that it was the role of the rationalized state to promote good morals. The state should, on the one hand, “work to develop good morals through social instruments” and, on the other hand, “endeavor to abolish … everything that can work against the progress of good morals.”58 The social instruments of promoting morality, he explained, were religion, education, and science, apparently in that order. The task of the enlightened state was to promote financial growth in agriculture and mercantile activity and to assure “tranquility, safety, and order” (Ruhe, Sicherheit und Ordnung).
When it came to print, Sonnenfels wrote, the benefits of “serious-minded and moderate investigation of the truth” had to be balanced against the need to protect religion, the state, morality, and personal honor. Personal honor and reputation were values to be upheld and legally protected, as they were consistent with the goal of civil order. Sonnenfels suggested that print should not be allowed to disrupt the stability, productivity, and honor of individuals or of institutions.59 We see the influence of these ideas in the 1788 Prussian law, which warned against “writers [who] create damage by distributing harmful practical errors about important human affairs; they corrupt morals with indecent pictures and alluring depictions of depravity and with malicious derision and spiteful disapproval of public institutions and regulations.”
Cameralist theories of the state and the police directly informed the language of Friedrich’s press law. However, it is more difficult to link the language of local ordinances and edicts to cameralist legal theory. Stralsund’s 1802 edict prohibited print that encouraged “religious enthusiasm, superstition, or [religious] disbelief [Schwärmerei, Aberglauben, oder Unglauben].” Authorities in Merseburg reported concerns that young people were vulnerable to books that “do not simply work to the detriment of moral feelings, but also inflame the fantasies.” Justi evoked similar terms, warning the police to make sure that “no gatherings take place under the guise of religion that spread enthusiastic ravings or that initiate crude debaucheries against good morals.”60 The language is similar to the 1824 report from Coblenz, expressing concerns about novels “that corrupt the heart and morals.”
Cameralism provided one way of linking emotional states to productivity and social order. Asserting that the virtue of the individual subject was the wellspring of the productive state and the happiness of the commonweal, thinkers like Justi and Sonnenfels provided a nonrepressive vocabulary in which to describe the positive benefits of moral legislation. At the same time—and this presents an odd tension in their writings on the subject—they suggested that these necessary interior spaces were usually beyond the reach of the regents and of law. As a result the cultivation of inner life was largely a matter of attempting to control unreliable figures (whether renegade priests or unscrupulous authors) rather than participating actively in the moral development of subjects.
The modern reader, perhaps unaccustomed to drawing parallels between the emotional states generated by religious practice and the provocations of profane narratives, might be surprised by this movement from pietist “ravings” and Schwärmerei to the superstition and mental disequilibrium attributed to reading secular texts. Yet it should not be surprising that as the religious monopoly over the soul gave way to an emerging practice of secular reading, vocabulary used to describe the effects of one would provide a starting point to discuss the other. Religion had long provided a language for Seelenkunde, and this language continued to have currency, even as the emerging secular sciences of psychiatry, neurology, and phrenology (each finding their footing in German-speaking states in the early decades of the nineteenth century) invented new terms to describe inner life. Romantic authors were simultaneously in the process of charting the existence of the human psyche and populating it with emotions, passion, imagination, and enthusiasm. German scientists and authors were at the forefront of various explorations of inner life, and some of these ideas found expression in heated discussions of obscene and immoral texts.
WESSENBERG’S MEDITATION ON READING AND MORALITY
More than any other figure, Ignatz von Wessenberg straddled the distance that separated the street-level scuffles of printers and police and the intellectual world of Romantic authors and early psychologists, each preoccupied with inner life (though imagining that space in different ways). Wessenberg studied what we might today term “mentalities”; that is, he worked to understand the assumptions and styles of thought that framed and shaped political, social, and cultural upheavals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. In his 1826 On the Moral Influence of Novels he applied himself with equal rigor to both highbrow and lowbrow texts, from Goethe to Paul de Kock, the French author of racy popular novels, whose work was often evoked by the police when they wanted to indicate that they were speaking of the lowest end of popular reading habits. In 1833 Wessenberg published On Schwärmerei, in which he offered an extended discussion of this pregnant (and, by the 1830s, no longer exclusively religious) contemporary epithet.61 He was also well-versed in contemporary philosophy, combining his analysis of popular literature with the aesthetic insights of Herder.
Wessenberg’s thought also reflected the intersection between religious and secular conceptions of the self that characterized so much of early nineteenth-century commentary on books and morality. As a Catholic and cleric, he used the language of the “soul” (Seele) to describe inner life. If he believed in original sin, he did not stress this point. He chose instead to describe an interior world filled with innate capacities and composed like an instrument of multiple notes, which, when artfully played by stimuli from the external world, might result in a well-balanced chord. The opposite was unfortunately also true: play false notes, cultivate the wrong capacities, and emotional distortion would result. For Wessenberg, the popular novel offered a means of both examining and shaping inner life. As the secular genre most closely associated with imagination and the emotions, novels played the crucial role in shaping the inner space of the self. While he did not bemoan the rise of the novel, he did suggest that this shift to secular reading had serious consequences. It is for this reason that he insisted that the study of the novel and its moral effects is crucial work, not to be dismissed as frivolous. Anticipating the criticism of his peers, he wrote, “Is it somehow irrelevant, how we pass the time when we have a moment free, or which images we favor to amuse our fantasies?”62 Insisting on the importance of fantasy, Wessenberg laid out an analysis of novel reading, grounded in his own articulation of early psychological theory.63 He was, as we have seen, not alone in his attention to the moral effects of secular reading habits, nor was he alone in his fascination with the substance and tenor of the human mind and soul, a problem tackled by the emerging disciplines of psychiatry, anthropology, and phrenology.64 He was joined in his efforts by the police and censors, who also worked to understand and articulate the mental effects of new reading habits.
In a sense Wessenberg’s treatise was a book on aesthetics, in which he used the contemporary novel to examine the constitution of human subjects and community. In taking the genre seriously he probably challenged assumptions of his peers, particularly those who decried the frivolity and immorality of the novel. His position was to explore the moral potential of the genre. While he warned of the dangers of “overheated fantasies” and explained that novel reading (particularly in the Romantic vein) might lead to insanity and Schwärmerei, he also saw potential in a genre that might shape and refine inner life.
For Wessenberg, the novel was the important modern genre because it provided a means of examining the content of the soul. He assumed that novels provided relatively direct representations of inner states, and because of this they presented an external manifestation of mental topography: “The deepest secrets of human nature, the riddles of love and hate, the greatest depths of character—such as our lives and histories reveal—are most vividly developed in the novel.” The topography of the soul was deep and inaccessible: “That which lies buried in the depths of man, all his natural inclinations and propensities, everything that springs forth from him, can be seen contained in the vivid colors of the novel.” He also advanced a vision of inner life as complex and varied, full of possibilities and inclinations. “This, in fact, is the advantage of the novel’s art,”
