Even when there were still two German states, people in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) showed little interest in the children’s literature of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Such literature was considered ideologically contaminated, and this attitude did not change much after the collapse of the GDR in 1989. Today, there is still no public interest in the children’s literature of East Germany, which has now become historical, and the new citizens of the Federal Republic look back on their former children’s literature with nostalgia at best. This is a pity, because a close look at the children’s literature of the Soviet occupation zone and the German Democratic Republic is highly interesting and one can learn a great deal from it.
In the following, I would like to embed the analysis of picturebooks of the GDR in the developing field of Visual Culture Studies. What is meant by “visual culture”? According to Aga Skrodzka (2020, 12), visual cultures concern
disparate and broadly understood visual texts, including buildings, monuments, murals, interior design, sculpture, painting, craft manuals, fashion, film, photography, computer games, television, cartoons, prison mug shots, theoretical diagrams, art magazines, recycling campaigns, wall newspapers, and children’s books.
Admittedly, this is a very broad and sketchy characterization. Nevertheless, while it is not clear that there is a well-defined, autonomous field of Visual Culture Studies (Adorf and Brandes 2014;Volkenandt 2011), it is beyond any reasonable doubt that children’s books, including picturebooks, are a proper part of visual culture.1
In picturebook research, the special nature of the picture–text relationship has been worked out in numerous studies (Kümmerling-Meibauer 2018;Nikolajeva and Scott 2001), but pictures also play a major role in other literature for children and young adults, be it in illustrations that accompany the text or on book covers that are intended to give an important first impression of the book’s contents. Broadly understood, picturebooks and illustrated children’s books can be conceived aspictorial literature.
While it is problematic to speak of a picture as a visualtext, as Aga Skrodzka does in the above quotation, it goes without saying that most picturebooks display picture–text combinations. An exception are wordless picturebooks. The accompanying text may guide the interpretation of the visuals. It is this inherent relatedness to texts that makes picturebooks an important touchstone for a general theory of visual culture. Note that even in the case of wordless picturebooks, it is necessary for the reader to construct a mental text, that is, the picturebook story.
When picturebooks a
