reliability primarily in ethical terms. As Cologne's district administrative president pointed out to officials in his district: “Since theatrical performances, especially those geared to the lower classes, can be very detrimental from a moral standpoint, it appears necessary to impose the strictest demands when considering the reliability of those who are seeking a theater license. Licenses should be granted only when the lifestyle of the applicant has been completely beyond reproach and provides no grounds for censure from a moral standpoint.”32 Even so, an enormous number of new theater licenses were granted in the years after 1869.33
But since theater attendance lagged well behind the proliferation of new theaters and the growing number of aspiring actors, the industry soon suffered from serious overcrowding and murderous competition, a condition many observers believed was responsible for an alarming decline in the quality of theatrical life. Drama critics and officials alike lamented that easy admission into the theater industry after 1869 had turned dramatic art into the crassest kind of speculation. Many new licenses, they charged, had gone to inexperienced and undercapitalized entrepreneurs who entered the business with dreams of quick fortunes; to survive they had to pander to the crudest instincts of the masses, thereby ruining the dramatic tastes of the public.34
Economic depression in the late 1870s created additional problems. Facing stiff competition, many new theaters went bankrupt, especially those whose owners lacked theatrical experience or sufficient financial resources. Several older, established houses were also driven out of business or encountered serious financial difficulties. In some cases fly-by-night theater operators simply disappeared, leaving behind huge debts and a troupe of unpaid employees and actors; many of the latter turned to busking, peddling, and begging or became a burden to local poor relief systems.
Responding to overcrowding in the theater industry and to local complaints about a growing “artistic proletariat,” in 1880 the Reichstag amended the Commercial Code, placing tighter restrictions on the granting of theater licenses. Because local officials were now expected to consider an applicant's moral, artistic, and financial qualifications, before approving a new license they began routinely checking with the theater industry's professional associations and with the Berlin police force's special theater division regarding an applicant's professional qualifications and general reputation. To further limit competition and ensure theaters did not attempt expensive productions beyond their financial means, after 1880 authorities could restrict a theater's license to one genre of performance—to light drama, for example, but not expensive operatic productions.35 These measures dramatically reduced the number of new theaters licensed after 1880. In Berlin, for example, where 146 licenses had been granted during the 1870s, during the decade 1881–1890 only twenty-seven applications were approved, while fifty were denied. Most applicants rejected by Berlin authorities in the 1880s and 1890s were actors, writers, or musicians lacking the financial means or businessmen lacking the artistic experience considered necessary to operate a theater.36
Originally, a license entitled one to operate a theater anywhere in the nation, but because of frequent abuses a theater license after 1896 was valid only within the state or specific district where it had been issued. Licensees were obligated to observe all local laws and ordinances; in Munich, police also admonished new theater operators to respect “religion and decency.” Licenses could be revoked if a theater failed to comply with the terms and restrictions of its license or the operator no longer met the necessary financial, artistic, or moral qualifications.37 While the most common grounds for revocation was financial, this weapon was also used against theaters whose repertoire authorities found objectionable.
Besides deciding who could operate theaters, German authorities were also able to decide what was performed on stage. In most of the empire, especially in the larger cities of Prussia, Bavaria, and Saxony, the local laws and ordinances that theater operators pledged to obey required them to obtain prior police permission for any drama to be performed publicly.
State censorship of the theater was hardly unique to Germany. By the eighteenth century, monarchs throughout Europe had brought theaters under strict regulation and required a central or local censor to approve each piece before it was performed. Although the democratic revolutions of 1848 temporarily abolished prior censorship of theaters in some states (including Prussia), it was usually quickly restored after the revolutions collapsed. By the late nineteenth century only a few smaller, peripheral states (Sweden, Belgium, and Portugal) did not censor dramatic works before they were performed—although authorities there, as in every nation, had the right to stop performances that violated the criminal code or caused a public disturbance; everywhere else some system of prior censorship still existed. In Russia and Denmark, for example, all dramas had to be approved by a special central censor, while in Austria-Hungary, Spain, and Italy each work had to be submitted to and passed by the local governor or prefect. Staging a drama without approval could result not only in the loss of a theater's license but also, in Russia at least, in a stiff fine and up to three months imprisonment. Even liberal England and the Third French Republic subjected theaters to prior censorship. The English Licensing Act of 1737 and Theatres Act of 1843 required that all privately owned theaters be licensed and all new plays be submitted to the lord chamberlain for approval before being performed. The lord chamberlain—a minister of the Crown and member of the House of Lords who was neither accountable for his actions to the House of Commons nor need give any reason for his censorship decisions—could prohibit or demand deletions in any drama if he believed “it is fitting for the preservation of good manners, decorum, or public peace to do so.” This system of theater censorship remained in force until 1968. In republican France the prior censorship imposed on all Parisian theaters in March 1871 was extended to the entire nation in 1874. Before a public theater in France could announce or perform a new drama, it first had to be submitted to a special dramatic censorship commission for approval; any work banned from the Parisian stage was also prohibited throughout France. Commission decisions could be appealed to the minister of public instruction, cults, and fine arts, but his decision was final. France's censorship system functioned until 1905 when the senate suspended it because the volume of submitted scripts was more than the censors could keep up with. Beginning in 1906 French theaters were free to perform any work they wished, although local police inspectors who regularly visited the performances could close down any that endangered public order and morality, and the theater manager could be prosecuted under the regular provisions of the criminal code.
Because of its federal structure the German Empire had no uniform, national system of theater censorship like England, France, Denmark, or Russia. In the free cities of Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck, in the medium-sized states of Württemberg, Baden, Braunschweig, and Hesse, and in all the tiny states, privately owned theaters were not subject to any prior censorship, although in Baden theaters had to notify police in advance of works they intended to stage. (Authorities in these areas could of course halt performances that contravened the Criminal Code or whose highly offensive content presented a danger to public peace. On rare occasion, authorities in Württemberg requested a script beforehand and then forbade the theater from performing the piece.) While there were thus several localities where theaters were virtually free of censorship, these liberal regions comprised only a fraction—about 15 percent—of the empire's population, and in the tiny states there were in any case few cities and commercial theaters. Prussia, Bavaria, and Saxony—the three largest states, which between them contained over 80 percent of the nation's population and in 1900 twelve of Germany's fifteen largest cities—each subjected their theaters to some form of formal or de facto prior censorship, as did Alsace-Lorraine. 38
Prussia's system of theater censorship, which was the most comprehensive in Germany and served as a model for the other major states, dated from the reactionary 1850s. Like Schiller, Berlin police president Carl von Hinckeldey regarded the theater as a “moral institution, a school…[that] the state can use as a lever for furthering general morality and all its other objectives.” In July 1851, responding to complaints from exasperated theater operators about arbitrary and unpredictable police meddling, von Hinckeldey ordained that henceforth “no public theatrical performance may take place within the greater Berlin police
