have explored the theoretical, historical, sociopolitical, and literary dimensions of censorship as a concept and as an institution.13 Other scholars (including Annette Kuhn, Sue Curry Jansen, Richard Burt, Michael Holmquist, Michael Levine, Robert Post, and Beate Müller), drawing on new insights from literary, communication, and media theory; on a growing interest in the external determinants and social dimensions of literary life broadly defined; and on theories about the evolution of the public sphere (Öffentlichkeit), have turned from the study of explicit acts of “repressive intervention” by identifiable regulatory authorities to more latent, generalized structural processes of communications control and cultural regulation. These newer approaches see censorship not as a series of discrete acts by specific institutions and external agents to silence a subject, but rather as an ongoing process or system of power relationships between a variety of censorious forces and agents that transcend time and place. Censorship is omnipresent and inescapable, an inherent structural necessity, they argue, because all expression is constrained by underlying psychic and social forces, internalized perceptions and inhibitions, diverse and dispersed techniques of domination, and by discursive practices of exclusion, selection, differentiation, or demarcation.14 The vast reach of contemporary censorship research is reflected in the recent four-volume Censorship: A World Encyclopedia, which defines censorship as any process, “formal and informal, overt and covert, conscious and unconscious, by which restrictions are imposed on the collection, display, dissemination, and exchange of information, opinions, ideas, and imaginative expression.” Its entries range from the areas of ethics, law, languages, media studies, and philosophy to politics, psychology, the physical sciences, religion, and sociology.15
As censorship studies have expanded, however, the term has been so broadly applied that scholars no longer agree on what censorship is. When the term is used so freely that it includes any attempt by any group or individual, public or private, to “control communication between people” (Berger) or anything, including free market forces, that limits what we can read, hear, or know (Jansen), or any “discourse control” or “use of semantic domination” (Kienzle and Mende)—including the use of professional or expert language (Schauer)16—then the term is virtually devoid of meaning. As Peter Dittmar observed even before the field's postmodern turn: “The inflation of the word ‘censorship' into a meaningless term of vilification [Allerweltschimpfwort] has become irreversible. Since ‘censorship' has come to serve as an excuse for every rebuff that can befall an author, including those that are self-inflicted, that word can hardly be used rationally any more.”17
In this study, the term censorship will be used in its narrower conventional sense, for acts of “repressive intervention”: those formal, overt, and conscious attempts to control the public expression of opinions. It is an institutionalized, usually legally sanctioned form of social control involving systematic state examination and judgment of expressions intended for public dissemination. Preventive or prior censorship (Vorzensur) occurs when authorized agents of the state claim the prerogative of inspecting expressions and either approving or prohibiting them (or approving them provided they are altered) before they are publicly disseminated. Since expressions cannot legally circulate publicly until they receive explicit official permission, this is the most rigorous form of censorship, for it theoretically bans everything except what the censors approve. Punitive, repressive, or ex post facto censorship (Nachzensur), by contrast, controls expressions and imposes sanctions only after the expressions have been made public, for example by confiscating, prohibiting, destroying, or mandating the alteration of the offending material and/or by punishing those responsible for the expression or for its public dissemination. Since under punitive censorship materials may presumably circulate freely before a decision is made to permit or ban them, this is a more permissive form of censorship in that all public expressions are tolerated until they are expressly banned. In imperial Germany most theatrical performances were subject to preventive censorship, while printed literature had to contend only with punitive censorship.
Though I approach censorship from a conventional perspective, I hope to avoid some shortcomings of traditional (and contemporary) censorship studies. Like the satirist who characterized it as “the younger of two sisters, the older of whom is Inquisition,”18 those who live from the expression and open exchange of ideas and opinions detest censorship. Artists, scholars, writers, and other people of letters decry censorship as a crude weapon wielded by the forces of ignorance to silence courageous heralds of truth and progress. One of its pioneering historians deemed the struggle of literature against censorship “the eternal conflict of two world views, the struggle of light against darkness, of enlightenment against obscurantism,” while a recent scholar observes “it has become all but impossible to discuss censorship in anything other than pejorative terms.”19 Literary scholar Dieter Breuer notes that many studies of repressive interventions by censors become simplistic “censorship polemics” that reduce the story to a Manichean collision between rigid petty functionaries and unyielding evangelists of freedom. Censors and authors, he points out, actually have considerable latitude in deciding how best to exercise their respective prerogatives: the former to assert the state's need for security in the interest of the common good, the latter to stake out and maintain some free space for the individual.20 Rather than a one-dimensional harangue, this study offers instead a nuanced examination of the motives, practices, limits, and consequences of state censorship of literature in Germany. Such an analysis demands that we look both at the censored and the censors, taking the latter seriously and seeking to understand the complexity of their motives and situation, and it requires us to consider the frequent gap between the intent and the effect of literary censorship. And although focusing on traditional institutional forms of state censorship rather than on broader impersonal processes of cultural regulation and discourse control, I draw on insights from recent literary and social theory (especially reader-response and reception theory and the social control of deviance) to explore some structural features of censorship—without, I hope, succumbing to the tendency of many such analyses to conflate or ignore the significantly different kinds of experiences of those who are subject to censorship.21
One such feature that has intrigued many recent scholars is the inclination of the subjects of censorship to internalize the mechanisms of control. Michael Foucault brilliantly analyzed the implicit systems of power and the constraining mechanisms embedded in modern social institutions (for example, prisons, factories, hospitals, or schools) that serve to discipline, control, and determine our behavior without our knowing it.22 Drawing on his work, many modern studies emphasize how writers and artists are conditioned by constant, omnipresent scrutiny and surveillance to exercise a self-discipline and self-control that makes overt censorship unnecessary. Anxiously anticipating the censor's judgment and hoping to avoid a conflict with the law, some authors may become hesitant or uncertain and may come to practice, either consciously or unconsciously, an inhibiting self-censorship—to write with what one observer has cleverly called a “scissors in the head.”23 Leo Tolstoy, for example, remarked that the “horrible czarist censorship question” always tormented him and caused him involuntarily to abandon many projects he wanted to write; Diderot noted that censorship instills in writers a reticence, uncertainty, and self-doubt so that in the end an author himself no longer knows what he thinks; and John Galsworthy, testifying before a parliamentary committee in 1909 about Britain's theater censorship, quoted letters from many authors who claimed, because of the censor, to have been deterred from writing about something.24 Censorship can thus ultimately create and sustain a power relationship semi-independent of the censors who exercise it: authors and artists caught up in this power situation can themselves become its bearers. Perhaps, as some observers suggest, censorship actually aims at “the internalization of the claims of domination”: regimes seek “to build the secret police into the individual's brain itself and have it assume the position of censor within him,” so that the result of successful censorship is ultimately self-censorship. As the French poet and essayist Paul Valery lamented, “In every way we are circumscribed, dominated by a hidden or obvious regimentation extending to everything, and we are so bewildered by this chaos of stimuli obsessing us that we end by needing it.”25 In examining the experiences of censored German authors, I will look closely
