Andreas Huyssen

Of Mice and. Mimesis:Reading Spiegelman with Adorno

Since the l9g0s, the question no longer is whether to represent the Holocaust inliterature, film, and the visual arts but how to do so. The conviction about theessential unfepresentability of the Holocaust, typically grounded in Adorno'sfamous and often misunderstood statement about the barbarism of poetry afterAuschwitz, has lost much of its persuasiveness for later generations who onlyknow of the Holocaust through representations: photos and films, documentaries,testimonies, historiography, and ffction. Given the flood of Holocaust replesen-tations in all manner of media today, it would be sheer voluntarism to stick withAdorno,s notion of a ban on images which trânslâtes a theological concept intoa very specific kind of modernist aesthetic. It seems much mole promising toapproach the issue of Holocaust representations through another concept thatholds a key place in Adorno's thought, that of mimesis.

In his fecently published book, In the Shadow of Catastrophe: GetmanIntellectuals Bøtween Apocalypse and Enlightenment,r Anson Rabinbach has per-

suasively shown how Adorno's understanding of Nazi anti-Semitism is energized

by his theory of mimesis.2 More important, however, he has linked Adorno's dis-

cussion of the role of mimesis in anti-semitism to Horkheimer and Adorno'shistorical and philosophical reflections on mimesis as part of the evolution of sig-

nifying systems, as they are elaborated in the first chapter of the Dialectic ofEnlightenment.s HercHorkheimer and Adorno discussed mimesis in its true and

repressed forms, its role in the process of civilization and its paradoxical rela-tionship to the Bild.ewubot, the prohibition of grâven images'a At the same time,the concept of mimesis in Adorno (and I take it that Adorno râther than Hork-heimer is the driving force in articulating this concept in the coauthored work) was

not easily deftned, as several recent studies have shown.s It actually functionedmore like a palimpses t that partakes in at least five different yet overlapping dis-

cursive registers in the text: first, in relation to the critique of the commodity form,

Copyright O 2001 by Andreas Huyssen. This essay has also appeared in N¿w German Cri-tiquø,W\nter 2001.

I resístbecomíng the Elíe Wiesel oJ the comic booh.

29

OJ Mice andMimesis

its powers of reification and deception, a thoroughly negative form of mimesis

lMimesis ans verhärtetelì secorLd, in relation to the anthropoloSical grounding of

human nâture which, as Adorno insists tn Minima Moralia, was "indissolublylinked to imitation " ¡6 third, in a biological somatic sense Seared toward survival

as Adorno had encountered it in Roger caillois's work, some of which he reviewed

for the Zeitschrift fùr sozialfoschung;7 fourth; in the Freudian sense of identiff-

cation and proiection indebted to Totem and Taboo; and lastly, in an aesthetic

sense and with strong fesonances of Benjamin's language theory, in relation to the

role of word and imæe in the evolution of signifyinS systems' It is precisely this

multivalence of mimesis, I would arg|¡et that makes the concept productive for

contempofary debates about memofy, traumâ, and representation in the public

realm. Thus it is more than merely a paradox that mimesis served Adorno to read

Nazi anti-Semitism, whereas it serves me to understand the ethics and aesthetics

of approaching Holocaust memory in our time'In this eSSâ, then, I focus on one specific aspect of memory discourse,

namely, the vexing issue of (in Timothy Garton Ash',s succinct words) if, how, and

when to fepfesent historical trauma.s My example for the fepÏesentation of his-

torical tïauma is the Holocaust, a topic on which, as already indicated, Adorno

had provocative things to say, although he never said quite enough. But I do thinkthat the issues raised in this essay peltâin as much to other instances of histor-

ical trauma and their repfesentâtion. \Mhether we think of the desaparccidos inArgentina, Guatemala, or Chile, the stolen generâtion in Australia, or the post-

apartheid debates in South Africa, in all of these cases issues of how to document'

how to repïesent, and how to view and listen to testimony about â treumatic past

have powerfully emerged in the public domain'I hope to show that a reading through mimesis of one speciffc Holocaust

image-text may allow us to go beyond âÏSuments focusing primarily on the fathel

conftning issue of how to ,"pr"r"rr, the Holocaust "properly" ot how to avoid aes-

theticizing it, My argument is based on the reading of a work, Art spiegelman's

Maus,e which has shocked many precisely because it seems to violate t]:rre Bilder'

verbotin the most egregious ways, but which has also been celebrated, at least by

somer âs one of the most challenging in an ever widening body of recent works

concerned with the Holocaust and its remembrance'But more is at stake here than iust the reading of one work through the

conceptual screen of another. A discussion of Art Spiegelman's Maus in terms of

the mimetic dimension may move us beyond a stalemate in debates about Holo-

caust representations, a stalemate which, ironicaily, rests on presuppositions thatwere ff.rst and powerfully articulated by Adorno himself in a different context and

at a different time. Reading Maus thtottgh the conceptual screen of mimesis per-

mits us to read Adorno "g"in.a one of the most lingering effects of his work on

contempoïary culture, the thesis about the culture industry and its irredeemablelink with deception, manipulation, domination, and the destruction of subjec-

tivity. While this kind of uncompromising critique of consumerist culture, linked

