acts did not. (Here we see the censor’s evocation of truth as a value to be protected.)43 The police and interior minister disagreed, reading the story according to the vocabulary and ideas that ran through their own file on colportage, condemning “published songs and pamphlets of thoroughly filthy and indecent content, which destroy the morality of the average man,” and “so-called spiritual wares, which exhale the most tasteless superstitions and thereby destroy the good morals of the average man.”44 While Pfaff’s judgment focused on the pamphlet’s content, the police were preoccupied with audience and effects. According to the police, the danger of the story hinged on its tale of a woman who lost her mental equilibrium and, as a result, was capable of unimaginable acts. By provoking strong emotions, the text might lead to the loss of the reader’s moral compass and mental stability. Both Pfaff and the police called upon legal principles articulated in 1788: Pfaff stressed the importance of truth; the police sought to protect readers from “indecent images and enticing depictions of vice.” With no courts to weigh in, the police usually won out in such disagreements.
Tom Cheesman has studied the “true crime narratives” that were ubiquitous in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German street literature. These narratives were often performed orally with the aid of poster boards (anyone who has seen the prelude to Threepenny Opera will be familiar with Moritätslieder); during the first half of the nineteenth century it was not uncommon for these oral stories to be published in inexpensive editions. It is likely that the Eva Riedelin pamphlet was such a story, and the narrative is typical of the genre. Cheesman explains, “The shocking ballad tradition is one of dramatic elaborations of this basic legend, the central motif being refusal of a request for food—i.e. ‘hard-heartedness.’” The basic outlines of this story sound familiar: a poor family, often headed by a women, is threatened with starvation. A request is made for charity from someone who is better off, and this request is refused. In the published versions of the story the woman usually kills all the children and herself. Cheesman interprets the “hard-heartedness story” as a reflection of emerging bourgeois norms, particularly ideas of the “self-enclosed” and “self-sustaining family,” newly separated into a public sphere in which the man worked, and a private sphere dedicated to privacy and consumption.45 The story of Eva Riedelin seems to complicate this analysis a bit: the baker’s wife works alongside her husband, and the baker has never before denied Eva bread (so women are not radically isolated). Nonetheless the story does highlight the economic vulnerability of the family, which is in fact so isolated that it must rely on the generosity of strangers to subsist.
A True Terrifying Horrifying Story lends itself to further analysis, just as it did in 1817, when the censors and police wrestled over the proper reading of the story. On one level the story offers a lesson in the perils of religious unbelief, stressing in the first few lines the fact that Eva, who will become the perpetrator of the unspeakable crime, has lost faith. This is also a story of serious economic hardship, as the family continues to starve despite the husband’s hard work. On another level an adequate account of the story must keep in mind that the themes offered in the story are themselves part of an existing body of narrative tropes, as Cheesman points out. Thus the history of such a text is related to real economic vulnerability of the kind certainly experienced by many tenant farmers, but the story has another history rooted in conventions and tropes dating to the eighteenth century, and probably earlier.
A second reading of this story links it directly to the early nineteenth-century concerns I have been exploring about the vulnerability of the subject, the dangers of intense emotions, and the ease of falling into vice. Eva, we learn on the first page, is mentally unguarded. The crucial moment in the story, the moment in which Eva loses her sanity, resonates with a broader preoccupation with suicide, melancholy, Schwärmerei, and the “falling away” from (already fragile) reason. Recall that the 1788 law focused on the fragile mental states of vulnerable subjects, condemning publications that “nourish base instincts—defamation, envy, vengefulness—and disturb the equanimity of good and useful citizens.” In the text the base instincts of the central character emerge as she succumbs to the impulses that make her murderous and suicidal. The law and the text share a common vision of human nature in which dark instincts are barely veiled, easily accessed, and potentially disastrous. Ironically the very emotions the story promises the reader, terror and horror, are precisely the problem. Involving imagination and fantasy, they bypass reason, intelligence, and mental balance.
Another confiscated publication, this one recorded in the file concerned with “obscene publications and unproven medical remedies,” provides another example. While we may puzzle at the title of this file, with its combination of morality and medicine, it had contemporary logic. Just as people could easily destroy their mental health by reading, they might corrupt their physical health by consuming poison packaged as medicine or by mistaking lies for legitimate knowledge. The combination of these two dangers—one mental, the other physical—also suggests that just as legitimate knowledge and real medicine would heal the body, the right kind of text might heal the soul. Thus a second kind of immoral text offered false, dangerous, or unauthorized knowledge about the body. In April 1824 the police in Magdeburg confiscated a pamphlet entitled The Book of Secrets: A Collection of More Than 200 Magnetic and Mysterious Remedies against Illness, Bodily Defects and Ailments and for the Promotion of Other Useful and Salutary Ends.46 Several copies of the pamphlet, the police reported, had been confiscated from a local bookseller on grounds that the work “promoted superstition, or is partially of an immoral tendency.” Shortly thereafter a report from the police in Düsseldorf noted that the work had been confiscated from a local bookstore, and the government of Saxon-Weimar wrote to the Prussian authorities warning that the work was “wretched, dangerous, and immoral” and the instructions themselves were even “life-threatening.”47
An early nineteenth-century edition of the text, published without a date and with the false imprint of “Bonston,” was bound in paper and contained no illustrations—both signs that the book was inexpensive. The text itself is divided into three parts: a titillating introduction by an unnamed publisher that makes misleading promises about the content; the body of the text, consisting of hundreds of remedies for a variety of ailments and circumstances; and a detailed index.
The introduction begins with an account of the publisher’s discovery of a dusty manuscript in “1814 in France, in a completely plundered castle or seigniorial manor, [found] under many other scattered books and papers.” The editor asserts that the unknown author of the manuscript was a medical man of some renown, who engaged in a series of “debates in Latin concerning various medical topics” and in “correspondence with first-rate doctors, who were well known at the end of the last century, among whom Mesmer is particularly worth mentioning” (a reference to Franz Anton Mesmer, whose theories of animal magnetism and hypnosis were the subject of some fascination). The editor writes that the author was a “scientifically educated man and a well-known practicing German physician” and promises that the book will “unlock the secrets of nature,” including “Animal Magnetism, Somnambulism, and Sympathetic Remedies.”48 Here again the very things that aroused the reader—the references to animal magnetism and “sympathetic remedies”—also attracted the attention of the police.
Though the introduction promises to reveal the techniques of Mesmerism, the “secrets” that follow show no sign, except for a few Latin phrases, of having been written by a prominent doctor or a man of science. The bulk of the pamphlet is dedicated instead to a list of ailments and corresponding remedies, largely focused on sick or wounded bodies of men (rarely women), horses, and dogs. The reader finds solutions to barking dogs, lame horses, smashed limbs, and wet gunpowder. Mentions of virility, as well as advice on how to prolong an erection and avoid nocturnal emissions are squeezed between advice on how to win a duel, avoid “red dysentery,” and cure bladder worms. It also provides advice on how to evaluate the character and intentions of the people sitting around a table and how to “make a piece of paper that a man has burned reappear in his hand.” Readers are instructed on how to make waterproof gunpowder and find a missing relative. The book offers tricks and sleights of hand: how to make a gold piece heavier,
