How Pippi came to the German Democratic Republic

The first edition of Astrid Lindgren's book Pippi Langstrumpf (GDR/1975) is our starting point for this presentation. It is also our first joint presentation of our project “Pippi beyond the border” (The Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies). The aim of the project is to examine the complex reception history of Astrid Lindgren's classic children's book Pippi Longstocking in the GDR, which was published in two different editions in 1975 and 1988 by the East Berlin Children's Book Publishing House (Kinderbuchverlag Berlin). We seek to define concrete examples and explain how children’s books were modified in the totalitarian society of the GDR to promote its view on children and childhood. The differences between the two GDR books, the BRD-license edition, and the Swedish original are interesting because they shed new light on the cultural recoding at work in the processes of transnational media exchange in the Baltic Sea Region.
We are interested in the role of children's literature in general in the GDR, but also in the conditions of publication, the everyday life of childhood and the functioning of publication practice in a dictatorship like the GDR. We are interested the political-social conditions under which the edition was allowed to appear in the GDR in the 1970s, but also in questions concerning the materiality of the book: what images were used, how was the cover designed, what edition could be printed, in what format and in what paper quality. The political relations between neutral Sweden and the GDR, which was firmly integrated into the Eastern Bloc politically, militarily and economically, play a central role here. In this context, we want to develop a concept of censorship as a dispositive of
political rule in the field of cultural production that not only follows the top-down direction, but also has inherent acts of negotiation despite all the asymmetry of power.