comedic distance holocaust

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Comedic Distance in Holocaust LiteratureMark Cory

T here i s a m om en t i n t he s c reen ve r s i on o fRobert Shaws The Man in the Glass Booth when theuniformed officer, played brilliantly by MaximillianSchell , is revealed not to be Lagerkommandant SSC ol . D or f bu t t he su rv i vo r A r t hu r G o l dm an . T hegiveaway is his humor, his characteristically Jewishhumor.This is not a funny mom ent in Shaws drama, buti ts effect as denouement depends upon our dawningrealization that in fact the play has been laced with agreat deal of humor, most of it sardonic and dark. In awork inspired by the Israeli abduction and trial ofA d o l f E i c h m a n n i n 1 9 6 2 , h u m o r m i g h t s e e mi ncong ruous o r even i n su l t i ng t o v i c t i m s o f t heH o l ocaus t , bu t S haw use s i t e f fec t i ve ly t o bu i l dsympathy for his own victim-protagonist. Reflectionyields still other examples of humor, a feature largelyi g n o r e d i n t h e h u g e c r i t i c a l l i t e r a t u r e o n t h eHolocaust . The very different aspects of humor int he se exam pl e s i l l u s t r a t e t he com pl ex i t y o f t hephenomenon. The adolescent impi shness of AnneFranks confessions to her diary have little in comm onwith the bawdy jests of Rolf Hochhuths characters inAct I of The Deputy and still less with the mockingl a u g h t e r o f h i s s i n i s t e r D o c t o r . P e t e r W e i s s sdocumentary drama on the F rankfurt Auschwitz trials,The Investigation, systematically employs humor as away to characterize moral bankruptcy as in-jokes aret r aded am ong t he accused a t t he expense o f t hes u r v i v i n g w i t n e s s e s . B y c o n t r a s t , th e c a r e f u lavoidance of humor by these same witnesses signalsthe high seriousness of the moral issues at stake. Inworks written by actual Holocaust survivors, the mostconspicuous co mic elemen ts tend towards gal lowshumor. In Simon Wiesenthals novella The Sunflowerthe narrator reports an execution at which a villagew a g d r a p e s e a c h h a n g i n g c o r p s e w i th t h e l a b e l k o s h e r m e a t . L a t e r i n t h e s a m e w o r k , t h eautobiographica l p ro tagoni s t j oke s tha t he w ouldrather just sleep until God com es back.In his seminal work o n humor and fear in Gothicli terature, Paul Lewis suggests a taxonomy for theway humor can function in fearful circumstances: itc a n b e u s e d t o e s t a b l i s h a te m p o r a r y s e n s e o fnormality, as a mean s of coping with or minimizing

fearful occurrences, by evil or benevolent forces toassert and celebrate their superiority, by victims inrising above their pain, and as a sign of madness ordemonic possession (Lewis 112). Many ex amples ofhumor in Holocaus t l i t e ra ture , i nc luding som e ofthose ci ted here, funct ion precisely in these samew ays . H ochhu t h s D oc t o r , ba sed l oose l y on t heinfamous Dr. Mengele, is shown through his cruel andt aun t i ng s ense o f hum or t o be a t l e a s t m ad andperhaps possessed of incarnate evi l . Ann e Franksspunky good humor despite everything helps her,and us as readers, rise above the deprivations of herl i fe in the S ecre t Annexe . Wiesentha l s charac terSimon copes with his loss of faith by joking that Godis on vacation. Laughter rises from the ranks of theaccused in Weisss The Investigation l ike an evi lc h o r u s a s t h o s e o n t r ia l f l a u n t t h e i r p e r c e i v e dsuper ior i ty . Th e in i t ia l com ic appea rance of E l i eWiesels Mosh6 the Beadle in Night helps establish asense of normality before the searing violations of thet r a n s p o r t s a n d c a m p s i n t r o d u c e u s t o Zuniversconcentrationnaire.

