Some Thoughts on Teaching Maus

Page Delano, English Department (retired)

Two questions to situate my readers in our often-thin grasp of history before I start:
How many concentration camps did the Germans run during WWII?
How many Russians died during that war?

I hope my students remember Maus, especially if they have paid attention to the Tennessee school board’s blighted steps to remove Maus from the school’s curriculum –due to nudity and concerns about language, and that eighth graders can’t handle this violence. The board zeroed in on Art Spiegelman’s mother’s suicide–and her being naked. A naked mouse, as some of my friends have pointed out.

Analyses differ as to whether this elimination was motivated by anti-Semitism, or whether it was due to a rigid concern about decency, violence, and what’s appropriate for eighth graders (which may be equally sinister). Lili Loofbourow, for one, writing in Slate (February 5, 2022), thinks the elimination of Maus “does not seem to be motivated by bigotry,” but, she warns us, it may be part and parcel of the growing conservative desire to control what students read, and in a more ominous way, creating a path into a dangerous “Holocaust pragmatism” with its “slow softening” on Hitler’s policies and of Hitler himself.

I thought I’d share my experiences teaching about war, state violence, the Holocaust, and in particular this amazing, and yes, provocative text, in a course I created as an English 350 “topics” course–Literature of Genocide. I first taught the course in 2013, then in 2016. The spring 2020 offering is not worth assessing, as we again went online abruptly before the class could gel. For the syllabus overall, it was difficult to come up with a semester’s worth of texts that could account for centuries of mass cruelty, which existed long before the term genocide was invented. By the time we reached “The Holocaust/World War II,” Maus served both as a vivid and extensive description of Nazi genocide against Jews and others, as well as the gateway to other discussions. Certainly, the way critics now read the school board’s unanimous rejection, 10-0, of Maus would become part of my future teaching of the text.

I want to address in part what (my) students know about the Holocaust, or any of America’s wars and its imperial endeavors, for that matter, or rather what they don’t know, and the role Maus played in this context. My first Eng 350 “topics” course was the Literature of the Vietnam War. One student’s father had served in the war, which made her a lively participant and a good leader, but the rest were unaware of, really, any matters of that war which had so rocked the nation in the 1970s. Perhaps a better topic to teach rather than 2000 years of mass political and social murders, my students worked hard, collectively at times, at times on their own, to grapple with numerous issues of the Vietnam War – through documentaries, fiction, and journalism–how GIs experienced it, many of whom came to oppose that war, how the Vietnamese as well suffered and endured, as well as issues of political conflict, gender, race, and environment. So, I am torn–between the focus on a single war/time period/issue, or a larger survey course. And of course, if I were to teach the genocide course again, I’m sure I would do it differently, not solely how I approach Maus, but touching on, sadly, further instances of genocide, increased literature, as well as more complicated histories and politics to address.

Here are some things I learned. It wasn’t that I didn’t already know some of these issues, but that the actual teaching and interaction with students brought some of this, shall I call it status–I don’t want to say deficits, to our common stage. For one thing, many of our students come grounded in culture, history, language/s outside the U.S. (although we might assume that their knowledge of that history can be frail as well). Secondly, students overall don’t seem to like history, so surely a literature course that is tied to history has to accept–well, not accept but realize that limitation. Thirdly, the Vietnam War was a long time ago, creating gap if not a chasm between people my age and students largely in their late teens or early 20s (as well as many of my colleagues, some years younger than me). This allows as well for historical erasures, revisions, etc, and sadly, (can’t be repeated enough) new wars that have come along to rewrite old wars.

And all that is even more true with the Genocide class – covering eons of man’s cruelty to man. The first time I taught the class, I had a student from Guyana, whose father had been a policeman present after the many deaths/ suicides/ murders at Jonestown (1978). Profound–and he offered this story in his class presentation, much to my amazement, at first, because it didn’t seem to fit the definition of genocide, but I realized he was also addressing the trauma of mass murder, so we included it in our discussion of genocide. The tragic deaths, and finding the bodies. This is also to say that many of our students come from or have inherited some type of political violence from “my country,” as they are wont to say. I did not insist on pulling this out–but if it appeared, I tried to help put it in a cultural, political, gendered, racial, imperial, internationalist context.