-Art Spiegelman

3

Andreas HuYssen

âs it is to a certain now historical type of modernist aesthetic practice, resonates

strongly with a whole set of situationist and poststructuralist positions developed

in France in the 1960s (Barthes, Debord, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Tel Quel), it has

generally been on the wane in csons, however, it has Proven tothat of Holocaust representatioAuschwitz (often misquoted, unanalyzetext)l0havebecomeastandardreferencepointandhavefedintotherecentrevivalof notions of an aesthetic sublime and its dogmatic antirepresentational stance'l1

This is where the issue of public memory emerges. Politically, almost every-

body seems to agree, thesalutory effects on Presecultural representationscase exemplifying this broad, though no

over Spielb erg's Schindle{s List and La

to mess audiences, fails to remember properly because it represents, thus foster-

ing forgetting: Hollywood as fi,ctional substitute for "real history'" Lanzmann's

refusal to replesent, on the other hand, is said to embody memory in the pfoper

waypreciselybecauseitavoidsthedelusionsofapresenceofthatwhichistoberemembered'Lanzmann,sfilmispraisedassomethinglikeaheroiceffortintheKulturkampf against the memory industry, and its refusal to re-pfesent, its adher-

ence to Bilderverbot, becomes the gr ,.rnd fo, its authenticity.rz Aesthetically

speaking, these opposing validations o

the unquestioned modernist dichotoagainst forms of high art'13 Lookingcursive scïeens of mimesis maY allïepfesentations today in a way different from this earlier dominant paradigm'

Narrative Strategies

3lOf Mice andMimesis

ambiguous, if not opaque, to the possible success of such enlightenment. Rather

than providing us with an enlightened moral or with a happy reconciliation between

high and low, human and animal I ttarlrnrla and memory, the aesthetic and emo-

tional effect of Maus remains jarring throughout. This irritating effect on the reader

results from a variety of pictorial and verba| strategies that have their common

vanishing point in mimesis, in both its insidious and salutoly aspects which, as

Adorno would have it, can never be entirely sêparated from each other.

Let me turn now to the dimensions of mimesis in this image-text. As is

well-known , Mausas narrative is based on interviews Art Spiegelman conducted

with his r.ather, vladek, an Auschwitz survivor, in the 1970s' Spiegelman taped

these interviews in Rego Park, Queens, in the house in which he grew up, and

during a summel vacation in the Catskills' These interviews trace the story of

Spiegelman's parents' life in Poland from 1933 to l944,but the telling of this trau-

matic past, as retold in the comic, is interrupted time and again by banal everyday

events in the New York present. This crosscutting of past and present, by which

the frame keeps intruding into the narrative, allows spiegelman, as it were, to

have it both ways: for vladek, it seems to establish a safe distance between the

two temporal levels; actually the tale of his past is visually framed by Spiegelman

as if it were a movie projected by Vladek himself . As Vladek begins to tell his story'

pedalling on his exercycle, he says proudly: "People always told me I looked just

ilk" nrrdolph Valentino" (I:18). Behind him in the frame is a large poster of

Rudolph valentino's 1921 film The Sheikwith the main actor as mouse holding

a swooning mouse lady in his arms, and the whole exercycle mechanism looks

remotely like a movie proiector with the spinning wheel resembling a fflm reel

andVladek as narratorbeginning to proiect his story. This crosscutting of past and

present points in a variety of ways to how this past holds the present captive inde-

pendently of whether this knotting of past into present is being talked about or

,"pr"ssed. Thus one page earlier, Art, who is sitting in the background and has just

asked Vladek to tell him the story of his life in Poland before and during the war'

is darkly framed within the frame by the arms and the exercycle's handlebar inthe foreground. vladek's arms, head, and shirt with rolled-up sleeves ate allstriped,

and the Auschwitz number tattoed into his left arm hovers ominously just above

Art,s head in the frame (I:12). Both the narrator (Art Spiegelman) and the reader

see Vladek,s everyday behavior permeated by his past experiences of persecution

during the Nazi Period'This first narrative framing is also itself split in two. In addition to the

narrative frame the interviews provide, another level of narrâtive time shows

the author Art Spiegelman, or rather ttle Kunstfi.gur Artre, during his work on the

book from I97B to 199I, y.^rrduring which Vladek Spiegelman died and the firstpart of Mausbecame a gieatsuccess, all of which is in turn incorporated into the

narrative of the second volume. The complexity of the narration is not iust an

aesthetic device employed for its own sake. It rather results from the desire of

members of the ,""ond ger,eration to learn about their parents'past of which they

Maus undercuts this dichotomy in the first rather obvious sense that Spiegelman

draws on the comic as a mass cultural genre, but transforms it in a narrative sat-

urated with modernist techniques of self-reflexivity, self-irony, ruptures in narra-

tivetime,andhighlycompleximagesequencingandmontaging'Ascomic'Mcusfesonâtes less with Disney than with a whole tradition of popular animal fables,

fromAesoptoLaFontainetoevenKafka.Atthesametime,itevolvedfromanAmerican comic book countertradition born in the 1960s that includes such works

as Krazy Cat, Fritz the Cat,and others. Yet, Mausremains different from the older

tradition of the enlightening animal fable. If the animal fable (George orwell's

Animal Farm as " tl"rrti"th-century fictional example) had enlightenment as

its purpose through either satire or moral instruction , Maus remains thoroughly

32

Andreas HuYssen

are always, willingly oï not, already apart" it is a profect of mimetically approxi-

matinghistoricalandpersonaltraumainwhichthevarioustemporallevelsareknotted together in a way that refuses to allow talk about the past to pâss away'

as discussed in the German Historiketstrøit oI the mid-1980s'14 The survivors'

son,s life stands in a mimetic affinity to his parents' trauma long before he ever

embarks on his interviews with his father.ls Therefore, this mimetic relationship

cannot be thought of simply as a rational and fully articulated working through'16

