districts bore little relation to the peacetime government's bureaucratic structure. While civilian administrators and communal officials continued their normal functions, they were now obligated also to obey the instructions of the district's deputy commanding general, who, in turn, was responsible only to the emperor. As Wilhelm II became an increasingly peripheral and distant figure during the war, the deputy commanding generals were virtually autonomous: they were “like rulers of independent satrapies, and they could—and to the extent they wished—resist attempts from above, from civilian or military agencies, to impose common policies or institutional constraints on them.”13 In the interests of public security they could issue formal police ordinances under their own authority or through the regular civilian police; failure to obey a commander's orders or his police ordinances was punishable by up to a year in prison. During the state of siege, special military courts were established to handle serious offenses (spying, treason, sabotage), the punishment for certain criminal offenses was dramatically increased, and several constitutionally guaranteed rights were suspended, including freedom of association and freedom of assembly.
Freedom of the press also ended, for all nonscientific publications were now subject to military censorship. Initially the Press Office of the Acting Army Corps Headquarters (stellvertretende Generalkommando) was responsible for censorship; after February 1915 it came under the authority of a specially created Central Censorship Office (Oberzensurstelle) attached to the acting general staff. Although these offices established policies and guidelines and issued detailed directives, local police handled day-to-day military censorship. All military-related newspaper articles and, after April 1915, other publications dealing with military issues had to be approved prior to publication; one copy of all other printed material (including periodicals, books, and pamphlets) had to be submitted to local police immediately upon publication. Early in the war some publishers voluntarily submitted materials, especially books, to the military for prepublication censorship, for they found it less expensive to have a manuscript vetted before it went to print than to risk having it banned or changes ordered afterwards. The head of the Stuttgart publishers' union claimed in 1916, “Preventive censorship lies in the interest of publishers, since its exercise protects them from penalty and great economic damage.”14
Police censors were instructed by military authorities to intervene against any printed matter that undermined the war effort by “disturbing the civil peace (Burgfrieden)” This granted them extremely broad powers, for during the war the civil peace was officially defined as “the effort to preserve the spirit of solidarity and submission to the great national goals, to prevent any endangerment of the unity of the German Volk, and never to allow the impression to arise that the determined popular will for victory is wavering.” In the interests of the civil peace, wartime censors would permit “an objective, even if pointed, representation of one's own standpoint in political and economic questions…[and] a calm discussion of the mistakes and errors of those who think differently.” But they would not allow “any insults to others,…especially any terms of abuse, derogatory comparisons, or degrading insinuations,…any attempts to impute to others selfish or base motives in the pursuit of political goals, any needless rekindling of old quarrels, or any insults between social classes, occupational groups, or religious confessions.”15 Unlike before the war, when the press often lambasted them, it was now forbidden to publish any criticism of the censors that might undermine public confidence in their activities.
To control printed materials during the war, police wielded a variety of special weapons: besides refusing to allow publication of military-related material, they could also issue formal warnings to the writers, editors, and/or publishers of material already in print; they could require that in the future certain nonmilitary publications also be submitted for prior censorship; they could issue temporary or permanent bans against all future publications of specific periodicals or publishing houses; and, in extreme cases, they could fine or imprison journalists or writers who regularly violated official directives. Decisions of the military or police censors could be appealed only to the Prussian minister of war, who seldom overruled his subordinates. Only in Bavaria did the press retain some of its prewar freedom. Because of Bavaria's special legal status in the empire, the state of siege and press censorship system there was less harsh and press offenders still enjoyed the right to a jury trial.
As authorities attributed military importance to an ever-widening circle of political issues, such as the debates over war aims or food rationing, and as the vague concept of the “civil peace” expanded to include ever more aspects of public opinion and civil life, the scope of military censorship during the war expanded enormously. As one writer complained, “Every political issue could be made into a military one, if the censor wanted. He could even transform issues of a general scholarly or artistic nature into military ones in order to bring them under his sphere of influence.”16
Censorship also became increasingly centralized and geographically uniform after 1914, as deputy commanding generals in the various Army Corps districts exchanged information and coordinated their policies concerning publications.17 This near absolute control over printed materials continued until 12 November 1918, when Germany's new republican government lifted the official state of siege, abolished all censorship, and restored the civil rights suspended during the war.
Control of the Theater
Theaters were central to the empire's cultural life; they received generous support from local rulers and municipalities and were enthusiastically attended by a broad spectrum of the populace. The English writer Henry Vizetelly, a frequent visitor to Berlin in the 1870s, observed, “The Berlinese of to-day are steady playgoers, and pass much of their time at the theatres, which, on Sunday evenings especially, are filled to overflowing.”18 On the eve of World War I the nation's theater association listed a total of 463 theaters in Germany. Along with 116 privately owned commercial theaters (the majority of which were founded after 1871), 132 were operated by city or town governments, serving as a source of civic pride. German princes sponsored some twenty royal or “court” theaters (Hoftheater) that functioned as dynastic showcases and prominent centers of social life, especially in the smaller princely residences; some sovereigns, such as Duke Georg II of Saxe-Meiningen, devoted their lives and resources to their beloved theaters. In addition to the many permanent theaters, there were also 84 traveling troupes and 112 that operated only in the summer or showed films.19 At the turn of the century, Berlin, with a population of 1.9 million and the “theater capital” of the nation, hosted three royal theaters and over twenty-five conventional commercial theaters (not counting scores of less-reputable vaudeville and variety halls) while its primary rival Munich (population nearly six hundred thousand) claimed two royal and fourteen commercial theaters.20
In contrast to the relative freedom enjoyed by print media, most theaters were subject to a number of special legal restraints including stringent prior censorship. Because of the powerful and potentially dangerous impact of the spoken word upon an audience, governments have always regarded the stage with particular concern.21 In nineteenth-century Germany, however, state interest in theater was all the more pronounced because of a widespread “cult of the theater” that ascribed to this medium a unique moral, spiritual, educational, and even political mission. In his famous 1784 address “The Stage Considered as a Moral Institution,” Friedrich Schiller venerated the theater as a source of moral enlightenment and civic education for the broad populace, an agent of social progress, and a source of national self-consciousness and unity. Its unique power and appeal was comparable to that of religion, he believed, and he foresaw a day when the stage would replace religion as a moral force in public life.22 Popular enthusiasm for the theater flourished and spread in the nineteenth century. While local theaters may not have become sites of public worship (as the dramatist Franz Grillparzer once predicted), in many places they did become centers of public life. Prior to 1848, when political assemblies and associations were forbidden or tightly regulated, theaters provided one of the few arenas outside the church where regular mass gatherings were allowed; for middle-class audiences theaters were not merely vehicles of entertainment but sometimes
