A problem with Maus
In the wake of the Tennessee school controversy, criticizing Maus gets a response appropriate to torturing puppies. Maus, it seems, is triply-untouchable. First, it is Art. Second, it is the real truth about The Holocaust. Third, it is someone’s medically necessary reconciliation with survivor syndrome, a legitimate way for Art Spiegelman to “process his trauma”, something that demands respect.* These merits supposedly make it perfect for education. Its status is seen to need vigorous defense against deplorables, people we dislike.
Ok, Maus may be an excellent artistic portrayal of the camps, therapeutically beneficial to its author. But in my opinion Maus is no way for anyone, of any age, to get a picture of a genocide, any genocide. Treating Maus as some masterful introduction to the Nazi genocide is a terrible idea.
In my experience, if you question the appropriateness of Maus in schools, or as a window on the Nazi genocide, you get at least two responses.
One is that Maus is no mere comic: not only is it art; it is, almost paradoxically, nonfiction. As such, it is effectively beyond criticism on any but aesthetic grounds.
The other is that it rests on the particular experiences of Art Spiegelman and his parents, so it is their story, and stories are all we can offer when we try to address the genocide.
These two responses reveal exactly why Maus, whatever its merits and virtues, is no way to tell anyone, of any age, about the camps.
First response: art and the camps
Is Maus both art and nonfiction? Can it be both? Frankly, I find this take quite disturbing, because it brings to genocide an obliviousness to what counts as reality. In a nonfiction account of the camps, are the victims really mice? Were the persecutors cats? Does Maus represent reality, yet at the same time an artist’s imaginary portrayal of someone’s perhaps fragile, partial memories from long, long ago? Such material may make for great art, or terrific entertainment. But for all its factual basis, it is not nonfiction. It is literally a work of imagination, a past transmuted into a fable. With genocide, you need the truth, and the whole truth, not someone’s artistic take on part of the truth.
Many have hurried to tell me that, when it comes to art, there is no “ought”; there are no limits on representation. And maybe if all you want from art is that it succeeds as art, that’s true. But does that mean we could tack onto the Spiegelman’s story a scene in which his father is exposed as a pathological fantasist? That — what a dénouement! — none of this ever happened? Because that would be a great story as well. It could be a very successful, even convincing piece of art. Perhaps when it comes to introducing people to a massive genocide, yes, there are oughts. People ought to understand what happened, in all its scope and horror. And though there are panels of horror in Maus, they at best are windows on a tiny, tiny slice of the reality, and a mere sampling of its atrocity. To appreciate its limitations, look at the second defense of Maus, as an educational device.
Second response: Maus as an educational device
Maus is a nicely assimilable portrayal of some events, and assimilability is a key pedagogical virtue. But it is not, as the US Holocaust Museum proclaims, vital to education about the camps. This isn’t any claim about what functions well in an educational environment. It is a claim about content. Maus is no doubt an excellent introduction to Art Spiegelman and his family’s memories — that’s really its subject. But it is hardly more than an aside about that vast complex of events, the Nazi genocide. To say that it’s an excellent introduction to that subject is like saying that a newspaper article on the commemoration of Rosa Parks is an excellent example take on the history of racism in the US. That’s no claim about what might or might not work in the classroom. It’s a claim about whether, in or out of school, the content matches the subject you want to learn about, or teach.
What does Maus leave out that matters? Hard to know where to begin. Perhaps it matters that many thousands of gypsies and Slavs died the same deaths. Or that the first inmates in the camps were German communists. Certainly it matters that there was a whole history, entirely outside the scope of Maus, shedding light on how the Nazi party was born, partly out of a German army intelligence probe. It certainly matters that resistance to Nazism was crippled by bloody fights between the German socialist and communist movements. It matters that overconfident political calculations drew German capitalists and old Prussian families into the genesis of Nazi supremacy. It matters that the end of First World War sowed the seeds of Germany’s descent into fascism, and so much more. And likely that’s the reason that none of the great anti-fascist artists, from Picasso and Diego Riviera and Georg Grosz to Brecht and Sartre and Camus, thought themselves equal to representing the Nazi genocide. They had humility in the face of events they could not assimilate into an artistic production. Perhaps they also had respect for the millions of victims that no image or story could honour.
