“Maus,” the decades-old graphic novel about the effects of the Holocaust on a family, became an Amazon bestseller in recent days as part of a backlash to news that it was banned by a Tennessee school board in from its eighth-grade curriculum.
The McMinn County school board says it took that step. Jan. 10 because of a handful of curse words and other aspects of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book that it found upsetting, including “its depiction of violence and suicide.” The board’s decision was unanimous.
“The schoolboard could’ve checked with their book-banning predecessor, [Russia President] Vladimir Putin: he made the Russian edition of Maus illegal in 2015 (also with good intentions—banning swastikas) and the small publisher sold out immediately and has had to reprint repeatedly,” Spiegelman wrote in an email.
Minutes of the McMinn school board meeting that led to the book being banned show that while some parents said they supported the idea of teaching about the Holocaust, they had problems with some profanity in the book. They also had an issue with an image showing a nude woman, who is Spiegelman’s mother.
“We can teach them history and we can teach them graphic history,” board member Mike Cochran said, according to minutes of the meeting. “We can tell them exactly what happened, but we don’t need all the nakedness and all the other stuff.”
CW: I go into gross detail about how Auschwitz prisoners were killed
The thing is, yeah okay you don’t want to show kids curse words, but this book is a damn effective way of showing just how horrible the Nazis were and just how people acted leading up to the holocaust. Former friends ratting each other out, the hopelessness, how much survival was based around luck and mutual aid, how brutally the Nazis quashed any dissent among their own ranks. I learned about the holocaust through history books, but nothing brought it home more to me than reading the first-hand account of Spiegelman’s father in Maus. I will never forget the scene of prisoners being pushed into graves while still alive after the gassing failed to finish them and then other prisoners being forced to set them on fire I believe that first hand human account is absolutely vital to understanding the events that took place and how to spot fascist tendancies in the future.
Your kids are going to learn about dirty words sooner or later anyway (lets be real they probably already know any bad words in this book), they might as well learn them for a good reason
i read a lot of holocaust books as a kid. all it did was make me empathize with the red army and jewish people hard. like i didnt even know what the red army was really nor was i absolutely sure about where russia, germany, and poland were besides ‘norther and in europe’. i just assumed there were different color armies everywhere.
like if the books werent in the nonfiction section, as a kid, i would have been absolutely flabbergasted. how could any of this have ever existed? and like, this is coming from someone whose region was annexed by the nazis. i was told stuff by osmosis. its important kids learn this stuff