And there were moments of other personal matters–perhaps it was “Rare Disease Day,” February 29. I revealed that my granddaughter Dylan had a life-threatening, very rare metabolic disorder, Glycogen Storage Disease 1B, AND a student revealed that she had sickle cell anemia–also deemed a rare disease. So, the two of us presented our stories (both diseases require substantial funding for research which is not yet forthcoming, although recently there have been great advances in treating sickle cell.)

So that’s some of the platform, so to speak, on which we professors encounter students in such a course, along with meeting unexpected moments, as I hope we do in any class we teach. But surely, as in any subject, there has been massive literature–including documentaries and films–which our students are largely unfamiliar with. A parallel point here is that I learned to be more attentive to students’ connections to these big, often overwhelming issues, and tried both to offer my own ignorance, my own questions, and to link them to some pedagogical moment. As Carolyn Forché wrote in her poem “The Colonel,” the ears the El Salvadoran General spilled out on the table were, as he told her, “something for your poetry.” Indeed, Forché turned this obscene moment into an amazing poem. All this is “something for my teaching.” And I found it was okay to cry in front of my students.

In my Literature of Genocide class, I included Maus, I and II along with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s documentary about the rise of Hitler, excerpts from Charlotte Delbo’s study of her ‘colleagues’ at Auschwitz [she addresses the experience of French resistants, which is not the Holocaust some argue, which makes a great topic in itself], Mary Berg’s diary [a Polish Jew, whose mother’s American citizenship saved her and her family from destruction in the Warsaw ghetto and eventually on a ship to New York], the film Defiance, [Jews resisting in the forests] and some of Tadeusz Borowski’s short stories from This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, along with short memoir pieces about gender and the concentration camps. I showed maps–to indicate the vast number of concentration camps the Germans ran. The USHMM maps are excellent. In the spring of 2016, as the presidential election battle raged, I had my students read news articles addressing the possibility of fascism in the U.S. My point was not for me to suggest the Republican candidate was ushering in fascism, but to have them be able to make sense of this national discourse, based on their earlier readings of the rise of fascism, and their observations.

The thing is how little my students knew of World War II, and of the Holocaust. Even the Vietnam War was eons back, and largely forgotten. I have observed that even knowledge of the civil rights movement is reduced to Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and Rosa Parks, with sparse knowledge of the valiant student sit-ins at segregated lunch counters or the Black Codes. Some of my students have in the past been confused about the actual end of US slavery, although once in a meeting, our former Provost Sadie Bragg suggested that many African American students thought that the intense racism from slavery days still existed–a comment that’s given me food for thought.

Most of my students know far more about popular culture, music, and musicians than I’ll ever know. They know their own experiences–I’ve often discovered students do volunteer work, take part in sports leagues, know the complete histories and stats of their beloved heroes, are the translators for their families in many situations, and frequently of course are holding down jobs or 20 or more hours a week, along with picking up siblings from grade school. One thing we don’t need to teach them–and here I’m disagreeing with some of my colleagues–is to ‘be responsible,’ to learn how to ‘be on time.’ These they already know. Their reasons for being late to class or missing an assignment are more complex.

They know a lot, but they don’t know much history or literature. It used to be that students from Eastern Europe had read the great thick novels of the Romantic era extensively, but this became less so over the years. In my general encounters, they knew Hitler was bad, but they had NO idea how he came to power. The history of anti-Semitism was out of the reach of many. I’ve found the understanding of religion itself a complicated story at BMCC, with many of my (I assume evangelical of some type) Protestant students insisting that Catholics are not Christians. And, if they knew anything about the Holocaust, they thought it happened at Auschwitz. The extensive network of killing camps, the overwhelming power of industrial murder, the Nazi methods of rumors, deceit, manipulation, were not readily evident.

And so I had them read Maus. Even as a graphic memoir, it’s not easy to read. Students grappled with the meaning of Spiegelman’s depiction of Jews as mice (we threw around possibilities: belittled, to be chased by cats–not simply non-human as the Germans would call them, because all the other characters were animals as well). They thought about the parallel stories, Spiegelman’s father’s story in Poland, and his own relationship with his father in Queens. They thought about how experiences are remembered, and what impact retelling them has. How difficult both aspects are. And about the relentless murderous violence Spiegelman’s father, family, people, country, fellow Jews–and others–faced. They looked at the role of propaganda, of systematic demonizing and the spreading of hatred.

