We're still working on getting back up and running so in the meantime, here's an old bonus episode. This is our March 2022 discussion of Art Spiegelman's Maus, to go with our public episode from February 2022 about the McMinn County School Board in Tennessee removing the classic graphic novel about the Holocaust from the curriculum. Sadly, this is relevant again because yet another school board - this time in Nixa, Missouri - has targeted the book. It's not alone either. Nor is Maus the only classic Holocaust text being targeted. Ann Frank's diary is in the crosshairs of Mom's For Liberty. Maus Our episode about Maus and the McMinn County School Board Auschwitz in Contemporary Popular Literature by Dr Wanda Witek-Malicka Of Mice and Memory by Joshua Brown Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent. Patrons get exclusive access to one full extra episode a month. IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1 Links: https://idontspeakgerman.libsyn.com/103-maus-vs-mcminn-county-school-board https://www.msnbc.com/ali-velshi/tennessee-school-book-ban-robbing-students-history-rcna87531 https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/185844 https://www.jta.org/2023/06/14/united-states/a-missouri-school-district-could-ban-maus-citing-concerns-about-whether-it-is-explicit-sexual-material https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/article-746349 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/06/14/art-spiegelman-maus-book-bans/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/01/27/maus-removal-old-debate/ https://eu.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/books/2023/04/07/anne-frank-book-pulled-from-florida-library/11622644002/ https://www.businessinsider.com/moms-for-liberty-get-florida-school-to-ban-anne-franks-diary-adaption-2023-4?r=US&IR=T
I'm Jack Graham, he him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he him, who spent years tracking the far right in their safe In In this show we talk about them, and about the wider reactionary forces feeding them and feeding off them.
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
content warnings always apply.
Okay.
Okay.
All right.
Right.
So this is this is it.
This is the this is the episode.
This is the episode.
I'm doing it now.
Yeah.
And it's a bonus episode.
And this one's about... I think it's week 16.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
And I just thought of a awful joke that I'm not going to say.
And you can tell me when we're not recording.
That's probably the plan.
Yes, it definitely didn't involve Prince Andrew.
And yeah, this one's about mouse or mouse or however you want to say it.
It should be mouse, really, because it's the German word by Art Spiegelman, who's it's a graphic novel.
We got complaints about previous bonus episodes, you see, where we didn't explain properly what we were talking about, and so I'm at pains this time to explain it.
A complaint from a particular person, whose name may or may not be David Gerrard.
Friend of the podcast.
No, I wouldn't call him out except he's a dear friend, so it's fine.
We only call out our dear friends on this podcast for complaints about structure and anything else, you know?
It's like, oh yeah, David Girard had something negative to say about us.
Yes, write two brilliant books about cryptocurrency.
Be a very famous person doing, you know, yeah, yeah, sure, sure, sure.
Also, you know, yeah, He said something vaguely negative about the fact that we didn't introduce Ellie Confidential properly.
Be gone with you, David Gerrard.
That's my opinion.
Well, you know, I get the feeling David Gerrard's probably quite used to fielding criticism.
Yes, most likely so, because I sometimes end up in his mentions, and I see the kind of criticism he gets, and given the choice between having Nazis on me or Crypto Bros, I mean, I don't know.
It's a very different experience, let's just put it that way.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, you know, specifically criticism from people who are irrationally touchy about his criticisms of things they've done wrong as well.
I mean, that's his that's basically his entire life at this point, isn't it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So yeah, to be very professional about it, this is the episode in which we talk about Art Spiegelman's Mouse.
Mouse is a graphic novel.
You might have heard of it.
It's about Wow.
It tells the story not just of the author's parents' experiences in Europe during the Holocaust as Jewish people, but also of the process of its own production as a text.
It tells the story of Art Spiegelman himself, the author, and his interviews with his father, Interviews.
It's not that structured, really.
They're conversations that he sort of constantly tries to turn into interviews.
And, you know, the father is almost constantly trying to derail him to get his father's testimony.
And he becomes an increasingly unpleasant person as the series devolves or evolves.
Yeah, yeah, indeed.
It's an unsparing, it's an unsentimental portrayal of a, you know, of a difficult man for all that he went through, dreadful things in which he was completely the victim and completely not to blame.
He's nonetheless a difficult and complicated person and it doesn't shy away from that.
Because this is a story very much not, you know, it's not just about How awful it was for Jewish people during the Nazi persecution in Europe during World War II and just before and during the war.
But it's also about the process of living with that and remembering it and constructing it in the memory afterwards.
And it's about being the child of people like that and so on and so forth.
It's a very complicated text, which, of course, no child should be exposed to because it contains the word damn.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, and just something that I didn't even talk about because we did a full main series.
And mouse titties, of course.
That's the other thing.
Mouse titties.
Traumatizing.
We should hashtag mouse titties.
M-A-U-S titties.
Hashtag mouse titties.
Yeah.
We're already going to hell.
Anyway, one of the things that I meant to tag in the main series episode that we did about the McMinn County Board banning mouse from their curriculum.
Critically acclaimed episode.
Yeah, so much good feedback from that episode.
Overwhelmingly positive, but also some conversation around some of the issues that we brought up.
You know, we may we may respond to some of that in a future episode.
But one of the things that I completely forgot that just kind of like I didn't get to was the fact that at the end of the book, it has Vladek Spiegelman, you know, like claiming that a black man that his son Art has given a ride to is going to like steal all the stuff that they've gotten from the grocery store and is going to just be thieving.
And he uses And I apologize here, he uses the word schwarzes, you know, several times in like big block letters and schwarzes in so in is basically the, you know, the Hebrew word For the N-word.
It is not quite as aggressive as the N-word from what I understand in terms of its context, but very nearly so.
And yet, none of the people claiming, you know, talking about the horrible language being used in this text even mention that, which really speaks volumes in terms of the context of, you know, how many of these people really understood the text, even on a surface level.
Or, you know, Reddit or Reddit.
Yeah.
Despite how many of them claim to have read it, I think like very many of them and much of the conversation around it from Nazis, because since we recorded that episode, I have now kind of caught up to some of the Nazi conversation.
And I don't think anyone.
On the right wing side of this has actually read this book, you know, despite it being very easy to find on various torrent sites, etc.
Not that I would recommend that anyone do such a thing, but it is easily findable if you choose to do it that way.
So, you know.
Yeah, well, you know, surely, surely people on the right wouldn't talk with authority as if they knew something about a text that they hadn't actually read.
I mean, you know, it's not like somebody would claim to be an intellectual and an expert on Marxism and Hegelianism and the dialectic and stuff like that without, you know, clearly anybody with even a passing knowledge of these things, without even sort of brushing against any of the actual texts on this subject.
And they might write a book called Race Marxism.
This will come up in a future episode, I'm sure.
Yeah, but he's just kind of on my mind today.
But this episode is not about him.
No, not at all.
Not at all.
Yeah.
So it's James Lindsay we're talking about, in case you didn't realize.
It's clear now from David Girard that we need to explain everything.
So we need to explain the inside jokes.
That's how it goes.
So.
So, Jack, let's just let's let's get to the book.
When did you first read it?
And because I know that you and I had very different experiences of like our journey through this book, I think.
And you have a longer history with it.
So, you read it.
What was your experience originally?
Come tell the story.
Well, the book has a kind of a storied history through publication because it started out as a sort of insert strip in a comic.
