previously approved and publicly performed were routinely reapproved; all “new” works (that is, those never before submitted to police or approved for public performance in the city) had to be individually examined. In Berlin and other large cities each text was assigned to a lower-level official (the Lektor, or reader) who wrote a brief synopsis and analysis of the piece and marked (usually in blue pencil) any dialogue, stage action, or other aspect that might be objectionable or impermissible. (One of the more pedantic readers in Berlin also marked grammatical and spelling errors he found.30) This report then passed to a superior who decided whether to approve the piece, approve it provided certain alterations were made, or forbid its performance completely. In highly sensitive or particularly controversial cases the matter was sometimes referred to the police president for final judgment. A letter, under the police president's signature, informed the theater or music hall of the decision. One copy of the script was returned to the theater, containing the censor's blue markings of passages or scenes that had to be cut or altered; the second copy was kept in police files. (By 1901 the Berlin police had collected over eleven thousand Textbücher.31) For future reference the Berlin police also kept a huge card file of all works submitted for censorship there; a separate card for each drama indicated what action had been taken as well as other pertinent information (for example, whether the work was “Social Democratic”). Before reading a newly submitted drama, censors referred to this card file to see if it had been previously approved or banned in the city. They also frequently consulted whatever press clippings had been collected concerning the work to see if it had been banned elsewhere or what audience reaction had been when it was performed. After the move to centralize and coordinate theater censorship beginning in 1908, provincial police also began checking the master lists of bans and approvals distributed by the Berlin, Munich, or Dresden censors.
If unable or unwilling to decide from the script alone—for example, if they wanted to see exactly how a sensitive scene or action would be staged—censors sometimes insisted on attending the dress rehearsal, to which theaters were obligated to admit them.32 Once a script was approved a police official or simple constable from the censorship bureau might also attend the opening and/or subsequent performances to ensure they corresponded exactly to the approved script; any deviations (for example, extemporaneous comments by the actors or inclusion of dialogue that had been ordered removed) were grounds for a fine or rescinding approval for the play. With particularly sensitive or controversial pieces a constable was often sent to the premier and wrote a report on audience reaction; if there were outbursts or disturbances, permission for the play might be withdrawn. Contemporaries report that at many theatrical performances a policeman was “often the most attentive listener in the hall, constantly comparing the spoken words with the manuscript in his hands.”33
Although their work might appear to outsiders as highly routinized, German theater censors actually had relatively wide discretionary power to decide which works were suitable for public performance. They were not given a detailed checklist of forbidden topics, situations, language, or other items against which to evaluate a script. Rather, they were guided by a broad mandate to prevent the performance of any material that, because of its general tendency, the manner of its depiction, or its probable effect upon an audience, was likely to pose a danger to public peace, security, or order. In Prussia and most other states this included material that violated various provisions of the Criminal Code, attacked the existing state order or state religion, attacked the social order or the family, offended public morality by grossly violating the sense of shame and morality, depicted “notorious” situations from private life, or portrayed concrete events from the life of a person still living. Individual states sometimes imposed additional specific interdictions for public entertainments; in Prussia, for example, policemen and other public officials could not be portrayed in an “obscene or inappropriate manner” and neither deceased members of the Hohenzollern dynasty nor characters from the Bible could appear on stage without express government approval.34 (See chapters 3 and 5.)
Different officials in different settings necessarily applied these general and specific taboos differently. For censors, like many other social-control agents, are “definition controllers” or “judges of normality” (Foucault) who decide (usually on the basis of subjective value judgments rather than objective criteria) what conforms to acceptable norms. Their power to name or label, their ability to determine what range of behavior is to be designated as obscene, blasphemous, inflammatory, or otherwise intolerable uniquely positions them not only to identify but also actually to “produce” what they claim to suppress. When the law regarding obscenity and morally offensive materials was broadened after 1900, for example (see chapter 6), one contemporary observer remarked: “The impossibility of concretely defining [obscenity] has the inevitable consequence that the judge's individual interpretation is given wide latitude, that subjective judgment occupies a large place in the evaluation, analysis, and investigation of inculpated works. The penalties imposed for [such] transgressions…thus differ greatly, and no other legal regulations yield such divergent judicial verdicts as these.”35 (It was no coincidence that from 1902 until World War I, the annual number of prosecutions and convictions for obscenity was about 50 percent higher than during the 1890s.36)
Once censors decided to permit or prohibit a drama's public performance, the theater director was informed in writing. Police were not required at this time to explain the reason for a ban or identify what they found unacceptable, beyond stating generally that it was proscribed on “moral,” “religious,” or “public-order” grounds; only if the decision were appealed did police explicate what was objectionable and why. In reaching a decision censors seldom discussed or negotiated scripts with the theater director, and almost never with the playwright. Like most bureaucrats, police resisted any external, unofficial interference in their area of jurisdiction (in this case, pending censorship matters) and much preferred to confine their interaction with the public to formal, prescribed legal procedures. More importantly, playwrights had no legal role or rights in the censorship process. In nineteenth-century Germany, dramatists generally gave their new works to agents, who in turn sold the scripts to theaters after negotiating the royalties, advances, and other compensations due the author. Since, under the law, it was the theater director who submitted the work for censorship, police dealt only with him and only he had the right to appeal a ban. Some directors had a censored dramatist participate in the appeal process as a co-plaintiff or witness, or worked closely with an author in revising the banned work so it would pass censorship, but directors had no obligation to do so and they could (and frequently did) refuse to appeal a police ban despite the author's wishes. Directors were often less inclined than authors to appeal a ban because they knew they had to deal with the censors on numerous future submissions. They probably knew also that officials in agencies of social control tend to be easier on those who are respectful and cooperative and deal more harshly with those who are not. Although both the Prussian Ministry of the Interior and the German Stage Association (Deutscher Bühnenverein) after the turn of the century pushed to give authors a larger, more direct role in the censorship and appeals process, it was the theater directors with whom the police dealt almost exclusively.37
In exercising their professional judgment to approve a work or not, censors were subject to various overt and covert pressures, some from outside the official bureaucracy, others from within. First, a censor could be penalized for mistakes—for example, approving a work he should not have. Although they were not fined or imprisoned for “wrong” decisions as in Russia, a few did lose their positions after their too-lax or too-stringent rulings caused embarrassing controversy. The Stettin police official who foolishly banned Emil Augier's Les Fourchambaults in 1878, sparking outcries from liberals and a debate in the Prussian parliament, was quickly put on “leave for an undetermined time,” and soon thereafter resigned. Conversely, at the turn of the century Administrative Councilor Dumrath, new head of the Berlin theater censorship office, was removed from his position after only nine months because his decision to approve Max Dreyer's Volksaufklärung (Popular Enlightenment,