And there were misreadings, for example this passage from a student’s Reading Paper (an informal thinking-on-paper commentary that expands on, and contextualizes, a specific moment in the text):

Maus’s parents surely did not forget about their mistreatment after the publication of their son’s graphic novel; the fame that the novel brought upon the family would not be enough to completely eradicate the brutal memories.

In my comments to this student, I noted that Spiegelman’s mother had committed suicide long before the publication of this memoir. Perhaps my student now remembers this moment–his reading and my comments—in light of current events. Looking back on it now, I would also note his use of “mistreatment” which seems a dangerous watering down of the horrors, trauma, death, fear –residual, borne with such complexity by survivors, that Maus depicts. I would reiterate the role of language in dehumanizing people.

A few things stand out. Spiegelman’s complex narrative gives a wide berth for looking at this terrible moment in history, and the burdens a child bears in living with the traumatized. We had intense discussions of how one could survive the death camps: even if one had wit, was connected, had a skill, etc. we understood those could not guarantee survival. This was, of course, the Nazi’s plan. Wit, thinking on your feet etc. surely helped, but some of it was a matter of luck. And that living through such an ordeal does not necessarily make someone a good person. This idea came out as well in our reading of Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. Borowski, a Pole, not Jewish, wrote a chilling account of the culture, if one can call it that, of Auschwitz, the cruelties involved in survival, the horrors of unloading the trains and watching people marched to the gas chambers. And while both texts live, so to speak, in Auschwitz, I think it became clear to students that this genocide was extensive, planned out and enacted with precision throughout Poland, Germany, even in France—not to mention the murders by bullet in Russia, Poland, eastern European countries. And, I should add, how they might view Ukraine in light of the Russian invasion–its role in genocide, its victimization, the destruction of the monument to the murdered Jews at Babi Yar.

In the 2016 spring semester class, we turned to settler colonialism–students were very eager to raise questions about genocide against Black people transported from Africa–not just to the US but to the Caribbean and South America as well. The middle passage was on my syllabus, but we’d raced through it. Now I was impressed, and moved, by the critical energy many students brought to this discussion, one that they had largely introduced on their own. The semester ran out before we could really grapple with these issues and connections. That’s perhaps the way a semester should end–opening the door to new conversations, intellectual, cultural, national, international, and personal questions.

I wrote this largely in February 2022.  I’ve added a few words in May, but have not expanded to address Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, where the Russians have carelessly thrown around some of the terms I use here.

[1] Wiki is a good place to start.  1,000 at one point.  23 main camps.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nazi_concentration_camps    But the USHMM notes some “44,000 camps and other incarceration sites.”  https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/gallery/camp-system-maps  My scholarship addresses Vittel, the civilian camp in the Vosges area of France, which held primarily British and American women, and at one point, Mary Berg and other Jews claiming American and South American citizenship–the majority of whom were sent to their death.  For the  (certified) British and American taken from their homes in France, this was considered a golden camp.

Deaths in the Soviet Union–total deaths, military and civilian: 24 million. Civilian deaths: 7-14 millions.  The numbers vary wildly, but the Soviets suffered the highest number of deaths.  Some note that means one in five Soviets died.  China may have suffered as many as 20 million deaths.

[2] Lili Loofbourow, “What the Outrage Over a Local Decision to Stop Teaching Maus Gets Wrong.”  https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/02/maus-outrage-not-book-ban-amazon.html   Accessed 14 February 2022.

[3] Forché’s poem first appeared in her stellar collection The Country Between Us (1981).   Here she reads it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXMbpFvCWMs   In introducing the poem, she notes two obscenities, 1) the four-letter word, that keeps her off the radio, and 2) the story itself–which the US government does not apologize for, which she describes in the poem.  Forché has become an important figure in documenting global atrocities.   See the anthology she edited, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (1993)

[4] See for example the USHMM, “Holocaust by Bullets” https://www.ushmm.org/online-calendar/event/VEFBBABIYAR0921 –this event from 2021 has links to other connected histories. Note also the path-breaking history, also titled Holocaust by Bullets(Macmillan 2009), Father Patrick Desbois, which explores the Nazi and collaborators’ murder of 1.5 million Jews.

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