“Maus” Author: TN School Board Wants a “Gentler Holocaust”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: This warning couldn’t be more timely as a wave of book banning washes over the United States. Its latest victim our next guest, Art Spiegelman. He’s the author of the acclaimed graphic novel about the holocaust, “Maus.” It was banned by a Tennessee school board last week, they say due to content that includes nudity, profanity, and violence. Seriously, it’s about a concentration camp. And Spiegelman wrote “Maus” about his parents who survived Auschwitz. Here he tells Walter Isaacson about what banning his book could mean for American democracy.

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WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you, Christiane. And Art Spiegelman, welcome to the show.

ART SPIEGELMAN, PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING ARTIST, ILLUSTRATOR AND AUTHOR: Thanks for having me.

ISAACSON: A Tennessee board of education removed your book, “Maus,” from the curricula a few weeks ago and it’s caused great controversy, it’s even made “Maus” now number one on the Amazon bestseller list. Now, that you’ve had a week or so to reflect on it, what do you think are the lessons from this?

SPIEGELMAN: I think it’s part of the dangerous and perilous times that we’re living in. A lot of it is directed at critical race theory in giant, frightening quotes and part of it is directed against non-gender normative people’s books. It’s amazing how often comics come up as a problem. It used to be that comics were burned back in 1954 when they were afraid they were causing juvenile delinquency. Now, in part thanks to “Maus,” it’s an accepted part of most curricula, the graphic novels, as they’re called, are within the scope of what is taught, because it’s effective. And the school board seems to be following an agenda, either consciously, or if I want to be generous, unconsciously, of Moms for Freedom, for liberty or whatever, turning this into an issue of parent’s rights rather than an issue of education and making sure that children are prepared for the world that is kind of barreling at them.

ISAACSON: After the controversy erupted over the removal of your book from the curricula, the school board in Tennessee issued a statement. And I would like to read it to you and get your reaction to it. They said, we do not diminish the value of “Maus” as an impactful and meaningful piece of literature, nor do we dispute the importance of teaching our children the historical and moral lessons and realities of the holocaust. To the contrary, we’ve asked our administrators to find other works to accomplish the same educational goals in a more age-appropriate fashion. Tell me your reaction to that.

SPIEGELMAN: Well, I’ve now come to realize that age-appropriate is a broad range that includes probably 40-year-old people on that school board as well as 14-year-old students in their classes. When you talk about middle school, you’re talking about some kids who can barely read and some kids who are just taking advanced placement classes for their university education. And anything that helps that education happen is important.

ISAACSON: Why do you think it’s important for an eighth grader to be taught a book like “Maus”?

SPIEGELMAN: Because in order to be a responsible human, not brought up with a lot of propaganda and prejudice, it’s a matter of being well educated. And some people are able to do that on their own. Many people need the schools to do it. I understand how many people believe that should be primarily a religious education. I don’t know that that’s the only way to get to an ethical future, but an ethical future is really important, to redress the ways we’ve created a never more divided set of classes in America. The difficulty right now of being a person of color in America or manifest that could make totally clear in the past few years. And as we get polarized throughout that issue, it’s important to embrace it all.

ISAACSON: One of the school board members this week said, yes, but parents can read “Maus” at home to their kids, that’s fine, we just don’t want to make it part of the curricula. Does that make any sense you and why would you say that?

SPIEGELMAN: Well, I think they would say that because it’s part of localizing all politics at this point. School boards are much better equipped than Congress to pass laws about how children might be educated, so they can be useful and good citizens of our country in peril. But also, it’s a bit disingenuous for them to keep focusing in “Maus” on a few rather mild bits of foul language and on something that I found really offensive. They keep not talking about the real issues, which is the holocaust, saying, we don’t mind teaching the holocaust, but basically, I feel they want a kinder, gentler holocaust to present to their children. And what they really are upset about is there’s one panel with what they describe as a nude woman, and then, they’ve described that as sexual. I found that as offensive as anything they found in “Maus.” It’s one panel, not with mice, but with inset into the book about my mother’s suicide and how I responded when I found out about the day she killed herself, that has her naked in a bathtub full of blood, without making anything especially licentious about that image, it’s just a person in a bathtub with blood. And usually, in the bathtub breasts are visible. So, I think they were asking me to like put a bathrobe on my mom in the bathtub or something, because it doesn’t make much sense as describing that as sexual. For them to use the word nude woman rather than naked, which is about her vulnerability, is also either a conscious or unconscious choice in how they presented this in order to deflect from the real issues in the book. And in fact, why “Maus” is such a good teaching tool even though I have confessed that I never expected or wanted it to be a Y.A. novel. I’ve learned my lessons over the years because kids have learned their lessons from “Maus” and they have done very well assimilating those lessons from the children I’ve spoken to in schools, the young people. And I think the very things they’re objecting to, which is not — one of them actually said, I love the holocaust, in his school board meetings, saying that, it’s great for the part of the story that my father is telling. That’s perfect. But why is there all of this other stuff that has nothing to do with the holocaust, which is not true. Because the way book comes forward and the way it was meant is it’s through my eyes, understanding and learning and thus, teaching myself as well as anybody wanted to share the book with me. How the heck I ever got on to this planet? Both parents were supposed to be dead in Auschwitz. So, as an adult, I went back to my father and he was willing to tell me in detail. And we finally found common ground where we could talk to each other without yelling at each other, like, ironically, in his memories of his time in the death camps.

