Political battles over book are heating up in Missouri. This seems to be the right time to ban books like 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Slaughterhouse Five. Will Fahrenheit 451 be banned too? Why is it missing?
The Missouri law on banning books was enacted in August. Missouri law 775 sets the guidelines, starting on page 51. The law prohibits books with visual representations of sexual activity a.k.a. pornography. It is a very specific definition.
Legislators visual representations only (not “art” or “anthropological”). They lost the CRT battle and needed something like this in law. They avoided the battle over the written word and content, just pictures. Graphic novels took the hit. Teachers and any school adult can be charged for distributing a censored book.
The conservative strategy is get the door open for book banning and then it will swing wide open to written word and content this year.
Below are four articles – St. Louis Post Dispatch (with lists) and KC Star
Of course, there were no guidelines from the State.
KIRKWOOD — About 15 parents and students spoke out Monday against the Kirkwood School District’s recent book bans, including a comic book adaptation of George Orwell’s “1984,” the cautionary tale about government mind control.
At least 114 book bans have been enacted in schools across St. Louis this fall in response to a new state law prohibiting “explicit sexual material” — defined as any visual depiction of sex acts or genitalia, with exceptions for artistic or scientific significance — provided to students in public or private schools.
‘Handmaid’s Tale,’ ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’: KC area schools now ban these books and more BY SARAH RITTER UPDATED OCTOBER 03, 2022 9:39 AM
https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/education/article266556371.html#storylink=cpy
ST. LOUIS — The 97 books banned in schools across St. Louis this fall cover topics like anatomy, photography and the Holocaust. There are books that are also popular TV series, including “Game of Thrones,” “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “The Walking Dead” and “Watchmen.”
And as life imitates art, Kirkwood School District banned a comic book adaptation of George Orwell’s “1984,” the cautionary tale about government mind control.
JEFFERSON CITY — With a new crop of hard-right Republicans expected to join the Missouri Senate, some Democrats are worried that the upper chamber’s priorities will swing more to the right in the next legislative session.
Conservative wish list items such as bans on transgender student athletes and legislation that targets school curriculum have failed to pass in previous years amid infighting among Republicans. But Senate Democrats say those policies could have enough momentum in the coming years with more hard-right members joining the upper chamber.
For months now, a handful of books dealing with LGBTQ themes have been targeted by Kansas City area conservative parent groups and politicians.
Conservative groups have demanded the removal of books on LGBTQ themes from public school libraries, but the censorship is expanding to other titles that someone finds objectionable. The Handmaid’s Tale, for example, has no LGBTQ content. It’s about a dystopian society in which women have no rights. But it’s being pulled from library shelves, and librarians are facing stiff fines if they defy the law.
But facing a new Missouri law, some schools have now removed a much wider array of books from library shelves, including “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Watchmen” and “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
The law, which bans sexually explicit material from schools and went into effect in late August, is tucked into a larger bill addressing sexual assault survivors’ rights. Librarians or other school employees who violate the law could be charged with a misdemeanor, risking up to a year in jail or a $2,000 fine.
In response, several school libraries have pulled at least 20 book titles in districts on the Missouri side of the Kansas City metro, according to reports provided to The Star through open records requests.
The legislation specifically prohibits images in school materials that could be considered sexually explicit, such as depictions of genitals or sex acts. As a result, most of the banned books are graphic novels. The law does provide some exceptions, such as for works of art or science textbooks.
Proponents argue the legislation will protect children from inappropriate content and indoctrination. “In schools all across the country, we’ve seen this disgusting and inappropriate content making its way into our classrooms,” state Sen. Rick Brattin, R-Harrisonville, said in a statement after the legislation passed. “Instead of recognizing this as the threat it is, some schools are actually fighting parents to protect this filth. The last place our children should be seeing pornography is in our schools.”
But others warn that such bans violate students’ First Amendment rights and mainly target books that feature LGBTQ relationships, people of color and diverse viewpoints.
“You don’t see people trying to ban any books that are on the far conservative end. So I think at this point, what we’re seeing is a kind of protracted political strategy,” said Joe Kohlburn, chair of the Missouri Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Committee. “It feels very targeted to folks who identify as LGBTQ, or (people of color) or women. If you see your library is removing ‘Handmaid’s Tale,’ that tells you something very specific. And I don’t think that’s an accident.”
Before the bill’s passage, conservative politicians, action committees and parent groups in the Kansas City metro spearheaded challenges to school library books, mostly featuring racially diverse or LGBTQ characters. It’s a trend seen across the country, with the American Library Association reporting that the number of attempts to ban or restrict books this year is on track to exceed last year’s total, which was the highest in decades.