And of course, by comic, what we're talking about is an American underground comic.
It's a three-page strip in 1972.
Yeah, in the 70s, in an underground comic called Roar.
And this was kind of in the, I suppose, kind of the aftermath of the heyday, because the heyday of the underground comic was really sort of the late 60s, early 70s, you know, Robert Crumb and stuff like that.
And so this is still kind of the heyday, but it's the latter end of the heyday of the American underground comic.
And in Roar, I believe it was called, Yeah, this insert comic strip called Mouse by Spiegelman, which is actually quite different.
It's quite similar in some ways and quite different to the eventual comic.
The art style is more detailed and the Nazi cats are much, much bigger than they end up in the finished product, etc.
It's kind of like his first go at it, you know.
And then he, as I say, he sort of gives it another pass and you end up with the material that ends up being what was published as MAUS Volume 1, which is kind of like the, it's basically the first half of the complete story.
Right.
And I do think there's a distinct difference if we're talking about the artistic merit.
I think Mouse One and Mouse Two have like, there's a very, you can see the evolution of the artist through these two books.
And I almost think it's not even worth considering the books together almost, although I think we're going to end up doing that.
But like really looking at it critically, I think Mouse One and Mouse Two are very different texts, you know, but yeah.
Well, this is one of the interesting things about the book that we might end up talking about, which is the fact that the book kind of contains ruminations on its own writing, because the second volume is written after the publication of the first volume.
I mean, not just because it was an ongoing comic strip, but also because I believe the volume one was actually published in book form before volume two was finished, before the material was finished.
So Mouse was serialized between 1980 and 1991 in RAW.
And then it was published as a book in 1986, right?
So it was serialized between 1980 and 1991 as the full thing.
But the first six chapters that make up Mouse One were published in 1986 as a full book, and that got critical acclaim All over the place within the indie comics world.
That's the same year that Watchmen came out, which gives you some kind of context of this is the era of comics becoming an adult form sort of thing.
And so it rides that wave to a certain degree.
Yeah, it's a very important liminal work of art, because it's not just its success, but the process of its creation as an entire text coincides with the process whereby the
The greater artistic complexity that was to be found in parts of the underground comics revolution, not the entire thing, but in parts of the underground comics revolution of the 60s and 70s, began to find its way into the more mainstream comics.
So you have things like the Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen and so on appearing.
And that's partly as a result of the influence of the very milieu that Maus comes out of and then feeds back into.
Yeah.
So the first volume gets published in 1986, and then he continues to publish the, you know, the individual chapters, as I understand, until 1991.
And then the whole book kind of gets released in 1992, and then it wins the Pulitzer.
So that's the, you know, that's the kind of, and so we think of like Maus as like a continual, like one volume.
You know, like one book today, but like for 13 years, it would have been seen as like this kind of continuing thing that was happening in the pages of this like magazine with a kind of major touchstone in 1986 when the first volume was released.
And I think the bulk of the second volume is written in response to some of the response to the critical response to the first volume.
And I think that's I think that's an important inflection point in terms of kind of understanding the text.
Very much so, because the second volume contains ruminations on the first volume, the critical response to the first volume, and how he feels about the process of writing it, and his problems with continuing past volume one.
There are brutally self-confrontational images like him Like a pile of corpses, you know, underneath him and the book, the success of the first book, he depicts himself as being successful on top of this pile of the murdered Jews of Europe, you know.
And this might be, you know, cognizant later, he Trace himself as a human being wearing a mouse mask, which is a visual metaphor from both the first and the second books do this.
But, you know, when you are faking something, you know, so when at one point, Vladek Spiegelman is faking being a pole and speaking to another Polish Jew, and they're both wearing mouse masks, despite the fact that the Polish Jew is wearing that or they're wearing pingmas, which is the the The signifier of the pole, you know, so, yeah, no, the question of the mask and the way the mask is used in the text is fascinating.
Like, we could talk for an hour just about that, right?
But I think it is useful that both Spiegelman, you know, is wearing that in that moment in which, like, at the end of the panel, at the end of the page, you see him, like, Sitting on top, you know, a pile of corpses, but also his therapist, a few pages later.
He's also a Holocaust survivor, a Jewish Holocaust survivor.
Absolutely.
And they're both wearing the masks.
Yeah.
I mean, I think we're definitely going to get because, you know, One of the things I should have said, since we're explaining everything, is that this is the comic where the Jews are portrayed as mice, and the Nazis are portrayed as cats.
Well, it's actually the Germans that are portrayed as cats, and the French are frogs, and the Poles are pigs, and Americans are dogs, and things like that.
All the way through, that is sort of the conceit of the comic.
It's very famous for that, and there's all sorts of interesting complexities there.
So, yeah, I mean, one of the things I was going to say was that the one of the hackneyed things that is said about this is that it's, you know, it's very postmodern in that sort of folk sense.
You know, folk postmodernism is all about, you know, fourth wall breaking texts and texts that are aware of their own status as texts.
Well, you know, I have serious issues with this not to get off on a tangent, but that's something that's something that modernism did.
I mean, that's not postmodernism.
That's fucking modernism.
And actually, it goes, I mean, texts have always done this.
And one of the things about Maus, you mentioned about the way that it was an ongoing process for people reading it as it was created.
Well, in many ways, it has things in common with the 19th century mass readership novel.
You know, stuff like Dickens and Victor Hugo and people like that wrote their huge doorstop novels over years, and they were published serially.
And they would do, To an extent, anyway, they would do stuff like you see in Maus, where they would respond to things that readers had said about the ongoing novel.
This is not a new thing, necessarily, but that is a bit of a digression.
What I was getting at was that Maus is published incrementally.
And in pieces, and I didn't read it myself to answer the question you initially asked about my history with the book.
I didn't read it until that was all over.
The process was all over and the whole thing had been published together in one volume.
It was round about the time, I suppose it would have been round about the time it won the Pulitzer Prize, because it won the Pulitzer Prize in 91, I think, 1991.
92 or 93, something like that, yeah.
Okay, so it was a year or so after it was first compiled and published as one volume.
And I suppose it was probably just in the news, it was probably just part of the conversation at the time, you know, the early 90s, it was one of those things.
And I read it then, so I would have been in my late teens when I read it.
The best time to visit this kind of material, you know, as a disaffected teen.
I mean that both in the best and worst ways, just to be clear.
It's funny, I've talked about this on another show, but it's kind of the best of times and the worst of times, because you do kind of get that moment when your interest in consuming texts explodes.
You know, you get to that moment in your mid-teens.
Early to mid-teens for most of us, where you suddenly become aware that there's this gigantic world of texts that are culturally significant and so on.
And you have that moment of takeoff where you just want to read everything and watch every important film and read every important book and so on.
And it's a wonderful few years where you're just reading everything and watching everything.
But the problem with it is that things kind of rush by you.
And particularly, of course, you are still very young.
So they rush by you at a time when you're not No disrespect to our younger listeners, not perhaps as equipped to to process them as you might be later on with.
I mean, it's you know, it's part of the process of gaining that ability, isn't it?
Yeah.
I mean, I can imagine I read Slaughterhouse-Five when I was about that age.
And that like book was it became like it still is one of the like it's not my favorite Vonnegut now, but it really like it's hard to describe.
A book that hit me harder around that time, and I feel like Mouse might have been that text for me had I, you know, been given it at that, like, time, right?
