455/Representations of the Holocaust/Response Paper #2, due APRIL 18, 2012
I actually stole this assignment from Professor Doris Bergen—full credit to her!!--because I can’t think of a better way for us to interact with MAUS, the world’s lone graphic novel/comic book Holocaust memoir…
Imagine that you are an intern at a small Holocaust museum in the state of Washington. The director has arranged to host an exhibit of drawings from Art Spiegelman’s MAUS along with a public lecture by the artist. The staff and volunteers are excited about the event, but some donors and members of the local community are not happy. Your supervisor has passed on three of their letters to you and asked you to draft an answer to one of them, the rest to be assigned to other interns. One letter is from a Polish American furious at the way Spiegelman depicts Poles. How dare the museum promote such negative stereotypes, she wants to know. She threatens to organize a protest outside the museum. Another letter is from a Jewish Holocaust survivor. He is angry at how Spiegelman portrays Jews during the war as mice and Holocaust survivors as neurotic basket cases. This is no way to remember and honor those who suffered so much under the Nazis, he asserts. The third letter is from a disappointed middle school teacher. She is teaching a unit on comparative genocide and she wanted to bring her students to the Holocaust museum. Now she is worried that if the students see the Holocaust turned into a comic strip, they’ll never take it seriously. She also doesn’t like the exclusive focus on Jewish suffering. Her school has very few Jewish students, so how are her students supposed to relate to MAUS?
Choose ONE of these letters and draft a reply. If you find yourself unable to defend the exhibit, write a memo to your supervisor instead, in which you explain your reasons.
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