crunchbuttsteak:
[Image descriptions in order: a twitter thread by @/gwenckatz “Gwen C. Katz” which says “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.
"Maus, by contrast, the children are not innocent. They are perpetrators of injustice just like adults.” Attached is a photo of a page from Maus. It says “they ran screaming home.” Atop a comic panel. The panel shows two German boys, drawn as pigs, running away from the narrator—Maus’ father—a Jew drawn as a rat wearing a pig mask. The kids are yelling “Help! Mommy! A Jew!!” And “A Jew!” At the bottom of the panel, it says “Quick, the mothers came outside to see what was!” The panel beside it shows Maus’ father in the modern day, narrating “The mothers always told so: "be careful! A Jew will catch you to a bag and eat you!” … so they taught to their children.“ The third panel in the row says at the top "I approached over to them…” The panel shows the rat in the pig mask approaching three adult pigs, each with a young pig boy. The rat says “heil hitler.” The caption at the bottom says “if i ran away they would see: "yes, it is a Jew here.”“.
You can see the top of the two panels beneath it, where Maus’ father is bending down to greet the German boys, saying "Don’t be afraid, little ones. I’m not a Jew. I won’t hurt you.” The next panel shows the adult pigs, the German mothers, waving and chuckling apologetically to the rat in the mask, saying “Sorry, mister. You know how kids are… heil hitler.”]
[Returning to the thread: “Maus also smashes the claim that people just didn’t know what was going on in the camps.” Attached is another photo of a page, showing a panel where a transport train with a swastika on one of the cars on the left side of the panel. There are three armed guards and one guard dog looking threatening, and two prisoners. One at the far left, barely in frame, being threatened into the transport car. The other at the side of the transport car holding a suitcase.
The caption at the top left corner says “And we came here to the concentration camp Auschwitz, and we knew that from here we will not come out anymore..”. The caption at the bottom right says “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.”
Continuing with the twitter thread: “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…” Attached is a photo of four panels. The first says at the top “and everybody crowded inside into the shower room, the door closed hermetic, and the lights turned dark.” The panel shows a drawing of the gas chambers, which look like a large, communal shower room. A caption points to a spot on the roof, saying “Zyklon B, a pesticide, dropped into hollow columns.” The caption at the bottom says “it was between 3 and 30 minutes- it depended how much gas they put- but soon was nobody anymore alive.”
The second panel shows the outside of a door to one of the shower rooms. It is grey, with one small square window in the top and a simple handle. The caption at the bottom says “the biggest pile of bodies lay right next to the door where they tried to get out.”
The third panel has the text at the top “this guy who worked there, he told me…”
Beneath is a drawing of Maus’ father lifting a large pipe with another prisoner. The prisoner is saying “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 next panel shows them carrying the pipe together, the unnamed prisoner at the back, Maus’ father at the front. The prisoner continues “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.” Maus'father turns his dead back angrily to shout, “ENOUGH!” The caption at the bottom says “I didn’t want more to hear, but anyway he told me.”
The thread 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.” Attached is a photo of a page from Maus. The first panel is slightly out of frame, showing Maus listening to his father saying “…clubs. then the germans took away the factory from Anja’s family.” The second panel is also slightly out of frame, with Maus’ father saying “…money and she left him and he killed himself.” To the right of Maus’ father, is a photo of two Jews, with a bullet hole through where the head of the left one would be. The next panel is Maus’ father showing Maus more photos. He is saying “the middle brother, Levek, he ran with his wife to Russia when the ware came, but when he saw how it was there, he wanted to run back.”
Maus’ father continues in the next panel “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 the centre of the page is a drawing of a photo of Levek, a haunted looking rat.
Maus’ father continues “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 bottom of the page is full of drawings of photos of all the people who died.]
[The twitter thread 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.”
Attached is a photo of a panel of Maus slumped over his desk, flies flying around him and emaciated bodies of the Jewish victims piled at his feet. The caption at the top says “At least fifteen foreign editions are coming out. I’ve gotten 4 serious offers to turn my book into a TV. Special or movie. (I don’t wanna-)
In May 1968 my mother killed herself (She left no note.)
Lately I’ve been feeling depressed.”
There is a speech bubble coming from off screen, which says “Alright Mr. Spiegelman We’re ready to shoot!..”
The twitter thread 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]