There are dimensiorr, ,o^*i*esis that lie outside linguistic communication and

thatarelockedinsilences,repressions,gestures,andhabits-allproducedbyapast that weighs all the more is in its

physiological, somatic dimen similar'

a movement toward, never ^ ^n it be

reduced to compassion or empathy' It ra ity and

nonidentity together as nonidentical similitude and in unresolvable tension with

each other'Mausperformspreciselysuchamimeticapproximation'Spiegelman,s

initial impetus for conducting these interviews with his father came out of â trau-

matic experience: the suicide of his mother An|a in |968, an event Spiegelman

made into , fo.rr-p"g" image-text originally published in I973 inan obscure under-

ground comic under the title "Ptisonet of th" Hell Planet'" It is only in the latter

half of the first part of Maus thatArtie suddenly and unexpectedly comes âcross

ten âttempt to put part of his own life'sces the "Prisoner of the Hell Planet" in

med in black like an obituary in Germanmouse natratíve, breaking the frame inier work, the figures of Vladek and Artie

mourning the death of Anja are drawn as humans, afacttinat goes surprisingly

unremarked by the mice Artie and Vladek as they are looking at these pages in the

narrative of the later work. The identit,, of the nonidentical seems to be taken for

granted in this porousness between h Second' the comic

"Ptisonet on the HelI Planet" opens shows lO-year-old

Art in 1958 with his mother on summe i11s'I7 It is the first

ofthreefamilyphotosmontagedintothecomic,allofwhichfunctionnottodocument, but to stress the unassimilability of traumatic memory'18 Third' "Pris-

oner,, articulates an extreme moment of unadulterated despair that disrupts the

,,notmal,, frame of the interviewing plocess, the questioning and answering, the

bickeringandfightingbetweenfatherandson'Thesepagesgivetestimonytothe emotional breakdãwn of both father and son at Ania's burial: in Art's case' itis overlaid by a kind of survivor guilt of the second degree, once lemoved from the

originaltÏaumahisparentsexperienced.ThememoriesofAuschwitznotonlyclaim Anja; they alsã envelop the son born years a{ter the war. Thus Art draws

himself throughout this episode in striped Auschwitz prisoner garb' which gives

asurrealqualitytothesestarklyexecuted,woodcut-like,srotesqueimages.

33

OJ Mice and Mimesis

In this moment of secondary Holocaust trauma Spiegelman performs a

kind of spatial mimesis of death in the sense of Roger Caillois's work of the 1930s,

which Adorno read and commented on critically in his correspondence with Ben-jamin.Ie Spiegelman performs a compulsive imaginary mimesis of Auschwitz as

space of imprisonment and murder, a rhimesis, however, in which the victim, themother, becomes perpetfatof while the, real perpetratols have vanished. Thus atthe end of this raw and paralyzing passage, Art, incarcerated behind imaginarybars, reproaches his mother for having committed the perfect crime: "You put mehere...shortedallmycircuits...cutmynelveendings...andcrossedmywires!. . . llyou MURDERED me, Mommy, and you left me here to take the rapl!|"(I:103). The drawings âre expressionist, the text crude though in a certain sense

"authentic," but it is easy to see that Spiegelman's comic would have turned intodisaster had he chosen the image and language mode of "Prisone{' fot the laterwork. It could only have turned into psycho-comikitsch'

Spiegelman did need a different, more estranging mode of narrative andfigurative ïepresentâtion in order to overcome theparalyzing effects of a mimesisof memory-terror. He needed a pictorial strategy that would maintain the tensionbetween the overwhelming reality of the remembered events and the tenuous/always elusive status of memory itself . As an insert ín Maus, however, these pages

function as a reminder about the representational difficulties of telling a Holocaustor post-Holocaust story in the form of a comic. But they also powerfully supportSpiegelman's strategy to use animal imagery in the later, longer work. The choiceof medium, the animal comic, is thus self-consciously enacted and justified in thenârrative itself. Drawing the story of his parents and the Holocaust as an animalcomic is the Odyssean cunning that allows Spiegelman to escape from the terrorof memory-even "postmemory" in Marianne Hirsch's terms-while mimeticallyreenacting it.20

But the question lingers. What do we make of the linguistic and pictorial punningof Maus, Mauschwitz, andthe Catskills in relation to mimesis? The decision totell the story of Germans and fews as a stoly of cats and mice as predators andprey should not be misread as a naturalization of history, as some have done.Spiegelman is not the Goldhagen of the comic book. After all, the comic does notpretend to be history. More serious might be another objection: Spiegelman'simage strategies problematically reproduce the Nazi image of the |ew as vermin,as rodent, as mouse. But is it simply a mimicry of racist imagery? And even ifmimicry, does mimicry of racism invariably imply its reproduction, or can suchmimicry itself open up a gâp, a difference that depends on who performs themiming and how? Mimesis, after all, is based on similitude as making similar