Som e examples of humor in Holocaust literaturetake us beyond the functions of the comic in Gothicfiction, however, and call for an expanded taxonomyappropriate to an aesthetics of atrocity (Langer 22).One of these functions is to define the boundaries ofour moral response to the events of the Holocaust.Thi s occurs paradoxica l ly by the in t roduct ion ofinappropriate, often sav age humor in the depiction ofnegative characters, and then by the suppression ofhumor in those characters-whether victims or non-victims-with who m the author wants the reader toempath ize . We empath ize wi th Fa ther F ontana inHochhuths The Deputy, with the Jewish victims andwith the enigmatic SS officer Gerstein; our rejectiono f m a n y o f t h e o t h e r c h a r a c t e r s i n t h e G e r m a nmilitary-industrial complex and the Catholic Churchis conditioned by the tastelessness of thei r fascistjokes. An example is the banter of the character ofAdolf Eichmann, as he remarks to Baron Rutta thatKrupps concern over the welfare of children born toRussian forced laborers will disappear on ce a factoryi s s e t u p i n A u s c h w i t z: I n A u s c h w i t z n o b o d ycomplains. And Ive never heard (h e laughs know-

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36 Journal ofAmerican Culturei n g l y ; R U T T A ~ O ~ ~ Si m ) of any pregnancies inAuschwitz either (43).

Another distinct function of humor in Holocaustliterature is to mark the boundaries between differentorders of reality. Lawrence Langer has shown howJakov Lind successfully exploits lunatic characters tochallenge the readers perception of what is in factpossible in a supposedly rational world. Satire and thegrotesque combine to break down our normalresistance to aberration and hence to prepare us fordepictions of the Holocaust in which aberration wasthe n01-m.~ n exactly complementary fashion, humoralso serves to create a sense of verisimilitude in afictional world whose contours defy comprehension,yet whose purpose collapses if the reader does notaccept its historical reality. Viktor Frank1 and DavidRoussets independent observations on the surprisingpresence of humor in the camps4 mean among otherthings that some examples, especially of gallowshumor, function in part to contribut e to thisverisimilitude. Humor was a feature of camp andghetto life, and so it appears in the literature depictingthis experience. Wiesenthals anecdotes serve thisfunction, as does the instance in Elie Wiesels Nightwhen Elies father reacts to the order to don theyellow star with Oh well, what of it? You dont dieof it (20). Thus while it is true, as Lawrence Langercorrectly and eloquently points out, that to establishan order of reality in which the unimaginable becomesimaginatively acceptable exceeds the capacities of anart devoted entirely to verisimilitude(43), Holocaustliterature is obliged to forge a link to external realityin a way Gothic fiction is not. Humor helps.

Beyond marking moral boundaries andestablishing nuances of credibility in incrediblecircumstances, the comic in Holocaust literature alsofunctions as resistance, as protest. Although related tothe use of humor by fictional victims in Gothicliterature to rise above their pain, protest humor inHolocaust literature is more than comic anesthesiaagainst political, moral and religious oppression. Inhis analysis of American Jewish and Afro Americanhumor, Joseph Boskin has pointed out that minoritycultures cope with the problem of subordination inpart through a highly complex order of protest humor( 5 5 ) .A favorite device is the trickster motif, by whicha member of a vulnerable group suffers but survivesby outwitting his enemy. Haseks good soldierSchweyk, Brechts Azdak, Grass Oskar Matzerath,Charlie Chaplin, and Buster Keaton have all enrichedthe tradition of wise fool and comic antihero in ourcentury. As the trickster is manifested most commonlyin the literature of the Holocaust, the little man

appears as a boy who is launched on a nightmarejourney through the reaches of hell. Two works offerparticularly clear examples of this motif, the recentlyreleased and highly controversial film Europa, Europaand Jerzy Kosinskis compelling and very disturbingThe Painted B ird.

