WEBVTT

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[electronic music]

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[electronic music]

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[electronic music]

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It is a story of what happened to my father and mother.

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They\'re Eastern European Jews who were born

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and raised in Poland, and as a result,

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were caught up in the maelstrom of Hitler\'s Europe

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and lived through the concentration camps.

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And is basically the story of Papa Mouse

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telling his child mouse what happened to him.

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[jazz music]

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What\'s important in the story is the interface

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of my father\'s life, of his story with history.

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And what\'s important is my relationship with my father.

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And those two stories are what those several stories

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are what intertwined to make this thing happen.

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Which once it\'s finished, will be 250-page novel.

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Beautiful?

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Yeah, yeah.

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[lively music]

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Well, it\'s an idea I\'ve borrowed

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from my collaborator, Adolf Hitler.

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It\'s really the rhetoric of the final solution

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was one of dehumanization and extermination.

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It was to kill animals less than people.

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Specifically, Jews were considered vermin.

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And in the Nazi propaganda, they were often portrayed

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as mice and rats.

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Once I started with mice, the natural predator,

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as I\'ve learned from looking at many animated cartoons,

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was the cat.

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[playful music]

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Pigs, the Poles are outside the food chain of cats and mice.

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Therefore, they\'re the witnesses

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and the fact that it\'s an kosher animal,

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well, this was useful to indicate the enmity

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between Jews and Poles.

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What made the first book come out

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was when I got wind of the fact that Spielberg

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and an animator named Don Bluth,

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who was teaching in the same school of visual arts,

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got this way of recuperating

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and changing what \"Maus\" was into something quite for me,

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creepy, but was much more commercial

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than anything mouse could be, which is like,

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well, mice and cats, that\'s a good idea.

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And perhaps antisemitism,

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but the Holocaust is too much of a bummer.

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Maybe we could kinda make it

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more like Fiddler on the Roof.

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And lo and behold,

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you had the \"American Tail\" movie coming out,

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and all I wanted was for him to shut up

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and stop making his thing till my book could come out.

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And that\'s really why the first part of Maus came out

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as a separate volume before the whole thing was finished

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in order to beat the movie.

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So I wouldn\'t be seen as copying Spielberg,

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both in his conception and even in his name.

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You know, Spiegelman, Spielberg.

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It just would be too confusing.

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[lively music]

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[playful music]

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Well, I believe that \"Maus\" proves that it can be done.

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In a way, if the question is, is it in bad taste to make

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[translator drowning our Art]

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The comics you have seen before were innocent,

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but it seems to me that after Auschwitz,

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we have no innocence.

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[Joann laughing]

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The relationship between father and son

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is even more universal than the concept of racism

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and genocide, which is more widespread than it should be,

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but not universal, thankfully.

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And it allowed people a way in,

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although I wasn\'t professional

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or cynical enough to think that through,

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it\'s just that was the way I made the book.

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[lively music]

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[bright music]

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[lively music]

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The Fortunoff Video Archives for Holocaust Testimonies.

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To deny that it ever happened,

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personally speaking, see, I was...

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I was unable to read any books, for instance, okay?

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About the Holocaust.

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Until very recently, I didn\'t read one word

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about the Holocaust.

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I was never able to watch any movies about the Holocaust.

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Okay?

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And I was pretending very hard, it never happened to me.

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But the most important was that for this first time,

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there was this Holocaust

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movie on television.

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Now, it\'s not important whether it was good

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or statistically good or whatever.

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So for the first time, I decided to watch it with my family,

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and it was a moving experience, okay?

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So at one point, by the end of it,

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we were all crying.

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And my nine-year-old daughter said to me,

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\"Hey, daddy, you are crying.\"

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I said, \"Yeah, and you\'re crying too.\"

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And she said, \"Yeah, but no, I cry from time to time,

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but I\'ve never seen you cry.\"

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I said, \"Well, you know, I\'m human.

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I do cry from time to time.

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It\'s really not as much as you do.

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But you know, I can remember times when I cried.\"

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I asked her, \"Why do you cry here?\"

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And she said, \"Well, I cry for all those poor people.

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Why do you cry?\"

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And I said, \"Well, you know, I really cry for myself.\"

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And she said, \"What do you mean for yourself?\"

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And I said, \"Well, you know, I was a part of it.

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I went through those miseries.\"

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And she looked at me.

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She said, \"Daddy, I never knew.

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Why didn\'t you tell me?\"

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[lively music]

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No, this kind?

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Yes, it was never until, so they were, had such a mustache.

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When I was working on \"Maus\"

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there wasn\'t such a phrase as \"second generation.\"

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And there wasn\'t a body

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of psychotherapeutic literature on it.

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While I was working on \"Maus,\" in fact,

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the woman who either invented

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or popularized the phrase, Helen Epstein,

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while I was teaching at the School of Visual Arts,

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she was teaching at NYU.

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She asked if she could show it

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to her second generation therapy group.

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I said, \"Sure, I\'d be very interested in hearing

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what the responses to this work in progress.\"

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Then she never called back.

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So eventually, I called her

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and she was very tense on the phone.

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And I said, \"Well, what gives?\"

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She said, \"Well, we talked about it.\"

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I said, \"Yeah, that\'s why I\'m calling.

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What was the response?\"

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And she said, \"Well, we decided

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you\'re not in touch with your feelings.\"

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And then she went on to say,

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\"And I\'ve had nightmares about mice ever since.\"

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So that was my first contact with second generation.