Image Strategies

34

Andreas HuYssen

(AngleichunginAdorno'sterminology)'theproductionof"the-samebutnotquite"'as Homi Bhabha describes it in another context'zl And Angleichung implies dif-

ference.ThusSpiegelmanhimselfdrawsthereader,sattentiontohisconsciousmimeticadoptionofthisimagery.TheverytopofMausl,scopyrightpagefeaturesa Hitler quote: "Th" I;;; "'""""do"btedly

a '"""' b"t they are not human'" And

tvlourll,righ, "fr", the copyrigh tp^ge'begins with a motto taken from a Pomeran-

iannewspaperarticlefromthemid-1930s:"MickeyMouseisthemostmiserableideal ever revealed. . . ' Healthy emotions tell every independent young man and

every honorable youth that the dirty and filth-covered vermin' the greatest bac-

tertacarrierintheanimalkingdom,cannotbetheidealtypeofanimal.''.Awaywith )ewish brutalization of ih" people! Down with Mickey Mouse! wear the

swastika cross!,, M¿us thus gives copyright where it is due: Adolf Hitler and the

Nazis.Butthatmaystillnotbeenoughasanânsweftotheobiection.Morecru-

cial is the way ir, *ii"h the mimesis of anti-semitic imagery is handled' Here itwould be enough to compâfe Spiegelman,s work with the 1940 Nazi propaganda

movie The Eternal I"*, *ttnt iorit"y"d the |ewish world conspiracy as the inva-

sive migration of plague-carrying herds of rodents who destroy everything in their

path. such " "o-p"i"iron makes it clear how Spiegelman's mimetic adoption of

Naziimageryactuallysucceedsinreversingitsimplicationswhilesimultane.ously keepi,'g o, "*"," of the humiliation and degradation of that imagery,s orig-

inal intention' Instead of the literal fepÏesentation of destructive vetmin, we see

persecutedlittleanimalsdrawnwithahumanbodyandwearinghumanclothes'withahighlyabstracted,nonexpressivemousephysiognomy.,,Maus,,heremeansvulnerability,unalloyedsuffering,victimization.Asinthecaseofthe,,Prisonerof the Hell Planet ," hete, too' an earlier more naturalistic version of the mouse

drawingsshowshowfarSpiegelmanhascomeinhisâttempttotransformtheanti-semitic steïeotype for his purposes by eliminatinS any all-too-naturalistic

elements from his drawings'Defenders oÍ. tVtais have often iustified the use of animal imagery as a

necessâry distancing device, a kind of Brechtian estrangement effect' spiegelman's

own iustification is more comPlex:

Firstofall,I,veneverbeenthroughanythinglikethat_knockonwhateverisaround to knock on-and it wo.ríd be " coont"rfeit to try to pÏetend that the

drawings "ä r"nr.."ntations of something that's actually happening' I don't

t rro* "*""ii;;h". a German looked like who was in a speciffc small town

doingaspecificthing.Mynotionsarebornofafewscofesofphotographsanda couple of *orri"r. im bound to do something inauthentic. Also, I',m afraid

thatifldiditwithpeople,itwouldbeverycorny'Itwouldcomeoutassomekind of o¿á pt"" foisympathy or ,Remember the six Million,' and that wasn't

mypointexactly,either'Tousetheseciphers'thecatsandmice'isactuallyaway to allow you past the cipher at the feopte who are experiencing it' so it's

really a much more direct way of dealing with the matetlal'zz

35

Of Mice andMimesis

It is, in my teïms, ân estrangement effect in the service of mimetic approxima-tion, and thus rather un-Brechtian , for atleast in his theoretical reflections, Brechtwould not allow for any mimetic impulse in reception. Spiegelman accepts thatthe past is visually not accessible through realistic representâtion: whateverstrategy he might choose, it is bound to bç "inauthentic." He also is aware of hisgenerational positioning as someone who mainly knows of this past throughmedia representations. Documentary auth¿nticity of representation can thereforenot be his goal, b:ut authenticationthrough the interviews with his father is' Theuse of mice and cats is thus not simply an âvant-gardist distancing device in orderto give the reader a fresh, critical, perhaps even "tfansgtessive" view of the Holo-caust intended to attack the various pieties and official memorializations that have

covered it discursively.Of course, Spiegelman is aware of the dangers of using Holocaust mem-

ory âs scïeen memory for various political purposes in the present. His narrativeand pictorial strategy is precisely devised to avoid that danger. It is actually a''

strategy of another kind of mimetic approximation: getting past the cipher to thepeople and their experience. But before getting past the cipher, Spiegelman has toput himself into that very system of ciphering: as Artie in the comic, he himselfbecomes mouse, imitates the physiognomic reduction of his pârents by raciststereotype, the post-Auschwitz |ew still âs mouse, even though now in the coun-try of the dogs (America) rather than the cats. Paradoúcally, we have here a mimeticapproximation of the past that respects the Bilderverbot not despite but ratherbecause of its use of animal imagery, which tellingly avoids the representation ofthe human Lace. Bildervetbotand mimesis are no longer irreconcilable opposites,

but enter into a complex relationship in which the image is precisely not meremirroring, ideological duplication, or partisan reproduction,2s but where itapproaches writing. This Adornean notion of image becoming script was ffrst elab-

orated by Miriam Hansen and Gertrud Koch in their attempts to make Adornopertinent for film theory.za But it works for Spiegelman's Maus as well. As itsimage track indeed becomes script, Maus acknowledges the inescapable inauthen-ticity of Holocaust replesentations in the "realistic" mode, but achieves a newand unique form of euthentication effect on the reader precisely by way of its com-plex layering of historical facts, their oral retelling, and their transformation intoimage-text. Indeed, it is as animal comic that Maus, to quote a typically Adorneanturnof phrasefromthefirstchapter of.Dialecticof Enlightenment, "presetvestheIegitimacy of the image . . . in the faithful pursuit of its prohibition."2s

