Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism and the Public Sphere (Minneapolis, 1994); Michael Holmquist, “Corrupt Originals: The Paradox of Censorship,” PMLA 109, no. 1 (1994): 14–25; Michael Levine, Writing Through Repression (Baltimore, 1995); Robert C. Post, ed., Censorship and Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation (Los Angeles, 1998); Beate Müller, ed., Censorship and Cultural Regulation in the Modern Age (Amsterdam and New York, 2004). Two overviews of recent censorship research are Beate Müller, “Censorship and Cultural Regulation: Mapping the Territory,” in Censorship and Cultural Regulation, 1–31; and Helen Freshwater, “Towards a Redefinition of Censorship,” ibid., 225–45.
15. Derek Jones, ed., Censorship: A World Encyclopedia, 4 vols. (London and Chicago, 2001) (quotation from “Editor's Note,” 1:xii).
16. Melvin Berger, Censorship (New York, 1982), 1; Jansen, “Censor's New Clothes,” 192–93; Michael Kienzle and Dirk Mende, eds., Zensur in der BRD. Fakten und Analysen (Munich, 1980); Frederick Schauer, “The Ontology of Censorship,” in Post, Censorship and Silencing, 162.
17. Peter Dittmar, Lob der Zensur. Verwirrung der Begriffe, Verwirrung der Geister (Cologne, 1987), 183–84.
18. Eberhard Ultra, in Johann Nestroy's Freiheit in Krähwinkel (1849), Act I, scene 14 (Johann Nestroy, Komödien, 3 vols., ed. Franz H. Mautner [Frankfurt, 1970], 3:47).
19. Heinrich H. Houben, Hier Zensur—Wer dort? (Leipzig, 1918), 3; Freshwater, “Towards a Redefinition,” 237.
20. Breuer, “Stand und Aufgaben,” 59–60.
21. Freshwater, “Towards a Redefinition,” 225, 240–42.
22. Michael Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977).
23. Henryk M. Broder, ed., Die Schere im Kopf. Über Zensur und Selbstzensur (Cologne, 1976).
24. Eli Oboler, The Fear of the Word: Censorship and Sex (Metuchen, NJ, 1974), 138; George R. Scott, “Into Whose Hands”: An Examination of Obscene Libel in its Legal, Sociological, and Literary Aspects (London, 1945), 180.
25. Kienzle and Mende, Zensur in BRD, 231; Walter Bückmann, ed., Kunst vor dem Richter (Frankfurt, 1964), 102; Valery as quoted in Jascha Kessler, “The Censorship of Art and the Art of Censorship,” The Literary Review 12, no. 4 (Summer 1969): 421.
26. Quoted in Pascal, From Naturalism to Expressionism, 257.
27. Jack P. Gibbs, Norms, Deviance, and Social Control: Conceptual Matters (New York, 1981), 4.
28. Breuer, Geschichte der literarischen Zensur, 12–17, 201.
29. Otto, Die literarische Zensur, 19, 67–112, 129, 137–47, and “Zensur.” See also Dieter Richter, “Literaturfreiheit und Zensur,” Buch und Bibliothek 31, H. 4 (Apr. 1979): 323–30, and Sue Curry Jansens work.
30. Ödön von Horváth, “Zensur und Proletariat,” in Gesammelte Werke, 8 vols., ed. Traugott Krischke and Dieter Hildebrandt (Frankfurt, 1972), 3:667.
31. Oboler, Fear of the Word, 239.
32. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjarhe, quoted in Breuer, Geschichte der literarischen Zensur, 145–46.
33. Otto, Die literarische Zensur, 46, 71, and “Zensur,” 11.
34. Jansen, Censorship, 14, 203.
Chapter 1
THE LAW
The police want to know everything, everything.
—Der Wirt, in Lessing, Minna von Barnhelm, Act II, scene 2
Before the law, all citizens are equal—but not, it seems, before the censors.
—Otto Brahm, director of the Berlin Freie Bühne,
Deutsches Theater, and Lessing-Theater
Like their counterparts throughout Europe and North America in the nineteenth century, anyone engaged in literary or theatrical life in the German Empire did not enjoy absolute freedom to say, publish, or publicly perform whatever they wished. The law limited what subject matter writers could treat and the language they could use; it shaped and restricted institutions that mediated between writers and the public, such as the theater, press, and book trade; and it helped determine which audiences had access to which literary works or performances, and under what conditions. Some legal constraints were enacted by a popularly elected legislature, some were simple administrative (or, after 1914, military) edicts, and some, surprisingly, were requested by publishers or theater managers seeking more predictability, economic security, or legal protection. The laws restraining imperial literary life were uneven and at times confusing: different laws applied to different media, while the empire's federal structure ensured wide local variation in their nature, enforcement, and consequences. For these reasons and others, censorship laws were the subject of much public debate, especially after 1890, as popular and official forces struggled to standardize, broaden, narrow, tighten, or loosen them. Only war in 1914 and revolution in 1918 brought substantial changes to Germany's patchwork censorship system.
Control of the Printed Word
During the first half of the nineteenth century, the printed word was one of the most ruthlessly censored forums of public expression in Germany and other European states; by the last quarter of the century it was one of the freest from state control. Extensive government restrictions such as licensing and prior censorship shackled the press and book trade in most nations until 1848, but thereafter liberal reformers progressively dismantled these controls, especially prepublication censorship. By the 1860s there was substantial (but not total) freedom of the press and book trade in Great Britain, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, and several German states (including Prussia), while France abolished the last vestiges of state press control in 1881, and Russia not until 1905.
Prior censorship of books had ended in the German states with the revolution of 1848. Freedom of the periodical press was guaranteed in the new German Empire by the Imperial Press Law of 7 May 1874, which abolished government licensing of the press and all prepublication censorship of printed material. Although government retained the right to be informed about the contents of most periodical publications (except for artistic, scholarly, or commercial publications, publishers were to submit a copy of each issue to local police as distribution began), the Press Law placed few significant legal restraints on printed materials. (The exceptional Anti-Socialist Law, which did prohibit a wide range of socialist publications from 1878 to 1890, is discussed in Chapter 4.)
The state, however, did exercise a punitive or postpublication control over the printed word through other means. Under the Imperial Criminal Code of May 1871, for example, it was illegal to incite others, in print or speech, to disobey the law or commit criminal acts; to incite social classes to violence against each other; to knowingly fabricate or distort facts in order to incite in others contempt for state institutions or the law; to slander or libel officials, clergymen, or
