http://doombot.com/2005/12/29/what-stabby-mcknife-can-teach-us-about-art-and-entertainment/ by Jane Austen Fri, 06 Jan 2012 17:05:54 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 http://doombot.com/2005/12/29/what-stabby-mcknife-can-teach-us-about-art-and-entertainment/comment-page-1/#comment-107 Josh Sat, 07 Jan 2006 21:32:00 +0000 http://www.doombot.com/wordpress/?p=144#comment-107 A digression on Maus. I read at some point that while Spiegelman was certainly trying to take advantage of the expectation that, as you say, the Holocaust doesn't happen to cartoon mice, he was also very consciously answering the famous language that the nazis had for jews, that jews were rats, vermin, scum, that sort of thing. There was even a propaganda film at one point that depicted jews literally as rats spreading all over europe, a kind of plague. So, another way to read the mice thing is that even if the jews are rodents, they can be awfully personlike and cute, and all the more so tragically exterminated. A digression on Maus. I read at some point that while Spiegelman was certainly trying to take advantage of the expectation that, as you say, the Holocaust doesn’t happen to cartoon mice, he was also very consciously answering the famous language that the nazis had for jews, that jews were rats, vermin, scum, that sort of thing. There was even a propaganda film at one point that depicted jews literally as rats spreading all over europe, a kind of plague. So, another way to read the mice thing is that even if the jews are rodents, they can be awfully personlike and cute, and all the more so tragically exterminated.

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