If this seems too strong a claim, consider the notion of image-becoming-script in Maus Írorr- another angle. Again, Spiegelman himself is a good witnessfor what is at stake:

I didn,t want people to get too interested in the drawings. I wanted them to bethere, but the story operates somewhere else. It operates somewhere betweenthe words and the idea that's in the pictures and in the movement between thepictures, which is the essence of what happens in a comic. So by not focusing

36

Andreas HuYssen

youtoohardonthesepeopleyou,reforcedbackintoyourroleasreaderratherthan looker'26

And in a radio interview or.lggl,he put it even more succinctly by saying that-¡vt)*,

¡""a comic book driven by the wotd/27 :

IcannothopetogiveafullsenseofhowthelinguisticdimensionoÍMausdrivestheimage."qo",,"",.Afewcommentswillhavetosuffi.ce.Centralhereisthe rendering oi vr"¿li]', r"rrgo"g" t"k"r, from the taped intewiews' The estranging

visualization of the animal comic is counterpointeã by documentâry accuracy in

theuseofVladek,slanguage.Thegøstusorvu¿"t.tspeech,noteasilyforgottenbyany reader with an ;;;Ër; is srrane.d fv cadences, syntax, and intonations of his

EastEuropeanbackground.HisEns]ishissuffusedbytheStfuctulesofYiddish'Residues of

" tort *Jrtd are inscribed into the language of the survivor-immigrant'

It is this literally-ra.t,", .t'",, poetically or mystically-broken speech that carries

the burden of "*,fr"rrii"",*, Jfr", *fri"frl, ;á"* remembered or narrated' On the

other hand, Vl"d"t h1*r"lfi, ^w^teof the problematic nâture of any Holocaust

remembran"", "u""'îi*""' when-he says: "It's no more to speak" (ILl13)'

Spiegelman', "o*nì"* l"ã"'ã*""t of t"*poral levels finds its parallel in an

equallycomplexdifÍerentiatio'oflinguisticregisters.Thus.theinsidenarrationabour the years i" p.i""¿ as told by vladek are rendered in fluent English' A nat-

urallanguar"r""o'O'"q"i'"dherebecauseatthetimeVladekwouldhavespo-kenhisnâtionallanguage,Polish.Itrlog¡catthatVladek,sbrokenspeechonlyappears on the tevel áf the frame .,or, ,t "-n"rrative

time of the pÏesent' Past and

present, clearly ¿i'ìi"g"i'rted by the-;;;;;" track' are thus nevertheless suf-

fused in the present-iî ut"¿"t ,, urot "r,

îrilirh, *hi"h provides the linguistic

marker of the insuperable distance that stiliseparâtes Artie from vladek's expe-

riences and from lii, -"*ories. Artie, aÍler a!1, always speaks fluent English as

his nativelanguage' n's proiect is mimetic "ppt:Îi:t:1i::::,:1,"^î:Ïï :Ti;

selves,butofthememoriesofhisp"'""t''andthusaconstructionofhisown"postmemory"28 then this mimesis is one that must remarn fractured' frustrated'

inhibited,incomplete'Thepainofp"'tto"maisrepeatedthroughnarrationinthepresent",'a"..""t'"sitselftothelo.",,",,toArtieaslistenerinsidethetextas well as to the rå"á", *rr" "nnro""t "r-,t "

áo","",s of vladek's autobiographic

tale through its effects on Artie. ¡r,t" ", aKunstfigur-the same but not quite the

SameastheauthorArtSpiegelm,,,-th,,"b""o*"*h"mediuminthetextthroughwhich we ourselves become witnesses of his father,s autobiographic narration.

while this narration, gently "rrd ,o-Jmes not so 8ently extrâcted from the sur-

vivor, aims at " k;t'ã; *oiki"g tht"gft in language' it'is a mimetic process that

will never reach an end or come to "å*n1"it"", ;;"r, if and when Vladek's tale

catches up to the postwar period' -:--L-1^L^+^ata t^ e fir.ll mimet'Andthenthereisalwaysthatothelmostpainfulobstacletoafullmimetic

knowledgeofthepast.FortheprocessofanAngløichungansVetgangene,aÍl.âSslm-

-1)tOJ Mice øndMimesis

ilation to the past, is not only interrupted by the inevitable intrusion of everyday

events during the time of the interviews; another even mole signifrcant gap opens

up in the s"rrs" that only vladek's memories are accessible to Artie' The memories

of Artie,s mother, whose suicide triggered Art spiegelman',s project in the firstplace, remain inaccessible not only becausq of her death, but-because vladek, in a

ilt of despai r afterher death, destroyed her diaries in which she had laid down her

own memories of the years in Poland and in Auschwitz' And iust as Artie had

accused his mother for murdering him, he now âccuses his father for destroying

the diaries: ,,God DAMN you! You . . . you murderer!" (I:159|' Ania',s silence thps

is total. If it was Ania's suicide that generated Art spiegelman's desire to gain self-

understanding through mimetic approximation of his patents' story and of survivor

guilt, then the discove ry thatthe diaries have been burned points to the ultimate

elusiveness of the whole enterprise. Artie's frustration about the destruction of

the diaries only makes explicit that ultimate, unbridgeable gap between Artie's

cognitive desires and the Ãemories of his parents. Indeed, it marks the limits of

mimetic approximation, but it marks them in a pÏâgmatic way, without resorting

to new definitions of the sublime âs the unpresentable within representation'

