and occasionally ended up “needing” censorship.
Even when narrowly defined as formal, overt, and conscious intervention by state authorities, censorship exerts a potent effect upon authors. Whether or not internalized self-censorship actually determines how or what authors think or write privately, it is clear censorship can profoundly influence what they produce for the public, including what subjects they choose and what genres and language they use. Censorship affects if and how their work is disseminated to a wider public and which groups or individuals have access to it. Censorship can have significant personal and financial consequences not only for writers and playwrights but also for the publishers, editors, and booksellers who help distribute their works or the theater owners, directors, and actors who stage them. Finally, censorship can influence how the public reads or understands an author's work or how theatergoers and dramatic critics respond to it. Censorship, in short, must be considered as a constitutive factor of literary life. And so it was in imperial Germany, where official efforts to censor literature and drama had a significant impact on the literary life of the period: as the writer Herbert Ihering observed, until censorship was abolished in November 1918, German police regulations were “an aesthetic principle” that shaped the language and themes of literature and the theater.26
In Germany, as elsewhere, state censorship was a form of social control employed by governing authorities to defend and secure conformity to the shared political, social, religious, and moral norms and values that, in their view, were essential for communal integration, social cohesion, and civic order. While all sociopolitical systems guard their norms and many use censorship to do so, censors must nevertheless permit some modification and adaptation of those norms over time. For norms are historically relative, not eternally fixed: as new existential circumstances emerge in a society, as conditions governing communal interaction and the satisfaction of basic human needs change and evolve, the norms on which the society's identity, cohesion, and stability depend must also change and evolve. New situations demand new norms; no social order will remain stable unless it adapts to changing circumstances and no code of norms will remain viable unless it, too, evolves to meet the changing conditions of social life. A continual dialectical tension thus exists between society's need to defend and uphold its norms on the one hand, and its need to adapt or creatively reformulate its norms to changing circumstances on the other.
Censorship plays a central role in this larger process of the evolution or reformulation of norms (Normenwandel). Any viable social order has—indeed, must have—people, institutions, and processes that promote the evolution and modernization of its norms: by questioning, challenging, and deviating from established norms and by exposing reigning conventions as outmoded, indefensible, or no longer tenable, they encourage the development of new values better suited to the social needs created by new circumstances. As one authority on social norms has observed, “All social change commences as deviant behavior.”27 Since the function of the censor is to uphold existing norms by suppressing public expressions that endanger or subvert them, an inevitable, perpetual conflict exists between the norm-preserving efforts of censors and the efforts of those, especially imaginative writers and artists, who promote norm evolution and adaptation. Confrontations between censors and writers are part of the larger, ongoing process of norm-conflict and norm-evolution that occurs in all societies and in all historical periods.28
The decisions of censors are clearly an important factor influencing the rate at which norms will evolve. The more rigidly censors interpret and defend existing norms and the more intolerant they are of deviations from reigning standards, the more norm evolution will be retarded; the more flexible and tolerant they are of expressions that depart from the traditional, the easier the process of norm adaptation and evolution will be. Censors who perform their function too well—that is, those who suppress all nonconformist expressions and thus block any change in the reigning code of norms—actually pose a threat to a society's long-term stability, especially in periods of rapid social transformation such as imperial Germany was experiencing. For when members of a community begin questioning or dissenting from traditional norms, it usually indicates prevailing norms have not adapted to changing social conditions. Nonconformist expressions, especially of a literary nature, are frequently symptoms of deeper social transformations taking place or that have already occurred. Unless these new underlying circumstances, needs, or problems are recognized and the society's norms are allowed to evolve to meet them, those norms will become unviable and will no longer provide a source of social integration, cohesion, and stability.
If seen simply as a means of preserving a social or political system's indispensable code of norms, censorship seems a justifiable and even beneficial social institution. But it also has a profoundly ideological dimension, both in the stricter sense of reflecting the interests of a particular class, and in the broader sense of being intimately involved with the dynamics of power and domination. Political sociologists and others have persuasively argued that all censorship is simply a method used by politically dominant elites to defend their interests and preserve their sociopolitical dominance by protecting and upholding the code of values on which that dominance is based.29
Self-protection, to be sure, is hardly how censoring authorities conceive of or characterize their actions. Those who exercise censorship or support its use have traditionally claimed they do so for the welfare and protection of others. Censorship is necessary, they maintain, to defend society's weaker, more susceptible, and more easily misled elements: women; the young; the less-educated, naïve, or susceptible readers or theater-goers; certain religious or ethnic groups; a particular social class—the list is extensive. Such justifications for censorship are based on two paternalistic-authoritarian assumptions: first, that some (or most) people, being weak and corruptible, can be saved from evil only by strict rules imposed by external authority; and second, that some social elements, because of their immaturity, inferiority, or some peculiar corruptibility, are not competent to defend themselves against harmful ideas or influences and are thus in need of the censor's tutelage. (“Censorship is guardianship,” observed the Hungarian-German writer Ödön von Horváth; “for guardianship, one needs police; for police, one needs the penitentiary.”30) As guardians or wardens for others, censors of course assume they and a circle of colleagues are safely immune to the moral dangers and corrupting influence of the materials they examine in order to declare them harmful to someone else. The “unsafe,” vulnerable audiences they usually identify are people with no power to answer back: young, uneducated, or politically impotent groups that must accept the status of being unable to make their own decisions.31
Censorship, in other words, protects not society's most defenseless and least powerful members but its most secure, influential, and dominant ones. The prevailing system of values and social norms censors uphold and defend are defined by and serve the interests of that society's most powerful, dominant groups. Attempts to censor public expressions that conflict with, challenge, or violate established norms are, quite simply, attempts to defend and preserve the status quo, the system of relationships, attitudes, and conditions on which the primacy of the dominant elite rests. The institution of censorship, one early analyst observed, existed primarily to defend the established order against dissidents and critics. The most enthusiastic advocates of censorship are defenders of the status quo, those who feel most in harmony with and depend most upon established institutions and values and whose interests would be most harmed if these were radically altered. By contrast, it is those least attached to the status quo—maladjusted outsiders, the underprivileged, radicals, and heretics—who, because of their susceptibility to dangerous notions, are regarded as the greatest threat to the established order. Precisely these groups, because they cannot be trusted with dangerous ideas, are the real targets of censorship; in “protecting” these social outsiders from contact with certain “dangerous” expressions, censors are ultimately protecting the existing social order. As Goethe noted: “The powerful demand and exercise censorship, the underlings want freedom of the press. The former want neither their plans nor activities obstructed by a cheeky, contrary force, rather they want to be obeyed; the latter want to express their reasons in order to legitimize their disobedience.”32
Despite