ISAACSON: Tell me what you think the underlying fear was that’s causing people want to remove from the curricula books like yours?

SPIEGELMAN: Well, I think it’s part of a general and widespread authoritarian influence. Like, when I tried to deconstruct what happened with the school board, which I’m sure would be no happier with any of the books that are out on gender issues and grace issues, has to do with who’s in charge here. And they wanted to be the Moms for Liberty. And the problem with that is they’re not really equipped to give children a good education. In fact, the school board is probably made up of parents who went to school in (INAUDIBLE) County and never got a good education that would allow them to deconstruct my book, for example, with any intelligence. Therefore, even though I didn’t make it for children, if it’s going to be in schools for kids who are 14 years old, that’s not a problem, but it’s better to be done under a curriculum that’s giving supporting materials, that’s actually helping one understand the issues more broadly. And in fact, the people who are — the teachers at this board meeting were adamant that they thought that it should be taught in their classes, because it is part of a curriculum that can show newsreel footage, other films, other books, articles that put it in context, they say they don’t want to drop it, because I’m the third item on their curriculum. The fourth quarter is about Japanese internment camps. So, better that — I think that they’re on the right track. I feel sad when I listen to the — when I read the minutes of the school board meeting that even they were trying to find ways to get past the school board by saying, well, we tried whiting out some of the bad words like damn and the word bitch is there in the book when I’m talking about my anger at my mother for having abandoned me, in the heat of having to find out she had killed herself. And they just they just left the B of bitch in place. And I — as a modest proposal, I would said, rather than leave the B, they could put in bagel or blintz because it brings up more wholesome parts of Jewish heritage and maybe we could put some recipes in the back. It’s just all deflection, which is the case for every one of these books that’s being banned across the country.

ISAACSON: Let me push back on something you just said, which is that the parents are not really well educated enough and that they don’t really know what would be good for their children? Isn’t that a problem if we’re not trying to balance the act that parents should have some say and that we’re seeming contemptuous, parents who want to say, I need some control over what’s being taught to my kids?

SPIEGELMAN: Well, obviously, that’s a very American attitude. But I believe the way it’s done, for instance, in France, which is the other culture I’m sort of exposed to regularly because of my wife and my friends in France, is public education is about educating people so that they could participate in their great democracy experiment. And therefore, one has to learn to trust the teachers or hire teachers that are trustworthy. It’s not about trusting children. It’s about trying to make sure they’re not exposed to anything outside of the very narrow focus that’s being offered to them. And this includes people who are triggered by reading about the slave Jim in “Huckleberry Finn” and being exposed to a bad word. This is better taught in a school than having them come across the word and think that Mark Twain is writing about it in 2021 and exposing them to the N-word. It’s in a context in which Jim is the most human and fully developed character, in some ways, in all of “Huckleberry Finn.” So, I’m just a First Amendment fundamentalist and believe it’s best taught with more talk. That one exposes children to things. These things could be taught, should be taught, all of it, including the ugliest parts, as well as the most beautiful, without trying to whitewash it and hide the actual histories that children and young people and adults need to be exposed to.

ISAACSON: In “Maus,” you portray the Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats and other groups as different animals. In some ways, that helps give an emotional distance, in a way. These are not human characters.