All of Spiegelman's stfategies of narration thus maintain the insuperable tension

within mimetic approximation between closeness and distance, afffnity and dif-

ference. Angleichung is not identiffcation or simple compassion. Artie's listening

to his father's story makes him understand how Vladek's whole habitus has been

shaped by Auschw itz andthe struggle for survival, while Vladek himself, caught

in traumatic reenactments, may ïemain oblivious to that fact. Rather than assum-

ing continuity, vladek',s storytelling seems to assume a safe and neutralizing dis-

tance between the events of the pâst and his New York present. But his conclete

behavior constantly proves the opposite. Artie, on the other hand, is always con-

scious of the fact thai the borders between past and present are fluid, not only inhis observation of his father, but in his self-observation as well' Mimetic approx-

imation as a self-conscious proiect thus always couples closeness and distance,

similitude and difference'This dimension becomes most obvious in those passages in Maus II where

spiegelman draws himself drawing Maus llÍ:4lff.)' The year is 1987; Vladek has

been dead for five !eaïs; Art works on Maus II from the tapes which now have

become archive; and Maus I has becom e a g1e^t commercial success' This chap-

ter, entitled ,,Auschwitz (Time Flies)," demonstrates how beyond the multiplyfractured layering of langUage and narrative time, the very pictoriality of the ani-

mal comic is significan,ty ãirrop,"d as well. We see Art in profile, sitting at hisdrawing table, but now drawn as a human frgure wearing a mouse mask. It is as if

Bilderverbot and Mimetic Approximation

38

Andreas HuYssen

sustain itself, as if it own

tself to be a sham' Th mitswork anY longer' The time

in Auschwi tz itselÍ,iust begun in the preceding chapter' oint'

ThiscrisisinthecreativepÏocessistellinglyconnectedwiththecom-mercial success of Mausl: the Holocaust as part of the culture industry' crisis of

representation and crisis of success throw the author into a depressive melancholy

state, in which he resists the marketing of his work (translations, fiIm version'

TV)throughafitoftotalregression.Heavoidstheannoyingquestionsofthemedia sharks (questions such as: lffhat is the message of your book? Why should

youngef Germans today feel guilty? How would you draw the Israelis? II:4Zlby

literally shrinking in his chair from frame to frame until we see a small child

screaming:,,I want . . . I want . . . my Mommy!,, ([:azl.The pressures of histori-

calmemoryareonlyintensiffedbyHolocaustmarketing,tothepointwheretheartist refuses any further communication. The culture industry's obsession with

theHolocaustalmostsucceedsinshuttingdownSpiegelman,squest.Thedesirefor a regression to childhood, as fepresented in this sequence, however, is not only

an attempt to cope with the consequences of commercial success and to avoid the

media, This moment of extreme crisis, as close as any in the work to traumatic

silenceandrefusaltospeak,alsoanticipatestheveryendingofMausT|'Ontherr"ryl"rtpageofMausll,asVladek'sstoryhascaughtupwithhis

postwar reunification with Ania, ironically described by vladek in Hollywood

terms as a happy ending and visually rendered as the iris-like fade-out at the end

of silent ff.lms,2e Artie is again put in the position of a child' In a case of mistaken

identity resulting from a merging of past and pÏesent in his father's mind' vladek

addresses Artie as Richieu, Artie's own older bfotheÏ who did not survive the war'

whose only remaíning photo had always stared at him reproachfully during his

childhood from the p"rãrr,.,bedroom wall, and to whom Mausrris dedicated. As

Vladek asks Artie tã turn off his tape recorder and turns over in his bed to go to

sleep, he says to Artie: ,,I'm tired from talking, Richieu, and it's enough stories for

now,,(II:136}.ThismisrecognitionofA:tieasRichieuishighlyambiguous:itis

spiegelman 1978-1991," years that marect of approaching an experience thât ultimately remains beyond reach'

Much -or" "orrid be said about Spiegelman's mimetic memory project,

but I hope to have made the case that the Adorne aî category of mimesis helps us

read Holocaust remembrance in ^ way that brackets the debate about the proper

oï correct Holocaust repïesentation and shifts the criteria of fudgment' If mimetic

39

Of Mice andMimesis

approximation, drawing on â variety of knowledges (historical, autobiographic,testimonial ,literary, museal), were to emerge as a key concern/ then one couldlook at other Holocaust representations through this prism rather than trying toconstruct a Holocaust canon based on narrow aesthetic categories that pit theunrepresentable against aestheticization, modernism against mass culture, ormemory against forgetting. This field of discussion might be more productive thanthe ritualistic incantations of Adorno regarding the culture industry or the bar-barity of poetry after Auschwitz.