Librarians have raised concerns over harassment, with some questioning whether to stay in their jobs. Tom Bastian, with the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri, called the book challenges an attempt to “whitewash viewpoints and perspectives of historically marginalized communities.”
Read more at: https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/education/article266556371.html#storylink=cpy
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Amnesia is the most profound of political victories. Book banning works. Many prominent authors whose books were burned on May 10, 1933 in Germany were lost to further publication after the end of the war. It was Hitler’s most successful and lasting tangible legacy, one of which few are aware.
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“The law’s intent is to stoke fear.”
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Greg, are theee books that were burned that had no copies in non-German libraries?
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Not necessarily, but there was great impact. Many authors got up in the ideological struggle between East and West, others had their books neglected, go out of print, and be forgotten, and now, decades after the fact, amends are being made.
The one I am most familiar with is Leonhard Frank, whose first novel in 1914 caused a minor literary sensation. He was twice exiled. He went to Switzerland during WWI to promote pacifism, wrote another minor classic that was distributed to German POWs, Der Mensch ist gut (Man is good). He was an influential member of the German Academy, an organization of sorts that was only open to published authors and acted as a sort of “Good Housekeeping seal of approval” for German literature. It was one of the first institutions Nazis targeted when they took power. He ended up escaping to France, being interned, and then escaping through southern France to Portugal to Hollywood, where he was employed as an unhappy screen writer with an office across from Thomas Mann, with whom he became great friends. Mann would read aloud excepts of an unpublished novel that would become Dr. Faustus. One of Frank’s last novels, Left Where the Heart Is, is a very thinly-veiled autobiographic novel that lays out his life, escape from Naziism, unhappiness in the U.S., and then ultimately learning that he was forgotten and his books were out of print. He concluded that Hitler lost the battle but won many parts of the war. He, like many authors, was printed by the East German press and celebrated, even though he lived in Munich. I search out his out-of-print novels whenever I am in Germany.
Another was Mascha Kalecko, a Jewish writer who had minor acclaim when she returned in the late 1940s and was award the Berlin Academy of Arts’ Fontane Prize in 1959 but turned it down when she learned a member of the jury was once in the SS. She moved to Israel and was mostly forgotten. Kadidja Wedekind (whose son wrote a masterful book, Everyone Writes Alone, that I am reading now, about authors who stayed in Germany during the Third Reich to bear witness) wrote a popular novel and emigrated in 1938. She was also active in theater. When she returned in 1949, she was mostly forgotten and died in 1964. Alfred Döblin, whose Weimar masterpiece Berlin Alexanderplatz was made into an epic film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, also was largely forgotten when he returned. None is officially banned, but they are a few of many whose writing and acting careers were ended by the actual policies of the Third Reich.
My thoughts on Der Mensch ist gut:
More than ten years before Im Westen Nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front), there was Der Mensch ist Gut (Man is Good). Leonhard Frank quickly wrote this book while he was in self-imposed pacifism-motivated exile in Switzerland during World War I. His novella was torched with as much hate-filled gusto during the Nazi book burning rallies as was Remarque’s classic. Frank also had to flee a certain fate in the German concentration camps in 1933. But unlike Remarque, Zweig or the Mann brothers, he joined the vast majority of authors who became relatively anonymous after they were banned during the Third Reich only to become part of the post-World War II amnesia that infested too many parts of German culture.
Published in 1917, Der Mensch ist Gut is a series of interwoven stories of people in Berlin who have learned about the deaths of their loved ones in World War I. A waiter loses his only son; a son for whom he sacrificed and gave everything he could. As he realizes how complicit he was in his son’s death—by giving his son a toy gun in his youth and teaching him about value of duty to the Kaiser—he runs through town shouting “Peace!” and others join him until a large crowd builds in a city square. A widow learns her husband was shot in the head; better than to be shot in the stomach followed by a long, painful death she reasons in silence. She wonders if her unborn child will care when he or she learns that he was an insurance salesman. And then she goes for a walk. A mother whose worries about her son finally become true realizes her husband will always be blind to the propaganda about the need to protect the fatherland. After wandering the streets, she comes face-to-face with a waiter and the insurances agent’s wife. They all understand what brought them together as soon as they look each other in the eyes.
