Four-Color Communism: Comic Books and Contested Power in the German Democratic Republic by Sean Eedy

Abstract

Reviewed by: Four-Color Communism: Comic Books and Contested Power in the German Democratic Republic by Sean Eedy Anna Horakova Four-Color Communism: Comic Books and Contested Power in the German Democratic Republic. By Sean Eedy. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2021. Pp. 218. Hardcover $135.00. ISBN 978-1800730007. Sean Eedy's monograph fills a gap in GDR, comics, media, and education studies by charting the ways in which the East German government sought to summon the popular appeal and educational powers of comics to instigate enthusiasm for socialism and the development of the socialist personality among the GDR's youths. Eedy's study focuses on the paradoxical efforts by the Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ) as the most representative state-mediating institution of the GDR's youths, to channel the semantically polyvalent and, as he suggests, potentially uncontrollable hybrid medium of the comics. Seeking to portray the interplay between dissent and state power in the culture of the GDR in nuanced and historically contingent ways, Four-Color [End Page 174] Communism constitutes an invaluable contribution to recent scholarship dedicated to dissident or marginalized cultures in the GDR, alongside Seth Howes's Moving Images on the Margins (2019), Sara Blaylock's Parallel Public (2022), and Sarah E. James's Paper Revolutions (2022). However, instead of documenting the critique of state power from within the ranks of East German avant-garde artists and filmmakers, Eedy's study locates this critique within its mass-produced but still relatively marginalized comic book print culture. In so doing, Eedy's monograph follows in the footsteps of Scott McCloud's classic study Understanding Comics (1993), as it maintains a dual focus on close reading and historical context, teasing out the formal qualities of GDR comics as well as their uneasy relation to state power and oblique practice of social and institutional critique. Eedy's study traces the origins of East German comic book production to larger postwar anxieties about the medium's rootedness in perceived "US cultural imperialism and the destruction of national and cultural identities" (21) that were likewise shared by, for instance, West Germany, France, and the UK. The first two chapters, "Comics and the Crisis of Kultur in the SED State" and "State Power and the East German Zeitgeist," offer a meticulously researched and historically grounded account of how the GDR's policies desired to create alternatives to American (and later West German) productions in order to encourage East German child-readers to perpetuate the East German socialist state. The chapters follow the evolution of the country's two major comics, Mosaik von Hannes Hegen and Atze (and to a lesser extent, Frösi), from their inception in the mid-1950s as a bulwark against the perceived capitalist-imperialist influence of Western comics that were feared to be deleterious to the fledgling socialist state, all the way to the surprisingly positive impact of the Berlin Wall's construction on the quality of East German comics that were now allowed to become "more than derivative clones of West German and American publications" (8). That even at their qualitative peak, however, East German comic books did not evolve in the supposed vacuum of the "walled-in state" is correctly maintained by Eedy, who demonstrates the formal influence on these comic books exerted by both their German precursors (such as nineteenth-century and Weimar-era comics and children's literature) and Disney studios productions. In terms of the latter, Eedy's study takes seriously the official demand to "create a socialist alternative to Mickey Mouse," demonstrating Disney's influence especially on Mosaik's creator and drafts-man Hannes Hegen, and discussing how Mosaik's subsequent popularity with East German children is attributable to the transnational influences it had been intended to countermand (a topic that is discussed in depth in chapter five, "Western Influence, Popular Taste, and the Limitations of the FDJ's Publishing Regime"). Crucial to Eedy's study is a theoretical model of the GDR society as Nischengesellschaft (first defined by Günter Gaus), where the population is thought of as having retreated into the private, domestic sphere to escape from the thorough politicization [End Page 175] of East German society by the...