Our Daily Bread: East German Production Stories for Children in the Postwar Years

This article focuses on three East German descriptive picturebooks from the 1950s that explain the production of bread, milk, and fish. These production stories not only convey knowledge by means of the juxtaposition of text and images but also emphasize the achievements of the five-year plan with respect to the provision of food for the citizens of the German Democratic Republic. This combination of information and propagandistic messages served to encourage the child readers' identification with the agenda of the socialist state. Hence, the presumptive role of the child reader as naive consumer merges with the idea of the politically engaged socialist child.