There’s no hint at what action this cover is even attempting to convey. Is Manfred Weinland, Trucker Hero, engaged in a fierce tug of war with a rig, or is he simply trying to drag his truck like a fearful and reluctant calf over to the awaiting biplane, perhaps for a ride? The Secret of Clear Lake indeed.

(Note: Yes, dammit, I know. I don’t care! ‘DDR Pulps’ just sounds better.)

Continuing yesterday’s post, today’s DDR Pulp is issue 238 of the oldest and most veritable of Germany Trucker pulps: Trucker-King. Let’s examine the cover.

Note the fleeing children. Each is rendered with the garish ineptitude of a palsied Mört Drücker, and each reacts to the crushing onslaught of Der Katastrophen Truck with bizarre discordance. Perhaps most understandable of all their reactions, the eyes of the first child seem drawn to the hovering ghostly head — as massive as the sun — of who I can only imagine to be Der Katastrophen Trucker-King himself, Michael Connors (“Nothing and no one can stop him,” the cover grimly notes). On the other hand, the girl on the extreme right seems more alarmed by the font choice than the impending gelatinization of her friends. A Helvetica snob, no doubt. Admirably, the flouncy lavender, second from the right, will not let even imminent death disturb his attempts to master a perfect attitude en pointe. Meanwhile, the retarded girl in pink tries to escape Der Katastrophen Truck by flapping her arms, thus invoking the secret power of all Downies: spontaneous flight.

Speaking of which, one thing that can be deduced from the action on the cover is that we, ourselves, are in no danger. Luckily, the adventures of Der Katastrophen Truck take place in an alternate world where the laws of physics have been repealed. Note that the jungle gym and the lamp post have all crumpled before being hit by the front grill of Der Katastrophen Truck, while the springed rocking horse, having been alerted to the imminent catastrophe, has cut his losses and fled the scene with one spectacular pogo leap.

While recently wandering the Hackescher Markt flöhmarkt with the inamorata, our joint bibliophilia inexorably led us to a slush pile of DDR-era East German pulps, fifty pfennigs to the kilo.

Although the quality of ablauted prose in these magazines is as cheap and itchy as the newsprint, the covers are fascinating. Judging solely from these covers, there seem to be four genres of DDR pulps.

The first genre is also the largest: romance pulps that are usually bound in bright and florid photographic covers featuring the real life weddings of alarmingly mucousy looking East German couples. Given the romance pulps’ cover models, all of whom have a certain Smeagol-like quality that identifies them as villagers caught at the peripheral of Chernobyl’s fallout area, these photographs are likely plucked from submissions of wedding pictures sent in by actual readers.

There’s then an additional three genres:

a. Pulps about trucks.
b. Pulps about monsters.
c. Pulps about both monsters and trucks.

As an example of the vibrant subgenre c, then, I give you the cover to Dinoland vol. 1, issue 1. There’s no actual publication or copyright date anywhere in the magazine, but given the Dinoland logo’s font, this must have come out around 1993, around the time of Jurassic Park.

Still, the cover is interesting. One can only imagine the progression of events that led to this snapshot in time. Two stranded RV campers are changing a flat tire in Germany’s vast and arid desert wastelands when a rampaging Tyrannosaurus pulls up to them. Eager for help, one camper lifts an arm in an insistent attempt to flag the dinosaur down. However, his companion is more cautious, and places one hand — quivering with trepidation — upon her boyfriend’s elbow.

“Gunter!” she whispers, “Look at his arms! That dinosaur’s never going to be able to help us change this tire.”