Symbolism and Interpretation

I have written about it a lot already in my blog but Poland and its culture are very important to me. Polish culture and customs have played a huge part in who I am as a person and the values, morals, and ideals I have created for myself. In Maus, Polish people are drawn as pigs. Judging from the image that pigs are dirty and smelly creatures, and from how others call snobby people “pigs”, I found this portrayal of Polish people quite bothersome. We were very helpful to Jews and others during the Holocaust and often times, were the victims and prisoners ourselves. I decided to do a little research into Art’s decisions on what animals should represent which groups of people and I found a little reassurance. Apparently, it could be interpreted in a way that pigs symbolize a neutral animal and that the Nazis also saw the Polish as “swine”. There is a direct quote from Spiegelman that “all metaphors in meant to self destruct in his book”. In a way, I can see how this happens, since in the end, it didn’t matter what group of people you were originally a part of. In order to overcome the negative, those walls needed to be taken down and people needed to see each other as one. In the world today, I think discrimination towards others based on their ‘groups’ has definitely decreased and although we might have preconceptions in the backs of our minds at times, we are not acting upon those preconceptions in our behavior and attitudes towards others.