It's heartbreaking that recent events have made it necessary for some bookstores and libraries around the country to highlight books that "explain Nazism" and serve as reminders of "why Nazis are evil." Among recent releases are titles like Swansong 1945: A Collective Diary of the Last Days of the Third Reich by Walter Kempowski and Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning by Timothy Snyder. But there are also classic titles that include such scholarly works as The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer as well as first-person accounts such as Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl and Elie Wiesel's Night.
First appearing in book form in part in 1986, Art Spiegelman's Maus is a middle ground between those contemporary accounts and recent scholarship, and as much a publishing industry landmark as it is a reminder of the evils of Nazism.
Maus helped transform mainstream opinion of the graphic novel from "mere" comic book to serious work of art. Spiegelman uses anthropomorphic animals--Jews as mice, Germans as cats and Poles as pigs--to tell the story of his parents during the Holocaust. In 1992, Maus became the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize. In 1996, Pantheon published The Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale ($35, 9780679406419), and in 2011, it published MetaMaus, a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Maus with a supplementary DVD ($35, 9780375423949). --Tobias Mutter