the reading practices of women, the poor, and the less educated. This rhetoric conflated moral instability with vulnerability to dangerous political views and translated into ongoing efforts by elites to control the reading practices of ordinary people. As a result, he argued, poor and uneducated Germans were rendered “a people without a book,” lacking a literary culture because of censorship, limited distribution networks, and the vocal disapproval of people in positions of authority.10 Thus even scholars positively inclined toward “low” texts of various kinds experienced disappointment in the face of cheaply produced, derivative, poorly written, and politically uninspiring books and pamphlets.
Why unearth such allegedly degraded material? Why scrutinize handwritten police files trying to trace the routes these books traveled and comb through library catalogues for rare extant copies? These were, after all, texts condemned by contemporaries and scholars alike as filthy, frivolous, morally poisonous, or mind- and heart-destroying. They exist as a category only because of their alleged ability to distort readers’ minds and bodies and thus to produce changes in the ways people conducted themselves in the world. In a sense it is precisely these condemnations that I seek to understand, to study in detail what cohered in this heterogeneous body of texts and images, which ranged from “gallant tales” and the “secret dispatches” of midwives to popular medical books and urban crime narratives.
There are in fact many reasons to be interested in the history of obszöne und unzüchtige Schriften. To begin, one learns a great deal about the movement of texts and ideas in the German states during the first half of the nineteenth century. Because the authorities were preoccupied with their effects, they worked to trace their origins and movement. A careful study of files on the circulation of books, pamphlets, and other forms of print kept by the Prussian Interior Ministry, for example, reveals a complex network of routes and spaces that emerged to cater to the needs and desires of readers. Books and pamphlets regularly crossed borders, moving between the heterogeneous body of German kingdoms, principalities, electoral units, and free cities, each with its own laws and practices surrounding book production and distribution. They also traveled across the western borders with France and Belgium and the eastern border with Polish-speaking regions. As transportation networks broadened and the book trade quickened in the revolutionary decades of the 1830s and 1840s, so too did authorities’ anxieties about the circulation of French and Polish books as well as books on France and Poland. Their concerns, materialized in an extensive set of files, offer entrée into a world of booksellers and publishers, readers’ practices, and channels of distribution. They also provide us with a list of publications that circulated on the street, in peddler’s boxes, and in the disreputable (but also popular) institutions contemporaries called lending libraries. These libraries offered books to those who could not afford to buy them; to those who could, they offered the kinds of books that people were more inclined to rent than to buy.
This record of an alternate world of books and readers, deepened by a careful look at the suspect texts themselves, offers new insights into a topic that has recently sparked a body of important scholarship, namely, the growth of civil society and the role of writing and publishing in this development. Historians Isabel Hull and Ian McNeely have argued that print provided the essential medium for the emergence of civil society in the German lands during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Journals, pamphlets, reports, novels, legal codes, dictionaries, and encyclopedias—indeed writings of all kinds—provided a space in which people could formulate and circulate heterogeneous views of the world.11 McNeely has referred to this development as “the emancipation of writing,” for it was during this period that German elites lost their monopoly on writing and publishing and on the attendant ability to define the limits of what could be expressed. Hull argues convincingly that print culture made possible the growth of civil society, a public exchange of ideas that facilitated the development of public opinion as an alternate source of authority in a world still dominated by political absolutism. Print culture generated new types of social knowledge as well as new sources of authority, expertise, and political legitimacy.
There was a lot riding on the circulation of print in this period, and not simply for collective forms of public culture. During the first half of the nineteenth century many Germans believed that the individual had much to gain through his or her engagement with books and reading. Just as new forms of social knowledge initiated new social realities (agronomic knowledge, for example, sparked novel uses of land), readers’ engagement with books and journals seemed to hold out the promise of transforming people. In 1824 the introduction to the Brockhaus Conversations-Lexikon, a hugely popular encyclopedia sold in installments, suggested that the publication “should act as [a] key of sorts, to gain entry into educated circles and into the meanings of good authors.”12 Bildung, a contemporary term that referenced both formal education and a broader idea of self-cultivation, became an important cultural ideal. The Brockhaus editors suggested that reading rendered the individual capable of conversing about matters of general interest in a room full of unknown or unfamiliar people. The influence of pietism, a form of Protestant religious practice, also affirmed the importance of reading to the development of the self. Pietism encouraged the development of the individual’s inner life through reading, letter-writing, and self-reflection; the cultivation of interiority made way for an inner church and for a personal relationship with God. Pietism’s focus on inner life also paved the way for the more profane practice of novel reading.13 Protestant religious practices had long focused on literacy, but German Catholics were also not immune to this growing interest in the way reading shaped the self. Writing in the 1820s, Ignatz von Wessenberg, a progressive Catholic cleric and popular author, argued that romantic novels provided an education for the senses, cultivating empathy and rendering men and women capable of a good marriage. While he assumed companionate marriage as a cultural ideal, he warned readers that this form of intimacy hinged on a spectrum of emotions accessible through print.14
Given the range of transformations associated with reading in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century it is not surprising that people worried that there was a downside to an engagement with print and images. The many new publications that circulated were imagined as vehicles for positive change, but they were also deemed capable of producing infelicitous social realities, unreliable authorities, and individuals who were distorted by literacy and reading. A self that could be perfected might also be corrupted. These pitfalls were imagined in multiple ways. If representatives of the Prussian state conflated moral and political dangers, clerics, early practitioners of psychology (or Seelenkunde—literally, the care or study of the soul—as it was sometimes called), and publicists framed their concerns in different terms. This book works to understand how various groups described the darker corners associated with the rise of print culture.
Their concerns often rested on particular and evolving visions of the self. Questions of inner life—of what it consisted, how it functioned, how it developed—were central to efforts to describe the effects of obscene texts. Critics of all kinds, including such unlikely figures as government ministers and the police, found language to explain how the “heart- or soul-destroying book” accomplished its work. As definitions of obscenity changed over the course of the period treated here, these efforts to describe interiority remained constant. As a result this book also tells a history of the self. Recent scholarship has shed new and important light on concepts of the self generated in the German lands and in neighboring France and England.15 Among other things, this new work has challenged a story about the German national character that has been repeated in multiple contexts over the course of two centuries. This story suggests that Germans have long favored transformations in inner life at the expense of changes in the public world of politics and institutions. An early example of such thinking is found in Germaine de Staël’s 1810 study, On Germany, in which she declared that Germans were “deficient in acts and abundant in thoughts [Tatenarm und Gedankenvoll].”16 By this she meant that Germans allegedly privileged intellectual development and autonomy—freedom of inner life—over collective political action. I complicate this narrative of German particularity. To begin to understand the relationship between inner life and material changes as it was framed in the nineteenth century, it is first important to discard
