A minute into the event, the pre-determined limit of participants in this Zoom call had already been reached: five thousand people had tuned in from all over the world to listen to Art Spiegelman.

Those who wanted to join now - and there should be as many again in the end - were referred to the Facebook page of the host institution: The Jewish Federation of Greater Chattanooga.

How did Spiegelman, the self-confessed agnostic, come to a Jewish association?

And what does the man who leaves his beloved New York City as seldom as possible have to do with Chattanooga?

Andrew Plathaus

Responsible editor for literature and literary life.

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Well, the city with the sonorous name is the fourth largest in the American state of Tennessee, and in a neighboring small county called McMinn, Spiegelman's comic "Mouse" was removed from the school curriculum a month ago (FAZ February 1).

The outcry in the United States was great: the Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiographical comic about the fate of a Jewish family in the Shoah should no longer be used in eighth-grade history classes about the Holocaust because of the use of the swear word “bitch”?

Growing censorship pressure feared

Spiegelman himself saw this as a sign of the growing censorship pressures on educational books in the United States.

And that's why he was only too happy to accept the invitation of the Jewish Federation - especially since Christian and secular organizations also supported the event out of solidarity and it was a streamed conversation due to the pandemic, so that the comic author left his studio in SoHo could switch on.

Still, his upcoming "Tennessee Waltz" was making him sweat, Spiegelman had let it be known in advance, but when the now white-haired mid-70s appeared on screen, he was calm himself: backed by a crammed bookshelf (not a single comic book!

At first, Spiegelman reported, he thought the news from McMinn County was a joke.

But "Maus" has always been a source of misunderstandings for him.

When the comic was completed in 1992, it received the prestigious American Young Adults Fiction Award.

Spiegelman reported how upset he was at the time: He did not consider "Mouse" to be either fiction or a young adult book.

He was right about the former;

even the New York Times corrected its initial classification of the comic in the fiction bestseller list in favor of the non-fiction section.

But with regard to the assessment as a young adult book, Spiegelman then corrected his opinion when, in the following years, more and more schools, first in America and then worldwide, used “mouse” in their lessons.