Art Spiegelman and Maus: Censorship Past and Present

On January 10, 2022 the McMinn County School Board in Tennessee voted unanimously to ban Art Spiegelman's Maus, a comic depicting his family's experience during the Holocaust.1 The book was taught as part of the eighth grade language arts curriculum, helping to make the horrors of the Holocaust understandable to teenagers. Board members objected to the book's depictions of nudity, profanity, and violence, implying that teaching the book was tantamount to promoting what it shows. This censorship was met with widespread backlash, with some young people now distributing copies of Maus alongside other banned books like Toni Morrison's Beloved.2

Having taught the Holocaust to seventh graders, I can tell you how ludicrous it is to try and prevent students from accessing accurate information on it. 3Students come to class with preconceived — often ill-conceived — notions of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany.4 While talking about the realities of genocide is never pleasant, students will not understand the reality and severity of it if they are not exposed to its brutality and violence. This plays into the hands of Holocaust deniers, who sometimes adopt a strategy of downplaying what really happened (rather than outright denial) to try and make themselves appear more reasonable. Images and personal testimony are the most powerful tools available to teachers to convey complex and horrifying realities to students. Removing these tools from teachers serves only to ensure that students will remain uninformed and it is that, not teaching reality, that is “not healthy or wise.”5

This is not the first time that Art Spiegleman's works have been censored.6 Spiegleman is responsible for the Garbage Pail Kids cards that were popular in the 1980s, and which were also banned in schools, and, apparently, the entirety of Mexico. The cards, no doubt gross and unpleasant, were targeted for their “value system,” and encouraging students to tease one another.7 In 1993, Spiegleman engendered controversy with “a cover for the New Yorker that featured a Hasidic man and a Black woman bonded by a passionate kiss.” The image was meant to be a commentary on the 1991 Crown Heights Riot, a series of violent anti-semitic attacks by black residents. He became controversial yet again with his comic anthology, In the Shadow of No Towers, following 9/11. The comics represented Spiegleman's sometimes controversial takes on the post-9/11 landscape and the events which led up to it. American publishers refused to print it, so he had to publish them in Germany, instead.8 This appears to be the first time, however, that Maus has been subject to school censorship.

The present controversy hasn't hurt Maus financially; indeed it has quickly become a bestseller once again. The real losers, as in all cases of school censorship, will be the students who will be denied the ability to have the book put into proper context by an educational professional, who will have a less rich education, who will be a little more susceptible to misinformation. Once can only hope, as they grow, mature, and become adults, that the members of the McMinn School Board will learn not to repeat their mistake.