In the story of Salomon Perels incrediblesurvival, Europa Europa follows a German-Jewishteenager fleeing pogroms first to Poland then, afterthe invasion of Poland, further eastward into Sovietterritory. What distinguishes this story from theparallel but unrelieved adventures of Jakob Littner astold by Wolfgang Koeppen in Aufzeichungen auseinern Erdloch is that the Perel teenager prospers. Heis nurtured by a Soviet Communist youth leaguewhere he learns Russian, but by adroitly switchinglanguages, shedding his newly-acquired Communistideology and cunningly concealing his ethnic identityhe later becomes the mascot of a German army unitwhen the Soviets are overrun. Although not a comedyper se, what raises the film above the tedium of theinnocuous published memoir is the adroit interplay oflight and dark moments achieved by directorAgnieszka Holland. Audiences react with a rush oflaughter when Perel as uniformed German mascottries to rejoin his Soviet comrades by cover of night,only to be overtaken by a German surprise attack,which he then appears to be leading. For his heroismin this battlefield victory, which w e know to havebeen an attempt to flee, he is rewarded by assignmentto an elite academy for the Hitler youth, and in timeby adoption and romance. The romance has its comicaspect, too, for although the chameleon can changehis linguistic and ideological skins, he cannot changehis foreskin. Painful though the attempt clearly is, itamuses by introducing into the desperate situation oft h e Holocaust some of the familiar anxieties ofadolescence.

Kosinskis T h e P a i n t e d B i r d probes aninconceivably hostile universe of persecution andcruelty through the eyes of an even younger witness.Both Perels teenager, whom we meet on the eve ofhis Bar Mitzvah, and Kosinskis boy are tom out of asecure and happy environment and initiated into abewildering world where they are threatened at everystep. Like Perel, the boy survives his incredible seriesof misadventures by cunning adaptation, quick wits,and bizarre good luck. He survives his odyssey acrosseastern Europe, in and out of the grasp of superstitiouspeasants, of evil clerics, of Russian and Germansoldiers, despite always being the other and hencevulnerable. And yet he survives, and in surviving,triumphs. The comedy associated with his scrambling


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Comedic Distance in Holocaust Literature 37antics, with his initial naivetC, with his increasingcunning is the authors clever protest against themultiple afflictions of the Holocaust.

Not all the humor stemming from the trickstermotif involves the young, however. In many ways thebest known example is Jurek Beckers novel Jacob theLiar. As the little man whose white lies about theSoviet advance feed the hungry imaginations of hisfellow ghetto dwellers starved for any hopeful sign,Jacob must become increasingly resourceful andinventive to avoid dashing the hopes his fictitious radiohas raised. Over time, as the situation in the ghettobecomes more and more desperate, his stories mustbecome increasingly detailed and encouraging. Whatstarted as a reflex leads Jacob to somethingapproaching a struggle of heroic proportions (seeWetzel), but the comedic distance built into thisstruggle defeats the pathos Becker consciously soughtto avoid. In part this distance is achieved through adepiction of little people coping with the predicamentsof daily shtetl life in the tradition of Sholem Aleichem?In part it is achieved through parody, as the ghettochildren attempt their own acts of resistance (Brown196-97). In the main, however, it is achieved throughthe nearly endless sequence of devices, each moreclever and yet more desperate than its predecessor.These devices conceal the fact that no clandestineradio exists, to the end that all those who have come torely upon Jacobs lies might survive for yet one moreday.

Although, as these several examples show, humorhas functioned in one way or another as a regularfeature of Holocaust literature, Beckers Jacob theLiarremained to my knowledge unique for nearly twodecades as the comic novel of the Holocaust. Thatexclusivity was challenged by the emergence in 1986of the remarkable Maus: A Survivors Tale by theAmerican Art Spiegelman. The basic incongruitybetween humor and a subject as serious as theHolocaust is radically compounded by Spiegelman,who treats this same serious subject in a form whichfor most of us seems the exclusive domain of theinfantile and the trivial: the comic book. Theappearance of Maus and its companion volume MausII in 1991 offers an unparalleled opportunity andunambiguous challenge to understanding theparadoxical relationship between atrocity and humor.

Not that the comic book, at least when spelledcomix, has much to do anymore with humor. Thecenturies-old tradition of witty graphic art thatspawned the American comic strip gave way after thewar to a different tradition when the newspaper funnieswere paralleled by adventure series whose four-color

superheroes-from Superman to GI Joe-substituted ablack and white view of morality and justice for theimpish nonsense (Mordden 90) of the originals?

