also nibble at food stores, ruining them, the way that Nazi's saw the Jewish people spoiling the Aryan race. Mice were chosen over rats because of the more negative connotation associated with rats- the characters had to be something to root for. The infamous relationship between mice and cats, and cats and dogs was used to showcase the inevitability of the U.S winning WWII. Dogs also represent the Nazi distaste for mixed heritage as dogs are often referred to as "mutts".
The frog was chosen to represent the French because of France's history of consuming frog legs-a food considered undesirable by the rest of Europe. The frog also leaps away and submerges itself whenever danger arises. They can be viewed as cowardly and weak, mirroring the world's view of France's easy defeat. Art's French fiancée was wondering what animal would be used to represent the French, and Art created a historically and biologically symbolic one. The fact that Art used a mouse as Francois indicates that he values her choice to convert to Judaism as more indicative of her personality than her nationality/ethnicity. While he is willing to portray her as a part of the Jewish struggle post Holocaust, he still separates her with her clothing as he himself still wears a vertical stripe on the side of his pants. Instead of wearing vertical stripes on her shirt, she wears horizontal stripes with a scarf tied to the side-a clear reference to her French tires.




“Do you know why most survivors of the Holocaust are vegan? It's because they know what it's like to be treated like an animal.”
― Chuck Palahniuk