Transcription, because it is worth reading:
Thereâs a phenomenon I actually see extremely commonly when literature is used to teach history to middle school and high school students. Letâs call it âpajamafication.â
So a school district nixed Maus from their curriculum, to be replaced by something more âage-appropriate.â IIRC they didnât cite a specific replacement title, but it will
probably be something like John Boyneâs âThe Boy in the Striped Pajamas.â
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is tailor-made for classroom use. Itâs taught at countless schools and itâs squeaky-clean of any of the parent-objectionable material you might find in Maus, Night, or any of the other first-person accounts of the Holocaust.
Itâs also a terrible way to teach the Holocaust.
Iâm not going to exhaustively enumerate the bookâs flawsâothers have done soâbut Iâll summarize the points that are common to this phenomenon in various contexts.
First, obviously, the context shift. Maus, Night, et al are narrated by actual Jews who were in concentration camps. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is narrated by a German boy. The Jewish perspective is completely eliminated.
Second, the emphasis on historical innocence. Bruno isnât antisemitic. He has no idea that anything bad is happening. He happily befriends a Jewish boy with absolutely no prejudice.
Thus weâre reassured that you too, gentle reader, are innocent. You too would have have a childlike lack of prejudice and you too would be such a sweet summer child that you would have no idea the place next door is a death camp.
In Maus, by contrast, the children are not innocent. They are perpetrators of injustice just like adults.
[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where children run away yelling âHelp! Mommy! A Jew!! - the next panel says âThe mothers always told so: âBe careful! A Jew will catch you to a bag and eat you!â âŠSo the taught to their children.â]
Maus also smashes the claim that people just didnât know what was going on in the camps.
[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where a Nazi truck is arriving at Auschwitz guarded by men with sticks and a pointing, growling dog, the boxes say âAnd we came here to the concentration camp Auschwitz. And we knew that from here we will not come out anymoreâŠâ âWe knew the stories that they will gas us and throw in the oves. This was 1944⊠we knew everything. And here we were.â]
Third, nonspecificity. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas turns a specific historical atrocity into a parable about all forms of bigotry and injustice. Iâm sure Boyne thinks heâs being very profound. But the actual effect is to blunt and erase the atrocity.
Thereâs the too-cute-by-half way it avoids terminology: âOff-With,â âthe Fury.â Harsh language becomes âHe said a nasty word.â
Notice how âitâs a fableâ ties in with the goal of eliminating anything parents might object to.
And thatâs our fourth point. Bad things can happen, but only abstractly. Someoneâs dad disappears. Heâs justâŠgone. How? Who knows. People stand around looking hungry and unhappy and saying âItâs not very nice in here.â
The ending is sad, but itâs sad like a Lifetime movie. Itâs sanitized, itâs quick, there are no details, itâs meant to poke that bit of your heart that loves crying.
Mausâs description of the gas chambers, meanwhileâŠ
[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where the process of gassing and then taking out the bodies are described in detail as inmates are working. That it took 3 to 30 minutes to gas people. That the largest pile of bodies was by the door. The worker telling the story mentions âWe pulled the bodies apart with hooks. Big piles, with the strongest on top, older ones and babies crushed below⊠often the skulls were smashedâŠâ âTheir fingers were broken from trying to climb up the walls⊠and sometimes their arms were wera as long as their bodies, pulled from the sockets.â Until the narrator says, âEnough!â âI didnât want to more to hear, but anyway he told me.â]
A historical atrocity can never be a metaphor for all bigotry because the specifics are what makes it an atrocity. The Nazis didnât just do âbad things, generally,â they did THESE things. And leaving out the details is simply historical erasure.
However much poor little Bruno and Schmuel might rend your heartstrings, you can ultimately retreat into the knowledge that they arenât real and they didnât really die.
Now, I write historical fiction, and obviously I believe it has a place, in the classroom and out. But no Holocaust education can be complete without nonfiction that teaches about real people who genuinely did experience it.
One of the striking things about Maus is how big the cast is and how few of them survived.
[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where one character describes to another many other people who didnât make it. Eventually covered over in lower panels by pictures of the dead.]
Because itâs a true story, Maus can also explore neglected aspects like the intergenerational trauma, which simply vanish in a pat fictional story that is just finished when you get to the end.
[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where the illustrator sits at the drawing desk above the pile of bodies. The artist says: âAt least fifteen foreing editions are coming out. Iâve got 4 serious offers to turn my book into a TV special or movie. (I donât wanna.) In May 1968 my mother killd herself. (She left no note.) Lateây Iâve been feeling depressed.â Someone calls from out of panel, âAlright Mr. Spiegelman⊠Weâre ready to shoot!âŠâ]
Thus, books like The Boy in the Striped Pajamas are not an age-appropriate equivalent way to teach the Holocaust, but a false construction of history.
This ends the first part of the thread. But thereâs moreâŠ
The Maus incident is not an isolated case. Itâs part of a broad trend of replacing the literature used to teach history with more kid-friendly, âappropriateâ alternatives.
And outside of the Holocaust, it usually doesnât meet with much controversy.
It might mean replacing Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave or Solomon Northupâs Twelve Years a
Slave with modern historical fiction, for example.
Wars, the Civil Rights movement, Apartheid: any âickyâ part of history can be a target.
But it plays out along the same general lines: Primary sources replaced with modern fiction, victim perspectives replaced with perpetrators, specificity replaced with Star-Bellied Sneetch-style âWhy canât we all just get along?â metaphors.
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