the result of the impressions made upon the mind by a harmful text. Rather than a blank slate, the law assumed that base instincts were already there, ready to be activated. According to the law, people were prone to mental weakness, subject to worry and envy, and easily led to defame their neighbors (and thereby to destroy the fragile social equilibrium). Despite the fact that they were cast as the victims of the bookseller’s crime, readers already possessed the potential for corruption and were therefore not entirely innocent. The disequilibrium and vulnerability of the individual translated into an impoverishment of the state, as it introduced elements of disorder by “disturbing the equanimity of good and useful citizens.” Those who crafted the law did not underestimate the power of texts and images; they recognized the growth of secular print (and, for that matter, of so-called fanatical religious print) as a powerful means of crafting subjects.
At the local level different definitions of unsittliche Schriften often prevailed; this was the case in part because Prussia had expanded its borders substantially as a result of the revolutionary wars and was still in the process of asserting authority in these regions. During the first few decades of the nineteenth century provincial governments continued to draw on local and regional police regulations and ordinances to assert alternative terms and concepts to describe the moral offenses of print. This was especially true in territories incorporated into Prussia as a result of the Napoleonic Wars, regions with different political and legal traditions and inhabited by residents (and often officials) with different mores and attitudes. Stralsund, a port city on the Baltic coast formerly under Swedish authority, occupied by the French in the early nineteenth century, and incorporated into Prussia in 1815, used a different vocabulary to describe the moral dangers of print. The city’s 1802 ordinance explained that the goal of censorship was “to prevent the distribution of immoral or obscene books, songs, stories, or engravings as well as those that promote folly, fanaticism, superstition, or [religious] disbelief. The same applies whether the sale takes place during, or outside of market times.”28 The language expressed local conditions; public spaces and marketplaces would be subjected to particular scrutiny and local concerns about marketplace literature that might include folktales, dream books, penny dreadfuls, or books of prophesy. In its preoccupation with public spaces and with the literature of the marketplace, the 1802 language echoed early modern ordinances that constituted the purview of the Sittenpolizei or Zuchtpolizei, ordinances that, as we saw earlier, focused on festivals, dancing, gaming, and public prostitution. These traditions of thinking about the order and morality of public spaces (particularly the marketplace) would begin to intersect with growing concerns about the reading habits of the Bürgertum, which took place increasingly in private (or semiprivate) spaces.
In the newly acquired regions in the Catholic Rhineland—territories incorporated into Prussia after the defeat of Napoleon—the decision of the Interior Ministry to institute strict oversight of lending libraries in 1819 inspired mixed responses and some active resistance.29 According to the new police ordinance, lending library proprietors were required to apply for concessions, to produce regular lists of the publications they carried to the local authorities, and to submit to regular inspections by the local police. In Trier, a city in the far western reaches of Prussia’s new territories, the regional government explained that historically, local laws had not authorized restrictions on lending libraries for reasons of “scientific or moral education,” nor did they feel capable, with a small staff and limited knowledge of contemporary literature, of measuring existing literary products according to the standards articulated by the authorities in Berlin.30 Determining the scientific and moral value of “literary products” was best left to experts, they argued; those who did not regularly apply themselves to reading contemporary literature, including the police, could not adequately evaluate the contents of lending libraries. In the western city of Muenster, also newly incorporated into Prussia, resistance to the authorities in Berlin was more direct. Asked about existing regulations of lending libraries, the city’s police commissioner replied that there were no laws on the books. Furthermore he protested the new regulations on the grounds that he was simply too old (over seventy) and too busy to review “all the new literature of the country.”31 In the Rhine city of Coblenz, which boasted at least eight lending libraries in the city and surrounding areas (one with a female proprietor), the regional authorities asked the Interior Ministry for clarification: Did laws regulating lending libraries also apply to reading circles and private clubs, where members could find or borrow books, newspapers, and other publications?32
In addition to regional differences in emphasis and legal language, visions of the imagined victim changed over time. As we saw, Stralsund’s 1802 ordinance imagined the vulnerable reader as the poorly educated and easily manipulated inhabitant of public spaces. By 1824 the authorities in Coblenz had begun to concern themselves with the mental (and moral) vulnerability of elite young men, particularly gymnasium students, and with the private exchange and consumption of books. Writing to Berlin about the supervision of lending libraries, the regional government in Coblenz stated, “We keep this important matter perpetually in mind, and we hope to be supported in this by Gymnasia and high schools. Nothing is more desirable than to see realized the wholesome idea that lending libraries should not be open to school-age students without explicit permission.” It was important, the report continued, to keep young people from reading “dangerous writings or inferior novels, which corrupt the heart and morals, promote distaste for serious studies, and make their mark [on the reader] through the damaging influence of half-truths and precocious, unhealthy emotions.”33 A report from the provincial government in Merseburg, a city on the southeast border of the Prussian territories, described the influence of lending libraries in similar terms: they were particularly dangerous for young people because “they have a detrimental effect on moral feelings; they also inflame the fantasies and spoil them for the pursuit of their own studies.” Using the language of health and healing, the authorities in Merseburg urged people to aid the government in its measures to “protect new generations from moral poison, just as apothecaries guard them against physical
poison.”34
From these disparate sources of law, edict, and commentary, each formulated in particular historical and geographical contexts, we can discern the outlines of a pattern of thought about the dangers of texts and the nature of readers. In almost every case the legal language focused on the potentially faulty development of readers’ habits of mind. The law of 1788 described the crime of immoral texts in terms of the mental effects of reading, condemning publications that “nourish worry and unhappiness in many inadequately educated souls, [and] encourage the gratification of base instincts—defamation, envy, vengefulness.” The 1802 edict in Stralsund defined its task in terms of protecting people from “folly, fanaticism, superstition or [religious] disbelief.” Adolescents in Coblenz could have their heart and morals corrupted “through the damaging influence of half-truths and precocious, unhealthy emotions.” In Merseburg there was concern about books that “inflame the fantasies” of young people and “spoil them for pursuit of their own studies.” Defining the goal of moral censorship as the protection of vulnerable individuals (less often, following the French model, of public mores) rather than the State marked a shift in models of power and authority. The state was now expected to frame its laws and authority for the good of its subjects, who, as imagined in law and police craft, were in need of protection. This growing emphasis on inner life mirrored broad contemporary discussions of reading and inner life—discussions about the nature of the emotions, the dangers of empathy, and the cultivation of the self. Before turning to those broader debates, however, I will take a closer look at the kinds of texts that were singled out as obscene or immoral in the early decades of the nineteenth century.
TRANSLATING THEORY INTO PRACTICE
Armed with broad authority and a set of vague principles governing their surveillance of the trade in texts and images, Berlin’s Police Headquarters, the Censorship Board, and the Interior Ministry crafted a vision of the texts, spaces, and readers that concerned them. Though censors were officially charged with reading and judging the content of texts, the police supervised lending libraries and peddlers, and they had the power to confiscate
