Art Spiegelman Reacts to School District Banning His Book Maus: ‘The Breath of Autocracy and Fascism’
Art Spiegelman discussed the recent decision by a Tennessee school district to remove his critically acclaimed graphic novel on CNN Thursday and slammed the move as having “the breath of autocracy and fascism.”
Tennessee’s McMinn County School Board voted unanimously earlier in the month to ban the novel, which in 1992 became the first and so far only graphic novel to win the Pulitzer Prize, due to “naked pictures” and language like “God Damn” appearing in the book. The board voted to remove the novel, which depicts Jews as mice and Nazis as cats in its telling of the Holocaust, from the eighth-grade curriculum.
Spiegelman, being interviewed by CNN’s John Berman and Brianna Keilar on Holocaust Remembrance Day, noted the importance of teaching the Holocaust in schools and called it a “harbinger of things of to come.”
“That’s disturbing, that’s terrifying,” reacted Keilar. “Which makes it more the more troubling if you don’t want to teach it and don’t want to use the tools available to discuss it,” Berman concluded.
Spiegelman was asked to explain his reaction to the school board’s decision, saying, “I’ve moved past total bafflement to trying to be tolerant of people who may possibly not be Nazis, maybe? Because having read the transcript of the school board meeting; the problem is bigger and stupider than that.”
“They really genuinely focused, reading this 20-minute document, they totally focused on some bad words that are in the book. Like ‘damn it I can’t believe that the word ‘damn’ would get the book jettisoned out of school on its own, but that’s where the genuine focus seemed to be,” Spiegelman argued.
Spiegelman went on to discuss how the “nudity” cited by the school district was hardly visible in the book and was of his own mother in a bathtub having slit her wrists. The novel tells the story of Spiegelman interviewing his father about his time as a Polish Jew in the 1930s and Holocaust survivor.
“So it [the nude drawing] is seen from overhead and you can see it’s a tiny image so would really have to want to get your sexual kicks by projecting on it, it seems like a crazy place to get them,” Spiegelman said.
“I think they are so myopic in their focus, and they’re so afraid of what implied and having to defend the decision to teach Maus as part of the curriculum it led to this daffily myopic response,” Spiegelman said of the school board.
Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN), Tennessee’s first Jewish congressman slammed the decision on Thursday, noting that “censoring books about the Holocaust, or about slavery and lynchings, or other atrocities, was a way to purge one’s understanding of the horrors of what humanity is capable of.”
“It’s depressing to see this happen anywhere in the country, and when it comes to censoring an easy way to reach children and teach them about the Holocaust, it’s particularly disturbing,” Mr. Cohen said in an interview to the New York Times.
Watch the full clip above via CNN
