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Accepted: 11 August 2024

First Online: 4 September 2024

Declarations

:

: This study did not involve human or animal participants.

: The author declares no competing interests.

: ¹ Maus is a German word and a cognate of the English word mouse. It is also evocative of the German verb <i>Mauscheln</i>, which is etymologically related to the names <i>Mauschel</i>, <i>Moishele</i>, and most importantly, Moses (Levine , 21–22). As per Michael Rothberg (, 208), the term <i>Mauscheln</i> also refers to the special way in which the Jews spoke the German language in a “unique, singing manner”. Accordingly, Sander Gilman claims that, as indicated by Hitler’s racial mentor, Julius Streicher, “one can recognize Jews and Jewesses immediately by their language, without having seen them” (208) due to the specificity of their speech style.² Publication history of the <i>Maus</i> manuscripts can be traced back to frequently serialized issues of the graphic novel that were published in <i>Raw</i> between the years 1980 and 1991, a comics and graphics magazine edited by Art Spiegelman himself, along with his wife Françoise Mouly. The first six chapters of the book appeared in 1986 as <i>Maus I: My Father Bleeds History</i>. Subsequently, the rest of the chapters were compiled into <i>Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began</i>, which was published in 1991, five years before the entire collective volume also appeared in published form (150 Years ).³ Giorgio Agamben, referring to the term Shoah, “claims that the Jews used a euphemism to describe the destruction [of the Holocaust]. In scripture, “Shoah” often alludes to the notion of divine punishment. This is the term that Primo Levi used when discussing the attempt to explain the destruction as a punishment for our sins” (Michman , 233). The word “Holocaust” on the other hand means “a burnt offering” (233) in Judaism denoting a form of sacrifice and is thus directly associated with the notion of crematoriums.⁴ Roberto Esposito (, 11) notes that “But if death as such constitutes the motor of development of the entire [Nazi Sovereign] mechanism — which is to say that it needs to produce it in ever greater dimensions, first with regard to the external enemy, then to the internal, and then lastly to the German people themselves (as Hitler’s final orders make perfectly clear) — then the result is an absolute coincidence of homicide and suicide”. Also, Ono (, 53) writes the following about Hitler’s suicide: “In his bunker under the Reich Chancellery, Hitler faced the impending doom of the Allied assault. Indeed, many, including Albert Speer questioned Hitler’s sanity. Thus, faced with the limited options of the defeated, Hitler issued the Führer order for the complete destruction of all German infrastructures on March 19, 1945. Famously referred to as the ‘Nero Decree,’ Hitler’s scorched-earth policy hastened Nazi Germany’s path to catastrophe” (53).⁵ Jean-Luc Nancy equates “immanence” with the immunitarian way of life where the self is enclosed and protected from a hostile outside. Nancy’s work offers a critique of such a subject-oriented ontology, rather conceiving, as a result, a social ontology whereby the self emerges from an originary community (Hutchens , 15).⁶ According to Erving Goffman (, 12) “The term stigma, then, will be used to refer to an attribute that is deeply discrediting” and which subsequently reduces in our minds the person with that attribute into a tainted and discounted individual. “But it should be seen that a language of relationships, not attributes, is really needed. An attribute that stigmatizes one type of possessor can confirm the usual-ness of another, and therefore is neither creditable nor discreditable as a thing in itself” (13). The Jews are thereby stigmatized <i>as thoroughly bad</i>, or <i>dangerous</i>, or <i>weak</i> because they do not fall under the conception of the human individual as formulated by the Nazis, and not because they are either racially or biologically inferior by themselves.⁷ “In his book <i>Mein Kampf</i>, Hitler described the Jew as a parasite, a sponger who, like a pernicious bacillus, spreads over wider and wider areas according as some favourable area attracts him” (Nielsen , 45).⁸ “The job of B cells is to produce a blood protein called an antibody, which hunts down and helps destroy foreign invaders swimming around in body fluids” (Clark , 10).⁹ Wiliam R. Clark (, 10) explains that T cells “promote an itchy, painful process called inflammation, which provides a powerful defense against all sorts of microbial invaders… T cells also help B cells make antibodies”. Also, “Killer T cells [specialized T cells] … can detect when a cell has been invaded by a virus. The infected cell looks different: ‘altered self’ is the term immunologists commonly use…. To a killer T cell, cells from another person implanted in your body look sort of like your cells, but not really like your cells. They look different” (47–48).¹⁰ Interpellation is described by Louis Althusser (, 174) as a function of <i>ideology</i>. A mechanism by which individuals are indoctrinated into subjects. The transformation of the Jews into pathogenic nonself and racially inferior others, as portrayed by Spiegelman, occurs primarily through bio-politically legitimized practices of interpellation, further sanctioned by the eugenicist language of racial hygiene.