SOURCE: Landsberg, Alison. “America, the Holocaust, and the Mass Culture of Memory: Toward a Radical Politics of Empathy.” New German Critique 71 (spring-summer 1997): 63-86.

In the following essay, Landsberg discusses the significance of Maus and the comic book genre as a medium for representing the Holocaust from a fresh visual and emotional perspective.

Like those birds that lay their eggs only in other species' nests, memory produces in a place that does not belong to it.

—Michel de Certeau¹

In the final scene of Schindler's List (Steven Spielberg, 1993), a marching line of actors leaving a liberated concentration camp dissolves into a marching line of the “real-life” Schindler Jews approaching Schindler's grave in Israel. In this dissolve, the black-and-white film changes to color, signaling both a generic and a temporal shift from the classical Hollywood mode and the past to “real-life” and the present.² The real Schindler Jews walk with...