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| Cover (c) Pantheon |
Art Spiegelman's comic "Maus" is about the time of the Third Reich in Germany. The central character of the story is Spiegelman's father, Wladek (1906-1982), a Holocaust survivor. In numerous sessions, the father tells his son the story of a survivor, as the subtitle of the book is called; the comic thus addresses both the Holocaust and the painful memory of it. Spiegelman puts the story told by the father down on paper, not without going into the current situation of the narrating father, who has developed into a reclusive, stingy and stubborn old man and, despite his Holocaust experiences, discriminates against black people. The difficult relationship between son and father and the suicide of the mother are also taken up as topics.
The story is told as a fable. Through the animal metaphor (and the medium of comics), Spiegelman keeps his distance from the horror that is being told:
“I need to show the events and memory of the Holocaust without showing them. I want to show the masking of these events in their representation." (Spiegelmann, quoted from James E. Young)
In January 2022, it was announced that a school board in McMinn County, Tennessee, made a decision the previous year to ban the use of the comic in the classroom. The ten-member panel unanimously voted to ban the comic from classrooms after initially discussing partial censorship.
However, the book makes an important contribution to looking into this time and not forgetting it. With more and more schools talking about banning certain books, it's time to think about what to do about it. The simplest trick politicians hate: buy the book yourself. This is how this important cultural asset is preserved.
There are now two books, "Maus" and "Maus II", as well as the anthology "The Complete Maus". You can order them from AMAZON.com right here:
Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History
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