Banning Maus
I remember hearing about Maus before I ever saw it. This was the mid-80s. My impression at the time was that it was a punk gesture. Having mice and cats as Jews and Nazis seemed like a deliberately tasteless move; a snotty punk reposte to a sacred cow. But fortunately, Maus was something very different indeed. Art Spiegelman, the cartoonist of Maus, was deep into the subculture of comics and the formal mechanics of comics when he was producing it. His use of mice and cats was in part him reaching back to early comics (where such creatures were used as often stand-ins for racial categories) and fables. He balanced the fabulous with a heavily researched story, based on recorded discussions with his father Vladek, a Polish Jew who survived Auschwitz.
Now a school district in Tennessee has banned Maus from its middle school classrooms. According to the Washington Post:
the McMinn County school board expressed concern that the expletives in “Maus” were inappropriate for eighth-graders. Members also said Art Spiegelman’s illustrations showing nudity — which depict Holocaust victims forced to strip during their internment in Nazi concentration camps — were improper.
One question that comes to mind (which was unclear in the article) is, are the children forbidden from reading Maus? Does it mean that all copies are removed from the schools? How serious is this “ban’?
I kind of believe their explanation. Or let’s just say, I don’t think they are Nazis or holocaust-deniers. My guess is that to them, Jews and their tragedy are so remote that to them Maus is like a work by an ancient Greek writer. Of historical interest, but nothing we should worry about too much today. (Even though the author is still alive and his own parents were holocaust victims.)
Also, I think it has to do with the visual element. When one writes: “Jews were forced to disrobe and to enter the shower rooms, where Zyclon B gas was released to kill them,” the content of the sentence describes an obscenity, but you don’t see any naked bodies. (Not that the naked bodies in Maus are by any means prurient.) One wonders if they would also ban Primo Levi’s searing If This is a Man (retitled in the USA Survival in Auschwitz). I doubt it because banning it would require that they read it (which is hard!), and it has no naked pictures. But if they did ban it, I would have no hesitation about calling them Nazis. But in the case of Maus, I think it is just as possible that they are just prudes. They are religious fanatics who hate images of the human body as well as the notion that victims of great historical crimes say naughty words and sometimes have sex outside the bounds of holy matrimony. It’s impossible for me to look in their hearts, so I won’t assume that they are Nazis. But I know that they are small-minded religious fanatics who want to control what their children see, and they don’t seem to mind being ridiculed by the rest of the country.