SOURCE: Huyssen, Andreas. “Of Mice and Mimesis: Reading Spiegelman with Adorno.” New German Critique 81 (fall 2000): 65-82.

In the following essay, Huyssen evaluates Maus in terms of Theodore Adorno's theory of mimesis, asserting that the work provides an alternative to the dominant modes of representing the Holocaust.

I resist becoming the Elie Wiesel of the comic book.

—Art Spiegelman

Since the 1980s, the question is no longer whether, but rather how to represent the Holocaust in literature, film, and the visual arts. The earlier conviction about the essential unrepresentability of the Holocaust, typically grounded in Adorno's famous statement about the barbarism of poetry after Auschwitz and still powerful in some circles today, has lost much of its persuasiveness for later generations who only know of the Holocaust through representations: photographs and films, documentaries, testimonies, historiography and fiction. Given the flood of Holocaust representations in all manner of media today...