[image description: a Twitter thread by Gwen C. Katz (@ gwenckatz) reading, “There's a phenomenon I actually see extremely commonly when literature is used to teach history to middle school and high school students. Let's call it ‘pajamafication.’
So a school district nixed Maus from their curriculum, to be replaced by something more ‘age-appropriate.’ IIRC they didn't cite a specific replacement title, but it will probably be something like John Boyne's ‘The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.’
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is tailor-made for classroom use. It's taught at countless schools and it's 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.
It's also a terrible way to teach the Holocaust. I'm not going to exhaustively enumerate the book's flaws--others have done so--but I'll 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 isn't antisemitic. He has no idea that anything bad is happening. He happily befriends a Jewish boy with absolutely no prejudice.
Thus we're 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.”
Image 1: An excerpt from ‘Maus.’ Polish gentiles are depicted as anthropomorphic pigs, while Jewish people are depicted as mice. Children are seen running from the Jewish Vladek, screaming, “Help! Mommy! A Jew!! A Jew!” Vladek narrates, “They ran screaming home. Quick, the mothers came outside to see what was! The mothers always told so: ‘Be careful! A Jew will catch you to a bag and eat you!’ …So they taught to their children.”
Vladek approaches the suspicious mothers wearing a pig shaped mask and saying, “Heil Hitler.” He narrates, “I approached over to them…if I ran away, they would see: ‘Yes, it is a Jew here.’”
Vladek says to the children, “Don’t be afraid, little ones. I’m not a Jew. I won’t hurt you.”
One of the mothers, assuaged, says, “Sorry, mister. You know how kids are…Heil Hitler.”
The tweet continues: “Maus also smashes the claim that people just didn't know what was going on in the camps.”
Image 2: An illustration from “Maus” of the entrance to Auschwitz. It has a large gate with a truck with a swastika on it driving in, and nazi officers with batons milling about. They are depicted as cats. There is also a gentile prisoner in striped uniform walking by a truck, as well as a vicious looking dog. Vladek’s narration reads, “And we came here to the concentration camp Auschwitz. And we knew that from here we will not come out anymore. We knew the stories—that they will gas us and throw us in the ovens. This was 1944…we knew everything. And here we were.”
The tweet continues: “Third, nonspecificity. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas turns a specific historical atrocity into a parable about all forms of bigotry and injustice. I'm sure Boyne thinks he's being very profound. But the actual effect is to blunt and erase the atrocity.
There's the too-cute-by-half way it avoids terminology: ‘Off-With,’ ‘the Fury.’ Harsh language becomes ‘He said a nasty word.’ Notice how ‘it's a fable’ ties in with the goal of eliminating anything parents might object to.
And that's our fourth point. Bad things can happen, but only abstractly. Someone's dad disappears. He's just……gone. How? Who knows. People stand around looking hungry and unhappy and saying ‘It's not very nice in here.’
The ending is sad, but it's sad like a Lifetime movie. It's sanitized, it's quick, there are no details, it's meant to poke that bit of your heart that loves crying. Maus's description of the gas chambers, meanwhile…”
Image 3: Four panels from “Maus” describing the gas chambers. The first panel depicts a line of shower heads and has narration reading, “And everybody crowded inside into the shower room, the door closed hermetic, and the lights turned dark. Zyklon B, a pesticide, dropped into hollow columns. It was between 3 and thirty minutes—it depended how much gas they put—but soon nobody was anymore alive.” On a panel of a door, narration reads, “The biggest pile of bodies lay right next to the door where they tried to get out.”
In the third panel, Vladek carries a large pipe with the help of another Jewish man. He narrates, “This guy who worked there, he told me, ‘We pulled the bodies apart with hooks. Big piles, with the strongest on top, older ones and babies crushed below…often the skulls were smashed…’” The man continues in the last panel, “Their fingers were broken from trying to climb up the walls…and sometimes their arms were as long as their bodies, pulled from the sockets.” Vladek says, “Enough!” His narration reads, “I didn’t want more to hear, but anyway he told me.”
The tweet continues: “A historical atrocity can never be a metaphor for all bigotry because the specifics are what makes it an atrocity. The Nazis didn't just do ‘bad things, generally,’ they did THESE things. And leaving out the details is simply historical erasure.
Finally, fifth: Fiction. However much poor little Bruno and Schmuel might rend your heartstrings, you can ultimately retreat into the knowledge that they aren't real and they didn't 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.”
Image 4: A page of “Maus” in which Vladek shows his son, the author, photos of their family. The top of the page is cut off. He says, “…then the Germans took the factory from Anja’s family. (Cut off) …money and she left him and he killed himself. The middle brother, Levek, he ran with his wife to Russia when the war came, but when he saw how it was there, he wanted to run back. Those who ran to Russia, they put to Siberia as traitors, but to smuggle back over the borders cost a fortune.”
“I sent some money… In ‘38, when I needed cash to my factory, he gave. So now I helped him come back to his wife’s family…to Warsaw. In Warsaw, you know how it was. If they stayed only in Russia, they still now could maybe be alive. Anja’s parents, the grandparents, her big sister Tosha, little Bibi and our Richieu…all what is left, it’s the photos.”
The tweet continues: “Because it's 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.”
Image 5: A panel from “Maus” in which the author, Art Spiegelman, is depicted as a human wearing a mouse mask. He has his arms folded and hunches over his desk in anguish, while he is surrounded by a pile of emaciated corpses with flies buzzing around. He says, “At least fifteen foreign editions are coming out. I’ve gotten four serious offers to turn my book into a T.V. special or movie. (I don’t wanna.) In May 1968 my mother killed herself. (She left no note.) Lately I’ve been feeling depressed.” A voice offscreen says, “Alright, Mr. Spiegelman…we’re ready to shoot!…”
The tweet continues: “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 there's more…
The Maus incident is not an isolated case. It's part of a broad trend of replacing the literature used to teach history with more kid-friendly, ‘appropriate’ alternatives. And outside of the Holocaust, it usually doesn't meet with much controversy.
It might mean replacing Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave or Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave with modern historical fiction, for example. Wars, the Civil Rights movement, Apartheid: any ‘icky’ 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 ‘Why can't we all just get along?’ metaphors.” End id]
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