Relocating the Text: "Mosaik" and the Invention of a German East German Comics Tradition

At the height of the international anti-comics debates of the mid-1950s, East Germany began publishing the popular comic book Mosaik. Scholars argue that, despite its opposition to comics as a quintessentially American form, the state tolerated Mosaik to counter popular comics from the west and promote a socialist German identity in its readers. This article uses the example of the changes made to Mosaik's speech balloon text in 1962 to show further how the comic's creators intentionally invented an East German tradition and tapped into a national reading community in opposition to the international comics of the Federal Republic by locating the comic in the East German socio-historical, political, and literary present. By creating a new Mosaik with its text below images, its creators were placing the work within an imagined cultural history stemming directly from the German Bildgeschichtentradition of the nineteenth century.