and industrial strife. A population explosion was accompanied by massive internal and external migration and rapid urbanization. Secularization, the modernization of the school curricula, and greatly expanded access for the middle and lower middle classes (and women) to a university education were altering many worldviews. New forms of mass entertainment, from the popular press and Schundliteratur (“trashy” pulp fiction) to the cinema, were rapidly changing popular culture. The growth of Europe's strongest socialist movement and of a middle-class feminist movement, as well as the growing assertiveness of various ethnic and religious minorities, heightened the level of social, religious, cultural, and political conflict. Everywhere traditional norms and values seemed to be colliding with newer, more modern ones.
This was true especially of art, where defenders of the traditional clashed with avant-garde proponents of new styles, techniques, and subject matter. The conventional, idealistic view of art and literature prevalent in imperial Germany was a conservative, backward-looking one that worshipped classical notions of the true, the good, and the beautiful and viewed innovation with profound suspicion. Artistic and literary traditionalists preached adherence to certain eternal, unchanging principles, including order, harmony, regularity, and a disinterested enjoyment of beauty. Rejecting notions of elite aestheticism, traditionalists also believed art had a social mission—indeed duty—to ennoble and uplift the broader populace, to elevate the spirits of common men and women and inspire them with noble, idealistic sentiments. For art to fulfill its social responsibilities required that artists and writers represent recognizable and potentially inspiring subjects in an intelligible and uplifting way.
No better articulation of this idealist conception of art can be found than in the pronouncements of Emperor Wilhelm II, especially his famous December 1901 speech at the dedication of the Berlin Siegesallee, at which he lectured the assembled sculptors about the nature of true art and the dangers of artistic modernism. Art, Wilhelm II proclaimed, takes its models from nature and God's eternal laws and the artists of classical antiquity expressed most perfectly these eternal, unchanging laws of beauty, harmony, and aesthetics. “[D]espite all our modern feelings and knowledge, we are proud when it is said of a particularly fine artistic achievement: ‘that is nearly as good as the art of 1900 years ago.' But only nearly!” Warning against the corruption of pure art by “so-called modern tendencies,” the emperor implored German artists not to be led astray by passing fads or to abandon the principles on which art is built. “An art that transgresses the laws and limits I have outlined ceases to be art,” he proclaimed. Artists who march behind the seductive banner of “freedom” frequently fall into unbounded license and overweening presumption. For Wilhelm II, “Whoever strays from the law of Beauty and from the feeling for the aesthetic and harmonious…sins against the fountainhead of art.”
Finally, Wilhelm II expounded on art's social mission: art should help educate the nation:
[Art] should make it possible even for the lower classes, after their toil and hard work, to lift themselves up and be inspired by ideals,…to elevate themselves to the beautiful and rise above the constraints of their everyday thoughts. But when art, as so often happens today, shows us only misery and shows it even uglier than misery is anyway, then art sins against the German people…. [Art must] hold out its hand to raise people up, instead of descending into the gutter.8
The emperor's notion that art should elevate and show only the beautiful reflected and reinforced attitudes widely held in imperial Germany. His conservative conception of art also became the semiofficial one because his opinions—and many of his stock platitudes on the subject—were in turn dutifully repeated in the reports of the empire's censors, the arguments of its public prosecutors, and the verdicts of its judges. Whether this was done out of genuine conviction or out of a desire to avoid the kind of royal reprimand given to a few of their more liberal-minded colleagues is largely irrelevant; contemporary observers were convinced that had Wilhelm II taken a less-hostile stance toward modern German drama, “then surely many actions by the censorship authorities—who have proven to be genuine enemies of art, shackles on the mighty, rushing development of our artistic life—would not have taken place.”9
This conservative artistic idealism stood in sharp, even irreconcilable conflict with modern artists' conception of the function of their art and their relation to society. Like their counterparts elsewhere, avant-garde German artists and writers rejected traditional aesthetic norms, repudiating the classical conception of art in which some timeless beauty was the revered touchstone and artists strove for the ennoblement and uplift of the human spirit. For modernist writers especially, truth now became the central axiom of art and the artist's task was to make art conform to real life. Rather than glossing over unpleasant realities or attempting to beautify and idealize what was base or unattractive in life, mid-nineteenth-century German Realists (and the Naturalists who soon followed them) believed that truth in art demanded the acknowledgement and examination of the negative as well as the positive in nature. Using scientific observation and objective analysis in order to portray and reproduce reality as exactly and naturalistically as possible, they hoped finally to lay bare the raw, naked truths about modern society and human existence. Moreover, beginning with Naturalism, and becoming ever more pronounced in the avant-garde movements that followed it, modernist artists proclaimed the autonomy of art and the absolute independence of the artist. In fin de siècle Germany, as elsewhere, many modernist artists and writers embraced a vaguely anarchistic, extremely subjectivist cult of elite aestheticism and commitment to “art for art's sake” that emphasized the creative artists' spiritual and intellectual superiority over ordinary people and insisted on their immunity from normal social conventions and obligations.
As the remarks of Wilhelm II illustrate, these new conceptions of art met with strong resistance from wide segments of the general public as well as from state officials. Imperial authorities, for example, confiscated the work of some writers and artists, prosecuted others for violating the laws against obscenity, blasphemy, or lèse majesté, and police in most cities regularly prohibited the performance of certain dramas. Accordingly, some historians have argued that modernist writers, at least in the short term, were “effectively bridled and isolated” by legal and administrative controls; that legal penalties exerted an effective “restraining influence on writers” by “punishing or preventing the expression in literature of facts or opinions that demanded expression”; or that writers, satirists, and other cultural figures in Wilhelmine Germany existed in some “no-man's land between repression and liberality.”10 Others maintain that “ideas flowed freely” and the empire's “arts and literature were flourishing”; pointing to the “great latitudes of freedom and protection” artists and writers enjoyed, they argue the state's efforts at literary censorship were “largely ineffectual” and “official attempts to exert influence on the theater repertoire and on modern literature came to naught.”11 A leading textbook on twentieth-century European history flatly declares individual rights in the empire were carefully protected and “[t]here was no censorship.”12
To determine what role formal state controls did in fact play in the literary and political life of imperial Germany, this book examines the laws, institutions, personnel, and everyday practices of literary censorship at both the central/national and the local/regional level. Taking a comparative perspective—noting where the empire's literary censorship resembled and where it differed from that of other European nations—it can also shed light on the issue of Germany's relative “backwardness” or “normalcy,” particularly in its response to modernist literature.
Censorship
The study of censorship is an interdisciplinary field where political, legal, religious, and literary histories intersect with those of the book trade, libraries, the press, theater, and film. Traditionally, studies of censorship have focused on efforts to muzzle particular authors, artists, publications, or ideas, or on the censorship policies and practices of particular regimes or time periods. Since the late 1960s, however, “censorship studies” has expanded considerably and now flourishes as never before. Seminal systematic analyses by Ulla Otto, Hans
