Maus, Radicalized Gaze, Die Ewige Jew, and That Perfect Mouse Metaphor

The mouse metaphor that runs through Art Spiegelman's Maus and the war propaganda film Die Ewige Jew serve as a perfect representation of what Sue Hum was discussing in her essay “Between the Eyes”: The Racialized Gaze as Design. In it, Hum had discussed the difference between site (which is a location) and sight (which creates features with facts in them (194)). She says that our sight of ethnic minorities is created through the media that we absorb ("I argue that the racialized gaze as Design provides a valuable theoretical framework for visual rhetoric, exegesis, and cultural analysis by directing our attention to how designers may unwittingly sustain practices of racialization and perpetuate racially based sociocultural exclusions." (194)) As anybody who has talked to me for than five minutes may recognize, I find this insanely important. Everything from the way that girls view themselves to how people view the disabled to our perception of the world around us can be traced back to media. Spiegelman and Hitler's decisions to use mice to represent the Jewish people is one of the most calculated moves on both of their parts, although they use the mouse for different reasons. I am using Hum's writings on sight to discuss what this means for them and for us.


Rhetorician Kenneth Burke wrote about Hitler's logic in his essay "The Rhetoric of Hitler's Battle", claiming that Hitler had found most success in creating an enemy for the German people ("This materialization...is, I think, one terrifically effective form of propaganda in a period where religion has been progressively weakened by many centuries of capitalist materialism" (194)). If we follow Hum's idea of sight, we can say that he used sight to create this enemy. How did he use sight? Through mouse imagery. In the propaganda film Die Ewige Jude, director Fritz Hippler had overlayed pictures of Jewish people who were living in the ghettoes with pictures of dirty, swarming mice and rats. Facial features were also targeted, as the picture had taken photos of Jewish men with large beards and had compared them to mice with large ears, thin noses, and long whiskers. 

Not pictured here: any form of subtlety in the least (Film poster from here, mice from "Fancy mice" by Polarqueen at the English language Wikipedia. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

Art Spiegelman also uses the sight of the mouse in his comic Maus, but for an entirely different result. While Hitler had depicted the Jewish people as masses of dirty and seething beings, the mice in the comic were of a different nature. Doe eyed and soft furred, they served as a perfect metaphor for victims doing their best to survive against the large Cats that hunt them down and play games with them before they off them in various ways. It's hard not to sympathize with them when they scavenge for food, look out past chain link fences, or recall the horrors of the concentration camps. 

From Art Spiegelman's Maus: Working-Through the Trauma of the Holocast

So what's happening here? How is one person able to make an animal represent something hateful, while another reuses the animal for something completely different? Hum writes that "These visible corporeal differences are believed to signify a host of social attributes of identity, including breeding, intelligence, morality, and nationalism (Eze; Finnegan)." There is emphasis on identity in this situation. Spiegelman isn't exactly using the same imagery that Hitler is using. As mentioned earlier, the doe eyed mice are a great contrast to a swarming mass of mice. Hum has also said that "Hence, the characteristic of sight imbues socially identified visible corporeal differences with facticity. It confers significance on socially determined corporeal markers to construct bodies of color as a homogeneous group."(195) In this case, details that were taken as true were reconstrued into something else. Hitler saw men with beards and reinterpreted them as filthy whiskeres. Spiegelman, however, saw racist media that had depicted the Jewish people as mice and reinterpreted it as not only a hardworking and dedicated group doing their best to protect themselves against an enemy, but a way to reclaim a racist image.

So what does this mean for us? It means that we have to be vigilant about the signs that we use to identify others. So if you hear a friend talk about wearing mustaches and sombreros for a border party for a sorority or a fraternity, you may want to correct them on what they're saying. If you hear an older person go on about how "Not all Muslims, but most Muslims attack people because of their religion", then you can throw out statistics on terrorist attacks created by white male Christians. These people are using things that ethnic minorities take as proud signs and twisting them into evil things. Don't let them do that to them.