Visual worlds in children’s literature and school textbooks from the GDR

Educational media in the GDR had an educational mission to fulfil: it was supposed to contribute to a sense of identification with the socialist state and to educate individuals to become socialist personalities who knew and embodied the values of GDR socialism (→ comprehensively developed socialist personality). These values also included the idea of gender equality. Although gender equality was a declared political goal of the GDR, the traditional allocation of women's responsibility for reproduction, care and child-rearing tasks was not fundamentally questioned (cf. Trappe, 1995). Against this background, the aim of this project was to examine in more detail the portrayal of familial, generational, and gender relationships in educational media. Particular attention was paid to the relationship between text and image and to possible differences between what is said in the text and what is depicted in the image (→ image worthiness).

The source material used consists of approximately 50 German textbooks for grades 1 to 4 and approximately 40 children's books from the period between 1949 to 1990. The complete collection of textbooks from the Research Library for the History of Education at DIPF in Berlin (BBF) was used. All children's books published in the GDR can be viewed as source material in the Children's and Young Adult Book Department of the State Library in Berlin (Kinder- und Jugendbuchabteilung, Staatsbibliothek Berlin).

The selection of both the schoolbooks and children's books was based on the methodological approach of serial iconographic image analysis according to Pilarczyk and Mietzner (2005). After an initial exploratory viewing of the books, dimensions and aspects were identified in which gender appeared visually as an organising category. This was done to understand how gender is shown, repeated, and consolidated as a structure in individual motifs (cf. Nünning & Nünning, 2004). To do this, we focused specifically on who is involved in the stories told and depicted and who is not involved.

Some questions remained unanswered in this first project phase or have arisen anew because of the results. In the second funding phase, the project is therefore turning to the period of the late GDR and asking how the topics of masculinity and fatherhood changed socially from the 1980s onwards, and whether these processes of change are also reflected in educational media. In these later years of the GDR, it was no longer just soldiers and teachers (Baader, Koch, Neumann, 2023) who were portrayed in connection with gender relations and their professions. Fathers were increasingly shown in the context of family, child-rearing, and housework, i.e. in care work.

An additional focus will be on children's literature in more depth. The analyses during the first project phase were able to show differences between school textbooks and children's literature. With regard to the theme of the education of the socialist personality, the stories and pictures in the children's books were also permeated by a subtle criticism of existing social conditions, which indicates a greater creative freedom in children's books. However, since the aesthetic and political potential in children's literature in the GDR has thus far been researched very little (vgl. Kohl & Ritter, 2022) the second funding phase will examine the design scope of children's book illustrations in more detail. We will also investigate where and how illustrators were trained in the GDR.