Three pages from a now-banned graphic comic are included in this post. All copyrights to Maus belong to Art Spiegelman. Less-than-stellar photos courtesy of the author.
A recent decision by the McMinn County (TN) school board to ban the graphic novel Maus caused a national uproar after being publicized by the Tennessee Holler. The banning itself is the latest in a wave of bans or proposed bans in US school districts.
In November 2021, Virginia’s Spotsylvania County School Board voted unanimously to remove what they deemed sexually-explicit content from district schools before reversing themselves the next week. Here’s a list of 50 books requested to be removed from Texas school districts in 2021. A list of twenty-nine books concerning the Goddard County (KS) school district includes books with racial or authoritarian themes: the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fences, by August Wilson; They Call Themselves the K.K.K.: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group, by Susan Campbell Bertoletti; Black Girl Unlimited (a book which currently has a 4.35/5 rating from 3,281 ratings on Goodreads), by Echo Brown; The Hate U Give, by Angie Thomas; and The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood.
After a similar legislation was broached in Georgia, one state senator speculated on Twitter that “obscene” would become the new “CRT,” a mostly-undefined, scare-word used for political opportunity, while in Texas a state senator requested for some school districts to report books that could cause students “guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex or convey that a student, by virtue of their race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.” His concern list includes 850 titles.
That school boards have historically forbidden some books is unquestioned. My high school English class didn’t teach A Catcher in the Rye. I have been graduated four decades and I am still not sure why it was banned. I have a memory of one English class that required parental permission to do a report on an optional book; it might have been that one. But, obscenity, or even sexual content, is a whole different kettle than banning books of history.
The McMinn County School Board, however, is not merely an example of banning a book. It is a template for the fear of learning, a lack of intellectual rigor, fact-free decision-making, and knee-jerk reactivity.
The book in question is Maus, a Pulitzer winning graphic novel about the Holocaust. Published in 1989, the first volume of two begins the narrative of Vladek Spiegelman, a Polish Jew who endured marginalization, the ghettos, Auschwitz, and Dachau. He was ultimately reunited with his wife, Anja, after liberation. They had a son, Art, who authored and drew the novels. For the content, he interviewed his father, recording their conversations over many hours.
Maus was the first comic to win the Pulitzer Prize. It reached a general audience, including people who normally didn’t read comics. Maus has been translated in more than thirty languages, including German, Polish, Hebrew, Chinese, Korean and Japanese. In everywhere except McMinn County, TN, it seems, Maushas had quite an impact.
Though insisting they understand the gravity of the Holocaust, and that they did not mean to stop all studies of the Holocaust in McMinn County, the board members exemplified the worst ways to make decisions about book inclusion in curriculum. When given a second chance by an upset community to reverse the ban, they refused to do so—even though the Jewish community opposed the ban.
As noted in The Oklahoman about recent actions to ban certain books, “Peel back the layers and it’s often revealed that books have been misinterpreted or judged by cryptic snippets. The fervent pushback is based on a lack of knowledge.” This is certainly the case in McMinn County. Even über-conservative columnist Rod Dreher gets it:
“We are a stupid country. My 10th grade daughter read about this story yesterday, and said that she read Maus when she was a lot younger, and she understood that it was about the mass murder of European Jews.”
Of maus and women…and cuss words
The repeated complaints are Maus includes a depiction of suicide, a nude female, and a number of swear words. The first and third are accurate; the second is only semi-accurate. But they are accurate in the same way it is accurate to say nuclear physics includes basic math or the Super Bowl includes a ball. The facts are right, but they are insufficient for explaining the reality.
It is relevant that maus is German for mouse. All the Jewish people in the comics are drawn as mice (perhaps because the Nazis referred to Jews as vermin). The Germans are cats. Poles are pigs. Mice wearing pig masks are Jews in disguise. There are no “people” in the books; only anthropomorphic creatures. Thus, no cartoon people are hanged. No one looking like Charlie Brown, Lucy, or your next-door neighbor kid are shown dead. Even in a child-killing scene, the point of impact is off the panel. It need not be A Clockwork Orange Redux for the horridness of the Holocaust to be communicated.