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And then after a certain point, actually,

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I went to a second generation meeting.

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My downstairs neighbor at our loft a few blocks away,

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he is also a child of survivors.

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She found out about this thing

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that time we were on speaking terms, unlike now.

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And we went together

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to one of these second generation meetings.

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And I was distrustful of it

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because, you know, my father always taught me to watch out,

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stay away from large groups.

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And the main thing I found that was interesting was,

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well, it was a large group that all distrusted

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the idea of being in large groups.

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So that was interesting.

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But I couldn\'t, maybe because I\'m divorced from my feelings,

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identify thoroughly with seeing my entire life

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through the lens of being a child of survivors.

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Even though clearly, it\'s a narrative thread

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that is in my life if I try

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to turn my life into a narrative.

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But I felt I could also be

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in a underground cartoonist support group

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or in a children of suicide support group,

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or people damaged by entering communes

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in the psychedelic 60s support group,

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or God knows which other ones.

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One of which could have been this one.

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But I think it was about the time at the end of the meeting

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when the person who was holding this group of, I don\'t know,

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maybe 100 people together,

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was announcing a second generation singles party

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that I realized this was not where I wanted

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to hang out and meet a mate.

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It would, the pickup lines at the bar

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would just be too awesomely painful.

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Like, \"What camp was your mom in?\"

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You know?

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And I just didn\'t need that.

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So I found that after finding out what it was,

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I backed away from it.

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I\'m grateful that the book has found use

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for other people in terms of like being able

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to use whatever my responses were.

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Because actually, one other thing I found in that meeting

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that was interesting to me

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was, as well as breaking various taboos

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about making the story of the Shoah on a comic book

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or whatever, which just came very naturally to me.

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The other taboo, which had to do with being so angry

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at my parents rather than just guilty about my parents,

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wasn\'t the normal response.

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That most of the people I was meeting,

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many that were vocal enough to at least speak thought,

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\"Well, my parents suffered so much,

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I can\'t make them suffer more.\"

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My response was, \"They\'re your parents.

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They\'re making you suffer by definition almost

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\'cause they\'re your parents.\"

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I know now \'cause I\'m a parent.

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And well, it was a very natural response for me.

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And in a way, I think without entering

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into the universe of psychotherapy too deeply,

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I think maybe \"Maus\" was useful in giving other people

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who were in analogous position permission

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to feel that anger at their parents

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and that maybe that might have been useful for them.

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[suspenseful music]

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[lively music]

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[lively music]

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[lively music]

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[lively music]

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My name\'s Alan Moore.

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I write comics.

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[rock music]

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[rock music]

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The main thing that they cite as a reason for this

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is that it is harmful to the small

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and vulnerable minds of children,

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which obviously, I\'m a parent myself.

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I mean, I\'ve got Leah and Amber.

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And basically, my feeling is in is that the world

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that we have been careless enough to leave laying around

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for our children to inherit is a place

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which is sometimes hostile, which is sometimes dangerous,

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which has got a lot of very frightening edges to it.

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And the only way that I can help my children,

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the only real sort of chance that I can give them

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of securing their emotional and physical

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and psychological survival, is to actually tell them

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about the stuff that\'s going on in the world.

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If there are sort of nuclear pollutants

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and poisons laying around, let\'s tell them about that.

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If there are psychopaths lurking upon every street corner,

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they should know.

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I don\'t think that it does children any service

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to present them this artificial, pastoral,

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colored Care Bear world in which everybody is friendly,

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everybody wants to hug each other.

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[lively music]

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[crowd cheering]

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[lively music]

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Justin Green began to do very confessional,

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autobiographical, quirky and personal comics.

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It inspired Robert Crumb

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to become more involved in autobiographical work.

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It inspired me to pursue that.

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We became friends.

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And in fact, when I moved to San Francisco,

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I moved into his house as he was moving into another,

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I saw his masterpiece in progress

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when I was first moving to San Francisco

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called \"Binky Brown meets the Holy Virgin Mary.\"

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It was about the obsessive compulsive response

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to Catholic guilt.

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So Binky Brown was Justin Green.

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And it\'s a very, very dense and rich comic.

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But this was a game changer.

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There wasn\'t such a thing

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as intimate autobiographical comics till Justin.

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That possibility of moving toward the most intimate use

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of comics, rather than the most generic, was opened up

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by him and became important for me.

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And eventually, I think important for a generation

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of cartoon is finding a new way into what comics could be.

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In order to even understand what he was saying,

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I had to read whatever was available on the subject,

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which wasn\'t so much.

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When I was beginning the book,

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It was not like now it wasn\'t a river of books in English.

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And then I think in \'78, Francois and I went together

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to Poland to try to look around for the first time.

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In fact, one of the sketchbooks that is now out

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through Castroman, the McSweeney sketchbooks

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is kind of some spillover of that first trip

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to Poland is in that sketchbook.

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So I did that kind of research.

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I certainly started looking up photos

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and drawings by survivors became very important to me,

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or drawings that survived even if the people in the camps

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didn\'t \'cause it was the only way

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to get certain kinds of documentation.

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And sifting through that very carefully

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gave me the grounding

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where I felt like it was possible to continue.

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[gentle music]

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[gentle music]

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[gentle music]

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[gentle music continues]

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[gentle music continues]