As a work by a member of the "second generation," Maus may indeedmark a shift in the ways in which the Holocaust and its remembrânce are nowrepresented. It is part of a body of newer, "secondary" attempts to commemoratethe Holocaust that simultaneously incorporate the critique of representation andstay clear of official Holocaust memory and its rituals. I have tried to show howSpiegelman confronts the inauthenticity of representation within a mass culturalgenre while telling an autobiographic story and achieving a powerful effect ofauthentication. Like many other creators of works of film, sculpture, monuments,Iiterature, theater, even architecture, Spiegelman rejects any metalanguage of sym-bolization and meaning, whether it be thè official language of Holocaust memo-rials or the discourse that insists on thinking about Auschwitz as the telos ofmodernity. The approach to Holocaust history is sought in an intensely personal,experiential dimension that finds expression in a variety of media and genres. Pre-requisite for any mimetic approximation (of the artist/reader/viewer) is the liber-ation from the rituals of mourning and of guilt. Thus it is not so much the threatof forgetting as the surfeit of memory3o that is the problem addressed by suchnewer work. How to get past the offtcial memorial culture? How to avoid the trap-pings of the culture industry while operating within it? How to represent thatwhich one knows only through representations and from an ever-growing histor-ical distance?

All of this requires new narrative and ffgurative strategies including irony,shock, black humor, even cynicism, much of which is present in Spiegelman'swork and constitutive of what I have called mimetic approximation. Bildewerbotis simply no longer an issue since it has itself become part of official strategies ofsymbolic memorializing. This very factmay mark the historical distance betweenAdorno, whose " after Auschwitz" chronotope with its insistence on the prohibi-tion of images and the barbarism of culture has a definite apocalyptic ring to it,and younger postmodernist writers and artists to whom the prohibition of imagesmust appear like Holocaust theology. But if, on the other hand, Adorno's notionof mimesis can help us understand such newer artistic practices and their effectsin a broader frame, then there may be reason to suspect that Adorno's rigorouslymodernist reflection itself blocked out representational possibilities inherent inthet mimetic dimension. In its hybrid folding of a complex and multilayered nar-ration into the mass cultural genre, Spiegelman's image-text makes a good case

40Andreas HuYssen

againstadogmaticprivilegingofmodernisttechniquesofestrangementandnega.tion, for it demonstrates hoally exclusive, but can actu

FinallY, there is a

Auschwitz'/ statements' Such a reading

through classical cultural traditions-mân "tolerance" of the |ews, Goethe's

German Poetrt music, and so

rPe has called it'31 The sPirit of

suchacritiqueofanofficialGermanpost-AuschwitzcultureisonethatAdornoshares with the newer generation of artists in many countries today, all of whom

trytoworkagainstthecontempolaryversionsofanoffrcialHolocaustculture,thedimensionsof*t'*t'Adornocouldnothaveimaginedduringhislifetime'There is another sentence' less frequent

than the famous statement "to write psentence continues to haunt all conte

"Even the most extreme consciousness

chatter.,,s2Onlyworksthatavoidthatdangerwillstand.ButtheStlategiesofhowto avoid such degeneration into idle chrtter in artistic fepresentations cannot be

written in stone'

NOTES

l'AnsonRabinbach,IntheshadowofCatastrophe:Germanlnte]]ectua]sbetweenApoc-

discussion of signiffcation' hier

pre-saussurean, presemiotic in the strict sense' It remains indebte

and through Beniamin "i;;; ' "it'"t"tttth-centurv tradition of

But it is precisely,h" "ä-î;;;"råri rr"r"r" "i ittì" ,nã"sht that allows the notion of mimesis

to emerge inpowerful-ways. " ithetik,,, in Koch, Diø4. See Gertrua råãi,'"ruri*esis und Bilderverbot in Adorno's As

EinstølL¿ung ¡st di" tinsíîi;; ffÞråï åi^Yïi;fÌ"!'r:i:kr:;!ff, bøi Adorno(wùrzburg:l"' y¡l^it¡t on the Move: Theodor W' Adorno'sci"i"iè"¡'uer and Christoph Wulf' MÍmesis:

,:T:åLï:*ilH::;'i",i'il'-lJJ;'"Hiï:i;ii-37.

6'TheodorW.Adorno,MinimaMota]ia:ReflectionsfromaDamagedLife,tr.E.F.N.|eph-cott (London: Verso, 19741, 154' . ô^:r^:- fùr-- '1. Theodor W' Adoino, Review of Roger Caillois'Sozi -11' See also Adorno's lette 37 '

and i' t"tt"' of October 2' 1937'' en-

'iam 0' ed' Henri r'""it"irïÃúfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 19941' 276-

78,286.

4T

Of Mice andMimesis

8. The literature on representing the Holocaust is by now legion. One of the richest andstill influential collections of essays is Saul Friedlander, ed., Prcbing the Limits of Representa-tion: Nazism and the "Final Solution" (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). Mostrecently, Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca and London: CornellUniversity Press, 1998).

9. Art Spiegelman, Maus I: A Survivor's.Tale. My Father Bleeds Histoty {New York: Pan-theon, 1986) ind Mout II: A Sutvivot's Tale arld Here ithy Tloubles Bøgan (New York: Pantheon,1991). Page references will be given in the text.