The image below is the page from Maus that recounts the story of Anja Spiegelman’s suicide. It followed years of mental anguish. Having lost one young son to Hitler’s megalomania and the Nazis’ demonic hatred, and suffering through Auschwitz herself, depression finally took its toll and she committed suicide in their bathtub. If you look hard, you can see the image in question: it’s a mouse corpse, rendered in an obscurant angle in a corner of a panel covering approximately 1/9 of the page. The image is not even the focal point of the panel it’s in; Vladek’s reaction is.
Make no mistake: pornography consumption among kids is a real problem. But this is not porn.
The hangings? The dead children? Also mice; also effectively told without being explicit or exploitative.
The final complaint addressed swear words. I did not count them, but a fair estimate would be about a dozen in nearly 300 pages in both volumes, perhaps eight of them in volume one. Some are from Vladek’s story, while others are in the inter-narrative, spoken by the author or his father as they interacted over the course of several months. If McMinn County’s middle school(s) are like most, the hallways between periods each day have scores more swear words than Maus.
The book no one read
Reports from the school board meeting reveal none of the board members had read Maus before voting to ban it. As a result, they had a below elementary understanding of how the horrific facts of the Holocaust and its impact on the Spiegelman family are portrayed in the graphic comic. Said board member Tony Allman, “It shows people hanging, it shows them killing kids, why does the educational system promote this kind of stuff? It is not wise or healthy.” That a school board member does not understand the difference between educating and promoting is a real problem for McMinn County schoolkids.
Worth noting: the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum includes Maus in their recommended curriculum for studying the Holocaust. They also say sixth grade and above is age appropriate for learning:
“Students in grades six and above demonstrate the ability to empathize with individual eyewitness accounts and to attempt to understand the complexities of Holocaust history, including the scope and scale of the events.”
The teacher above speaks of “deeper meaning going on in the book.” One of the things that makes Maus such a powerful work is how Speigelman weaves in the story of the effects of the Holocaust on his family after the war was over, including how it affects him. The book explores his father’s continuing suspicions and fears; his strained relationship with his father; and his own emotional struggles. In one especially brilliant section, Spiegelman depicts himself visiting his therapist. As he shares, the panels depict him shrinking down to a child, indicating his feelings of inadequacy in the face of his problems. After the therapy session, encouraged to keep trying, panels show him returning to adult size. It is subtle and effective.
The Holocaust, more than a single historical abomination, has a multi-generational effect. This is a deeply important truth captured well in the books. It is also a truth students should know, because it has applications beyond the Holocaust: people—including classmates—with PTSD or other trauma, victims of other genocides (Cambodia, Rwanda), or the lingering effects of slavery, Jim Crow, and racial bias in the US. Maus would compel these deeper conversations.
Maus trap
I, for one, would not blanket approve all the books in every school library or every public library; there’s more than enough trash and plain-terrible content to go around. And age appropriateness is common throughout our educational process. That’s why the majority of schools, public or private, have age-graded learning, accelerated classes, and in some instances dual-enrollment with a local college. Education is important, and history—even unpleasant, hurt-my-feelings history—is crucial. Novelist Robert Heinlein said, “A generation which ignores history has no past—and no future.”
Students by middle school age should learn about the Holocaust, American slavery, the Rwandan genocide, and the othering impulses authoritarianism and the genocidal impulses of totalitarianism.
In his book How Fascim Works: The Politics of Us and Them, Jason Stanley (himself a descendent of Nazi-persecuted Jews) warns in a chapter on anti-intellectualism,
“Fascist politics seeks to undermine public discourse by attacking and devaluing education, expertise, and language. Intelligent debate is impossible without an education with access to different perspectives, a respect for expertise when one’s own knowledge gives out, and a rich enough language to precisely describe reality. When education, expertise, and linguistic distinctions are undermined, there remains only power and tribal identity.” (p 36)
Holocaust survivor, author, and Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel said, “Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.” History is a way of collectively remembering and rejecting despair. The tendency toward anti-learning to shield kids from hard truths about history—and potentially about themselves—is a road to a very dark place.
Maus 1: My Father Bleeds History (Pantheon Books, 1986) and Maus 2: And Here My Troubles Began (Pantheon Books, 1991), by Art Spiegelman. Also available in a single volume.
ides quaerens intellectum
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