Art Spiegelman's depiction of the Jewish people as mice, the Polish as pigs and the Nazi's as cats completely changes the way you perceive the characters. Mice invoke an image of infestation, that they are not supposed to be here and they need to be exterminated from their lands. This would be used in German propaganda to convince the people that this was necessary to win the war and be the superior race. By convincing their citizens that the Jewish were an infestation it allowed for them to "disappear" and the citizens to rejoice. This image is used directly by Spiegleman when he shows the town with banner hanging over head reading "This town is Jew free". The use of mice also induces images of science experiments preformed on mice in labs. The Nazi's would preform all different kinds of experiments on the Jewish people in concentration camps, specifically Auschwitz and Mauthausen.
The imagery behind the cat as the Nazi's is a pretty obvious choice after picking mice for the Jews. While it is known that cat catch mice this maybe the first representation in media that I have seen where the cat actually catches the mice. But the cat does not get Vladek or the other survivors in the end which is the point of part one titled "The Survivors Tale".
The one imagery I did not understand was the Polish peoples depiction as pigs. I would have understood had this been written from the German perspective as they held an extremely low view of Pol's. But the Spiegelman's knew good Polish people and while there were obviously Pol's who were anti-Semitic to categorize them all as pigs seems harsh.
Chris, I found your insight into the anthropomorphic nature of this book very interesting. I, too, was wondering why exactly the Polish were depicted as pigs. The Cat and Mouse choice is very self-explanatory, but I was unable to come up with a reason for why the Pol's were pigs. Possibly because pigs are consumed so frequently by humans for many different reasons, and the Polish were, in a sense, slaughtered by the Germans. I just looked this up to double check and found that ~6million Polish citizens were killed during the war ( 1/5 of their population). So maybe that is a theory for why Spiegelman depicted the Polish as pigs.
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