deutscher Erzähler), a lobby group for Germany's literati that sought to improve their working conditions and opposed the censorship of public entertainments.22 Although he had moved from overseeing and controlling writers to representing their interests, in both roles Glasenapp functioned as an intermediary between the artistic community and the state.
If a sensitive, liberal-minded, highly respected censor like Glasenapp inspired confidence and trust within the artistic community and thereby helped legitimize censorship, some of his colleagues did exactly the opposite. Critics frequently charge that those who act as censors of others are blatant hypocrites acting out of questionable or even twisted psychological motives. “Show me a censor,” said one writer, “and I will show you an individual suffering from frustrated desire”; another wit defined a censor as a man who gets paid for his dirty thoughts. The renowned psychoanalyst and Freud biographer Dr. Ernest Jones claimed, “it is the people with secret attractions to various temptations who busy themselves with removing these temptations from other people; really they are defending themselves, under the pretense of defending others, because at heart they fear their own weakness.”23 Given the often arbitrary way German police officials were assigned to censorship duties, it would be hard to argue such men became censors to satisfy their own dark, unconscious drives. Nevertheless, the issue of moral hypocrisy in censors fascinated many critics of censorship in the last years of the empire. As the cases of Traugott von Jagow and Dietrich Bittinger show, when a censor's embarrassing private moral behavior appeared to conflict with his public role as a defender of morality he quickly became a cause célèbre; when such censors became objects of widespread ridicule and disrespect, especially in the artistic community, they undercut the legitimacy of censorship itself.
Archconservative Traugott von Jagow was appointed police president of Berlin in 1909 and was Glasenapp's immediate superior. Although Glasenapp's division normally handled most questions of theater censorship, unique or difficult cases were sometimes passed up to the police president for final decision. When the censorship division was reluctant to pass Carl Sternheim's drama Die Hose (Underpants) in February 1911 on moral grounds, Max Reinhardt, director of the Deutsches Theater, appealed to von Jagow and invited him to attend a dress rehearsal to see for himself how inoffensive the performance would be. (On the Die Hose case, see chapter 6.) Leaving little to chance, Reinhardt also asked Tilla Durieux, one of his most attractive and popular actresses, to sit next to von Jagow during the performance and distract him with conversation whenever the language or action on stage became a little racy. The stratagem worked and von Jagow approved the play. He also sent this personal note to Ms. Durieux: “Dear Madam: Since I must exercise censorship over the theaters, I would like some personal contact with actors' circles. It would be a pleasure for me if we could continue our conversation of today. Would you mind if I paid you a visit? Perhaps Sunday at 4:30 PM? Respectfully, von Jagow. (Please address personally).”24
Von Jagow did not know Durieux was married to Paul Cassirer, publisher and coeditor of the radical, avant-garde journal Pan. A few weeks earlier von Jagow had ordered two issues of Pan confiscated and charged Cassirer and his colleagues with obscenity. (On the Pan affair, see chapter 6.) Cassirer and his coeditors Wilhelm Herzog and Alfred Kerr decided to exploit the incident, hoping von Jagow would drop the charges against them or perhaps even resign from office. Cassirer sent the police president a note accusing him of behaving boorishly toward his wife and challenging him to a duel.25 The next day an imposing military officer in full uniform appeared in Cassirer's office with von Jagow's apology: “Herr Cassirer, my friend, His Excellence the police president of Berlin, Herr Traugott von Jagow, has instructed me to apologize to you in his name. On his word of honor, he did not know that Ms. Durieux was your wife. He assumes this embarrassing incident is now settled.” Cassirer indicated he was satisfied, but could not guarantee that others (namely, the firebrand Alfred Kerr) wouldn't discuss it further in the press. Indeed, over the next weeks Kerr and others published several caustic articles, poems, and cartoons about the affair, castigating von Jagow for cynical moral hypocrisy and abusing his office and ridiculing the double standards in respectable Wilhelmine society. The scandal was quickly picked up by the Social Democratic press and even by papers in the US, Argentina, England, and Hungary.26 Although he remained Berlin police president until 1916, the affair embarrassed von Jagow and added fuel to a growing anticensorship movement in Germany on the eve of the war.27
As the von Jagow affair was dying down in Berlin, another scandal involving a police theater censor and an actress flared up in Munich. In late 1911 an obscure Munich journalist published an article charging Dr. Dietrich Bittinger, head of the Munich Police Department's Referat VI, with making indecent advances on an actress who visited him in his office, supposedly to discuss a matter of theater censorship. Bittinger successfully sued for libel but the journalist appealed the decision and won a retrial. At this second trial (February 1912) another actress testified that at a ball three years earlier, Bittinger had grabbed her under her skirt—something Bittinger claimed he didn't remember and which at any rate, he said, happened all the time at a bal paré. Although upholding the journalist's original conviction for libel, the court reduced his fine from four hundred marks to fifty, implying Bittinger's reputation was less sterling than previously thought. Munich's liberal and socialist press quickly publicized the miniscandal, drawing attention to this guardian of morality's own lack of morality. Bittinger, meanwhile, had left Munich to assume the position of police director of Stuttgart.28
Although neither of these scandals found much resonance beyond the local left-wing press, both raised questions about the moral standards of censors who professed to uphold public morality by banning immoral materials. For those who already opposed censorship in principle as either ineffectual or unnecessary, these two incidents merely confirmed their worst opinions about arrogant censors and provided further proof the institution of censorship had to be abolished.
The Censor's Work
Like most work of public welfare divisions in the police forces in larger cities, that of the censors was highly routinized. After visiting the Berlin police in 1913–1914, one American observer commented on the “over-organization” he found:
There are bureaus and sub-bureaus, specialties and sub-specialties, with an interminable line of reports and documents proceeding through official channels to the [Police] President's office. Every official method is carefully prescribed; every action, even to the smallest detail, is hedged about with minute rules and regulations. Police business is reduced to a methodical and, as far as possible, automatic routine…. [It is] a piece of machinery from which the human element has been completely eliminated, leaving no room for individual initiative or imagination…. [A]s one surveys the entire organization of the Berlin department, the impression becomes firmly fixed that it is a huge, ponderous machine, impeded by its own mechanical intricacy and clogged with work.29
While bureaucratic organization was less systematized and routines less rigid the further one got from Berlin and Prussia, censors everywhere operated within a highly structured setting that imposed significant institutional constraints on their work.
Since artistic and scholarly publications were exempted from censorship under the Press Law, officials in the press censorship bureau were rarely involved in literary censorship. In scrutinizing the extensive outpouring of the periodical press, however, press censors also clipped and filed articles and references to anything that might be of use to other police divisions. Thus, they often forwarded to the theater censor newspaper items about dramas in which the latter might have an interest—for example, reports about controversial plays banned in another cities, or reviews of dramas performed elsewhere that raised questions about those works' suitability for the public stage.
Where theater censorship existed, theater directors were usually required to submit to police two copies of the script (Textbuch) of any work to be performed
