School Board Bans Art Spiegelman’s ‘Maus’ Pulitzer-Winning Graphic Novel
A Tennessee school board barred schools from teaching a beloved graphic novel about the Holocaust in an unanimous vote the day before Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The move to ban Art Spiegelman’s Maus, first reported by The Tennessee Holler, is the latest in a wave of book banning sweeping the country, particularly school districts in conservative areas.
The McMinn County school board’s 10 members voted to axe Maus from curricula and school libraries, citing its use of the phrase “God Damn” and its drawings of “naked pictures,” though those are cartoon mice.
School members said the ban was not related to the book’s depiction of the Holocaust as it tells the story of author Spiegelman’s father in German concentration camps, with Jews depicted as mice and Nazis as cats. Serialized over nearly a decade, it was collected in a book that in 1992 became the first, and so far the only, graphic novel to win the Pulitzer Prize.
In 2015 Art Spiegelman has called Russian bookstores’ decision to stop selling copies of Maus – his Pulitzer prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust – the “harbinger of a dangerous thing”, as authorities move to remove Nazi insignia ahead of the 70th anniversary of the allied victory in the second world war.
Moscow’s major bookstores have withdrawn copies of Spiegelman’s book – which includes a Swastika on its cover – in an attempt to comply with a law banning Nazi propaganda. The 70th anniversary of Victory Day is 9 May.
“It’s a real shame because this is a book about memory,” Spiegelman told the Guardian. “We don’t want cultures to erase memory.”
Maus, which won a Pulitzer in 1992 and was published in Russian in 2013, is an anti-fascist narrative about the Holocaust told through the memories of his father, a Polish Jew who moved to the United States. The novel portrays Jews as mice and Germans as cats.
The book’s removal is apparently in response to a recent crackdown by Russian authorities on Nazi insignia. In December, Russia passed a law forbidding “Nazi propaganda”, and since then authorities have reportedly raided toy stores and antique shops believed to carry the paraphernalia.
