{"id":608,"date":"2022-09-09T20:50:09","date_gmt":"2022-09-10T00:50:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/rpg-testing\/?p=608"},"modified":"2022-10-18T16:13:21","modified_gmt":"2022-10-18T20:13:21","slug":"some-thoughts-on-teaching-maus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/inquirer\/2022\/09\/09\/some-thoughts-on-teaching-maus\/","title":{"rendered":"Some Thoughts on Teaching Maus<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Concentration<\/h3>\n

Page Delano,\u00a0English Department (retired)<\/h3>\n

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

\n

I hope my students remember Maus, especially if they have paid attention to the Tennessee school board\u2019s blighted steps to remove Maus from the school\u2019s curriculum –due to nudity and concerns about language, and that eighth graders can\u2019t handle this violence. The board zeroed in on Art Spiegelman\u2019s mother\u2019s suicide\u2013and her being naked. A naked mouse, as some of my friends have pointed out.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s appropriate for eighth graders (which may be equally sinister). Lili Loofbourow, for one, writing in Slate (February 5, 2022), thinks the elimination of Maus \u201cdoes not seem to be motivated by bigotry,\u201d 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 \u201cHolocaust pragmatism\u201d with its \u201cslow softening\u201d on Hitler\u2019s policies and of Hitler himself.<\/p>\n

I thought I\u2019d 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 \u201ctopics\u201d course\u2013Literature 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\u2019s 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 \u201cThe Holocaust\/World War II,\u201d 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\u2019s unanimous rejection, 10-0, of Maus would become part of my future teaching of the text.<\/p>\n

I want to address in part what (my) students know about the Holocaust, or any of America\u2019s wars and its imperial endeavors, for that matter, or rather what they don\u2019t know, and the role Maus played in this context. My first Eng 350 \u201ctopics\u201d course was the Literature of the Vietnam War. One student\u2019s 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 \u2013 through documentaries, fiction, and journalism\u2013how 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\u2013between 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\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n

Here are some things I learned. It wasn\u2019t that I didn\u2019t already know some of these issues, but that the actual teaching and interaction with students brought some of this, shall I call it status\u2013I don\u2019t 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\u2019t seem to like history, so surely a literature course that is tied to history has to accept\u2013well, 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\u2019t be repeated enough) new wars that have come along to rewrite old wars.<\/p>\n

\"\"And all that is even more true with the Genocide class \u2013 covering eons of man\u2019s 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\u2013and he offered this story in his class presentation, much to my amazement, at first, because it didn\u2019t 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 \u201cmy country,\u201d as they are wont to say. I did not insist on pulling this out\u2013but if it appeared, I tried to help put it in a cultural, political, gendered, racial, imperial, internationalist context.<\/p>\n

And there were moments of other personal matters\u2013perhaps it was \u201cRare Disease Day,\u201d 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\u2013also 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.)<\/p>\n

So that\u2019s 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\u2013including documentaries and films\u2013which our students are largely unfamiliar with. A parallel point here is that I learned to be more attentive to students\u2019 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 Forch\u00e9 wrote in her poem \u201cThe Colonel,\u201d the ears the El Salvadoran General spilled out on the table were, as he told her, \u201csomething for your poetry.\u201d Indeed, Forch\u00e9 turned this obscene moment into an amazing poem. All this is \u201csomething for my teaching.\u201d And I found it was okay to cry in front of my students.<\/p>\n

In my Literature of Genocide class, I included Maus, I and II along with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum\u2019s documentary about the rise of Hitler, excerpts from Charlotte Delbo\u2019s study of her \u2018colleagues\u2019 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\u2019s diary [a Polish Jew, whose mother\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2013to indicate the vast number of concentration camps the Germans ran. The USHMM maps<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s \u201cI Have a Dream\u201d 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\u2013a comment that\u2019s given me food for thought.<\/p>\n

Most of my students know far more about popular culture, music, and musicians than I\u2019ll ever know. They know their own experiences\u2013I\u2019ve 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\u2019t need to teach them\u2013and here I\u2019m disagreeing with some of my colleagues\u2013is to \u2018be responsible,\u2019 to learn how to \u2018be on time.\u2019 These they already know. Their reasons for being late to class or missing an assignment are more complex.<\/p>\n

They know a lot, but they don\u2019t 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\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

And so I had them read Maus. Even as a graphic memoir, it\u2019s not easy to read. Students grappled with the meaning of Spiegelman\u2019s depiction of Jews as mice (we threw around possibilities: belittled, to be chased by cats\u2013not 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\u2019s father\u2019s 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\u2019s father, family, people, country, fellow Jews\u2013and others\u2013faced. They looked at the role of propaganda, of systematic demonizing and the spreading of hatred.<\/p>\n