Because I think the pleasures, you know, some of the complexities are similar, you know, there's similar texts in some ways.
I'm sure I'm the very first person to ever make that comment on these two texts, but, you know, but also, like, Huck Finn was something that I didn't really Understand, despite the fact that I read it twice, both in grade school and high school, I didn't really get it until I was in my late 20s, honestly.
I reread it and was like, oh no, now I understand what it was going for.
But you need some perspective on these books sometimes.
And so yeah, no, I totally get that.
Yeah, it's kind of a Catch-22 to name another book that I think probably played that same role for a lot of people.
And certainly, certainly it's not the book for me.
But Catch-22 was a book that I read when I was about that age.
I suppose I would have been about 17 when I read Catch-22.
And certainly, you know, it's one of those books that does, if you're a certain sort of person, it does make a huge impression.
And yet, of course, you're reading it at a period when you're not Perhaps as equipped as you need to be to fully grasp it.
But as I say, it's a Catch-22 situation because the process of becoming fully able to appreciate, you know, I probably flatter myself, but you know, You know, assuming that I do fully appreciate it.
But the process of developing those sorts of faculties involves consuming loads of stuff before you have them, if you know what I mean.
Right, yeah, sure.
You don't really get what Catch-22 is doing unless you've read a whole lot of other stuff to go with it, you know.
And I think some of the criticism, and not to lend any kind of rhetorical weight to the bullshit that happened in McMinn County, obviously, but I think some of the Some of the conversation around like, when do you introduce certain books to people is, you know, it's hard to introduce Maus to 13 year olds and give them like any kind of like real context for it.
Even if you make it as part of a unit, like it's still kind of like, it's hard to imagine getting it Without, you know, kind of already having at least kind of a baseline understanding of, like, a whole lot of stuff that's just outside of the bounds of what a 13-year-old is going to be experiencing, which is because it is a very adult book.
And I don't mean that in a, you know, purient way.
I mean that in a, it is about, like, being an adult and coming to terms with, like, your father being kind of an asshole, sort of.
Like, much of the book is about that, you know, as opposed to about, like, the Holocaust, you know, ultimately.
So, Yeah, these texts have complexities, and the way that we view them matters.
And you do have to start somewhere.
I mean, you can't say, you know, we can't get them to read Maus because first we have to make sure that they fully get Animal Farm and they're fully conversant with the, you know, American 60s and 70s underground comic scene.
So, you know, you have to start somewhere.
So, you know, you're 17 and you read Catch-22, you maybe don't fully get it, but And then, you know, you go on and you read Erewhon by Samuel Butler and you read Vonnegut and you reread Gulliver's Travels and so on.
And you start, OK, OK, OK, I get, you know, and it's a, well, I hesitate to say, but it's a dialectical process.
It's often a question of rereading and kind of coming back to things later and sort of getting the stuff that you don't miss, because I think one thing that gets missed in sort of the You know, again, the purient conversation is that, like, kids just kind of gleam over anything that they don't understand because they're used to reading these, like, big, you know, old books that they don't understand.
And so they just sort of, like, get what they get out of it.
And you just hope they get the right things out of it, you know, and then hopefully they come back to it later, which, again, I did with Huckleberry Finn.
So, you know, like it's and which, again, was taught to me twice, and I got very little out of it.
Until I came back to it as an adult, which is, again, kind of an interesting phenomenon.
But I mean, that plays into what I was leading up to, which is that, you know, I read this in the early 90s after the process of its ongoing creation was finished.
And it was kind of like a finished thing.
It had been completed.
It was published in one volume.
It had won the prize, etc.
It was a bona fide cultural Touchstone or whatever you want to say.
So I suppose that's probably why I read it.
And I didn't like it.
I was however old I was, like 18 or whatever.
I did not like it.
And it's difficult, actually, for me to quite remember why.
It might just have been pure contrarianism, I suppose.
It's not impossible.
You were a contrarian when you were 18 years old?
Pshaw, my friend, do not believe you.
But yeah, I think what it might have been in retrospect is that I was at the stage where I was starting to question The things that have been very formative to me, and one of the things that have been very formative for me had been science fiction, and you know, maybe not the highest brow science fiction either.
So I was at that stage where I was realizing things like, oh, like alien races in the science fiction I like, They're often, you know, it's about something else, you know.
And I'm starting to realize about things like race essentialism and Orientalism in textual depictions, et cetera, and about how, you know, the discourse of scientific racism found its way into science fiction and fantasy in a sort of coded form, you know.
And I think, I mean, it's a criticism that actually quite a few people have leveled at the book.
And it's essentially the criticism of the basic premise, which is that, you know, you depict the Jewish people as mice, you depict the German people as cats, etc.
And I think what I probably felt at the time was that the book was inadvertently, but quite damagingly, partaking of a discourse that reinforced race essentialism through that sort of Representation of humans is separated into fundamentally different races.
Because one of the things with that sort of science fiction planet of the hats, you know, where you go to the planet Zarg and everybody has the same personality, you know, like Vulcans are all logical, etc.
You know, dialects are all evil.
It's a way in which science fiction talks metaphorically about things like race and racism and nationalism and war and so on and so forth.
But it is based upon a literalization of that idea.
It's based upon the idea that these different groups are fundamentally Biologically, essentially different in some way.
And I think my problem with the text at the time was probably that I thought it was doing that.
Admittedly, I'm sure I understood that it wasn't meaning to do that.
But I think I felt, as I say, several critics of the book have felt that what it's doing accidentally is it's actually reproducing the essentially The essentially racist worldview that the Nazis propagated, you know?
I mean, so personally, I disagree with that.
I disagree with that perspective.
I do now, but at the time, I think that's probably what I thought.
Sure.
I'm not disagreeing with you.
I want to just kind of lay this out.
My perspective now is like, I disagree with that perspective in terms of Maus.
I think Maus is, Playing with some of those ideas.
And I think it's using this metaphor in a way that is powerful.
But I think that Spiegelman, certainly by the second volume, he seems to very much understand that he is playing with this metaphor that is problematic and that he has kind of lended himself to that.
But ultimately, He's using it as a metaphor.
He's using it as a way of getting at some kind of essential truth without necessarily leaning into that like Star Trekification of this, right?
That's my perspective.
I think Spiegelman is smart.
I think the book knows better than to do that.
And I think that's a bad read of the text.
That said, I think there are very bright people who Do you think that's a valid read or, you know, a very good read or a, you know, sort of the best read of the text?
And it's hard for me to argue with that because ultimately we're talking about like kind of a liminal, you know, kind of criticism, right?
Because ultimately it's like, well, there are a few panels in the second book That seemed to suggest if you read it this way, it is not actually doing that thing.
And like, it's very easy to but it's very easy to kind of look at the overall thing and kind of go, yeah, it is.
It is kind of doing a kind of race essentialism thing.
So I do get that criticism and I just want to kind of highlight that here, although personally, I disagree with that.
And hopefully we'll get into at least a little bit of that.
Yeah, I mean, The book is... Spiegelman has said, you know, that the idea is to show the inanity of the very idea that I suppose at the time I thought he was replicating.
And the metaphor is designed to break down.
And when you actually really pay attention to the text, it's...
It is really not replicating any sort of race essentialism because the fascinating thing, I mean, it plays around with masks, as we've already pointed out.
