Thank you so very much for posting this.
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The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is a regular part of school curriculum now a days, as is Maus. There are also many books aimed at young audiences that might be used in education to teach the events of the Holocaust on a number of grade levels:
Your assumption that most people get their historical facts is pretty far off.
And yes, Primo Levi is ALWAYS relevant when discussing Holocaust education and understanding.
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Do you honestly think that a lot of comic book readers learned about Magneto being a Holocaust survivor and thought “golly, I guess the Nazis were right then” or “wow, I didn’t realize that the Holocaust turned all the Jews evil”?
Of course not. If anything, the takeaway for most readers was “sometimes people who do evil things were themselves traumatized by acts of evil, and they deserve some measure of our sympathy for that even as we recognize and respond to the harm created by their actions.”
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You mean people who read comics are capable of taking away complex messages!!! /s
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You essentially made my point. You’re finding offensive even my drawing a parallel for the sake of literary criticism. Imagine how others, then, may feel about Jewish trauma being used as a poor retcon to humanize a comic book villain. (And no, I’m not the only one I’ve heard raise this about Magneto.) Drawing parallels is sometimes the only rhetorical device that will reorient people so they are aware of their blind spot. Clearly, even that does not always work.
The “kapos exist” defense of it is nonsensical. When the only major Marvel character who has “Holocaust survivor” known as part of his backstory has also been written as trying to subjugate and mass-murder humans in a Nazi-like fashion, that’s not a balanced portrayal. It’s a problem.
Also, what I was describing was not self-hatred, so that seems to me something of a puzzling detour of a direction to take this in.
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Magneto’s first appearance was in 1963. I don’t think most kids even know the issues of comix being discussed. Their grandparents & parents, sure.
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Claremont himself is Jewish… he doesn’t get to decide the kind of stories he tells about his own culture and heritage…?
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Unlike Cap - Magneto wasn’t frozen in the ice with the super soldier serum preserving him. He’s at least in his 90’s & putting on the tights. It’s a bit ridiculous at this point to expect relevance for kids today. He’s like the civil war era to adults.
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The story line was introduced in the X-Men in the 1980s… which is about the time that many americans began to seriously think about the events of the Holocaust in a broader manner… In the 1960s, not many people were really talking about it in the states and it was over the next couple of decades that it started to be seriously introduced into curriculum in education, so it’s not surprising that by the 1980s many people would be looking to incorporate it into popular culture, too.
Also, I’m thinking of that movie from a few years ago, Black Book, about a young Jewish woman who joins the resistance in the Netherlands. The final scene of the film shows her in Israel, dressed in the traditional manner of Orthodox women, surrounded by scenes of chaos and violence in Israel in the early 1950s. The implication is that the violence she experienced as part of the resistance set her up to accept the violence that came along with forging a new nation in the Middle East for the Jewish people. Some might see it as a justification, but it can also be read as a criticism of Israelis who displaced others to found their new state.
Well, sure. Yet people still seem to enjoy the X-men… but I guess it’s why the more recent iteration of the films was moved back to the 60s…
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I often think of the X-Men as we know them as really starting with the Chris Claremont revival of the team, even though I know it’s wrong and that from the very beginning it was a metaphor for minorities (see the eternal discussion about how it and DC’s Doom Patrol came out at the same time).
What does make things more interesting is that the old attitude of thinking comics readers are 99% adolescent males with no knowledge of the history of a character has made it harder and harder to keep characters relatively young. Peter Parker can be rebooted every five years, but a character like Magneto has a fixed event in world history woven into his past. If they want to keep it, then they will have to retcon him into doing a Steve Rogers. I personally think it would be better to let characters age and die, but I am not in the business of selling comics.
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God, I hate these fake geek guys, who pretend they’re fans of comics or SF or whatever, but very obviously don’t know anything at all about the thing they’re supposedly fans of.
I’ve never, ever encountered even one “fake geek girl”, but these morons are all over the place.
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Magneto had his Steve Rogers moment in the '70s
It was, like, aliens or something?
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Also, history has pretty well proven that Magneto has always been in the right.
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X-Men #199 literally includes a scene at a meeting of Holocaust survivors, where Kitty Pryde meets a couple that knew her grandparents. Magneto is there, too. It’s a great story!
Also, regarding @Ankylosaur’s comment that:
Imagine how others, then, may feel about Jewish trauma being used as a poor retcon to humanize a comic book villain.
It’s worth noting that, while Claremont made Magneto a Holocaust survivor, he never explicitly said that Magneto was Jewish. It’s more heavily implied that he actually comes from a Roma background, as his dead wife was Roma. Magneto’s Jewishness was never canonical until the late 2000s Magneto Testament story. As I’ve shared here at BB before, the X-Men podcast Cerebro has a fantastic episode exploring Magneto’s Jewishness that doesn’t shy away from the complications, either.
As far as the Xorneto thing, that’s pretty widely accepted as one of the sloppiest retcons in Marvel Comics history, so there’s that. But Morrison’s motivation for writing that actually came from the same place as @anklyosaur’s argument: that Magneto spent his first ~18 years as a megalomaniac and it was dumb to retcon him as a sympathetic anti-hero, so let’s bring him back to his megalomaniacal roots.
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But they are fictional characters that are rather popular… no reason not to let new authors have their shot at the characters, I’d argue. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Black Panther has been excellent for example.
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The movie X-Men: First Class showed a flashback of young Erik participating in a menorah lighting ceremony with his mother though, so at least some versions of the character are explicitly Jewish.
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Yeah, I think, in the movies, his Jewishness was made clear even earlier. First or second movie as I recall.
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IIRC his family were wearing the yellow stars in that death camp but even if one was to argue that the Nazis might have lumped some Roma in with the Jews the flashback confirmed it.
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