with the aid of the interior minister, the police could challenge the decisions of censors.35
Read carefully, the files kept by the Interior Ministry reveal information about the world of early nineteenth-century print culture and the worldview of the police and officials themselves. The names of the files kept on the book trade provide a glimpse into the way authorities organized knowledge. Between 1810 and 1840 reports were sorted into several categories. Among them, the file on “obscene publications and unproven medical remedies” included reports on “gallant” literature (among them The German Don Juan) as well as books like The Barometer of Love and The Art of Kissing. Other files were organized around “the supervision of lending libraries” and “books and writings of religious mysticism, pietism, as well as those treating sects.” The police kept a file on “the censorship of writings, newspapers, and pamphlets about the cholera illness” and another “concerning songs, pamphlets, and stories of wonder carried by colporteurs.” These files point to the preoccupations of officials. They were anxious about texts that might produce unrest, social disorder, or violence. The file of banned publications on “cholera illness” suggests that anti-Semitism was one potential source of disorder. Some of the confiscated publications (copies of which were pasted into the file) blamed Jews for the spread of illness, on grounds that they were itinerant and carried filthy rags from place to place.36 In the absence of commentary on why such writings were confiscated, we can venture an informed guess: denunciations of Jews in the popular press might lead to spontaneous violence. Controlling anti-Semitic violence during cholera outbreaks was a means of heading off public disorder.37 “Cholera writings” were sent to the medical censor, who had the expertise to comment on the quality of the information presented. Mystical and pietist texts were suspected of promoting “enthusiasm and folly,” emotional states that could result in disorder. The police also worked to differentiate legitimate knowledge about the body, both medical and sexual, from “fraudulent” or unauthorized knowledge. Thus a text like The Authentic Memoirs of Midwife, or the Secret Dispatches from the Moral World of the Upper Class by the French midwife Alexandrine Jullemier warranted careful examination, both to determine the legitimacy of the text and to make sure that it did not contain unauthorized knowledge.
The police and censors also worked with an unarticulated hierarchy of offenses. This hierarchy moved in an ascending scale from the lowest level but still serious category “highly frivolous,” through (worse) “morally damaging,” and finally (worst of all) “dangerous publications that ruin heart and mind.”38 The “mindless novel” was bad enough to merit scrutiny and prohibit from circulation in lending libraries, which were thought to be filled with “useless and self-damaging readings.” Other infractions, such as “mockery of religion,” “obscene content,” or “promotion of superstition,” merited confiscation. Colporteurs and lending libraries were particularly suspicious, as they carried books aimed at the “common man.” The Memoirs of Casanova, confiscated from a lending library in Bromberg in 1824, was labeled “destructive of good morals” by the censors. In 1835 Amours secrètes des Bourbons, in the original French, was confiscated in Cologne from a box of books that had been sent from Brussels to a local bookseller named Schlesinger. Another French title, La Religion St. Simonienne, was confiscated from the same box. The censors decided that both works should be banned from lending libraries, Amours secrètes because of its “highly immoral” content and La Religion St. Simonienne because it “spread antisocial and anti-Christian lessons.”39 Authentic Memoirs of Midwife was judged only “slightly damaging to the morals” and was therefore allowed in bookstores, but it was banned from lending libraries.40 Gallantries, Adventures and Loves of a Young Woman of Standing, sold in four volumes and reviewed by the Prussian censors in 1834, received similar treatment. The censors decided that the title promised a work that was more titillating than it actually was; yet because the work was “highly frivolous” it was banned from lending libraries and lending circles, but bookstores were free to sell it.41 An implicit class bias informed this hierarchy of offenses and defined the bookseller’s crime as playing on the inherent vulnerability of an uneducated, lower-class reader. This reader was believed to possess an overactive fantasy life and to be subject to “folly and fanaticism” and worry. Colporteurs, who possessed none of the status granted to professional booksellers and who catered to readers at the lowest end of the book trade, were subject to regular searches.
A closer look at three specific texts introduces us to the kinds of texts authorities identified as morally dangerous in the first decades of the nineteenth century. In 1817 the police in the city of Halle reported the confiscation of a pamphlet entitled A True Terrifying Horrifying Story of a Mother, Eva Rosina Riedelin from Marienberg, who on February 25 of this year Roasted her own small Child, and with it Managed to assuage the Hunger of her other Five Children. Paying a visit to the local song and picture salesman, the police discovered that the source of the pamphlet was a man named Weimann.42 Under interrogation Weimann gave up two more names: he had obtained the original text from a man named Nicolai and then gave it to a printer named Bantsch. Weimann must have kept the production costs low, as the pamphlet (luckily pasted into the report itself) was bound in plain paper and sold for six pfennig.
Composed of six pages in a large font, the story itself is simple to recount. A True Terrifying Horrifying Story tells the tale of Johann and Eva Riedelin and their six hungry children. Johann is a tenant farmer who cannot make an adequate living farming and is therefore forced to take on other jobs to feed his family. He works hard, taking on extra jobs and missing sleep in an attempt to earn money. In spite of his hardship, he never gives up faith in God:
Figure 1. Title page of Wahre schauderhaft-schreckliche Geschichte einer Mutter (1817). This copy was confiscated and pasted into the Prussian Justice Ministry’s files on printed songs, pamphlets, and stories of wonder carried by colporteurs. Geheimes Staatsarchiv PK, I. HA Rep. 77, Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 243, Nr. 50, Bd. 1: 57.
In Boden, a sizable village close to Marienberg, lived a poor tenant farmer by the name of Johann David Riedelin with his wife and 6 small children, the eldest around 8 years old and the youngest seven weeks old, who relied on him to work. Even if he denied himself sleep to earn extra in addition to his daily labor, he was still not in the position to earn enough money to feed his family. Nonetheless, untiring and constant in his trust in God, he never lost courage.
Not so his wife.
Though Eva Riedelin is presented as a woman who has lost her faith, she is also resourceful. In an effort to feed her family she adopts the habit of borrowing bread on credit from the local baker, who takes pity on her and never presses her to settle her bill. In this way she is able to keep her family from starving. One day, prompted by six children crying for food, Eva resolves once again to ask the baker for bread on credit. Arriving in town, she discovers that the baker is away on business, leaving his wife to take care of the store. When Eva asks timidly if she may borrow some bread, the baker’s wife urges her to return when her husband comes back, for she herself is not authorized to give bread on credit. Despairing, Eva returns home, where she is accosted by hungry children crying “Mommy doesn’t love us anymore” and clawing at her skirts. Pushed over the edge by the cries of her children, Eva kills the smallest child, roasts him, feeds him to his siblings, and hangs herself. Returning home from his trip, the baker hears of Eva’s visit. He urges his wife to carry two loaves—one as a gift, the other on credit—to the Riedelin home. When the wife arrives, anticipating the happy cries of the hungry children, she discovers “the arms and legs of a small child scattered on the floor” and the other children “gnawing on a human hand.”
A police investigation into the text revealed that in 1814 a manuscript of the story had been presented to and approved by a censor, Dr. Pfaff, a member of the philosophy faculty at the University of Halle. Questioned by the police in 1817, Pfaff explained that he had approved the manuscript because the story
