challenges to the reigning code of norms—a code that is defined by and serves the interests of the dominant social group—from dissidents, critics, and opponents of the status quo, censorship is a coercive political weapon used to preserve the established sociopolitical order and the dominant elite's primacy within it. From the standpoint of political sociology, the history of censorship is “the history of the struggle for power of dissident groups against the existing interests in politics, religion, and morality, and the banned book is often only a symbol for a more comprehensive struggle over authority.” What is at stake in this struggle is consensus over a system of norms and social rules that promote conformity beneficial to those in authority.33 As one influential censorship scholar notes, all censorship (whether narrowly or broadly defined) is inextricably linked to the control of power and knowledge: it is “a mechanism for gathering intelligence that the powerful can use to tighten control over people or ideas that threaten to disrupt established systems of order” and “a strategy used by the powerful to deny the powerless access to power-knowledge.”34
Interpreting censorship as an instrument of elite or class domination reveals and explains much about its motives, functions, and consequences in imperial Germany, but such an approach is not without its problems. In practice, the sorts of expressions censors attempt to suppress (and the severity of their coercive sanctions) vary greatly. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century this was true not only among different nations with similar social norms, sociopolitical systems, and ruling elites, but also, as we shall see in Germany, among different regions or cities within the same nation. Moreover, different members of the “dominant elite” and different branches of the state apparatus, even at the local level, often disagreed vehemently over whether a particular expression should be prohibited. Identifying a coherent national or local ruling elite, its interests, and a particular code of norms crucial to its social and political power, whether in Germany or elsewhere, can be a dubious undertaking. The picture is further complicated by the fact that conservative segments of the broader German populace frequently pressured governing authorities to censor or prohibit things the latter would have preferred to ignore or tolerate.
As with many human institutions, censorship often produces ironic outcomes that are contrary to, even in mockery of, the intended, expected, or appropriate results. This study will show how in imperial Germany an array of important restraints to state power thwarted the efficient exercise of censorship and made it highly unpredictable. While efforts to censor literature proved effective in some settings, it also had consequences quite different from what the imperial authorities intended.
Notes
1. Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler, trans. William Weaver (San Diego and New York, 1981), 234–35.
2. Quoted in Peter Jelavich, “Paradoxes of Censorship in Modern Germany,” in Enlightenment, Passion, Modernity. Historical Essays in European Thought and Culture, ed. Mark S. Micale and Robert L. Dietle (Stanford, 2000), 277–78. See also Michael Knoche, “Einführung in das Thema,” in Der Zensur zum Trotz. Das gefesselte Wort und die Freiheit Europa, ed. Paul Raabe (Wolfenbüttel, 1991), 23–39.
3. Hans Widman, Geschichte des Buchhandels. Vom Altertum bis zur Gegenwart, rev. ed. (Wiesbaden, 1975), 154; Ernst Umlauff, “Zur Struktur der europäischen Kulturwirtschaft. Der deutsche Buchhandel bis 1930,” Europa-Archiv 2 (Sept. 1947): 891–93.
4. One leading authority estimated in 1896 there were approximately six hundred theaters in Germany. (Adolph L'Arronge, Deutsches Theater und deutsche Schauspielkunst [Berlin, 1896], 24); another estimate on the eve of the war claimed over 460 (Eugen Schöndienst, Geschichte des deutschen Bühnenvereins. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Theaters 1846–1935 [Frankfurt, 1979], 229).
5. Bernhard Kellermann, “Der Schriftsteller und die deutsche Republik,” in An alle Künstler! (Berlin, 1919), reprinted in Weimarer Republik. Manifeste and Dokumente zur deutschen Literatur 1918–1933, ed. Anton Kaes (Stuttgart, 1983), 30–31.
6. For brief overviews of the historiography of imperial Germany see Roger Chickering, “The Quest for a Usable German Empire,” in Imperial Germany: A Historiographical Companion, ed. Roger Chickering (Westport, CT, 1996), 1–12 and James Retallack, Germany in the Age of Kaiser Wilhelm II (New York, 1996), 1–15 (quote from 42).
