1. A sacrifice wholly consumed by
fire; a whole burnt offering. 2. transf. and
fig. a. A complete sacrifice or
offering. b. A sacrifice on a large scale.
c. Complete consumption by fire, or that which is so consumed; complete
destruction, esp. of a large number of persons; a great slaughter or
massacre.
d. the Holocaust: the mass murder of the Jews by the Nazis in the war
of 1939-1945. Also used transf., of the similar fate of other groups;
and attrib.
The specific application was introduced by historians during the
1950s, probably as an equivalent to Heb. {hdotbl}urban and shoah
‘catastrophe’ (used in the same sense); but it had been foreshadowed by
contemporary references to the Nazi atrocities as a ‘holocaust’ (sense
2 c): see quots. 1942-49. The term is in common use among Jews, but
seems to be otherwise relatively rare except among specialists.
Quotes from A. Spiegelman:
Letter to the NY Times Book
Review on 29 Dec. 1991, protesting the placement of Maus I and II on the Fiction
Bestseller list, instead of the Non-fiction Bestseller list: "As an
author, I believe I might have lopped several years off the thirteen I
devoted to my two-volume project if I could have taken a novelist's
license while searching for a novelist's structure" (qtd. in Doherty
69).
Why a Comic Book?
From The Nation 17 Jan.
1994: "The mouse heads are masks, virtually blank, like Little Orphan
Annie's eyeballs--a white screen the reader can project on" (qtd. in
Doherty 77).
In a 1988 interview with Gary Groth: "Also, I'm afraid that if I did [Maus] with people, it would be very
corny. It would come out as some kind of odd plea for sympathy or
'Remember the Six Million,' and that wasn't my point exactly, either.
To use these ciphers, the cats and mice, is actually a way to allow you
past the cipher at the people who are experiencing it. So it's really a
much more direct way of dealing with the material" (qtd in Huyssen 75).
"In Germany there was much more concern about the propriety of doing
comics. At one point, I remember being interviewed and asked: 'Do you
think it's in bad taste to have done a comic book about the Holocaust?'
I said: 'No, I think the Holocaust was in bad taste'" (qtd. in Richter
85).