It is possible for one of the quote-unquote mice to don a pig mask and pass as a pig, you know, among the quote-unquote poles.
Later sections have, you know, Art Spiegelman talking to his psychiatrist, who is also a Jewish Holocaust survivor, and they're both wearing mouse masks.
And that makes it very clear to me that the faces, the animal heads, the animal faces, are really meant to be taken As masks all the way through, as roles that are played by different people.
But the fact that they're not always depicted as masks, you know, with string going around the back.
I mean, if you did it that way, you would be underselling the extent to which race is a lived and biological reality for people.
Race, of course, is not actually a biological reality in a scientific sense.
Modern science tells us that that's just not a thing.
There's more genetic variation within so-called racial groups than between them.
So, you know, race science, gone instantly, just crap the whole thing.
But even so, it is in a social sense, it is a biological reality, particularly when you're dealing with something like Nazi antisemitism, which is a biological form of racism, a form of modern biological racism.
It's distinct from the anti-Semitism of the past, where like Shylock at the end of the play, you can just stop being a Jew.
I mean, admittedly, he's forced to, but it's like, you know, you could convert, you know, and the Jews under Nazi rule couldn't do that.
You could renounce your Jewish religion.
You were still a Jew as far as they were concerned, because as far as they were concerned, it was biological.
So it was part of your body.
Of course, it wasn't in actual scientific or genetic terms.
In reality, it wasn't.
But as far as your social reality was concerned, it was a part of your body.
So, if you have the animal masks as just masks all the way through, then you're kind of underselling that, aren't you?
Because anybody could just take... This is it.
It's a mask.
You can put a mask on, but you can't take off the mask that has been put on you.
Right.
I think that's really it.
And I think there are two, just to do this right now, I think there are two moments in Mouse 2 which are really important in terms of Spiegelman commenting on this issue.
And the first is, there's an extended, I think it's a page and a half or two pages or so, in which Spiegelman, Art Spiegelman in the text, the character Art Spiegelman is talking to his then and current wife, I think then girlfriend, now wife, Francois, who is French.
And he's talking about like, how am I, how am I going to depict you in the book?
Right.
And so this is, again, part of that kind of postmodern, you know, kind of idea, you know, in terms of the text commenting on itself.
And, You know, the conversation is, well, you know, I'm French.
And so it's a, well, you know, well, I'm a Jew.
You should, I should be a mouse, obviously.
And in the text, she is depicted as a mouse, right?
But in the character, Art Spiegelman, in the text is saying, well, no, I should depict you as a frog because you are, you're, you're French.
And, oh, I know I will depict you as a frog.
And then when you convert, To Judaism, I will suddenly you'll be transformed into a mouse, you know, which is deeply, deeply, you know, like it's that is that is for me, like the key of Spiegelman, like understanding the deeply problematic nature of this metaphor and like sharing it with his audience to a degree, sharing it with the reader and saying, yeah, I know this is complicated.
I know this is problematic.
I'm literally talking about a conversation I had with my wife about how to depict her in this.
And you know what I did?
I depicted her as a mouse this whole time.
And she's never a frog, at least as I saw reading the book, anywhere in the text.
And so I think Spiegelman is aware of these issues, at least by volume two.
The second is a moment in Auschwitz when There is a German, there is a man, a man in the camp who is a Jew, who is a... Jesus Christ, I sound like an asshole!
A Jewish person in the camps who is being tortured by the Germans, obviously.
Yeah, you were talking and I just realized that earlier I was talking about Jews and Germans as if they were mutually exclusive, whereas of course, Well, which I think, God, it's funny how this conversation just lends itself to that, right?
And I think that the text The text, maybe that metaphor lends itself towards this conversation, towards that kind of framing of things, you know?
But like, certainly in the context of 1930s Germany, there was no distinct, you know, you are a German or you are a Jew.
Those are two completely distinct categories, you know?
And that's what, that's kind of what we land on.
And so, You know, please anyone, sorry, you know, again, so far into this episode, forgive us for, you know, slight misstatements or, you know, kind of whatever in these kind of contexts.
It's not that we're trying to, you know, to lean into any kind of essentialism here.
We're just trying to have a conversation with the text as it exists, right?
You know, but there's a moment in which There is a Jewish person being tortured in the camps who, you know, falls out of line and says, no, I'm not a Jew.
I'm a German.
And then you get a panel of the same guy in the same frame.
And suddenly he's not a mouse, but a cat, you know.
And then the next panel, they're like beating his head with a truncheon and putting him back in line.
And the question is asked, well, was he a German or was he a Jew?
And it's like, Nobody ever knew.
Yeah, you know, and so I, again, like that's my that's my kind of go to.
It's like Spiegelman is aware of these issues, at least by volume two.
And this is his way of addressing it.
And if you think that's inadequate, I'm willing to have that conversation.
But I think it I think it at least demonstrates that this is not kind of the like easy Star Trek criticism that we might believe, you know.
Hmm.
No, I think that now, yeah.
When you look at the text, it's very complicated, and it's self-complicating, and it's deliberately self-complicating, and I think it's doing it deliberately.
It creates a sort of scrambling effect, and I think that's deliberate, because I think what it's trying to do by working within a schema like this, it's trying to show you... I mean, Spiegelman said this himself, he was trying to show the inanity of the concept of race.
By trying to impose this schema on his depiction, he's actually managing to scramble things to the point where they become incoherent.
But they become meaningfully and intelligibly incoherent.
I mean, the incoherence is stated coherently, if that's coherent.
One of the things that is criticized by some is the fact that Americans are all portrayed as dogs, you know, black and white.
Well, I mean, that's deliberate.
That's the point.
That is the point, isn't it?
That is highlighting the fact that, you know, Americans is not, it cannot be an essential category.
It just cannot be any more than actually, in reality, can Jew or German.
That also feels very European perspective.
It's like Americans are all dogs.
Sorry.
As an American, it does strike me.
We're just big, slobbery animals that are going to come and kill the cats, kill the Nazis.
But also, we're just going to shit all over the place and leave mud everywhere.
I do love that depiction, personally.
Yeah.
No, that's us.
You got us.
You got us.
We're good.
Yeah.
This is the sort of thing that, you know, I think gave me pause back in the day when I was a callow 17 year old or whatever I was.
And I think it has given other people pause because, you know, there is a kind of yikes factor to reading this book where every Polish person is depicted as a pig and every French person is depicted as a frog.
In a way, that's almost more sort of...
Than the mice as Jews thing, because, you know, the mouse is not an inherently sort of pejorative.
It doesn't have inherently pejorative connotations, you know, although it does carry all sorts of connotations to do with weakness and being prey of predators.
Well, there are two.
Which, of course, is part of what he's playing with.
Fly Like a Spiegelman literally compares, like, there are two cartoonists I know, my son and Walt Disney.
Which, you know, the mouse comparison seems really overt at that point.
To put that in your book is to say, you are Walt Disney and therefore all Jews are mice.
You know, like Mickey Mouse is, I don't know, there's some weird metaphor going on there that feels very like I'm my father's son to me, you know?
And I have not, like, been able to unpack that.
The other thing is, you know, is Hans Landa and the Glorious Bastards doing the, you know, A German looks for the Jew in certain places in the conversation about the mouse, and they hide under the floorboards, which feels very built upon a mouse.
