Culture from the Slums: Punk Rock in East and West Germany by Jeff Hayton (review)

Abstract

tion of East German society by the SED. Eedy amends this model by adopting the concept of an “ersatz public sphere” where the critical public opinion that Jürgen Habermas associates with the public sphere finds alternative forms of expression within the privacy of the domestic space, and where Eigensinn—a mechanism that allowed East German citizens to normalize their domestic space by conceiving of it as outside of the reach of state-controlled media—plays an important role. With Mary Fulbrook, Eedy attributes to the GDR, as a niche society, a stabilizing effect for the SED regime, which for this reason unofficially allowed for criticism articulated in a permissible way (e.g., through civic petitions) from within the private sphere. Diffusion and consumption of children’s comic books fall under this category—and Eedy aptly documents East German comic books as sites of contested power where the regime’s efforts at complete oversight were countered by the comics’ creators (for instance, in the haphazard, anti-teleological time-travel of Mosaik’s comic book characters, the Digedags) or the children themselves (by using comic books to articulate their experiences of childhood under GDR socialism). By analyzing letters written to the FDJ, the third chapter, “Power, Eigensinn, and the Construction of Space through Comics,” examines further the interplay between the state and the comic book readership as a site of potential freedom, onto which the latter projected its interests and critical reflections. This point is further explored by Eedy in the evocative fourth chapter (“Escape, Escapism, and the Cultural Imperialism of Comic Book Travel in Mosaik and Atze”), which explores the comics’ capacious and problematic representation of travel as incompatible with both their supposedly anti-imperialist ethos and with the possibilities afforded to children by European communist societies, the latter of which resulted in the creation of “unrealistic expectations” among their young readership. Anna Horakova, University of Grenoble