similar shift emerged (somewhat awkwardly) in the work of police and censors who appointed themselves guardians of the vulnerable souls of inexperienced readers. In the process they produced a task for themselves that was practically impossible: regulating invisible spaces and mental effects rather than concrete actions. The opportunities for resistance were, of course, limitless. Yet this was a moral model that made sense within a specifically German cultural context. Inner life had been invested with meaning through forms of pietist practice (or, as some would have it, Schwärmerisch enthusiasm), philosophical engagement with the nature of inner life by philosophers like Kant and Herder in the late eighteenth century, a tradition of Romantic literature that constituted and explored emotional states, and a tradition of legal reform the defined Gluckseligkeit as one of its explicit goals. For a few decades in the early nineteenth century, it was neither the sexual content of the text nor the transgression of public mores that defined a text as obszön but the danger it posed to open, gullible, excitable hearts and minds.
SUMMARY: INNER LIFE AND THE POLITICS OF AUTHORITY
For Wessenberg, disorders of interior states were not separate from the politics of authority. He linked two disparate developments, pietist Schwärmerei and the effects of the French Revolution, by arguing that in both cases people were swept up in waves of emotion that caused them to detach from reason and external authority. In the case of pietism belief in direct revelation of the word of God through the cultivation of an “inner church” allowed the individual to bypass the authority of religious leaders. The Schwärmer was characterized by the desire to penetrate the secrets of the supernatural world, an attempt to distinguish oneself from the common crowd, disdain for others coupled with an overvaluation of fellow believers, and a failure to recognize authority outside oneself: “The Schwärmer spurns all other leadership as false, preferring his imagination; he places the sanctity and propriety he attributes to himself above all other sources of authority.”71 Thus the cultivation of interiority and the painstaking preparation of the inner church led the believer to separate from the outer world and to retreat into the autonomous space of the mind. This retreat from external authority, coupled with a rejection of reason, left the individual without a moral compass and without the necessary traction to resist the convincing (and often nefarious) arguments of others. Pointing to the etymology of the word Schwärmen, “to swarm” like bees, Wessenberg suggested that the individual separated form external authority and reason could be easily manipulated.
He identified a similar movement away from reason and toward emotionalism in the period following the French Revolution: “After the feverish anger of the Revolution had completed its cycle and man had regained his senses, a perception arose that reason had exercised a destructive influence on religion, and this in turn produced suspicion concerning reason.” Reason was rejected and “feeling” was embraced, giving way to “the emergence of many groups of mystical Pietists who—no matter how divergent in the details of religious practice—were united in their suspicion of reason.”72 To “fall away from reason” was also to fall away from a reliable source of authority, one that was available to the individual himself (less often herself). It was not the Revolution’s transformation of political forms that disturbed Wessenberg, but instead the cultural reaction to the Revolution. He saw the response in Germany as yet another retreat into subjectivity, emotionalism, and the schwärmerisch authority of the imagination. This manifested itself as a kind of cultural hermaphrodism, in which men moved easily from one position to another, incapable of standing firm: “What a swarm of hermaphrodites we see today in every rank, at all levels of society…. Their heads nod incessantly to the left side, and their mouths are constantly open trying to take back what they have just said.”73 Wessenberg’s cultural concerns were cast in terms of gender norms. While novels might bring the sexes closer together by educating both in the language of love and empathy, there was also the danger that men would cease to be adequately firm of character. If both sexes consumed and internalized the lessons of novels with equal enthusiasm, he feared that feminized men would be as vulnerable as women, incapable of autonomy and out of touch with reality.
Yet Wessenberg’s logic must be taken one step further. Was the real threat of secular reading habits—linking it to pietism and the French Revolution—the fact that they provided an alternative source of authority through which the reader could cobble together an understanding of the world and a vision of the good life independent of “official” voices and sanctioned knowledge? This, of course, might work both ways: for those denied access to formal education (or to knowledge of certain kinds), the availability of books made it possible to cobble together an unauthorized understanding of the world around them. Certainly the growth in the secular book trade and the boom in venues for book exchange opened up the possibility that one could pursue knowledge (or pleasure, or both at the same time) without asking one’s priest, teacher, or father. In this sense it offered a secular version of the autonomy enjoyed within pietist religious practice—the autonomy to bypass authorities in the crafting of one’s own inner life.
By positing the importance of novel reading in the cultivation of inner life, Wessenberg made an argument for the essential role reading habits could play in the creation of secular culture. If actions in the world proceeded from the impulses found in inner life, and if morality was rooted in the tone and texture of interior spaces, it was essential that authorities not make the mistake of underestimating the texts that held sway in the mind and heart of the reader. Nor should they underestimate the power of fantasy, dreams, and passions, for these inner impulses found expression in external actions and were thus well worth taking seriously.
The expansion of secular reading practices constituted not so much an escape from external authority as a shift in where authority came from, that is, a shift in who could speak, in what terms, and on which subjects. This was the dilemma that faced the censors, police, provincial governments, and the interior minister as they sorted through the growing body of texts available in new venues and new forms. Who could write and, more important, who was strong (or educated) enough to read? Early psychological theory, adopted and employed piecemeal by these authorities (who, after all, looked to civil society for moral models), gave them the tools to contemplate a mutable state subject, one that could be crafted and cultivated, leaving him or her vulnerable to others who set themselves up as authorities on subjects that interested readers.
This early nineteenth-century understanding of obszöne und unsittliche Schriften was rooted in a set of concerns about politics and the self specific to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Jan Goldstein writes that particular visions of the self become broadly relevant at certain moments in time: “One must speculate that at different historical moments, different mental operations—themselves constructed rather than given—are singled out as particularly anxiety-provoking and, hence, as the focus of cultural obsession.”74 In the period roughly between 1810 and 1830 a complex vision of the human subject and of the relationship between inner life and authority informed discussions of secular reading practices. Ironically, amid all the talk of the vulnerability of the individual there was an important subtext: the individual was vulnerable not only because the world was newly filled with nefarious authors and booksellers but also because he or she was finding new sources of autonomy. This autonomy (the corollary of vulnerability) marked an important shift in the way knowledge was produced, identities were crafted, and selves were refined.
CHAPTER 2
Dubious Sources, Dangerous Spaces, Porous Geographies
Understanding the Bookseller’s Crime, 1811–1840
Even if our own approach to things is conditioned necessarily by the view that things have no meanings apart from those that human transactions, attributions, and motivations endow them with, the anthropological problem is that this formal truth does not illuminate the concrete, historical circulation of things. For that we have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their form, their uses, and their trajectories. It is only through
