‘Maus’ Author Discusses Controversial Book
Art Spiegelman's graphic novel about the Holocaust has been banned in some school districts. He spoke at a recent Arlington Public Library event.
Graphic novelist Art Spiegelman recently capped off the Arlington Public Library’s “Get Graphic” author talk series. (Image courtesy of the Arlington Public Library)
Subversion is a natural part of comics, Art Spiegelman told a nearly packed auditorium at Kenmore Middle School on Sept. 21. But that was not his goal with Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, the 75-year-old cartoonist’s most famous and controversial work. In artful, stark and intentionally colorless lines, the Pulitzer Prize-winning book depicts Jews as mice and Germans and Poles as cats and pigs during the Holocaust.
And yet, “the book isn’t [a] document of the Holocaust,” said Spiegelman, whose Jewish parents lived in Poland during World War II. “It’s a document of me trying to understand what my father went through and trying to depict it as best I can. The book is really about what it is to receive and transmit history.”
Spiegelman’s author talk wrapped up the Arlington Public Library’s Arlington Reads: Get Graphic series, which in recent months also brought graphic novelists Alison Bechdel, Jerry Craft and Gene Luen Yang to the stage.
Donning a hat and puffing on a vape pen, the iconoclastic author recounted how his love of comics started when he was 4 (“they completely hijacked [my life]”), why his drawings have no signature style (“the story dictates what it should look like”) and how he embraces controversy (“I am willing to transgress and I’ve been doing it a lot for a long time”).
In the 1980s, Spiegelman was one of the inventors of Garbage Pail Kids, an irreverent but funny collection of trading cards (parodying Cabbage Patch Kids) that many schools banned.
Now, he’s become a poster boy for book banning, ever since a Tennessee county school board banned Maus from classrooms in 2022.
Book bans are happening nationwide. The number of public school book bans increased by 33% in the 2022-23 school year, compared to the 2021-22 year, according to an updated version of “Banned in the USA” that PEN America, a nonprofit dedicated to free expression, released Sept. 21.
Banned Books Week, established in 1982 to draw “national attention to the harms of censorship,” runs from Oct. 1-7 this year.
Art Spiegelman talks with Arlington Dept. of Human Services Director Anita Friedman (center) and Arlington Public Library Director Diane Kresh. (Photo by Stephanie Kanowitz)
Maus was not intended to be a book for children, Spiegelman told the audience. Rather, it was his way of processing his father’s experience in German-occupied Poland and eventual imprisonment at Auschwitz.
In 1972, after his father told him the story of burying an informer his cousin had killed for outing the family’s hiding place in Poland, Spiegelman penned a three-page version of Maus that ran in a single-issue anthology called Funny Animals.
“I realized I should ask my father more about this,” Spiegelman said. “When I was younger and I’d ask my father stuff, he said, ‘Nobody wants to hear such stories.’ He wouldn’t talk about it, but he’d wake up screaming about it.”
Father and son had a fraught relationship. Collaborating on what ultimately became a two-volume series—which took the younger Spiegelman 13 years to illustrate and write—was a way of connecting. His father died in 1982; Maus was published in book form in 1986.
“When I was thinking about doing this book, I didn’t want to make a beatified, saintly Holocaust survivor, which is the tendency—to say that they’re martyrs, they went through hell, and one has to forgive them and honor them for having gotten through it,” Spiegelman says. “To me, suffering does not make you better, folks. It makes you suffer….When I started working on this book, I just had to deal with him as he was, as I saw him.”
A universal aspect of the book is what Spiegelman calls “othering.”
“I heard years and years ago that Maus was being used in Inuit schools,” he said, “because they could identify with [the themes] even though it’s totally different than their situation. That’s at the heart of this thing. I think it’s why Maus got looked at carefully, and…I’m proud of that.”
In 1992, Spiegelman won a Pulitzer Prize for Maus. The Young Adult Library Association named the book one of its most recommended titles in 2009.
In 2020, the New York Public Library included the title on its list of the 125 most important books of the past 125 years.
A video recording of the author event is available for 30 days on Arlington Public Library’s YouTube page.
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