Staub, The Shoah Goes On and On: Remembrance and Representation in Art Spiegelman's Maus

Writing in 1949, German philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote "writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric."  For a generation after the war, artistic representations of any sort were almost taboo, since all media distort and exaggerate and simplify and constrain their subject matter.

I should point out that Adorno later changed his mind, but the taboo persists -- some Holocaust experts have never done more than glance at Maus because the medium does not appeal to them, and the U.S. Holocaust museum publishes a document that contains a warning against the use of simulations and games in the teaching of the Holocaust. Adorno was making a comment about how recent events changed the medium of poetry, and the museum presented its "no games or simulations" warning in order to prevent teachers from dividing kids up into guards and prisoners, both statements have been applied to warn artists away from using a particular artistic medium to represent a human experience, referred to in Hebrew as Shoah ("disaster; upheaval").

This article quotes Spiegelman as saying, "As they say, there's no business like Shoah business."