Unfortunately, the latter chapters lose much of the emotion built up in the first half of the book. One gets the sense that Frank felt rushed to get something out as soon as possible. Nevertheless, the book was quite a sensation. At the height of German reactionary violence in 1920, he returned to Germany to receive the Kleist Preis, awarded annually to a work or body of work of German literary significance, from Heinrich Mann. Copies of his book were reprinted by the thousands by the British to give to German prisoners of war in World War II. But today it is largely forgotten.
Although it has not been published for years in Germany, thanks to the University of Michigan Library digital collections (http://www.lib.mich.edu) and support by the Hathi Trust (http://www.hathitrust.org), Der Mensch ist Gut is still available in print. This service should be celebrated, explored, and used by readers everywhere.
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Greg, have you seen the TV series Deutschland? It’s tense and exciting. First season is 1983. Second season is 1986. Third is 1989. Highly recommend.
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I have not, I should. And while we’re at it: the first two seasons of Derry Girls and one segment in the first episode of its third and final season are, in my opinion, the only television comedy that approaches and surpasses Fawlty Towers. The first episode alone is as funny and smart as anything ever written.
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Better than Derrick Girls:
Much much better:
BAD SISTERS
Dark Irish humor
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I’ll try Bad Sisters, but as far as your comments on Derry Girls, them’s fightin’ words! 😇
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If you don’t like BAD SISTERS, DEUTSCHLAND, and TEHRAN, I will be very surprised. I won’t offer to eat my hat.
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Or does the law of unintended consequences apply since banned books are more appealing to teens? As long as a teen has a cellphone and or internet access, they have access to electronic versions.
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Any teen can get access to banned books online from the Brooklyn Public library.
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I know you’re being tongue-in-cheek, but I think this kind of rationalization is folly and ultimately dangerous. If the perpetuation and expansion of freedom is left to those who seek it, we are done for.
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In no way am I condoning book banning. Prohibition was supposed to reduce alcohol consumption, but did not succeed. I don’t think that book banning will reduce the reading of the banned book.
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A very disturbing and naive point of view. If you look above, I provide concrete examples of how banning books is effective.
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Project Gutenberg is another source for older books that are no longer protected by copyright. I’ve found books there I couldn’t find anywhere else. And its free.
https://www.gutenberg.org/
Project Gutenberg is a library of over 60,000 free eBooks
“Choose among free epub and Kindle eBooks, download them or read them online. You will find the world’s great literature here, with focus on older works for which U.S. copyright has expired. Thousands of volunteers digitized and diligently proofread the eBooks, for you to enjoy”
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I would be remiss, to follow on my comments above to note two very important books that were forgotten when they were printed and are now enjoying a rebirth. Both have been translated into English and I would encourage anyone to get them as presents for loved ones this Christmas:
Blood Brothers: Sometimes the backstory of an author adds to the legend of a great work of literature—Ulysses S. Grant wrote what many consider to be the greatest American autobiography after he learned he would die of cancer to provide for his family after he had lost all his money; Harper Lee wrote a seminal work of American fiction and decided to never write another book; J.D. Salinger wrote the book that is a rite of passage for virtually every American high school or college student only to live in cryptic isolation; John Kennedy Toole committed suicide before his novel was recognized at one of the great comic classics ever written. And even more rarely, it’s the lack of information about an author that intrigues, as is the case with Ernst Haffner.
Virtually nothing is known about Haffner; there are no existing records about how he lived or died. He was a social worker, all traces of him disappeared in 1938, when he was summoned to one of Joseph Goebbels’ departments which was responsible for the printed word in Nazi Germany. His only novel, Jugend auf der Landstraße Berlin (Youth on the streets of Berlin), was published in 1932 and was one of the books burned by the Nazis on May 10, 1933. Few of the 5,000 copies of the book that were printed survived World War II. Even fewer people remembered that it existed…until 2015, when Aufbau Verlag, the publishing house of former communist East Germany that has been resurrected into one of the most respected imprints in Germany today, published it with the title Blutsbrüder (Blood Brothers). And what a wonderful book it is.
The story revolves around a long forgotten episode of late Weimar, depression-era Berlin: the lives of young people with no homes or families, who lived on the fringes of society. Most of the story revolves around two young men, Ludwig and Willi, who despite their ages of 19 and 20, are still considered boys. At the time, boys who were not dependents lived in prison-like juvenile institutions. Ludwig is a member of a gang, the Blood Brothers, or in the parlance of that time, a clique, which acted as more of a social support network. He escaped a juvenile institution two years earlier. Willi escaped another one four months earlier, jumping on a freight train he thought would take him to Berlin but was instead bound for Cologne. His adventurous ride on the axle of passenger train from Cologne to the outskirts of Berlin reveals everything one needs to know about his character. Ludwig is duped into taking a rap for a crime with which he had nothing to do. Before he is saved by his “brothers,” Haffner teaches us a great deal about Weimar criminal justice.