That scene obviously was written flung after a mouse, but I guarantee you Tarantino read this book, and that was inspired, at least in part, by big chunks of this book are about how Jews would hide, and that feels very overt to me.
Yeah, I'm sure.
And the book, I'm sure you deliberately evoke, the book is evoking some of the most iconic, you know, pop culture texts of American culture.
You know, it's evoking Mickey Mouse, it's evoking Tom and Jerry with its animal imagery, its prey and predator imagery and stuff like that.
And one of the things, When I first realized from reading somebody or other writing about this, you know, that Mickey Mouse is partly constructed from minstrel tropes, minstrel stereotypes.
Oh, yeah, definitely.
Definitely.
You know, that's the white gloves of nothing else.
Well, yeah, it's very, yeah, yeah.
That's a bomb going off in the brain moment, and I'm sure it did retroactively affect how I saw Maus, you know, because it does cast things in a different light.
When you have people objecting to like, well, all Americans are dogs.
Well, this sort of animal imagery as a way of talking about race, I don't know if you've ever seen it, but there's a semiotically fascinating American television show from a few years ago.
I think it's finished now, called Grimm.
Do you know Grimm at all?
I do, yeah.
I haven't seen it, but I know it, yeah.
About the fairytales, right?
Yeah, yeah, it's based on it's based on.
Well, it's not.
It's not.
It's based on the semiotic value of fairy tales filtered through what mid 2000s CBS television or whatever.
It's either CBS or ABC required for their audience.
Yeah.
But yeah, I've seen the premise.
I think my wife.
So I've seen a little bit of it.
But yeah, go ahead.
I was into it for a couple of seasons.
It was kind of fun.
It had some nice characters, but the premise of it is that sort of, I think it's meant to be the entire world really, but of course the entire thing takes place in America.
As is right and proper, my friend.
That is the way things are, you know.
The premise of it is that a certain percentage of the population of the world are actually kind of not really human, but are actually kind of anthropomorphic or humanoid animals.
And they look like humans most of the time.
But certain people, somebody who is a grim, can see them, can sort of see through the disguise and see the sort of the animal underneath, you know, the animal face of the were-person.
And then they fight crime.
And then they fight crime.
Exactly.
I mean, that is the show.
That is the show.
But, you know, because, of course, the hero is a cop, as is obligatory.
But the There's all these different sort of varieties of these animal people walking around.
There's like mice people and wolf people and the show is just so...
Incredibly about race in America.
I mean, I know everything is in America, but to talk about semiotically dense.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You can't get away from, I mean, even things that don't talk about race in US pop culture are ultimately about race, even by its absence, you know, like it's always there.
You know, I do love one of the one of the things of like, you know, people talking about, like, why does it have to be about race all the time?
It's like because it is just always we live in America.
Like, fuck you.
It is just about race all the time.
Like, there's just no getting around that.
Yeah, it just is.
Yeah.
As I say, Mickey Mouse partly constructed from minstrel stereotypes.
You go to, you know, Tom and Jerry, you have the The black sort of mammy character, you only see her legs, etc.
It's fucking everywhere.
And The Mouse begins by playing on this basic idea of the comic book animal, the anthropomorphized animal as the comic book protagonist.
And the basic story of prey and predator, the chase narrative.
And it is deliberately crashing those things into, you know, a story about the Holocaust, and very consciously about race.
And not just race in terms of, you know, the Jewish experience during the Nazi Holocaust in Europe, but also the subsequent experience of the Jewish survivors in the United States, and of course, the second generation, their children.
Right.
And I think that's the ultimate thing that this book is about, right, ultimately.
And this is, again, not an original observation.
In fact, a very, but all observation is, you know, the book is ultimately not about the Holocaust.
It's not even about Vladek's experience in the Holocaust, but about growing up in the aftermath of that and growing up as a Jew in the aftermath of that in the United States and having
A complicated relationship with one's father who went through this terrible experience and then kind of understanding, you know, kind of coming to terms with, you know, your asshole father and, you know, the gravity of his experiences and your place in the world in the aftermath of that, I think.
And it doesn't come to neat conclusions.
I think that, you know, and in fact, in the book, in Mouse 2, You know, people ask him, you know, Speakerman says, you know, people ask me, like, what's the what's the message of your book?
And it's like, I don't know, I was just trying to tell the story of my father.
And I was trying to tell the story, you know, like, like, you know, there's no, there's no message here.
And I think that that's the thing that Gets under people's skin with the book to a degree, is that it doesn't come to some pat conclusion.
It's hard for me to say what is the message that comes out of Mouse, as opposed to Slaughterhouse-Five, which I think is a book that deserves placement alongside it.
But I think there is an overall message that comes out of Slaughterhouse-Five, which not a difficult message, but people are assholes.
I think Slaughterhouse-Five comes to a very clear decision.
The Milk of Human Kindness just works through all of Vonnegut's works, and I've read a bunch of Vonnegut.
no matter how like satirically gets, no matter how like absurd it gets or, you know, whatever, like it really is about like, people are mean to other people and that's bad.
And that's kind of Vonnegut's point.
And, you know, again, not to like put too heavy a foot on that, but like, yeah, that's a good message.
Yeah, I agree.
The Holocaust is bad because people are mean.
You know, like, obviously there's a lot more going on in Slaughterhouse-Five than that, but I think that's kind of what Vonnegut is going to get in a lot of his text.
But Maus doesn't even do that.
Maus is very Ambivalent about, like, what its overall message is, and I think it's just trying to portray a reality in a way, which I think is powerful.
I think it's powerful in its own way, saying, this is my dad, and he's an asshole, and he went through horrifying things that, like, I could never live through, and I feel complicated about the fact that I don't think I could have lived through that, you know?
And I think that that's a, you know, Fight Club is kind of about that, you know, our fathers went through, you know, wars and all the etc, etc, etc.
And like, we, you know, live here and we get we wear skinny jeans, you know, I feel like there is that that kind of always, yeah, no, I don't know.
It's complicated.
It's complicated.
It's kind of what I'm saying.
But I think there is no clear message that comes out of it in terms of, you You know, there's never like a pen in anything in terms of like what Speaker One is getting at.
And I think that's what makes you want to kind of keep rereading the book.
Yeah, sure.
I mean, what what message do you want in a book about this subject?
I mean, you know, it was wrong.
What message?
I mean, we can surely we can take that as read, can't we?
I mean, you know.
Yeah.
Well, well, and I think that's the thing, again, not to not to get back to our previous episode, but like, I feel like the There is this very like kind of Gentile perspective, you know, and I am myself a Gentile.
There is this very, you know, Christian, you see a lot of like commentary about the Holocaust, which is, Very generic is like, well, you know, should you lie to the authorities and if you are hiding Jews under your floorboards?
And this being like a complicated moral question.
And the answer is obviously like, yes, yes.
If the secret police come to your house, yes, lie.
Lying to them is much better.
But this is like a complicated moral question in like, you know, Christian Like evangelical culture, like this is something that comes up all the time, you know, if you are, you know, kind of doing this stuff, because like the Holocaust is not like a thing that happened to a particular group of people at a particular group, you know, at a particular time.
It is not like a process that happened.
And I want to come back to that before we end this, but it's not a, It's not a process of historical events, but like this gets sanitized into this like moral question, into this ethical issue is to, you know, where are you in terms of your own like moral rectitude?