Genocides, I think, are something that we cannot assimilate on any psychological level. The scope of their horrors exceeds any therapy we might desire or devise. Their effect on us, however pervasive and dramatic, tells us next to nothing about what we most need to know: why such things happen. Art cannot do what teaching about a genocide needs to do. Art cannot deliver to us a reality whose terrible nature transcends any one perspective on any particular, highly specific segment of the events. That takes study, and a meticulous synthesis of many thousands of accounts, not one account of someone’s particular, personal expression of one perspective on one part of what happened. If there is any faint hope of preventing future genocides, we will need the understanding that only historical productions can provide. Artistic works cannot provide that understanding, but only an illusion of understanding — of, the feeling, the intimate sensation, of being a victim.
Does this mean Maus should be banned from classrooms? Of course not. It just means Maus is a lousy way to teach the Nazi era, to anyone, at any level. This is not because Maus, in what it attempts, is morally or intellectually or even pedagogically deficient. It’s because Maus doesn’t cover the Nazi era, hardly more than an Osprey book on the Luftwaffe covers it — however assimilable it may be, however important the subject, however well it may go over in the classroom. Criticism of Maus invariably attracts talk of book banning, but this is just a way of shutting down any criticism of the book as an educational device. It dishonestly assimilates criticism, a non-authoritarian activity, with banning, necessarily an authoritarian act.
But if not to Maus, where do we turn? Here is a typical sample (among many) of the second take:
How do you think we tell people about it then if we don’t tell stories ? My relatives told me stories — their stories. It is how nations have shared their histories — their knowledge — their experience. By storytelling.**
Well no, we don’t just have stories; we have reports. These are significant because, unlike stories, they match up, very closely. They tell us that the same perceptions and judgements come from may perspectives. They are not merely subjective, they are intersubjective. They amount to the best sort of evidence we have. There are numerous reports, for example, of what allied troops saw when they entered the camps. These works have no literary nuance, no imaginative filter, but they are squarely on topic and need no decoding. If people have some passionate drive to teach naïve, entirely uninformed readers about the Nazi genocide, then it must matter that the teaching impart some sense of the realities, without a veneer of fantasy and a myopic fixation on one family’s diluted, retrospective fantasy.
Such educational-level material exists, with titles like Surviving the Holocaust: True Stories Of Auschwitz Survivors & War Crimes Of The Second World War, Survivors: True Stories of Children in the Holocaust, DKfindout! World War II Paperback , Remember World War II: Kids Who Survived Tell Their Stories, Simple History: Hitler & the Rise of Nazi Germany, and Holocaust Chronicle. As literary or artistic productions, these books can’t hold a candle to Maus. Perhaps the very prestige of Maus means no first-rank authors have taken up the challenge but that, of course, could and should change. Even no-frills history can take account of the sensibilities of children.
Maus’ intensity of feeling is also an intensity of focus, one that blots out most of the periphery. Its popularity as an educational device comes from confusing intense involvement with understanding. It’s taken as a given that what kids, even adults need to experience, is the pain of the victims. But you’d think if there is some pressing need to recall the genocide, it is to gain some insight into the entire Nazi era’s continent-spanning sadism, its structure and practice. Leading us on a journey into an American family’s agonized memories does not approach that objective. It is not even a first step in the right direction.
There is a panel in Maus in which the animals are represented arriving at the gate of Auschwitz.
The gate reads ARBEIT MACHT FREI, work brings freedom. So we have one story, Spiegelman’s narrative, intersecting with the Nazi story, the promise extended to the concentration camp inmates. The difference is that the gate with its lying slogan is, of course, closer to reality, less filtered, than Spiegelman’s tale of the camp inmates, who were not, after all, mice. Perhaps that is why you might feel a stab of outrage viewing that panel. In the of world of Spiegelman and many of his acolytes, “we only have stories”. “We only have narratives”.
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*From here on, I won’t use “Holocaust” or “Shoah”. For me, these terms reek of fake religiosity and forced piety. Here, to designate the Nazi genocide, I’ll usually just speak of ‘ the camps’.
** In the interests of privacy, the source of comments will not be identified.