Just six months ago, when times felt more normal – it’s damning of the times that I desperately want to return to the normalcy of six months ago – a week of English language headlines were dominated by the supposed story of a book banning in America. The two-part visual novel Maus by Art Speigelman was infamously pulled from the eighth grade English curriculum by the McMinn County Board of Education in eastern Tennessee. Naturally, the headlines prompted outrage; sales for Maus swelled in the days after the story broke, and it’s not uncommon to see Maus alongside titles like 1984 and The Catcher in the Rye in displays promoting the sale of “banned” books within certain bookstores.
The headlines stirred something in me; my contrarian instincts, which I try to mindfully regulate when it comes to politics, tell me when books are censored, there’s a reason for it, and that reason is worth investigating. Furthermore, Maus was pulled right before the International Day for Holocaust Remembrance, a wonderful way of commemorating a landmark retelling of the experiences of a Holocaust survivor. I had gotten both volumes of Maus a couple years ago as a gift. Given the characterization of Jews as mice and the ominous display of the Nazi swastika on the cover of the first volume, I wasn’t rushing to read it. My impression, informed solely by the cover art, was that Maus looked goofy and possibly even inappropriate. So it sat untouched on my bookshelf until this year, where the story of its removal from the eighth grade curriculum in Tennessee gave me the resolve to try it.
As you’ve hopefully picked up on, I've tried to be precise with my language in describing how the McMinn Board regulated Maus. The word “ban” conjures absolutist imagery; the imagery of books being rendered secret and forbidden knowledge, limited to the underworld; the imagery of massive frenzied crowds burning books in an orgy of fire and hate; the imagery of totalitarianism in action, where the state has the power to dictate what knowledge is and isn’t accessible for the masses or even what knowledge is. This isn’t an endorsement of the choice of the McMinn County Board of Education, but labelling their action as a “ban” is something of a misnomer. Of course, one could reasonably argue that this is where fascism starts as well, with incremental movements against heretical knowledge, an argument Art Speigelman made.
Nevertheless, without knowledge of Maus, how is one able to adequately judge if it belongs on school shelves? Having now read both volumes of Maus, it is, first and foremost, a triumph. Art Speigelman is a fantastic storyteller. The nature of the story Speigelman tells in Maus – a retelling of his father’s experience before and during the Holocaust – inherently holds emotional weight, but the manner Speigelman translates the story made it that much more effective and moving.
Ironically, despite Speigelman’s zoomorphic art style, the main element that makes Maus such a resolute success is that Speigelman’s father Vladek, is well humanized, for better and for worse. The elderly diabetic Vladek Speigelman, whose health is starting to fail after surviving two heart attacks, is portrayed as a stingy old man who frequently clashes with his second wife, Mala, over how austere he is with money and material possessions. The fighting between the two gets so bad that for much of the second volume, Mala leaves him. Vladek is also distrustful towards African Americans, despite his experience in the Holocaust. Between his insistence on taking paper towels from public restrooms rather than buying them, his paranoia that his wife is bleeding him dry, and his racism, Vladek is an imperfect character, totally human, aside from being depicted as a mouse. Mala is a great foil to that geriatric grump; like Vladek, she survived the camps, yet isn’t harshly economical or discompassionate. As such, Art is oftentimes critical of his father, though he becomes more sympathetic to Vladek as he learns more about his harrowing experiences. Art admirably portrays himself in the graphic novels balancedly, as a character who is invasively curious about his father’s experiences in the Holocaust but has less patience for talking to him otherwise, while he tries to come to terms with his mother’s suicide. He lashes out with shocking fury when his father reveals that he destroyed his mother’s diaries from the war as a way of coping, but he eventually arrives at loving his father anyways.
Other victims outside of the central cast of characters are aptly given depth as well. There are Jews who tried using what wealth and influence they had left to try to avoid the fate of so many others. This ranges from individual Jews trying to bribe Nazi officers into letting them go, giving them money or jewels when they seemingly agree, only to be mowed down by gunfire after being swindled out of what little they had left; to pro-Nazi Jewish councils who organized Jews from their homes and into ghettos, and then were charged with administrating the liquidation of those ghettos, incorrectly believing their cooperation would keep them within the Nazis’ good graces. The portrayal of these Jews was particularly striking from reading it this year, after the reporting this year arguing that Arnold van der Bergh, a member of Amsterdam’s Jewish council, is likely the man who sold out Anne Frank to the Nazis. Being a Jew so many years later, the thought that a Jew could sell out another Jew is… unconscionable, yet it shows how illusory ethnoreligious community solidarity can be.
