UPSIDE DOWN ON HORSE BACK: The trickster Pippi Longstocking in the GDR.

A sketch for the cover of the second East German edition to Pippi Langstrumpf (1988) showing a girl standing on her head on horseback is the starting point for this article. It was drawn by Cornelia Ellinger, only one year before the fall of the Berlin wall. The sketch becomes a starting point for a discussion of humor and materiality in the reception of Pippi in the GDR. Just as 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 to act ourselves, which makes issues of illustration, color choice and book format particularly important in a monolithic society, in an 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]