Art Spiegelman is more than conversant withthese competing traditions in American popularculture. As instructor at the New York School of VisualArts and co-editor (with his wife, Franqoise Mouly) ofthe avant-garde RAW commix, Spiegelman is in theforefront of experimentation with what may be anemerging genre at the close of the 20th century: thegraphic novel. He is also t h e son of Holocaustsurvivors. In Maus, he relates in words and cartoonsthe story of his Polish parents from pre-war bliss to theghetto, to separation in Auschwitz and Dachau, toreunification and a troubled life in Rego Park, NYC. Inconscious homage to the traditional funnies, he depictsthe Jews as mice, the Nazis as cats, the Poles as pigs,the French as frogs, the Americans as dogs, and eventhe Swedes as reindeer. When the Polish Jews wish topass as non-Jews, they don pig masks. WhenSpiegslman lets his own mask drop, hisautobiographical character Artie is shown wearing amouse mask.

The difference between these caricatures and thefunny an im a1s fam 1 ar t h rou g h D isn ey esquevariations is as profound as the difference between thecomic novel and traditional Holocaust literature.Graphically, Spiegelmans style is spare andsuggestive, rather than fussy with three-dimensionaldetail. Dialog is conveyed with the traditional balloonswhen Vladek Spiegelmans story is acted out, butsupplemented by narrative text when Arties father isshown thinking or telling his story. Unlike Mickey andDonald, these animals inhabit an adult world. Theysmoke, they drink, they swear, and they kill and arekilled.

M a u s is unique in Holocaust literature to date.Despite its radical approach, it has receivedremarkably favorable critical reception in bothGermany and the United States, where it has beencalled both honest and brutal and the firstmasterpiece in comic-book history (Mordden 91,96).It avoids trivializing its subjcct by focusing more onthe formation of a consciousness of the past (in Artie)than on details of the past itself. This shift, to which Iwill return shortly, and the grittiness of Spiegelmansstyle, prevent Maus from falling into the category ofpopular and pornographic indulgences that AlvinRosenfeld rightly claims only dull our politicalawareness and defeat our historical sense ( 1 04). Thequestion remains whether as Holocaust comic novel.Muus retains any humor, and if so, how that humorfunctions.


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38 Journal of American CultureWriting for the N ew Y ork T i m es , Lawrence

Langer notes that the animal characters create adistancing effect that allows us to follow the fablewithout being drowned in its grim, inhuman horrors(15). The comedic distance achieved by thetransformation of an autobiographical story into ananimal fable is readily seen by comparing an earlierversion of a portion of this story published in thepages of Shor t O rde r C om i x in 1973, where thecharacters are not represented as animals and theeffect is unrelieved.

Of course by invoking the cat and mouseparadigm, Spiegelman has been criticized forreducing a distinctly human evil to a hunter-preyphenomenon natural to the animal kingdom (Witek112). Still, his use of the animal metaphor is at basenothing more than an extended coping mechanism,one entirely consistent with the conventional uses ofhumor reviewed earlier (Scheel 438). In fact,caricatures-some roughly analogous to Spiegelmanscartoons-account for some 20 percent of survivingHolocaust art.8Gallows humor of the sort mentionedearlier is also present in Maus, as when Arts motherand father are forced to hide in a cellar and Anjarecoils in terror from the rats. Their hostess jokes,Well-youre better off with the rats than with theGestapo ..At least the rats wont kill you (148), andof course we perceive yet another dimension to thejoke at the thought of man-size mice being afraid ofrats. Even the trickster motif surfaces, as Vladekdevelops a whole repertoire of cunning strategies forsurvival, from claiming to be a master of trades heactually knows little about, to organizing clothingand food to be bartered for improvements in hissituation, to masking his appearance in order to passas a non-Jew before his capture.

