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.
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