And the reality is, if we look at Vladek Spiegelman's story, even taking that story as granted in the text, which I think the text gives you ample reason to think that Vladek is either exaggerating or You know, he is an unreliable narrator, which anyone would be 40 years after this event, right?
I mean, I think it specifically undermines his account in various ways.
I mean, the first volume ends with his admission to his son that he burned his wife's diaries after she killed herself.
And the second one literally like he's like trying to lay out like his his time frame at Auschwitz and you know art is trying to like lay it out and like write it down and say so you are here this time you were there this time etc etc and then the the times don't match up like you said you were 10 months but you've got 12 months worth of experience you know like so you know like the the text is you know challenging
One of the things that the book does is it deliberately problematizes this.
It problematizes the idea of memory, history as memory, history as constructed.
It's a book that's notoriously hard to categorize.
Is this fiction or non-fiction?
I mean, obviously it's fiction in the sense that it's about cats, mice, But if you call it fiction, then you're skirting with Holocaust denial, etc.
But again, it's doing this deliberately because all history is, without wishing to sound like I'm straying into Holocaust denial, which of course I'm not, but all history is to a certain extent fiction because it is kind of the attempt to recover through hugely imperfect means some sort of essential truth about what happened in the past and get us Get as close as you can.
But a huge amount of what we know, and we do know that it happened obviously, but a huge amount of what we know comes from the memories of people who are fallible, and memory is just inherently unreliable.
Whatever you think of Vladek, one way or the other, that is, you know, his memory problems are the sort of things that happen to everybody.
Absolutely.
And again, it's quite an incendiary thing, certainly now that the book does, which is that it does problematize, you know, the moral status and the memory status of survivors.
I mean, there is, in sectors anyway, there is this kind of unfortunate need to constantly portray the survivors as, you know, sort of morally perfect and admirable, which does them a disservice because there's no Onus on people to be particularly moral or noble or brave or good or have particularly good memories even, you know, to be rightfully called the victims of a horrific crime.
And plenty of people who were assholes were the victims of the Nazis, and that's bad as much as it is that good people were.
You don't have to be a saint for it to be bad for you to have been victimized by the Nazis and plenty of, like, truly terrible human beings.
Were murdered in Nazi death.
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah.
And people are not at their best in situations like that.
You know, it does not bring out suffering, does not bring out the best in people.
Well, and the and the trauma, the trauma, you know, from that, like down the line does not manifest itself in certain ways.
And I think I think the book at least at least could be interpreted as like some of what Vladek is going through is Is those years of want and suffering, you know, have just imprinted themselves on him.
Although, it is also a sedition in the text that like, you know, he's also just an asshole.
He's kind of a dick from the beginning to me.
Yeah.
I mean, Vladek is, let's just be clear, Vladek is not a good person.
He is not someone that I would ever have wanted to meet in my life.
And being his son would have been an excruciatingly terrible experience, you know?
And I can say that and also say, like, he should not have been subjected to the Holocaust.
And yeah, it turns out shades of gray, not shades of gray, in the slightest.
One of the problems, the ostensible problems that the McMinn County School Board had with the book was that it depicts premarital sex.
Well, the problem, I'm assuming they were talking about the section in the early part of Volume 1 where he talks about his girlfriend before he meets and marries Anya.
Well, I mean, the problem, you know, the objectionable thing there, firstly, you know, you don't take the book off the curriculum because of any of this.
But, you know, the thing that's upsetting about that isn't the premarital sex, it's the fact that he leads this woman on and then, you know, he gets the chance to marry a rich girl from a rich family and he just dumps her, you know, despite the fact that she's, you know, because of the world that they lived in, her social position is now compromised by the fact that she's no longer a virgin and she's been having an affair.
And isn't there the implication that he was sleeping with the hot girl and then, like, he married the rich girl who was kind of homely?
Am I misremembering those details?
But, you know, yeah.
I think he actually specifically says to Vanya, you know, she wasn't very good looking, but she had money.
She had money and we chatted and suddenly we were the best of friends.
Well, it's almost like a business.
It's almost like a business setup between her family and him, isn't it?
You know, you marry the girl, you get the factory.
There you go.
Take her off our hands and we pay you with a franchise.
You know, when you talk about it like this, it sounds like it's straying into stereotype, but that finds its way into the book.
And even that.
The character of Art in the book even talks about the fact that sometimes his father acts like an anti-Semitic stereotype.
In the first volume at that, just to be clear, not even in the second volume, in the first volume, it's noted that, you know, Art Spiegelman in the text is saying, like, I can't actually do this.
I can't write this because my father sounds like an anti-Semitic stereotype, you know, which, yeah, yeah.
Guess what the boys at the Daily Show I had to say about this banning?
Yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada.
Anyway, yeah.
We don't have to get into that.
Maybe we'll do it as a future episode.
Mouse 3.
What did the show?
Mouse 3, yeah.
Anyway.
Oh yeah, I'm sure I'll be edifying for everybody.
Mouse 3, the mousening.
One of the things we were talking about before was, you know, the sort of the meaning of the text.
And I just think there's kind of an inherent, you know, the Holocaust is just this gigantic, you know, this rent sort of in human history.
You know, it's such a vast abyss and kind of every attempt to sort of impose any sort of meaning on it.
I mean, I don't mean that it's meaningless, but any sort of, you know, we're going to do a story about this and we're going to have it mean this.
It just seems pat to me.
I mean, sure, one day we will talk about the movie Schindler's List, and that is a movie that I'm afraid I have huge problems with.
And it is bad.
It's bad.
Like that's like I feel like I feel like we're going to do an episode one day and it's going to be eight seconds long and we're just going to go Schindler's List.
It's bad.
Yeah, it's also bad.
That was IDSG bonus 17.
Congratulations.
Well, not to do it before we do it, but it is kind of this attempt to impose this very sort of nice, you know, salutary pat and very bourgeois moral on the... I mean, you were talking about the Gentile perspective.
I mean, I know Steven Spielberg is a Jewish man, but...
In some ways, it corresponds to what you were talking about, that kind of, I mean, this has been remarked upon, but it's about, you know, it's not a story about the catastrophic failure and what was done to the Jewish people.
It's about, you know, the heroic success of a Gentile businessman and stuff like that.
And, you know, that's just kind of inherently obnoxious.
But I think on a sort of even deeper level... The story of the Holocaust is about the 6 million people who died and the story you should not list is about the 6,000 people who didn't.
And whereas Maus does something much better than that, I think, and I think this is kind of what you find in the better literature about this, you know, like Primo Levi and the better stuff is not about trying to make it make sense, you know, because it's never going to make sense.
It is about asking the question.
That is the great service that you can do.
If you can do anything, then the service you can do to the dead is to just deal honestly with the complexity of it.
Deal honestly with the size of the wound, I think.
Well, and you run into, God, this is complicated, but you run into this concept of, like,
We're looking at this like huge thing in history, this wound of, and late in the text, it's something that you and I have previously discussed when we weren't off mic, obviously on mic because we don't live together, but like off podcast, you and I were talking about there's a great sequence in which at the end of the, near the end of the text, Where it's just like, and here's the list of all the people who died.
You know, here's, you know, cousin, so-and-so, uncle, so-and-so, my father, my uncle, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Yeah, that blizzard of photographs.
Just a blizzard of photographs, a blizzard of, you know, like, and this is this.