The principal comic effect in Maus , however,goes beyond any of the devices exploited by otherauthors thus far, and it is in this new comic dimensionthat Spiegelmans graphic novel merits our closestattention. For all its depiction of Polish ghetto life, ofMauschwitz, Birkenau, and Dachau, SpiegelmansM a u s is only secondarily concerned with theHolocaust. Its primary concern is the imprint of thatparental experience, the death imprint as it is called(Lifton and Berger 84), on the children of survivors.As such, this graphic novel joins the growingliterature on the Holocaust written by or about thesecond generation of victims, works such as Susan F.Schaeffers A n y a , Saul Bellows Mr. SammlersPlanet, Edgar Wallants The Pawnbroker, and JurekBeckers Bronsteins Kinder. Common to all suchworks is a complex syndrome of guilt at not measur-

ing up to the strength, skill, and courage of onessurvivor-parents, of a theological and existential questfor a meaningful relationship to the religion of thoseparents, and an aesthetic quest for the icons andimages appropriate to the experience of secondgeneration survivor^.^ The familial relationship is thusoften highly ambivalent, filled with love-hatetensions. Fictional surviving fathers in particular areoften portrayed as difficult, self-absorbed, demanding,cynical, and humorless--qualities easily conceded asurvivor in the abstract but clearly problematic for hischildren. Jurek Becker chooses to leave Bronsteinsbitter son little or no saving humor; in contrast, bymaking the prospect of having to move back homewith his fussy father Arts real horror, Spiegelmanmakes it clear that Arts own survival depends verymuch on his sense of the comic (Mordden 92).

The uses of the comic in the father-son relation-ship are actually quite conventional. It is the largercontext of those uses that lends them unusual power.Gallows humor takes on a new twist as Vladek tellshis son how the doctor had to break his arm at birth toease his passage down the birth canal, and howthereafter as a baby Arties arm would twitch up in acaricature of the Nazi salute to an amused chorus ofHeil Hitler from his parents. At that moment in thetelling Vladek demonstrates the gesture, upsetting hiscarefully counted pills for the day: Look now whatyou made me do! he shouts at his son (Maus 30).Late in the second volume as Vladek relates histransport from Mauschwitz to Dachau he exclaims,Here my troubles began ( M a u s ZZ 75). Thesignificance is that the troubles really begin forVladek with the suicide of his survivor-wife Anja in1968 and his subsequent remarriage to anothersurviving Jew, Mala. Their post-war relationship isfilled with such bickering that Mala eventually leavesVladek as Volume I1begins. Ever the trickster, Vladekfeigns a heart attack to manipulate his son intoreturning his call and ultimately into staying with himfor a while in his bungalow in the Catskills. On thepage that leads up to that call we see by contrast themuch more gentle humor between Art and FranGoiseas the artist makes it clear why he depicts his Frenchwife as a mouse rather than a frog (she converted), buteven this gentle humor issues from and seeks to dealwith Arts profound estrangement from his father andhis fathers religion.

This survivors tale ends with the death ofVladek Spiegelman from congestive heart failure in1982. The final panel of a work that, taken together,occupied Art Spiegelman for 13 years, shows hisparents tombstone. In the penultimate panel the


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Comedic Distance in Holocaust Literature 39failing Vladek confuses Art with his older brotherRichieu, who died in the camps and whose framedphotograph haunts this remarkable comic novel of theeffects of the Holocaust on survivors and theirchildren. The tender irony in Vladeks final confusionis a measure of how humor in this important body ofliterature has evolved over the past 45 years. Humorin the ghettos and camps was a psychologicalresponse to danger and oppression; it functioned asboth a coping mechanism and a means of resistance.As a literary device it has lent credibility to witnessliterature and functioned aesthetically to make theunfathomable accessible to the minds and emotions ofthe reading public. When its incongruity wasexploited to the fullest, humor has served as ametaphor for evil, but in later works the trend hasbeen if anything to use humor to soften the cosmicsigni fican ce of the suffering depicted in thisliterature (Alter 2 6 ) , to create, in Sarah Cohenswords, an alternative to an ennobling death (14).Finally, the incongruity of Art Spiegelmans comicvessel for the profoundly sad story of his parentsgeneration and the shadow those experiences castover the lives of second generation survivors marks aturning point in the literature of atrocity. Writing forMerkur, Kurt Scheel has likened this achievement toPaul Celans in his extraordinary poem, Fugue ofDeath. Each has created a symbolic language fordepicting the Holocaust which did not exist before:Celan and Spiegelman should be mentioned in onebreath because both poet and cartoonist have foundlanguages adequate to their topic which previouslydid not exist (Scheel437).

