Using research and information from Maus, explain why the mouse (or one of the other animal allegories – cat, dog, pig, frog, etc.) was used by Spiegelman as part of the animal allegory to portray Jewish people or a specific group.

Hi guys, my name is Linh Tran. And today I’m gonna talk about “Why the mouse was used by Spiegelman (s pie gel ment) as part of the animal allegory (a le go ry) to portray Jewish people ” (next)
Art Spiegelman’s (s pie gel ment) Maus I & II have a frame story and inset story. The Frame story is about Art’s meetings with his elderly father, Vladek, to record Vladek’s testimony of what happened to him during the Holocaust period. The inset story is about a love story and a survival story between Vladek and Anja as they struggle to survive Nazi occupation in Poland and imprisonment in Auschwitz. (Next)
In the novel we can notice right away that the characters are not human characters. They are drawn as animals. The author has used allegory to convey the message through the characters in the story and the outstanding events. In this novel, the author picked mice to represent Jewish people, cats to represent German people, dogs to represent Americans, pigs to represent Polish people. And then more for minor roles, frogs to represent French people. (next)
AND “Why the mouse was used by Spiegelman as part of the animal allegory to portray Jewish people”. (next)
As far as we might think of mice as being small animals and weak. But most of the time, people try to get rid of mice. If they’re in their house, they think they thought it was vermin. And people will try to set out traps, however, some people keep them as pets because they think they’re cute . However, cats are known hunters. They’re very sly, and sneaky. They can be ferocious. They have sharp claws and teeth. So they can also be, you know, cute and cuddly as well. That is why there are different connotations that go with each animal. And I believe that the author sort of uses some of these connotations to choose which animal goes with the ethnic group, and he’s also drawing from sort of stereotypical views of each ethnic group to pick the animals. So he’s going to really use the concept of racial division, or racism, that existed during World War Two and years of the Holocaust to inform his choice of animals and the animal allegory that he uses in mouse. Racist ideologies (Nazi race theory) used the idea that other races are inferior and sub-human, often using animal imagery in propaganda posters to convey this belief in racial inferiority. Through that, we can partly see the contrast between cats and mice, the difference in social status as well as human rights at that time. (next)
Hitler and the Nazis believed that the Germans as a superior race and Jews (who he identified as a race, not by religion) were inferior and dangerous (Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Nazi Racism”). The fact that he chose mice also relates to what he found as in actual Nazi propaganda. And according to 1940 German documentary that portrayed Jews in a ghetto, swarming in tight quarters, bearded caftan creatures, and then a cut to Jews as mice, or rather rats, swarming in a sewer, and they describé Jews are the rats or the vermin of mankind. This made it clear that this dehumanization was at the very heart of the killing project. They tried to use the gas in Auschwitz and elsewhere as the killing agent, a pesticide manufactured to kill vermin like fleas and roaches. Genocide is a term that was invented after World War Two just to refer specifically to what had happened to Jews, because there was no label for that scale of crime, trying to kill an entire ethnic group. So anybody who is Jewish or identified as Jewish to be sub human, unworthy of life, and dehumanize them. So we see that in this, this example of propaganda here, where you have a rat body and a Jewish, very exaggerated or stereotypical Jewish man’s face. (next)
Finally, The use of allegorical animal images is a way for the author to easily convey the message to the reader. The image of “rats” in the novel also partly reduces the pain of the victims who have experienced it—Jewish—because they themselves still have psychological scars even though everything has ended. (next)
To summary,