news could be exchanged.
By the imperial era, Schiller's idealized cult of the theater as an institution of personal cultivation and national consciousness was so pervasive that nearly every social stratum expressed reverence for the stage's uplifting spiritual power and national mission. At the pinnacle of the social pyramid, for example, Emperor Wilhelm II, whose aesthetic values were notoriously conservative, aggressively endorsed the “noble, idealistic viewpoint” of Schiller's famous essay. The Hohenzollern monarchy, he affirmed, had always regarded theater as a powerful weapon in the “struggle against materialism and un-Germanness (undeutsche Wesen)”; Wilhelm II believed the function of the stage, like the school and university, was to cultivate idealism and character in the younger generation, to ennoble their moral views, and to “prepare them for their task of preserving the highest spiritual values of our wonderful German fatherland.”23 The educated bourgeoisie that formed the backbone of imperial culture held similar views. Left-liberals like Ernst Müller-Meiningen viewed the stage as a powerful political tribune comparable to parliament where, when parliamentary discourse is blocked, the popular spirit resorts to “the sharpest, most dangerous weapons of political battle: parody, travesty, satire, in short, to scorn and mockery.”24 At the same time various cultural outsiders—Naturalist critics of the established culture, radical avant-garde modernists, and committed Social Democrats—also acknowledged the theater's unique spiritual power and rhapsodized over its importance as an institution that could help spark a national cultural, social, and political transformation.25 This idealistic cult of the theater was regularly invoked to justify extensive state controls over theatrical productions. Prussian ministers of the interior regarded it their duty to protect the stage as “a place of cultivation and spiritual uplift for wide segments of the population” and to prevent “any performance that the uneducated ‘common man' might misconstrue”; similarly, Munich's police director considered police censorship of theaters “a positive, state-sustaining, national, and monarchical institution.”26
But authorities in Germany (and elsewhere) were especially vigilant toward the theater because live theatrical performances, unlike dead printed texts, could stir an audience's emotions and thus posed a more immediate threat to public order and security. Schiller had noted how spoken dialogue on stage exercised a more profound impact and lasting influence on the senses of theatergoers than even morality or law, especially when combined with physical action and when actors directly address the audience. Dramatic art, and especially tragedy, also has a cathartic element: for centuries, dramatists have sought to create an illusion of reality that arouses the audience's empathetic identification with the characters on stage and stimulates and vicariously satisfies spectators' emotions. Viewing a theatrical production can be an intense emotional experience and a skillfully staged piece can provoke strong audience reaction. This experience, moreover, takes place within a public, social setting. Unlike the private, solitary act of reading, which the reader ultimately controls (if enraged or disturbed by what he or she reads, the experience can be immediately terminated), people who attend the theater are not isolated individuals but members of an assembled public group participating in a collective experience over which they have little control. Above all, as members of an assembled group—as part of a crowd—theatergoers are susceptible to the powerful influences of crowd psychology.
After the Paris Commune of 1870, the psychology and behavior of crowds worried many in fin-de-siècle Europe because crowd behavior was governed by potent, largely unconscious forces that easily overpower the individual personality. Gustave Le Bon articulated these fears in his influential 1895 study La psychologie des foules (The Psychology of the Crowd), where he argued an assembled group assumes new, entirely different characteristics than those of the individuals who compose it. Members of a crowd lose their individual identities, inhibitions, and the rational self-control exercised by their conscious personality, becoming automatons whose behavior is now governed by larger, irrational, unconscious forces. According to Le Bon, crowds are highly impulsive, excitable, impressionable, and sentimental; simplistic in their thinking, incapable of logical thought, they can no longer distinguish between illusion and reality. The anonymity of the crowd often gives its members a sense of unlimited power that inspires them to attempt the immediate realization of the most fantastic ideas or schemes suggested to them: “To the solitary individual, it is clear that alone he cannot burn down palaces or plunder shops, and he hardly even dreams of doing so. But as a member of a crowd, he is overcome by a sense of omnipotence that the group lends him, and he will immediately succumb to the first incitements to murder and plunder.” 27 To political reactionaries like Le Bon who feared the emergence of mass or crowd politics after 1870, the crowd represented an ominous threat not only to public order and security, but to civilization itself.
The theater was a particularly fertile and dangerous breeding ground for unpredictable, irrational crowd behavior. Le Bon was convinced crowds think only in images, which are able to horrify, inspire, or incite a crowd to action. Theatrical performances present images in their clearest form: “Nothing arouses the fantasies of people as strongly as a theater piece. The assembled spectators simultaneously feel the same emotions…[and] sometimes the feelings suggested by these images are strong enough to…translate themselves into action…. The unreal is in their eyes nearly as important as the real. They have a remarkable inclination not to distinguish between the two.”28 Indeed, Le Bon and other observers could cite examples of nineteenth-century theater audiences who had been incited to disorderly, even violent behavior by what they saw on stage: enraged lower-class theatergoers attacking actors who had depicted villains on stage; pitched verbal and physical battles between supporters and opponents of Victor Hugo's daring romantic style after his Hernani premiered in February 1830; how the opera La Muette de Portici, which depicted a seventeenth-century Neapolitan uprising against Spain, sparked demonstrations and riots that ultimately led to the Belgian revolution of 1830; and the 1896 near-riot that erupted when Jarry's absurdist Ubu Roi premiered in Paris.
German observers often cited these incidents as evidence of the unique power live theater exercised over its audience and the dangerous excesses to which theatergoers were sometimes prone. Theaters are collective enterprises in a public space; because the nature, function, and effect of that medium differed so radically from that of the press, government officials, local police, many legal scholars, and even some dramatists generally agreed it must be more stringently controlled. State supervision of the stage was considered necessary not only to safeguard the theater's special moral and national-political mission, but also to protect society against theatergoers who might, after viewing a particularly stirring performance, be transformed into a disorderly, even violent mob.29
Special legal restrictions were therefore placed on playwrights, theater operators, performers, and theatergoers, the two most important of which were licensing and prior censorship. While the Press Law of 1874 had established freedom of the press by ending state licensing and censorship of that medium and created uniform regulations for the journalism profession, no comparable national law was ever passed for theaters and other public entertainments. Theaters continued to be governed by a complex, uneven patchwork of laws and ordinances that predated the empire. Some aspects of theatrical life, such as licensing, were regulated by the Imperial Commercial Code (Reichsgewerbeordnung); others, such as theater censorship, were governed by state and local ordinances that varied widely.
Germany's liberal Commercial Code, adopted by the North German Confederation in 1869 and extended two years later to the new empire, proclaimed, “The practice of an occupation is permitted to everyone.” It removed corporative restrictions and established freedom of enterprise in most occupations, but not for the theater industry. Those who wished to operate a privately owned theater anywhere in Germany (with the exception of Alsace-Lorraine30) were still required to apply to district or county authorities for a license (Konzession), although royal theaters, theaters owned and financed by municipalities, and those holding only private performances not open to the general public were exempted from this requirement. Applicants could be denied a license only if authorities had evidence of their “unreliability.”31
During