And that's like the lived reality for, you know, Art Spiegelman kind of coming out of this.
He was born in 1948.
So Spiegelman grew up in this aftermath and You know, people didn't talk about this for years and years and years and it wasn't until like the early 60s until, you know, you started to see, you know, the, you know, the documentaries and the, you know, the kind of TV miniseries and people really like having a conversation because like,
You come away from the war, you go home, you just want to build your family, you want to find everybody, and you just mourn.
But like every Jewish person of that era has, like every family tree, trimmed branches from that, right?
You know?
And I actually want to, something I want to do in this episode, and I apologize for this, but is to kind of call myself out for this.
And it's very easy for me in talking about these issues and like covering Holocaust now, which we do on this podcast, because it's essential.
There's no way to talk about, you know, neo-Nazis in the United States without talking about the Holocaust and the Holocaust denial.
And it's very easy to sort of, like, get into that, like, mind frame of, like, talking about the gas chambers and the evidence for the gas chambers.
And, you know, like, here's why we know there's Prussian blue and here's why, you know, and yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada.
All the technical stuff, but that's not necessary, except to argue with the worst people in the world, right?
And yes, part of what we do here is to argue with the worst people in the world, but I will call myself out for having to do that and choosing to do that.
As a Gentile, that's not my place, obviously, to be in that place, but also, You know, all you have to do is listen to.
I don't know that I agree with that, but I'll yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I mean, sorry, it gets complicated in terms of for me in my headspace is like I'm always like trying to like.
Do the, you know, A plus B plus C times X equals such and such, right?
To find like the logic behind it and to argue with the Holocaust denier logic.
Even when I know that that logic doesn't exist, there is no logic behind it.
The logic is lies.
It's fundamentally lies.
And I can expose the lies by understanding the logic.
So there's a value there, right?
But, um, Ultimately, the real story, the real evidence, yes.
The truncated trees that we see in those sections of Maos, right?
You know, and the fact that the Holocaust is a process, right?
It is something, and this is something that is very clearly indicated in Maos, that I am proud to have talked about in many places on this podcast, you know, which, you know, the Holocaust United wants you to think about The mechanics of gas chambers that want you to think about, you know, like, you know, how many pellets it took to do this and what the diagrams are of this.
And they don't want you to talk about all the stuff that led up to that, right?
All the, you know, the Nuremberg Laws, the You know, the process that led to ghettoization that led to, you know, murders in the streets that led to, you know, the work camps, etc, etc, etc, etc.
They agree with all of that.
That's all the stuff they agree with.
It's just that last step, the darkest step, the step that is, In the, um, that has the least documentation that they can argue with, that they can quibble with.
That's the thing they want to argue with.
Right.
But mouse is about that whole process, you know, like the first volume is powerful because, I mean, at least in part, because it ends with.
You know, Vladek Spiegelman ending up in Auschwitz.
It does, you know, and the second volume is still not even really about Auschwitz.
It's about like kind of that that whole process.
Right.
You know, although it is it is about kind of the the Auschwitz process.
But he obviously was not sent to a gas chamber because anyone sent to a gas chamber died, you know, and didn't get to write their memoirs, you know.
And so, like, there is this there is this power to the text.
In that sense, in the sense that it is challenging that idea, the simplistic idea, the kind of, you know, the superficial concept of what the Holocaust is, is gas chambers.
And I don't think that that's something that... I think that's something that gets put into people's heads very easily, because that's the...
Big, you know, drop-down thing about the Holocaust.
But that comes down to a failure of real Holocaust education.
And that's part of why dropping Maus from the curriculum in McMean County, Tennessee is so terrible, because Maus actually does tell the story.
It tells the story through the eyes of a person Who lived through it, you know, and I think that there is a power in telling the narrative of this huge, complicated historical event through the eyes of an individual who, flawed as he may be, was there on the ground.
And as much as his perspective is biased towards his own feelings, It's valid.
It's worth listening to.
You know, it is not history by itself, but it is a narrative and there's a power in that.
And I feel like that's something that that kind of gets overlooked in terms of like thinking about the Holocaust, I think.
And I don't know, maybe maybe I'm coming across as an asshole or whatever, but, you know, that that's that that really hit me reading this book for the first time, you know.
Mm hmm.
Yeah, and it's something that's extremely important to remind people about because you hear it all the time, don't you?
You know, it's not fascism or it's not something to worry about because they're not... We heard it all the way through the Trump era, you know, when they were trying to institute the Muslim ban, when they were instituting the draconian laws, separating children from their parents and putting people in the cages at the border.
All the way through, every vile thing they did, there was always a contingent of people coming back with Well, you say this is fascism, you say this is this and the other.
You're not going to be rounded up by the Gestapo for saying that on Twitter.
And as many people pointed out, it doesn't begin with the worst thing.
The Nazis didn't begin with Auschwitz.
They got there.
They got to Auschwitz and Treblinka over the course of nearly More than a decade, you know, and that's an astonishingly short amount of time, actually, between, you know, the Nazi takeover of the German government and Treblinka, you know, the actions of millions of people.
I mean, we're talking like seven, eight years between, you know, the Nazi party taking power and the opening of the first death camps.
Yeah, and the entire thing from, yeah, the entire thing from their accession to power to the, you know, the surrender in Berlin, it was 12 years, you know, it was That's an astonishingly short period of time.
But the point is that they got there a bit at a time, bit at a time, bit at a time, incremental.
You know, it's the old boiling frog thing.
What you said just then about, you know, the Nazis concentrate on trying to discredit the historical reality and our understanding of the historical reality of Auschwitz and the gas chambers and so on, because it's the big, it's kind of the big sticky out bit, you know, that people have heard about because it's the big dramatic Horrific.
And it is, you know, it is one of the horrors of human history.
But, you know, they need to discredit that.
But all the other stuff like the racial segregation laws and stuff, they will go to bat for that.
They think that's defensible.
They think that's good.
They think that the way it ended up with the mass murders in the gas chambers is kind of what they need to deny.
Because if they can get rid of that, then they can You know, the rest of it's up for grabs.
You might be able to argue people around to that, if the horrors of the Holocaust aren't there, attributable, you know, on their balance sheet.
Well, just recently I was reading about the family that runs Hobby Lobby.
Which, of course, is one of the businesses that was defended by the brave Boogaloo boys and so on, who were worried about Black Lives Matter, you know, and so on and so forth.
But I tweeted something that was said by David Green, the CEO of Hobby Lobby.
And it was basically just the prosperity doctrine, you know, I'm rich because God wants me to be.
And somebody came back to me with a clip of the current CEO of Hobby Lobby, whose name is Steve Green.
I'm sure that's just a coincidence.
A president, I should say, of Hobby Lobby, who apparently he made a speech at this person's college in 2019, it's on my Twitter timeline, in which he said, you know, if it hadn't been for the Holocaust, then you can't say Hitler was wrong.
That's what he said in this clip.
But everything else, you know, like the racial segregation laws and banning the unions.
The Holocaust is like a big concept, you know, it's a little bit like saying, like, well, you know, if it weren't for colonialism, you know, what would the Americans do?
They were fine.
It's like, well, let's let's unpack that a little bit.
You know, clearly, you know, it's like, well, you know, well, if all Hitler did was, you know, give his corporate crony buddies the state control over industry and take control of everything and You know, but didn't like murder all the Jews and the Roma people, etc, etc, etc.