NotesOriginal title of the important work by survivor David

Rousset, now used as a metaphor for the incomprehensibleworld of the camps. Rousset, The Other Kingdom, trans.Ramon Guthrie (New York: Reynal, 1947).

*See Paul L ewis in a second im portant article, Jokeand Anti-joke: Three Jews and a Blindfold, Journal ofPopular Culture 21.1 (Summer 1987): 70.

)See Langer 205-49.4See Rousset, The Other Kingdom, and Viktor Frankl,

Mans Search fo r Meaning (New York: Simon, 1963), esp.68f.

SRussell E. Brow n argues that It was not Beckerspurpose to give a dramatic picture of the terrible physicalsuffering of the ghetto... ut rather to create a comic novel ofJewish shtetl life in the S holem Aleichem tradition (208).

On the history o f the comics see also Lawren ce E.

Mintz, Humor and Popular Culture Handbook of HumorResearch 11 Applied Studies, ed. Paul McGhee and JeffreyH. Goldstein (New York: Springer, 1983) 129-42; DavidKunzle, The History of the Comic Strip: The NineteenthCentury (Berkeley: U of California P, 1990); M. ThomasInge , Comic s as Cul ture (Jackson and London: UP ofMississippi, 1990) and Joseph Witek, Comic Books asHistory: The Narrative Art ofJack Jackson, Art Spiegelman,and Harvey Pekar (Jackson,MS: UP of Mississippi, 1989).

See also the reviews by Lawrence Langer, A Fableof the Holocaust, NY Time s Book Review 3 November1991: 1 and 35-36 ; K ur t Sc he e l , Ma usc hwi t z ? Ar tSpiegelmans Geschlchte eines Uberlebenden, Merkur 43(1989) 435-38; and Raymond Sokolov in The Wall StreetJournal 13 November 1991: A 14. These are representativeof the pos i t ive c r i t i ca l recept ion; a l so wi tness thenomination for National Book Critics Circle award for mostdistinguished book of b iography-autob iography of 199 1 andthe Pulitzer Board Special Award for 1992 (see Time 20Apri l 1992: 37); note also the MOM A exhibi t held inJanuary of 1992 featuring Spiegelmans archives of hisresearch and earlier versions from RAW (reviewed in theNew York Magazine 13 January 1992: 65).

*Sybil Milton, w riting on the co mplex relationshipbetween art and atrocity, lists caricatures as one of the half-dozen distinct art forms issuing from the Holocaust. SeeMilton, Artof the Holocaust: A Summary, Reflections ofthe Holocaust in Art and Literature, ed. Randolph L.Braham (NY: Columbia UP, 1990) 147-52.

90 ne of the several provocative issues posed by A lanBerger , Ashes and Hope: The Holocaus t in SecondGeneration American Literature in Reflect ions 97- 116.Specifically, Berger asks W hat are the distinctive icons andimages of the Holocaust employed in second generationwritings? (97).

Works CitedAlter, Robert. Jewish Humor and the Domestication of

Myth. Jewish Wry. Essays on Jewish Humor. Ed.Sarah Blacher Cohen. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP,1987.25-36.Becker, Jurek. Jakob de r Liigner. Berlin: Aufbau, 1969.- Bronsteins Kinde r. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986.Bellow, Saul. Mr. Sammlers Planet. New York: Vilung,1970.

Berger , Alan L. Ashes and Hope: The Holocaus t inSecond Generation American Literature. Reflectionsof the Holocaust in Art and Literature. Ed. RandolphL. Braham. B oulder: Columbia UP , 1990. 97-1 16.

