the other, the government usually preferred the former, while many on both the Right and the Left, having lost confidence in local decision making, preferred the latter. Substantial changes to the censorship system became possible only after the outbreak of the war, when the exigencies of national mobilization and the need for more administrative centralization and bureaucratic intervention allowed the military to sweep aside legal technicalities, long-standing constitutional balances, and deference to local considerations. Only then did the system become more uniform and centralized.
Since, in the end, so much about literary censorship in imperial Germany depended on the local censor, it is to these censors we now turn.
Notes
1. Reinhard Frank, ed., Das Strafgesetzbuch für das Deutsche Reich, nebst dem Einführungsgesetze, 8.-10. rev. Aufl. (Tübingen, 1912); Justus Olshausen, Kommentar zum Strafgesetzbuch für das Deutsche Reich, 8. Aufl. (Berlin, 1909); Franz Eduard von Liszt, Lehrbuch des deutschen Strafrechts, 9. Aufl. (Berlin, 1899).
2. Ewald Löwe, ed., Die Strafprozeßordnungfür das Deutsche Reich mit Kommentar, 12. Aufl. (Berlin, 1907); Franz Eduard von Liszt, Das deutsche Reichs-Preßrecht, unter Berücksichtigung der Literatur und der Rechtsprechung (Berlin and Leipzig, 1880), 123–29, 142–44; Heinz-Dietrich Fischer, ed., Deutsche Kommunikationskontrolle des 15. bis 20. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1982), 132–35; Alex Hall, Scandal, Sensation and Social Democracy: The SPD Press and Wilhelmine Germany 1890–1914 (Cambridge, 1977), 46ff., 64–72.
3. For negative assessments of the imperial legal system see Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire 1871–1918, trans. Kim Traynor (Dover, NH, 1985), 127–29; Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte. Dritter Band: Von der ‘Deutschen Doppelrevolution bis zum Beginn des Ersten Weltkriegs 1849–1914 (Munich, 1995), 857, 1238–39; and Albrecht Funk, Polizei und Rechtsstaat. Die Entwicklung des staatlichen Gewaltsmonopols in Preussen 1848–1914 (Frankfurt, 1986). More positive appraisals are offered by Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1866–1918. Band I: Arbeitswelt und Bürgergeist (Munich, 1990), 655–65, and Band II: Machtstaat vor der Demokratie (Munich, 1992), 118–34, 182–93; Retallack, Germany in the Age of Kaiser Wilhelm II, 34–42; and Kenneth F. Ledford, From General Estate to Special Interest: German Lawyers 1878–1933 (Cambridge, 1996), 1–85. Nipperdey states unequivocally, “The German Empire of 1871 was a Rechtsstaat. That is a central part of its constitutional reality…. The rule of law—despite some breakdowns—was entirely beyond doubt; the German order remained a just, legally-determined one in which even the little man, far more than seventy years earlier, was able to claim his rights and be afforded after all a modicum of justice.” (2: 182, 193).
4. For example Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 744.
5. Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 2: 133–34.
6. In the 1870s the overall acquittal rate in press cases was 18.5 percent, while for those heard by the Bavarian Geschworengerichte the rate was 30.3 percent. By the 1880s the acquittal rate of the nonjury courts in press cases was 30 percent. Fischer, Deutsche Kommunikationskontrolle, 141.
7. Ludwig Thoma, “Gegen die Staatsanwälte,” in Gesammelte Werke (Munich, 1932), 7: 369–70; Robin J. V. Lenman, “Censorship and Society in Munich, 1890–1914, With Special Reference to Simplicissimus and the Plays of Frank Wedekind,” (PhD diss., Oxford University, 1975), 7–8, 11–12.
8. Korfiz Holm to Albert Langen, 22 Mar. 1899, Das Kopierbuch Korfiz Holms (1899–1903). Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Albert Langen Verlags und des “Simplicissimus, ” ed. Helga Abret and Aldo Keel (Berne, 1989), 58; Heine to Holm, 15 Jul. 1899, StBM, Nachlaß Thomas Theodor Heine.