The following publications were extremely helpful in preparing this essay. I acknowledgethem summarily since my concern is a theoretical proposition rather than a new and differen-tiated reading of the text per se. |oseph Witek, Comic Books as History (fackson and London1989)¡ Andrea Liss, "Trespassing Through Shadows: History, Mourning, and Photography in Rep-resentations of Holocaust Memory," Framework 4:l lI99I): 2941¡ ll/^arianne Hirsch, "FamilyPictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-Memory," Discourse l5:2 (Winter 1992-931:3-29; MilesOrvell, "Writing Posthistorically: Krazy Kat, Maus, and the Contemporary Fiction Cartoon,"American Literary History 4:1 {spring 19921: IIO-28¡ Rick ladonisi, "Bleeding History and Own-ing His [Father's] Story: Maus and Collaborative Autobiography," CEA Critic: An Official lour-nal of the College English Association 57:l {Fall 19941: 4l-55¡ Michael Rothberg, "'We WereTalking |ewish': Art Spiegelman's Maus as 'Holocaust' Production," Contemporary Literuture35:4 (Winter 19941: 661-87; Edward A. Shannon, "'It's No More to Speak': Genre, the Insuffi-ciency of Language, and the Improbability of Definition in Art Spiegelman's Maus," The Mid-Atlantic Almanac 4ll995l:4-17; Alison Landsberg, "Toward a Radical Politics oÍ.Empathy," NewGerman Cútique 7l (Spring-Summer 19971:63-86. And most recently Dominick LaCapra,"'T!vas Night before Christmas: Art Spiegelman's Maus," inLaCapra, History and Memory afterAuschwitz llthaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998); fames Young, "The Holocaustas Vicarious Past: Art Spiegelman's Maus and the Afterimages of History," Critical Inquiry 24:3(Spring 19981:666-99.

10. For a discussion of the worst offenders see Michael Rothberg, "After Adorno: Culturein the Wake of Catastroph e," New German Critique 72 lEall 1997 1: 45-82.

11. The paradox is that when Adorno accused poetry after Auschwitz of barbarism, hedeeply suspected the apologetic temptation of a poetic and aesthetic tradition, whereas much ofthe recent poststructurâlist discourse of the sublime in relation to Holocaust representationsdoes exactly what Adorno feared: it pulls the genocide into the realm of epistemology and aes-thetics, instrumentâlizing it for a late modernist âesthetic of nonrepresentability. A very gooddocumentation and discussion of notions of the sublime can be found in Christine Pries, ed.,Das Erhabene: Zwischen Gtenzerfahrung und GröBenwahn (Weinheim: VCH Acta Humaniora,1989).

12.Paradigmatically in Shoshana Felman's much discussed essay "The Return of the Voice:Claude Lanzmann's Shoah," in Shoshana Felman and Dori Latb, Testimony: Cúses of Witness-ing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 19921, 204-83. For aconvincing critique of Felman's work see Dominick LaCapra, Reprcsenting the Holocaust: His-tory, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994) as well as LaCapra,History and Memory after Auschwitz llthaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998). Thelatter volume also contains a well-documented essay on Spiegelman's Maus that includes acritical discussion of much of the literature on this work.

13. This ârgument has been made very forcefully and persuasively in Miriam Hansen," Schindler's List Is Not Shoah: The Second Commandment, Popular Modernism, and PublicMemory" Critical Inquiry22lWinter L9961:292-812, also in this volume. For the earlier debateon the TV sertes Holocaust, a similar argument can be found in Andreas Huyssen, "The Politicsof ldentiff.cation: Holocaus¿ and West German Dtama," in Aftu the Great Divide: Modernism,Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 94-1L4.

14. These were central topoi in the German debate about Holocaust memory. See the spe-cial issue on the His¿o¡ik ersùeit, New German Critique 44 (spring-Summer 1988) as well asCharles S. Maier, The (Jnmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National ldentity(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).

15. Cf. the two-page prologue initiating volume I, dated Rego Park, N.Y. ca. 1958 when Artis only ten years old, or the photo of his dead brother Richieu that overshadowed his childhood,

42

Andreas HuYssen

dedicate this part of the work to Richieu and

13. ffl-":rfii; isch, Family Frumes: photography, Nanative, and postmemorv (cambridge,

M i"ry""in ä*ï:

Writing: Adorno, Derrida, Kracauer"'Gertnid Koch, "Mimesis und Bilder-t die Einstellung (Frankfurt am Main:

*n'låïi¿rtff"lk lÍ ,3,å "u- no, Diarectic of Entightønment, 2j.In German: " Gerettet wird d¿s

RechtdesB 'á'i't*iv"i¡""''l TheodorW'Adorno' Gesammelte

schûften 3 otal Histoty Røview 16 {1988): 103-4'

27.,,A fohn Hockenberty"'Talk of the Nation'

National Public Radio, February 20, 1992'28. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames'29' An observation I owe to Gertrud Koch'80. The term is ón"rt., S. Maier,s. se" his essay "A surfeit-of Memory? Reflections on

Hirtãrv Vtetrn"froty, and Denial," History and Memoty 5ll992l:136-51'31. Klaus R. s"hö;;;-li'olutr"mo"lüt*ilst Ls4548 {stuttgart: Reclam, 1982)'

32' Theodor Adorno, Prisms' 34'