in what they scrutinized. For once censorship becomes institutionalized and censors are assigned to identify and suppress nonconformist expressions, they develop a vested interest in the existence of such material. If the raison d'ètre of an undertaking depends on finding and controlling a certain deviant behavior—when its power and authority, its budget, its employees' jobs, and its continued existence is contingent upon the pursuit of this behavior—then that behavior will indeed be found, especially when the seekers themselves can define what constitutes deviance. Thus an antivice society or morality league organized for the purpose of identifying and combating obscenity, if it is to be successful (and if it is to continue receiving contributions from supportive patrons), must find obscenity—and always does.39 The same is true for other agencies, private or public, whose function it is to identify and combat other stigmatized behavior, be it witchcraft, “un-American activity,” official corruption and waste, “secular humanism” in textbooks—or supposedly dangerous, nonconformist expressions that violate established norms and must therefore be censored. And the more of this it can find the more the agency's existence is legitimatized and the easier it becomes to demonstrate its effectiveness and justify expanding its power, activities, staff, and budget. As one contemporary critic bluntly put it, “The censor must, from time to time, promulgate a ban in order to justify the existence of his office.”40 This was not mere speculation: Ludwig Sendach, a fin de siècle theater censor in neighboring Austria, confided in his memoirs that no matter how lenient and tolerant he wished to be, in his office “from time to time something ‘objectionable' had to be found in the submitted works, for otherwise censorship would soon have been suspected of being unnecessary! [emphasis in original]” The institutionalized pressure Sendach felt to “produce” was reinforced by the internal competition and rewards of the hierarchical bureaucracy in which he served: he soon realized the more passages he red-lined and the stricter a reputation he acquired, the more trust and respect he received from his superiors.41 In Hamburg competition between political and commercial police over control of theater performances meant the former, to justify their involvement, frequently claimed a performance violated some aspect of the Criminal Code. (In such cases, however, the police director sided with the commercial police, who found nothing objectionable in the works that political police sought to incriminate.42)
So Germany's censors always found much to do. As the number of theaters proliferated, so too did their work. Quantitative data in this area is sketchy and incomplete, but some does exist. (See tables 2.1—2.6.) In the later 1870s, for example, Berlin theaters submitted an average of over 530 dramas annually to police for censorship. By the 1890s this number had risen to about one thousand, although nearly three-fourths of these were works that had been previously approved there, leaving an average of about 275 “new” works needing the censors' scrutiny each year. Even in Frankfurt (whose population was about one-sixth that of Berlin), prior to World War I theaters were submitting about 240 dramas to the police each year.
Table 2.1 Dramas Submitted and Banned in Berlin, 1876–1880
Table 2.2 Dramas Submitted and Banned in Berlin, 1891–1900
Table 2.3 New Dramas Banned in Berlin, 1900–1917
Table 2.4 Dramas Banned or Withdrawn in Berlin, 1901–1903
Table 2.5 Dramas Submitted and Banned in Frankfurt, 1909–1914
Table2.6 Dramas Banned in Munich, 1908–1918
| Total Banned | |
| 1908–1914 | 50 |
| 1914–1918 | 28 |
| Total | 78 |
| (of these, 58 banned for moral reasons) |
Source: Michael Meyer, Theaterzensur in München 1900–1918, 154
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