Upside down on horseback: The trickster Pippi Longstocking in the GDR

A sketch for the cover of the second East German edition toPippi Langstrumpf (1988) showing a girl standing on her headon horseback is the starting point for this article. It was drawnby Cornelia Ellinger, only one year before the fall of the Berlinwall. The sketch becomes a starting point for a discussion ofhumor and materiality in the reception of Pippi in the GDR. Justas the cover frames and delimits the text, our preconceptions frame our gaze and affect what we can see. However, this act is not just something that is imposed on us but an invitation toact ourselves, which makes issues of illustration, color choiceand book format particularly important in a monolithic society, inan attempt to steer the reader’s attention in a desired direction.The discussed sketch was never printed. Instead, the publisher chose a more blatantly humorous image.