7. Volker R. Berghahn, Imperial Germany, 1871–1914: Economy, Society, Culture and Politics (Providence, RI and Oxford, 1994), 123.
8. Johannes Penzler, ed., Die Reden Kaiser Wilhelms II. in den Jahren 1901—Ende 1905 (Leipzig, 1907), 60–62. My translation is based on that in Gerhard Masur, Imperial Berlin (Devon, UK, 1973), 211 and Peter Paret, The Berlin Secession: Modernism and its Enemies in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, MA, 1980), 25, 26–27. For similar statements see his speeches of 2 May 1896 to the Berlin Kunstakademie, 16 Jun. 1898 to the personnel of the Königliche Schauspielhaus, 25 Jan. 1902 to the Berliner Kunstgewerbemuseum and 2 Nov. 1902 to the Hochschulen der bildenen Künste und für Musik, as well as Paul J. Seidel, ed., Der Kaiser und die Kunst (Berlin, 1907), 14–16.
9. Hans von Hülsen, “Der Kaiser und das Theater,” Die Tat 5, Heft 6 (Sept. 1913): 588; Paret, Berlin Secession, 162; Gerhard Schulz, “Naturalismus und Zensur,” in Naturalismus. Bürgerliche Dichtung und soziales Engagement, ed. Helmut Scheuer (Stuttgart, 1974), 109.
10. Arno J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (New York, 1981), 190; Roy Pascal, From Naturalism to Expressionism: German Literature and Society, 1880–1918 (London, 1973), 256, 261; Edgar Feuchtwanger, Imperial Germany 1850–1918 (London and New York, 2001), 128.
11. Jack. R. Dukes and Joachim Remak, eds., Another Germany: A Reconsideration of the Imperial Era (Boulder, CO, 1988), 210; Peter Jelavich, “Literature and the Arts,” in Chickering, Imperial Germany, 400; Wolfgang Mommsen, Bürgerliche Kultur und künstlerische Avantgarde. Kultur und Politik im deutschen Kaiserreich 1870 bis 1918 (Frankfurt, 1994), 45–46.
12. Felix Gilbert and David Clay Large, The End of the European Era: 1890 to the Present, 5th edition (New York, 2002), 79.
13. Ulla Otto, Die literarische Zensur als Problem der Soziologie der Politik (Stuttgart, 1968) and “Zensur—Schutz der Unmündigen oder Instrument der Herrschaft?” Publizistik 13 (1968): 5–15; Hans Norbert Fügen, “Zensur als negativ wirkende Institution,” in Lesen—Ein Handbuch, ed. Alfred C. Baumgärtner (Hamburg, 1974), 623–42; Dieter Breuer, Geschichte der literarischen Zensur in Deutschland (Heidelberg, 1982), 9–22; Klaus Kanzog, “Zensur, literarische,” in Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturgeschichte, 2. Aufl., ed. W. Kohlschmidt, et al., Band IV, ed. K. Kanzog and A. Masser (Berlin, 1984), 998–1049; Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison, WI, 1984); Reinhard Aulich, “Elemente einer funtionalen Differenzierung der literarischen Zensur. Überlegungen zur Form and Wirksamkeit von Zensur als einer intentional adäquaten Reaktion gegenüber literarischer Kommunikation,” in “Unmoralisch an sich…” Zensur im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Herbert G. Göpfert and Erdmann Weyrauch (Wiesbaden, 1988), 177–230. On the evolution of traditional censorship research through the late 1980s, see Dieter Breuer, “Stand und Aufgaben der Zensurforschung,” in “Unmoralisch an sich…”, 37–60 and Kanzog, “Textkritische Probleme der literarischen Zensur. Zukünftige Aufgaben einer literaturwissenschaftlichen Zensurforschung,” ibid., 309–31.
14. Annette Kuhn, Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality, 1909–1925 (London and New York, 1988); Sue Curry Jansen, Censorship: The Knot That Binds Power and Knowledge (New York, 1988) and “The Censor's New Clothes: Censorship in Liberal Societies,” in Patterns