And there were misreadings, for example this passage from a student\u2019s Reading Paper (an informal thinking-on-paper commentary that expands on, and contextualizes, a specific moment in the text):<\/p>\n

Maus\u2019s parents surely did not forget about their mistreatment after the publication of their son\u2019s graphic novel; the fame that the novel brought upon the family would not be enough to completely eradicate the brutal memories.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In my comments to this student, I noted that Spiegelman\u2019s mother had committed suicide long before the publication of this memoir. Perhaps my student now remembers this moment\u2013his reading and my comments\u2014in light of current events. Looking back on it now, I would also note his use of \u201cmistreatment\u201d which seems a dangerous watering down of the horrors, trauma, death, fear \u2013residual, borne with such complexity by survivors, that Maus depicts. I would reiterate the role of language in dehumanizing people.<\/p>\n

A few things stand out. Spiegelman\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2014not 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\u2013its role in genocide, its victimization, the destruction of the monument to the murdered Jews at Babi Yar.<\/p>\n

In the 2016 spring semester class, we turned to settler colonialism\u2013students were very eager to raise questions about genocide against Black people transported from Africa\u2013not just to the US but to the Caribbean and South America as well. The middle passage was on my syllabus, but we\u2019d 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\u2019s perhaps the way a semester should end\u2013opening the door to new conversations, intellectual, cultural, national, international, and personal questions.<\/p>\n

\n

I wrote this largely in February 2022.\u00a0 I\u2019ve added a few words in May, but have not expanded to address Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine, where the Russians have carelessly thrown around some of the terms I use here.<\/p>\n

[1] Wiki is a good place to start.\u00a0 1,000 at one point.\u00a0 23 main camps.\u00a0 https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/List_of_Nazi_concentration_camps<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But the USHMM notes some \u201c44,000 camps and other incarceration sites.\u201d\u00a0 https:\/\/encyclopedia.ushmm.org\/content\/en\/gallery\/camp-system-maps<\/a>\u00a0 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\u2013the majority of whom were sent to their death.\u00a0 For the\u00a0 (certified) British and American taken from their homes in France, this was considered a golden camp.<\/p>\n

Deaths in the Soviet Union\u2013total deaths, military and civilian: 24 million. Civilian deaths: 7-14 millions.\u00a0 The numbers vary wildly, but the Soviets suffered the highest number of deaths.\u00a0 Some note that<\/em> means one in five Soviets died.\u00a0 China may have suffered as many as 20 million deaths.<\/p>\n

[2] Lili Loofbourow, \u201cWhat the Outrage Over a Local Decision to Stop Teaching Maus<\/em> Gets Wrong.\u201d\u00a0 https:\/\/slate.com\/news-and-politics\/2022\/02\/maus-outrage-not-book-ban-amazon.html<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 Accessed 14 February 2022.<\/p>\n

[3] Forch\u00e9\u2019s poem first appeared in her stellar collection The Country Between Us<\/em> (1981).\u00a0\u00a0 Here she reads it: https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=dXMbpFvCWMs<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 In introducing the poem, she notes two obscenities, 1) the four-letter word, that keeps her off the radio, and 2) the story itself\u2013which the US government does not apologize for, which she describes in the poem.\u00a0 Forch\u00e9 has become an important figure in documenting global atrocities.\u00a0\u00a0 See the anthology she edited, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (1993)<\/em><\/p>\n

[4] See for example the USHMM, \u201cHolocaust by Bullets\u201d https:\/\/www.ushmm.org\/online-calendar\/event\/VEFBBABIYAR0921<\/a> \u2013this event from 2021 has links to other connected histories. Note also the path-breaking history, also titled Holocaust by Bullets<\/em>(Macmillan 2009), Father Patrick Desbois, which explores the Nazi and collaborators\u2019 murder of 1.5 million Jews.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Page Delano, English Department (retired)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3579,"featured_media":1206,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"portfolio_post_id":0,"portfolio_citation":"","portfolio_annotation":"","openlab_post_visibility":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"post_folder":[],"coauthors":[12],"class_list":{"0":"post-608","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-fall-2022","8":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/inquirer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/inquirer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/inquirer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/inquirer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3579"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/inquirer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=608"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/inquirer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1207,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/inquirer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608\/revisions\/1207"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/inquirer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/inquirer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/inquirer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/inquirer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=608"},{"taxonomy":"post_folder","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/inquirer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_folder?post=608"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/inquirer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}