You're like, everything is fine.
But like, obviously, God, this is so complicated.
I need to watch that clip.
Clearly, this is probably a whole episode of that.
So let's let's just let's just pin that for now.
Just reminded me.
That's all I wasn't meaning to get us into a big, complicated discussion.
I haven't seen that clip.
So I need to I need to I need to check it out.
One of the things I wanted to get onto was, I've been very impressed with an article that I read.
It was published in 2020, towards the end of 2020, by somebody called Dr. Wanda Witek-Malika, who is one of the people that's at the Auschwitz Memorial.
And she wrote, we're not going to talk about this now, I'm going to be very quick, but she wrote an excellent, I think it was an excellent article about what she called camp literature, which is kind of this rash of, you know, essentially novels masquerading as sort of historical books.
One of the things that Jack and I have been talking about for a while is talking about like Holocaust literature in general.
Yeah.
And sort of the empty, sort of the saccharine nature of it.
And I think one of the things that Maus demonstrates is that you don't, you can tell a story of this and not be saccharine.
One of the things I was thinking about is like, well, what does a good Holocaust narrative look like, right?
You know, what, what does, what is, what is the best, you know, version of this?
And the answer is like, there, there isn't, there isn't, you know, there's no way to really tell the story of the Holocaust in a book, you know.
It's certainly a fictionalized account.
I think there are some non-fiction books that do this very well.
Not least, The Case for Auschwitz is amazing.
We'll put some other things in the show notes.
You know, the saccharine nature of so much of like kind of Holocaust discourse.
I mean, honestly, it benefits the Nazis.
It makes it into like kind of a Hollywood story.
And I think that Maus stands in opposition to all of that.
You know, it stands as a story about the complexities.
Yeah.
That's exactly what I was going to say, because yeah, I'm not going to get into this now.
Hopefully we will talk about this another time, but there's this rash of sort of, you know, paperback bestsellers, and they've all got like striped covers that look like the uniforms prisoners are supposed to wear, and they're all called the something of Auschwitz, you know, and they're This article of Dr. Vitek Malik is really great, not just because she clearly disapproves of the books, but she writes in very measured and careful language.
And she actually goes through the, you know, in technical material terms, the problems with them in terms of their representation.
Again, not going to go into it now, but she does a section about how the books are terrible just on the geography of the camps, on the geography of Auschwitz, on its spatial organization.
And this is kind of a thing for me, because people do not understand Auschwitz physically.
They do not understand that it was vast, that it was a complex of camps, that it was like a city, basically.
It was like a small city, you know, etc, etc.
It was like a world unto itself.
It had streets, it had, you know, People don't get it.
People do not get it.
But anyway, she goes into how these books just make shit up, basically.
They don't know.
They assume stuff based on the fact that Auschwitz has now become a genre.
You know, our culture has turned the Holocaust and Auschwitz into this genre of storytelling.
So you can write about Auschwitz the same way – she doesn't say this, this is me saying this – the same way writers write about, you know, their Middle Earth knockoffs, you know.
Anyway, I just wanted to compare it to a bit from an article written by Joshua Brown in 1988.
So this is while Mouse is in this process of being written that we talked about at the start.
Joshua Brown's article, which was originally published in Oral History Review in spring 1988, it's called Of Mice and Memory, and he interviews Spiegelman.
And Spiegelman talks, I'm going to quote Spiegelman here just to end off the episode.
The stuff in the camps that I'm working on now is very, very difficult because I just can't get a clear sense of movement through Auschwitz.
None of the accounts are sufficient to let me feel that.
Unquote Spiegelman.
This is now Brown talking.
Not knowing presents Spiegelman as a cartoonist with several choices in representation.
How much is the artist willing to invent to fill out the incomplete record?
When parts of the past are closed in silence, how can the artist lend visual coherence to the images without producing pictures that merely provide an illusion of knowledge?
Quoting Spiegelman again, I'm proceeding very, very carefully, unquote Spiegelman.
Spiegelman answered, quote Spiegelman, and it means that in some places here I'm even more circumspect than I was before in terms of showing something, unless I need to show it.
I try not to speculate on what might be happening in the background, unquote Spiegelman.
And that to me, I think that illustrates something about this book, which is that, yeah, I mean, it's a story about cartoon cats and mice, but the level of conscientiousness there on display.
He's got to tell a part of the story which takes place in a tin workshop in Auschwitz and he's treading incredibly careful just on how he represents it in simple black and white line drawings in which the parts are played by anthropomorphised animals.
No, no, because he's aware of these complexities and he doesn't want to be misleading.
That is a real contrast to me.
You know, when I when I read that in preparation for this episode and the last mainline episode we did, it immediately reminded me of that bit from Dr. Vitek Malik's essay.
And it kind of it kind of, you know, kind of slapped me around the head because what a fucking contrast.
Yeah.
I mean, imagine Imagine trying to, like, there's a long segment of, you know, the text, which is, you know, Vladek talking about, like, he's relining boots.
He's, like, repairing boots as, like, so to gain favor among the guards so that he gets, like, enough food to survive for the next day, ultimately.
The text is very, you know, kind of about, like, his own feelings about, you know, like, how, or at least Spiegelman's art, Spiegelman's feelings about, you know, kind of what that means, etc, etc, etc.
But imagine, like, having to think, like, how would An inmate at Auschwitz repaired boots in 1943 in Auschwitz.
What techniques would he have?
What tools would he have?
How would you repair those boots?
What do those boots look like?
There's a technical detail to this that Spiegelman is obviously very interested in.
Just to just to be able to portray that means something, you know, it is a complicated problem that speak of in itself.
And that's part of why this this book took 13 years to write, despite that, despite some of its, you know, kind of, you know, inherent simplicity, you know, as a narrative, you know, every panel has that kind of detail built into it, you know, ultimately.
Sure.
But it's that acceptance of the complexity and the difficulty and the way it confronts you with it, I think, isn't it?
That's the ultimate difference.
For me, anyway.
For sure.
For sure.
Because it's very easy to tell the Pat story of the Hulk.
Yes.
And we love to.
Our culture loves that Pat story.
Well, and that's what, you know, again, talking about our mainline episode, you know, that's part of what, you know, Somebody says in that meeting, I love teaching the Holocaust.
Sorry, let me do the voice again.
This wasn't the same guy, but this is somebody else, but it's still worth doing it, right?
You know, I love teaching the Holocaust.
And the reason they love teaching the Holocaust is because they turn it into like a Christian Redemption story.
I met a guard, you know, I was in the camps and then we were released and then 20 years later I met the guard and I introduced him to Christianity and he was saved and isn't that great, you know, and that's the kind of narrative that you get.
It's very happy.
It's very pat.
It's very like a thing.
You don't have to think further than that, because ultimately, this was all created by guards being horrible.
And if they had been Christian, they would have been fine.
But ultimately, it doesn't get at the systemic problem.
It doesn't get at any of the things that actually created the conditions of the Holocaust.
That's bad.
I don't know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's bad.
Directly directly aids the people that are going to do it again if they get a chance.
Which which they will and are are they are currently doing it.
To be clear.
Yeah.
It's currently in process.
We are trying to combat that with doing this little podcast.
So, give us money.
That was I Don't Speak German.
Thanks for listening.
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