Their adventures touch on many aspects of the Berlin lower classes: gangs, prostitution, petty crimes, the constant nearness of violence, poverty, and coping to survive. There are characters who are reprehensible, cynical, conniving, and oddly friendly. But the true joy of the story is the inextinguishable optimism that keeps Ludwig and Willi going and eventually develops into the best of friendships. Blutsbrüder is one of those rare stories that burrows into your memory, hopefully for a very long time. It underscores the tragedy and mystery of what Ernst Haffner may still have offered the world. As I reflected on the characters. it occurred to me that Ludwig and Willi—and the other “blood brothers”—would likely have been fighting a war six years after the events of this story. How might have Haffner written their stories? My bet is that he would have humanized them. We can only speculate.
The Passenger: The plots behind “rediscovered” or “lost” novels sometimes have to compete with the stories about the authors themselves. Such has been the case for me in recent years with John Kennedy Toole, Hans Fallada, Ernst Haffner, and most recently, John Okada. Now I can add Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz to this both tragic and hopeful list. The intensity of his novel, seen over a few days completely through the eyes of successful Jewish businessman Otto Silbermann, beginning with the evening of Kristallnacht.
I feel like I have a pretty good understanding of the concept and history of Gleichschaltung, but as with all historical knowledge, it’s often a novel, or stories of individual fates seen from a different angle before one “gets” it. One sees pivotal events like Kristallnacht with the lens of history—we know how groups were affected, but we don’t know much about individuals. But Silbermann’s story, with an intensity heightened by the reader’s knowledge—which is actually more than he suspects about his eventual fate —forced me to take reading breaks. While he has lots of money, all he can do is travel on trains while he bides his time. The people he fleetingly meets along the way provide momentary escapes and occasional terror. The people he counted on turn their backs or exploit his situation. The only feeling I can compare it to was first seeing Jan Němec’s film, Diamonds of the Night, a story the begins with two teenagers fleeing Nazis from a train and never lets up until the predictable conclusion. Utter dread made into compelling, uncomfortable art.
I’m not going to go into the book or author much more than that. This is one to discover for oneself. It is a view of a historical episode, but like so much in life these days, I couldn’t help but wonder if it might be a glimpse of the future. It certainly would be for many Americans who fear “the other.” Which, perhaps too simply, can be boiled down to a lack of common decency. Translated systematically into public policy, it poisons a society down to its deepest roots. We saw it then. We see it now in the U.S. and other countries around the world.
But the most fearful and lasting lesson of this book is one that’s easily missed, one that should provide little comfort today. Ultimately, even though he apparently lived through Hitler’s assumption of power, was aware of the existence of concentration camps, had a “J” stamped into his passport, and likely witnessed many forms of discrimination, Silbermann somehow lived for five years and felt, right up to the night of Kristallnacht, that events would not consume him. That, however is still not the lesson. It’s about the speed with which people turned their backs and accepted the new reality they lived under, whether they were previous supporters or not. If they were not among the persecuted, it did not affect them, at least not in their public activities. Easier to turn one’s back, suppress any expression of decency, and follow the new rules. That’s not just reprehensible, it’s the norm. Boschwitz’s novel demonstrates this quite clearly.
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Greg: to quote my sewer buddy Russel…”you are a GD booka knowledge”
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I kill on some Jeopardy categories and have no clue about most others. I just strive to be like the good teachers I remember and know.
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I think Missouri needs to look good and hard at “Infidelity to Truth,” a great critique of the education establishment and their use of testing. That book is dangerous to the pocketbook of any good red blooded grifter,
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Oh, the irony! In order to arrive at the “Infidelity to Truth” as they see it, one has to be willing to accept many lies as gospel to know the right passwords to join the club.
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Ssshhhhhhhhhh!
(But many thanks for the mention!)
Tpig wit a bsted keboard is te pits!
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This is so very scary. I can’t imagine what these people banning books use be thinking. Or perhaps they’re not.
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The’re not.
Just thinking the other day about how close behind Texas, Florida, Tennessee, Arizona, ad others Missouri now is. Sad, indeed sad!
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Parties that ban books never go down in history as the good guys.
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Depends on who writes histories.
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I think we need to start a “banned book club” nationwide. It would be even better if high schoolers did this. GO to the top of all of these lists and start reading and commenting about the books on social media. Let’s make these know nothings sweat.
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