INTRODUCTION
Censorship, Society, and Literary Life in Imperial Germany
Then the first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction,
and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and reject those bad.
—Plato, The Republic, Book II
There was, besides, full freedom of thought,
Enjoyed by the masses of the nation;
Restrictions applied to only a few—
Those who wrote for publication.
—Heinrich Heine, Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen (1844), XXV
“Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do,” remarks a character in Italo Calvino's 1979 novel If on a winter's night a traveler. “What statistic allows one to identify the nations where literature enjoys true consideration better than the sums appropriated for controlling and suppressing it? Where it is the object of such attentions, literature gains an extraordinary authority, inconceivable in countries where it is allowed to vegetate as an innocuous pastime, without risks.”1 Calvino is certainly not the first writer to suggest that when artists enjoy total freedom of expression they are not being taken seriously. Alfred Döblin, remarking in the 1920s on demands by some in Germany for absolute artistic freedom, maintained that artists and writers were part of society and had a right to be treated like everyone else; allowing them to say whatever they want is to ignore or dismiss them as one would a child or idiot. “Art is not sacred, and artworks should be allowed to be banned,” he said; “We [writers] want to be taken seriously. We want to have an impact, and thus we have—a right to be punished.”2
As the proverbial land of Dichter und Denker (poets and thinkers), Germany in the imperial era (1871–1918) devoted enormous resources to creating, editing, publishing, distributing, marketing, reading, interpreting, and reviewing serious (and not-so-serious) literature. In 1900, for example, the German Empire published nearly twenty-five thousand book and journal titles, with an average run of about one thousand copies each—nearly twice as many titles as published in France, nearly three and a half times as many as in England, and nearly four times as many as in the US. Of these titles, one in nine were classified as “Schöne Literatur” (belles lettres), a portion that had risen to one in seven by 1908.3 With an estimated six hundred theaters, Germans were also heavily invested in producing, staging, directing, rehearsing, and performing drama.4 At the same time state and local authorities—right up to the final days of World War I—expended much time and money prosecuting and trying writers; supervising, controlling, regulating, and censoring literature and the public stage; and hearing and arbitrating frequent appeals of their censorship decisions. The national Reichstag, several state parliaments, various government commissions, and the press, meanwhile, studied and debated at length the empire's censorship decisions, policies, and laws. And legions of private citizens within and outside of the literary community mobilized and organized to protest the nation's censorship practices and agitate for their change. Although some, like the liberal-left journalist Bernhard Kellermann, believed no country disdained literature and everything spiritual more than did the German Empire,5 in Germany literature in general—and theater in particular—clearly enjoyed true consideration, was the object of great attention, and commanded an extraordinary authority. Writers there were taken seriously indeed and several were punished for what they wrote. Whether or not imperial Germany would have qualified as a “police state” in Calvino's eyes, it certainly went to great lengths to control and suppress some of its literature and drama. This is a study of how and why that literary censorship occurred and what consequences followed.
Imperial Germany and Modernist Literature
Historians have long argued about the nature of the German Empire, and since the 1960s their conflicting interpretations have often been vehemently debated. Many scholars characterize the Kaiserreich as a backward, rigid, pseudoconstitutional, semiabsolutistic and militaristic autocracy—a solidly authoritarian society where a strong interventionist Obrigkeitsstaat (a state based on monarchical, authoritarian principles) repressed or restricted civil rights and freedoms, including freedom of expression. Germany's weak, illiberal, and semifeudalized bourgeoisie (these observers argue) was unable to establish the kind of liberal, modern, middle-class political system their British and French counterparts had. Instead, the empire was controlled by a narrow, premodern, antiliberal, reactionary elite of agrarian-military aristocrats and archconservative industrialists who protected their domination by coercing opponents, manipulating political life and public opinion, and successfully blocking all progressive elements.
This “orthodox” view has been increasingly challenged by revisionists who argue imperial Germany was in many ways as liberal and “normal” as its Western neighbors. According to this school, the German bourgeoisie was actually strong and growing in influence; liberal bourgeois values had triumphed in many areas, and in the political realm had created a genuine Rechtsstaat (a state based on a rule of law). In some respects, such as its social security system, universal male suffrage, world-class universities, and exemplary municipal administration, Germany was more advanced than any other nation. New populist movements and ideologies within the lower middle classes were not fostered and manipulated by the elites from above, but rather arose from below through the autonomous political self-mobilization of previously subordinate social groups. After the 1890s, revisionists argue, modernizing and reformist forces in the empire were making headway; German society was becoming more progressive and pluralistic; the liberal public sphere, civil liberties, and freedom of the press were all expanding; and elections were fair and political culture was becoming more democratic. “[D]efenders of the ‘people's rights' were clearly more numerous and more powerful than scholars once believed.”6
Whether one believes traditional, antimodern forces still overpowered those of modernity, or that the latter were prevailing over the former, it is clear imperial Germany was a society in “restless movement” 7 undergoing fundamental and at times overwhelming economic, social, and cultural changes. The rapid shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy, while