SPIEGELMAN: Right, Walter, it does both. It both gives me enough distance to make these things by putting this mouse and cat and pig and dog masks on the people, but their masks — and it’s made clear in the course of the story, I don’t think of myself as a mouse, exactly, but that allows both the distance for me to enter into the material, but also kind of intimacy. Because if you have these mice all look sort of alike, you know, they’re all triangles with two dots, little lumps for ears, that means that if you identify with me, you’re going to be as a character in the book, Artie talking to his dad, you’ll also be identifying with the people who look almost exactly like him, because they’re all looking more or less alike, and there’s a mean feat to try to make sure you always understood who you were looking at, when I was telling the story of the destinies of many of these people. I don’t know how to resolve the dilemma you brought up a couple of minutes ago, the one about, well, parents have a right, what, dot, dot, dot. They have a right to have input, but I think they — all parents should have an advanced teaching degree before they take the ultimate authority for that sort of thing. Because, hey, it’s the same state that 35 miles away from the school board life was trying to keep evolution from being taught in schools in scopes Scopes Monkey Trial days. This is not a useful education. If they had succeeded in banning teaching Darwin in their schools. Similarly, I don’t think that stopping one’s education with the New Testament is any better.

ISAACSON: You said we’re living in really perilous times. But do you think that pulling a book like yours out of a curricula for eighth graders is really a step on the way to a real book banning and book burning?

SPIEGELMAN: Absolutely. I don’t know to what degree, the school board was working in collusion with Moms for Liberty, but that’s a very overt program, rather malevolent, completely malevolent, well financed to pull books out of libraries, out of schools, to only teach a very positive and patriotic picture of America’s past that isn’t useful in understanding America’s present. It’s as perilous as you think it is. These laws are being amped up. It’s not just taking it out of a curriculum and leaving the kid to fend for himself if they can find the book, it’s also about trying to control everything that’s being read, including in libraries. Fine libraries for having books that have been banned. I think there was one case where I was reading that you could get a $10,000 a day fine if you were promoting a banned book in that area. And that’s coming closer to the genuine book banning. The problem with banning books is, I was right that they’re not Nazis, the school board, that’s not what’s happening. But, you know, it’s not effective to ban a book, as you can see by “Maus” shooting up on the bestseller list again. But you have to then go on and burn the books. And then, after you have to burn the books, you have to burn the people that wrote them and read them. It’s a trajectory. I would like to say (INAUDIBLE) certain, but not exact.

ISAACSON: Whoopi Goldberg just got suspended for two weeks from “The View” because of what she said in a conversation about your book and the controversy surrounding the pulling of your book from the curriculum. So, let me read you what she said in the discussion and get your reaction to it. She said, the holocaust is not about race, it’s about man’s inhumanity to man. And then, one of the other co-hosts said, it was driven by white supremacy. And Whoopi Goldberg said, but these are two white groups of people. She apologized, but she was still suspended. Tell me what you think of that?

SPIEGELMAN: Fair enough. I think what was said was said in some kind of ignorance of a master race exterminating an interior race was the rhetoric of Germany at the time. So, whether or not Jews are white, black or striped isn’t the real issue, it’s about man’s inhumanity to man, the same way slavery is about man’s inhumanity to man, the same way about that the genocide of indigenous Americans was also men’s cruelty to men. But within that, race seems to be an important and highly charged topic in America. I think she learned her lesson because of the conversation that ensued as a result of what she said, which is basically a process of education. It’s what happened to her. She came out, I think, with a very sincere response saying, I didn’t get it. I get it now. And I don’t think it was — it shouldn’t be feared for her job. And the punishment is unnecessary. What happens, instead of a canceling was simply somebody just talking to her and explaining what the reality of that history is. And I think she was able to get it. So, case closed, let’s move on and deal with the problems of keeping what has to be remembered remembered, which is not just Auschwitz but our entire history.

ISAACSON: What role can “Maus” play in fighting anti-Semitism? And for that matter, in fighting racism?

SPIEGELMAN: Well, it gives one a model of what happened in a way that’s clearly, from my experience, just understandable, kids younger than 14, adults, I know that a copy was given by my friend J.R., the photographer, to a neo-Nazi who is in a prison in California and I got a fan letter from him afterwards that helped him open his eyes to what he’d been part of. And I was trying to figure out how a get a Nazi tattoo off his body. So, it’s across the board that it’s useful. I don’t think I don’t think neo-Nazis are out only to get Jews. I think there’s the great fear that Americans who aren’t off the mayflower (ph) might not be allowed to be part of the politics, be allowed to vote, things like that. And neo-Nazis are at least unhappy with black citizens as they are with Jewish. It’s all one pile of othering to make one’s self feel stronger and better. So, I think it plays into being useful by being in cats and mice for Nazis and Jews, because cats and mice allow it to become that self-destructing metaphor I was mentioning. It’s about all races and all fascists. And if you find them on your school board, if you find them messing with your libraries, they need to be resisted because you can see the possible sequences.

ISAACSON: Art Spiegelman, thank you so much for joining with us.

SPIEGELMAN: Thank you. A pleasure to be with you, Walter.