more traditional, classic art and literature. These groups, in turn, were joined by some conservative authorities in states like Bavaria who wanted to preserve states' rights against further centralization. The unprecedented political cooperation over this issue between middle-class liberals and the hitherto isolated Social Democrats—a partnership in which the Socialists often played a leading role and were accepted on more-or-less equal terms—also opened up new political possibilities for the future and helped further integrate Social Democrats into the imperial political system. Finally, the dramatic mobilization and politicization of the German artistic and intellectual community over the Lex Heinze was itself a significant new development and signaled a shift in the balance of cultural power. Whereas the political power of the cultural Right and state intervention against modernist literature had been in the ascendant before 1900, after that date both began to recede. To be sure, liberals failed to abolish theater censorship and state intervention into literary life continued after 1900, but censors now intervened in fewer areas, on a more modest scale, and with less effectiveness than in the 1890s. This softening of state opposition to modernist culture corresponded to what some have argued was a general “civilizing of power relationships” throughout the empire after 1900: the authorities, more concerned about avoiding criticism and scandal, used their powers more cautiously and relations between the police and citizenry became less tense.63
Their successful campaign to defeat the Right's efforts to bring dramatic art under tighter censorship again emboldened the Left, which immediately launched a counter campaign to free theaters completely from the burdens of the law. Having failed in their earlier judicial challenges to local theater censorship ordinances, after 1900 the coalition of liberal intellectuals, the Progressive Party, and Social Democrats that emerged during the Lex Heinze controversy adopted a new strategy to eliminate theater censorship and licensing by means of nationwide legislation.
Rather than disbanding after defeating the Lex Heinze in the spring of 1900, the Goethe Leagues redoubled their efforts to defend the nation against what one prominent league spokesman called any “muzzling or subjugation of spiritual and intellectual life.” Another leader compared the movement to a national guard that takes up its weapons whenever needed to defend the borders of free artistic creativity.64 Having beaten back the most immediate threat to freedom of art and learning, leaders of the Goethe Leagues pledged themselves to keep watch against any new attacks on intellectual freedom: “Our task is also to exercise a sharp, eternal, ever-ready vigilance against the silent and not-so-silent work of the Reaction, to train the German nation to exercise this vigilance for itself, and to educate the nation about the meaning and incalculable importance of a free national culture, of an independent scholarship and art.”65 When representatives of local Goethe Leagues met in November at a national conference in Weimar, they approved a resolution condemning censorship of theatrical performances by local authorities and demanding its abolition everywhere in Germany. German dramatic art, they declared, was an expression and manifestation of the German national spirit and it was time to treat it as a national, not local matter. The existing uneven patchwork system of local theater censorship contravened a truly national German culture, the resolution continued: it placed in the hands of local authorities, whose decisions frequently contradicted each other, important dramatic and artistic questions that should really be decided on a nationwide basis by the German people itself. The Union of German Goethe Leagues, condemning theater censorship as an antiquated and “unworthy tutelage [for] the German nation,” announced it would petition the Reichstag to abolish censorship by means of a national law and called upon “all friends of a free German art” for support.66
In November 1900 the Progressive Party presented the Goethe League petition to the Reichstag and two months later introduced a motion to abolish all local theater censorship by amending the Commercial Code. To the paragraphs of the code that required the licensing of all theater and music hall operators, Progressives proposed adding a clause clearly stating that no prior approval is necessary to stage an individual dramatic work in a legitimate theater or to hold declamatory, musical, pantomimic, or plastic performances on the popular stage.67
In Reichstag debates early the next February, Progressives condemned the confusing, haphazard hodgepodge of local censorship ordinances that were both unconstitutional (in Prussia) and violated the spirit of the nation's Commercial Code, which established freedom of occupation. They cited numerous instances where local police censors had recently issued irrational, arbitrary, and contradictory decisions (works banned in one locale but not others, important works by respected authors that should not have been forbidden at all but were, etc.), and argued if Germany were to have a truly national, rather than a local, particularistic literature, then the issue of prior theater censorship must be settled on a uniform, national basis. “Are we not one people, with one language and one literature?” a Progressive speaker asked. Yet from the illogical system of local censorship “one would almost conclude that we don't even have a local state literature, but rather simply a city literature! This is an abomination!” Theater censorship, Progressives maintained, was an area where the Reichstag and federal government must—and legally did—have ultimate jurisdiction. They called upon the Reichstag to undertake the difficult but necessary task of “finally looking into the Augean stables of particularistic police law—to examine it closely in regard to its legal compatibility vis-à-vis the provisions of the imperial constitution and the Imperial Commercial Code.” If one wanted a true state of law (Rechtsstaat) rather than an arbitrary police state, the Reichstag had to ensure local police power did not contravene national legal norms; and the place to start was by affirming the supremacy of the national Commercial Code over all individual, local police ordinances and arbitrary rulings. To Progressives, prior censorship of theatrical performances was an unnecessary form of police tutelage; the existing provisions of the Criminal Code were adequate to deal with any theater excesses, for if a performance did indeed violate the law, police always had the authority to halt it and prosecute those responsible. Dramatic art should enjoy the same freedom enjoyed by writers who published their work and who were subject only to the controls of the Criminal Code: “We want every author, every theater director, every actor to assume his own direct responsibility before the common Criminal Code; we want the actor and the director to bear responsibility for his work, just as authors [now] do for the contents of their books. And if state authorities take energetic measures under the provisions of the existing criminal statutes, then surely we have no more need for any [prior] censorship.”68
The Progressive's bill received enthusiastic support from Social Democrats (SPD), who expressed pleasure that bourgeois liberals had finally joined them in the fight against arbitrary, monopolistic police power. All forms of censorship, the SPD agreed, were to be condemned and art and intellectual inquiry must be liberated from censorship and other restrictions.69
The parties of the Right, however, staunchly opposed the bill. Both Conservatives and Free Conservatives, who customarily defended the status quo and resisted any attempt to reduce Prussian state rights or strengthen either the central (imperial) government or the Reichstag, urged the bill's rejection. Prior censorship of theatrical performances was needed now more than ever, they argued, to protect the more susceptible elements of the population from immoral, subversive, and harmful works. Relying simply on the Criminal Code and intervening only after a performance had taken place was foolhardy and dangerous, for by then the harm would already have been done. What was needed was stricter, not looser state control over theaters; and because local police were most familiar with their own city and were in the best position to judge what works may be harmful there, it was they who were in the best position to exercise prior theatrical censorship.70
Like Conservatives, the Center Party of course also wished to tighten, not abolish prior theater censorship. With delicious irony the Catholics pointed out that Progressives were now arguing the antithesis of what they had argued during the recent Lex Heinze debate. To prevent passage of the Center's theater paragraph, Progressives had earlier maintained that the “prophylactic actions” of local police censors and their legal authority to prevent immoral performances from taking place were more than sufficient to control excesses in theatrical life; indeed, Progressives
