Yes, Maus I: A Survivor's Tale Is Banned!

Maus is Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir of his father Vladek’s survival of the Holocaust, depicting Jews as mice, Nazis as cats, and Poles as pigs. It was the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize, in 1992. The book interweaves Vladek’s wartime experiences in Poland and Auschwitz with Spiegelman’s complicated present-day relationship with his father, creating one of the most powerful pieces of Holocaust literature ever produced.

In January 2022, the McMinn County School Board in Tennessee voted 10-0 to remove Maus from its 8th-grade curriculum, citing the use of the phrase “God Damn” and a brief drawing of a nude woman (depicted as a mouse). The vote made national headlines and briefly sent the book to #1 on Amazon’s bestseller list. Spiegelman called the decision “Orwellian.” The book has also faced challenges in Keller ISD in Texas and Spotsylvania County, Virginia, where school board members called for burning books pulled from libraries.

Why You Should Read This

Spiegelman drew his parents’ worst nightmares as cartoon animals, and somehow that made the horror more bearable to look at, not less real. The mice die in gas chambers. The mice are beaten, starved, and hunted. The form doesn’t protect you from any of it.

The McMinn County board said the profanity was the problem. Eight instances of “damn” in a book about Auschwitz. They found the language more objectionable than the genocide it described. That tells you everything about how book bans actually work: find a technicality, ignore the substance.

Maus is also a book about memory, about what survivors carry with them and what they pass to their children. Spiegelman’s relationship with his father is prickly, exhausting, and deeply human. The Holocaust didn’t make Vladek a saint. It made him a survivor, with all the scars that implies. That honesty is what makes this book irreplaceable.