Protesting "Maus" by Dr. Linda Kornasky

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"Maus" is a Pulitzer-Prize winning comic book about the Holocaust that depicts Poles as pigs. "Maus" is often used to teach students about the Holocaust.

Dr. Linda Kornasky responded to a previous blog entry about "Maus." That blog entry is here.

I asked Dr. Kornasky to allow me to post a guest blog entry about her experiences protesting "Maus." Her essay is below.

Protesting "Maus"

By Dr. Linda Kornasky

At Angelo State University (a university in Texas affiliated with Texas Tech University), I organized a protest against Art Spiegelman prior to and during his visit in February 2011, and I published this editorial article in my city’s newspaper: "Writer Spiegelman No Stranger to Controversy."

I was astounded by the outcome of this protest on many levels, but I was shocked most of all at the general indifference among those I spoke to about ethnic bigotry if it happens to be anti-Polish. Prior to Spiegelman’s visit, when I made my case for the protest to my colleagues, I compared the Polish pigs in Maus to the controversial chimpanzee depictions of black characters in the Memin Pinguin comic books popular in Mexico. Though my colleagues admitted immediately that depicting black people as apes is unethical, I faced a passive aggressive refusal to respond to the similarly unethical Polish pig depictions from many otherwise progressive people on my campus.

Some implied tentatively that Spiegelman did not intend to critique the Poles as a group by depicting them as pigs because pigs in comic books and cartoons are often cute--selfish and stupid as well, but cute. (In 2001, Spiegelman himself offered this unpersuasive argument in “Pig Perplex,” published in Lingua Franca, July/August 2001, pp. 6-8, citing Warner Brothers’ Porky Pig.) However, Spiegelman's interview answers on my campus revealed that he did not intend his Polish pigs to be seen as cute or innocuous Porky-type pigs but rather as Nazi-collaborating, fascist pigs.

When Spiegelman was asked about the Polish pig controversy directly in a softball question from his interviewer, he initially said that the entire dispute was just a petty conflict that Harvey Pekar had started with him. He said that Pekar, a fellow graphic novelist of American Splendor fame, had objected to the depiction of Poles as pigs only because Pekar, who was of Polish Jewish heritage like Spiegelman, did not like that Spiegelman had taken over the position as the leading Jewish-American comic book writer. Ignoring all of the substantive criticisms that Pekar had made about the Polish pig depictions in his reviews of Maus in the The Comics Journal (see the December 1986 and April 1990 issues, pp. 54-57 and 27-34 respectively), Spiegelman clung to this ad hominem attack.

Next, during the interview Q & A when I asked him whether he thought it was possible that Poles and Polish Americans who were offended by his pig depictions might not necessarily be anti-Semitic, he angrily dismissed this idea, pronouncing it “silly.” Spiegelman told the audience that he had read a book that supposedly proved that the Poles in Nazi-occupied Poland were in favor of the Holocaust. He alleged that Poles objected only to having to sit back and watch while the Nazis carried out mass murder, referring to a diary written by a Polish man that, Spiegelman claimed, showed that most Poles resented not being able to carry out the Holocaust themselves.

Spiegelman then said he could not remember the author or the title of the book on which he based this slanderous claim, joking awkwardly that he has always accepted the fact that memory is imperfect. And he added that Polish objections to the pig depictions were, in his opinion, as stupid and politically suspect as a recent conservative Israeli cartoonist's objections to the Jewish mice depictions in Maus.

In response to his answer, I said that I personally could understand why his Israeli critics were offended by his using Hitler's rodent imagery in depicting Jewish victims of the Holocaust in Maus, as well as in some of his other graphic texts.

Since there were others in line waiting to ask their questions, I was not able to ask him the logical follow-up question: why would he need to rely on memory in making the claim about wartime Poles' alleged desire to carry out the Holocaust themselves? Anyone would presume that he would have had the citation written down in his lecture notes, given that he must have known there was a chance that he would want to refer to it in response to questions about the pig controversy.

Spiegelman made the audience uncomfortable when he was speaking about how stereotypical images function in graphic fiction and cartooning. On a big screen, he projected an image of a strong, handsome, athletic man next to an image of an unattractive, bespectacled, scrawny man. He asked the audience to identify the Nazi image and the Jewish image. When the audience, made up mostly of students, gave the obvious answers—sexy and handsome–stereotypically Nazi and unattractive and scrawny–stereotypically Jewish—Spiegelman joked pointedly that he had figured there would be plenty of anti-Semites in Texas.

The students laughed nervously, and he apparently thought that he had thereby cleverly "deconstructed" these stereotypes, just as he has claimed that in Maus, he supposedly "deconstructs" Hitler's statements about Jewish "rodents" and Polish "swine." Somehow, according to his simplistic notion of deconstruction, simply being able to recognize ethnic and racial stereotyping constitutes racism.

Moreover, Spiegelman also revealed that he despises the civil rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton for being, he alleged, a "race baiter," and this ironic remark was met with an awkward murmur in the lecture hall since he had already been asked questions about the degree to which his book reinforces ethnic stereotypes of Poles. When an African American woman asked Spiegelman to elaborate about his disrespect for Rev. Sharpton, he quipped defensively, “It’s nothing personal.”

This quip was particularly telling. Spiegelman’s underlying message during his visit to my university seemed to be that taking slander against a race or ethnic group personally is ridiculously unsophisticated and dim-witted. Those who do so should be accused of being obsessed with maintaining a supposedly inane and outdated ideal once known as “the truth.” As he sees it, this ideal is one which truly intellectual deconstructionists, among whom he clearly believes himself to figure prominently, have given up long ago. A protest objecting to the pig depiction was merely, as it were, a case of “squealing” about an allegedly meaningless concern of 20^th century history: assigning culpability for the Holocaust of nearly six million people.