9. The case involved Hardens article “König Otto” in Die Zukunft VI Jg., no. 29 (16 Apr. 1898): 97–102. See chapter 3.
10. StAM/PDM 1046. The case involved the May 1903 cartoon “Gesandtenerziehung.” See chapter 6.
11. The Catholic Bayerische Kurier, for example, urged the Bavarian government to use §360 sect. 11 against Simplicissimus since §184 had proven so unsuccessful in the past. Lenman, “Censorship and Society,” 94, n. 3.
12. Thoma quoted in Ann Taylor Allen, Satire and Society in Wilhelmine Germany: Kladderadatsch and Simplicissimus 1890–1914 (Lexington, KY, 1984), 184. For more on this case, see chapter 5. Thoma later crusaded relentlessly to have such questionable legal practices stopped. See his “Gegen die Staatsanwälte,” 370–373.
13. Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 1998), 34. For an example of how independent-minded deputy commanding generals resisted implementing some censorship policies even when pressured by the War Ministry, see Karl Brunner's report to the PrIM, 29 July 1916, LAB A, Rep 30 Berlin C, Tit. 121, Bd. 16985.
14. Quoted in Wolfgang G. Natter, Literature at War, 1914–1940: Representing the “Time of Greatness” in Germany (New Haven, CT, 1999), 44.
15. PrIM to local police, 9 Feb. 1915, quoted in Kurt Koszyk, “Entwicklung der Kommunikationskontrolle zwischen 1914 und 1918,” in Pressekonzentration und Zensurpraxis im Ersten Weltkrieg. Text und Quellen, ed. Heinz-Dietrich Fischer (Berlin, 1973), 164; and definition of Burgfrieden in Oberzensurstelle's 1917 Zensurbuch, reprinted ibid., 210.
16. Kurt Mühsam, quoted in Ernst Fischer, “Der ‘Schutzverband deutscher Schriftsteller' (19091933),” Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens 21 (1980): 192. Indeed, in 1915 the military's chief censorship office admitted it was not possible “to sharply distinguish between political, military, and economic questions [so] it is left to the judgment of the authorities…to decide which writings they wish to view as political.” Quoted in Natter, Literature at War, 225, n. 20.
17. PrWM memo of 1 Apr. 1916 to all stellvertretende Generalkommandos (a copy was also sent by the PrIM to all local police and RPs), and Saxon IM memo of 20 Jun. 1916, LAB A, Rep 30. Berlin C, Tit. 121, 16985.
18. Henry Vizetelly, Berlin Under the New Empire: Its Institutions, Inhabitants, Industry, Monuments, Museums, Social Life, Manners (London, 1879; reprint New York, 1968), 2: 236.
19. Schöndienst, Geschichte des deutschen Bühnenvereins, 229.
20. LAB A/74, Th 5; Gerdi Huber, Die Klassische Schwabing: München als Zentrum der intellektuellen Zeit- und Gesellschaftskritik um 1900 (Munich, 1973), 240.
21. On state control of theater in nineteenth-century Europe see Robert J. Goldstein, ed., The Frightful Stage: Political Censorship of the Theater in Nineteenth-Century Europe (New York and Oxford, 2009).
22. Friedrich Schiller, “Die Schaubühne als eine moralische Anstalt betrachtet,” in Sämtliche Schriften, 5 vols. (Munich, 1968), 5: 92–101. A translation, “The Stage Considered as a Moral Institution,” has been published in Frederick Ungar, ed., Friedrich Schiller: An Anthology for Our Time (New York, 1959), 263–83.
23. Arthur Brehmer and Max Grube, “Der Kaiser und die Kunst,” in Am Hofe Kaiser Wilhelms II, ed. A. Brehmer (Berlin, 1898), 360; Wilhelm II's “Rede zu Kunstpersonal der Königlichen Schauspiele, 16 Juni 1898,” in Reden Kaiser Wilhelm II, 98–99.
24.