Boskin, Joseph. Beyond Kvetching and Jiving: The Thrustof Jewish and Black Folkhumor. Jewish Wry.Essays


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40 Journal ofAmerican Cultureo n J e w i s h H u m o r . Ed. Sarah Blacher Cohen.Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1987. 53-79.

Brown, Russell E. Jurek Beckers Holocaust Fiction: AFather and Son Survive. Critique 30 (1989): 193-209.

Celan, Paul. Todesfuge. Modem German Poetry, 1910-1960: An Anthology with Verse Translations. Ed. andtrans. Michael Hamburger and Christopher Middleton.New York: Grove, 1962.

Cohen, Sarah. Introduction. Jewish Wry. Essays on JewishHumor. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP , 1987. 1-15.

Europa, Europa. Agnieszka, Holland: Orion, 1991.Frank, Anne. The Diary of a Young Girl. Trans. B.M.

Mooyaart-Doubleday. New York: Doubleday, 1952.Trans. of Her Achterhu is. Amsterdam: Contact, 1949.

Hochhuth, Rolf. The Deputy. Trans. Richard and ClaraWinston. New York: Grove: 1964. Trans. of D erStellvertreter. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1963.

Koeppen, Wolfgang. Jakob Littners Aufzeichungen au seinem Erdloch. Munich: Klager, 1948. Frankfurt:Jiidischer Verlag, 1992.

Kosinsky, Jerzy. The Painted Bird. Boston: Houghton,1963.

Langer, Lawrence. The Holocaus t and the L i teraryImagination. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1975.

Lewis, Paul. Humor and Fear in the Gothic. ComicEffects. Interdisciplinary Approaches to Humor inLiterature. Albany, NY: State U of New York P,

Lifton, Robert Jay, and Alan L . Berger. HolocaustSurvivors and Children in Anya and Mr. SarnmlersPlanet. Modern Language Studies 16 (1986): 81-87.

Milton, Sybil. Art of the Holocaust: A Summary.Reflections of the Holocaust in Art and Literature. Ed.Randolph L. Braham. Boulder: Columbia UP, 1990.

Mordden, Ethan. Kat and Maus. Rev. of M a u s . ASurvivors Tale, by Art Spiegelman. The New Yorker

1989. 111-53.

147-52.

6 April 1992: 90-96.

Perel, Sally. Ich war Hitlerjunge Salomon. Berlin: Nicolai,Rosenfeld, Alvin H. Imagining Hitler. Bloomington, IN:Schaeffer,Susan F. Anya. New York: Macmillan, 1974.Scheel, Kurt. Mauschwitz? Art Spiegelmans Geschichte

eines Uberlebenden. Merkur 43 (1989): 435-438.Shaw, Robert. The Man in the G lass Booth. New York:

Harcourt, 1967.Spiegelman, Art. Maus. A Survivors Tale. New York:

Pantheon, 1986._. Maus II . And Here My Troubles Began. New York:Pantheon, 1991.- Prisoner on the Hell Planet. Short Order Comix #1(1973).

Wallant, Edgar. The Pawnbroker. New York: Harcourt,1961.

Weiss, Peter. The Investigation. English version by JonSwan and Ulu Grosbard. New York: Antheneum,1975. Version of D i e E r m i t t l u n g . Frankfurt:Suhrkamp, 1965.

Wetzel, Heinz. Holocaust und Literatur: Die PerspektiveJurek Beckers. Colloquia Gennanica 21 (1988): 70-76.

Wiesel, Elie. Night. Trans. Stella Rodway. New York: Hill,1960. Trans. of La Nui t . Paris: Les Editions DeMinuit, 1958.

Wiesenthal, Simon. The Sunflower. Trans. H.A. Piehler.New York: Schoken, 1976. Trans. of Die Sonnen-blume. Paris: Opera Mundi, 1969.

Witek, Joseph. Comic Books as History: The Narrative Artof Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar.Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 1989.

1992.Indiana UP, 1985.

Mark Cory, Professor of German, University of Arkansas,Fayetteville, AR.

comedic distance holocaust

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