![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
In 1966, the editor of the East German comic Mosaik submitted a report to the Secretariat of the Central Council of the Free German Youth. This report expressed the need to repackage the comic magazine (Bilderzeitschrift) Atze. As happened throughout the United States and Western Europe, comics in the GDR were criticised as being detrimental to childhood development. Comics represented the worst of western imperialist pulp literature; uncultured and lacking the tools necessary to mobilise youth to the construction of socialism. Through a close analysis of this report and the changes implemented in the pages of Atze, this essay examines the East German regime’s perceptions of children and childhood and how it hoped to awaken political awareness among its youngest citizens. Not only this, but the regime and its youth groups embraced the comic-book medium in a way almost unheard of in the West at the time, folding comics into the burgeoning children’s literature and a distinctly East German children’s Kultur.
Notes
1. This and subsequent, similar, references are from the Bundesarchiv (BArch), Berlin-Lichterfelde.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Sean Eedy
Sean Eedy is a PhD Candidate completing his dissertation on socialist comics as an intersection between childhood development and state power in the former East Germany. Having grown up with Marvel comics, he thinks Jason Aaron’s Thor: God of Thunder is currently the best book on shelves. He lives in Ottawa, Canada with his wife and two cats and eagerly anticipates new comic book day.