Conversation with Eir-Anne Edgar on “Maus”

In a recent post, I shared my conversation with Michael Dando about Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Along with talking about Maus with Dando, I spoke with Eir-Anne Edgar about Maus volume II for my Multicultural American Literature course. Eir-Anne recently spoke about McMinn County’s banning of Maus for an event at West Virginia University. When students read and discussed Maus volume I, they also read “Why Mice?” from Spiegelman’s MetaMaus and Hannah Arendt’s “We Refugees,” pieces that continued threads we have examined throughout the course about identity, representation, stereotypes, generational trauma, and more. For our discussion of volume II, students read María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro’s “Caught in the Grip of an Inherited Past: (Post)Memory and Representation in Art Spiegelman’s Maus.” During my conversation with Eir-Anne, we talked about a myriad of topics, and today I want to share some of that conversation.

At the beginning of our conversation, I shared images from my visit to Warsaw a few years ago. While I did not make it to Treblinka, Auschwitz, or other camps, I visited the The Warsaw Rising Museum which chronicles the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 and Pawiak, the prison that the Nazis occupied during World War II and turned into a German Gestapo prison. About 100,000 people were imprisoned at Pawiak during the war, 37,000 died there, and 60,000 were shipped to…