Ein frommes Nachdenken auf den Mäusen und den Katzen

Tokens was Thursday night; I always take the next day as a rest day. Friday, however, the cable was out due to the storms from the night before. So, unable to watch TV, I looked around my room for something to read. I saw Art Spiegelman's The Complete Maus on my shelf, pulled it down, and began to read.

I bought my copy at McKay last Summer and have wanted to read it ever since; I finally had a chance to at least begin. Little did I know that I would find it so compelling that I would be unable to put it down for two days -- last night I finished volume I, and today if finished volume II.

Maus is unlike any book I've ever read. First of all, it's a graphic novel of sorts. Spiegelman's illustrations added a depth and humanity that I have not experienced with other Holocaust accounts. And second, it is a biography. Though to simply call it a biography is insufficient. It is the story of Vladek Spiegelman -- a holocaust survivor, a refugee, an immigrant, a father. Art Spiegelman displays the complexity he experiences in relationship with his father, a survivor of a world he can't even imagine.

Like all Holocaust biographies and reflections, it is a difficult read. First-hand accounts of unspeakable brutality litter Spiegleman's father's life. First, in a POW camp, then, later, in a concentration camp and at many points in-between.

This morning, however, I was struck by another thought that made the book difficult to read. Spiegelman portrays the Nazis as cats. I sit here in 21st century America, reading Maus as a Katzenmiller. KATZEN. Cats. As this began to float around in my head, I began to hear the voice of Will Campbell, "We're all bastards but God loves us anyway;" "Both sides live in tragedy;" and especially, "Those people are our people." The fact that I read this story as a Katzen-müller made me acutely aware of these facts. To simply write the Nazi cats in Spiegelman's book as inhuman monsters is too easy because, as Thomas Merton points out, the Nazis were later considered "sane" enough to stand trial by the post-war courts. We must wrestle with the fact that we live in a world that values sanity, yes, but in this sane world there are all kinds of insane "sanities" -- those that allow for drone pilots to drop bombs from the other side of the world as part of a secret war; those that allow phrases like collateral damage to be coined; those that allow "realism" to be elevated to the status of Lord. But to allow these "sanities" to go unchallenged is to ignore the insanity of the Holocaust. The Nazis were not some historical anomalies; they were the outworking of the fallen principalities and powers, and terrifyingly enough for us Christians, there were yet another manifestation of a "baptized empire" (which is to say that Nazis were, for the most part, self-professing Christians).

I would therefore suggest that Maus is a must read for everyone. It -- in a way that no other book I've encountered -- humanizes the Holocaust, which for me has previously been an infinitely abstract event. 6,000,000 of anything is hard to even imagine. 6,000,000 victims of systematic, murderous extermination is even harder to visualize (though here the film Paper Clips is helpful). But Speigelman's book puts a human face, so to speak, on the Holocaust. The diversity of detail and action that Spiegelman was able to record is a treasure that must not be ignored. Vladek Spiegelman's story must initiate a response. At the very least, as Christians, we must commit to resist the principalities and powers that dehumanize and destroy, pledging always to care for the Other as if we are caring for Christ himself. Thus nationalism and other racisms can no longer be part of our churches. For where there are nationalisms and other racisms, Christ's body will be divided, and it will be in danger of witnessing a world that is the precise opposite of the new world that Christ himself inaugurated at the first Easter.

We soon will be in the season of Lent. In light of Maus, I will be praying for forgiveness for Christians' implicit and explicit support of the Nazis in the '30s and '40s. And I will also be praying for discernment in our churches today so that we can resist false spirits (1 Jn 4) and affirm the new creation that God is bringing. I would ask that you join me in this. And may it bring some small sense of healing and reconciliation to our world.

We pray: Thy Kingdom come.