Henry Jenkins has coined the term civic imagination to emphasize the political dimensions of imagination. Civic imagination is the capacity to imagine alternatives to current cultural, social, political, or economic conditions; one cannot change the world unless one can imagine what a better world might look like. The question is to what extent literature more generally, and a children's book about Pippi Longstocking more specifically, can appeal to the reader's imagination and show new possibilities in such a closed society as the GDR. In a totalitarian society like GDR, children's literature was not a harmless genre, because it contained criticism that could not find expression in fiction for adults. The aim of the paper is to examine to what extent the stories about Pippi could have contributed to the capacity to see one’s self as a civic agent capable of making change and as empathetic to the plight of others different than one’s self. In this context, we will investigate the inherent possibility of aesthetics to enable acts of negotiation despite all the asymmetry of power which the bureaucracy of the party brought with it.

Literature: Glenn, Phillip. Laughter in Interaction. Cambridge University Press, 2003. Jangbar, Sakina. Rhetorical Silence: An Emerging Genre. Dissertation. He University of Texas, 2018. Jenkins et al. Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination. Case Studies of Creative Social Change. New Zork Press, 2020. Joosen, Vanessa. “Just listen? Silence, silencing and voice in the aesthetics, reception, and study of children's literature”. Silence and silencing in children’s literature. Ed. Elina Druker. Stockholm: Makadam, pp. 24–41. Lindgren, Astrid. Pippi Langstrumpf. Berlin: Kinderbuchverlag Berlin, 1975