Maus also well depicts the utter disbelief at the reports of mass murder in the gas chambers that was rampant among many European Jews in the early stages of the final solution; the idea that the inhumanity of shipping Jews off to their deaths in gas chambers like cattle is impossible. Anti-semitism was (is?) normalized throughout the European continent for centuries by the time the Holocaust occured, and anti-semitic pogroms in Germany, Poland, the former Russian Empire, and elsewhere wasn’t uncommon, but the industrial scale of genocide practiced by the Nazis was unheard of. Despite the longstanding legacy of Jew hatred in Europe, the feeling that inhumanity of that level was impossible doesn’t seem that unreasonable from their perspective, despite Hitler not hiding his dreams of a greater Germany free of the Jewish people. The same notion kept much of my family on my maternal grandmother’s side in Lithuania, despite the warnings of other relatives who fled to Britain in the interwar period. Nothing remains of my family members who stayed.
It’s this successful humanization that makes the depiction of Vladek’s time in Auschwitz and the subsequent forced march to Dachau so moving. Naturally, the Holocaust is inherently a devastating topic, but the way Maus shows the Holocaust is even more effective because Art Speigelman is a spectacular storyteller. His visuals are unique and immaculate, the dialogue (along with Art’s prose) flows naturally and conversationally while still being consistently engaging thanks to his choice of words, and the relaying of Vladek’s story is paced well – his accounts are interspersed with scenes from his tumultuous marriage to Mala and him trying to spend time with Art and his wife Françoise. Throughout both volumes of Maus, Art Speigelman proved to be not just an excellent illustrator but a gifted writer and storyteller.
Having now established a frame of reference vis-à-vis the quality of Maus, how do the levied charges against it by the McMinn County Board of Education hold up? Per the transcription of their meeting, provided by The Comics Journal, where they decided to remove Maus from the eighth grade curriculum, Tony Allman questioned why, by including Maus in the curriculum, were schools promoting vulgar language, “people hanging” and “killing kids.” Other councillors then object to the book’s depiction of nudity, while still insisting that they value teaching students about the Holocaust.
The face of fascism is ugly and difficult. There is no getting around the industrialized murder of six million Jews, along with five million Slavs, Roma, homosexuals, disabled people, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Many of them were killed by gas, many of them were worked to death, doing slave labour for an empire that hated them, many of them died of preventable diseases. Those who survived the Holocaust left the camps oftentimes far from home, with their families utterly destroyed, and without any property to their names. Nazi cruelty went beyond the Holocaust, of course; the occupations of Poland, Scandinavia, the low countries, France, the Balkans, northern Italy, and much of the Soviet Union were brutal in their own right. For example, the Nazis flooded and starved much of the Netherlands when it became apparent their hold on Holland was tenuous in winter 1944. The Nazis were planning on starving the Slavs in the conquered lands of the Soviet Union, intentionally depriving them of their grain to both feed the Reich and get rid of the indigenous population. The Nazis were not the first to commit genocide or be tyrannical military occupiers, but their evil, and thus the evil of fascism, was uniquely inhuman.
At a time where genocide has yet again returned to Europe and where democracy itself in America is under siege, the face of fascism must be confronted head on, not white washed behind the veneer of decency. As I’ve written about before, Jewish children are taught about the Holocaust from a very young age, because the matter of survival is at the fore of Jewish collective consciousness. Well before the age of ten, diaspora and Israeli Jews alike hear the tales of hatred, of violence, and of death camps and gas. I don’t expect most kids to learn about this topic at the same age, but by the age of thirteen, children are more than ready to learn about the Holocaust, and Maus is one of the best tools to facilitate this education. It is accessible and excellent storytelling that shows fascism authentically. Its usage of profanity and depiction of nudity are limited and tasteful; anyone with basic critical thinking skills will tell the book is not promoting either, it is merely depicting how people behave. Putting aside the political nature of Maus, it is a remarkable and complex work of art, and children should not be underestimated or coddled, as if they are too stupid or pure to read and understand Maus.
Though Maus wasn’t “banned,” its removal from bookshelves is, at best, paternalistic, and at worst is indicative of how unaware American institutions are of the fascist threat. Are the members of the McMinn Board of Education fascists? Likely not, but they likely believe that the inhumanity of Nazism could never happen there. If there is just one lesson people ought to take from Maus, it is that fascism is never impossible. At least, the Jews who thought the reports of murder en masse by gas had no precedent to call upon, but nearly a century later, there is no such excuse. The horrors of Maus could happen again, which is exactly why Maus, and why teaching about the Holocaust in earnest is important, as showing what it was is the best way to stay vigilant against it.