to Romantic men were of a piece.5 Reading the wrong books, and thus stirring up fantasy and imagination, created inner disorder; once disordered, the mind could rarely be put right. Wessenberg described a world filled with the dangers of schwärmerisch enthusiasm for revolutionary politics, religious mysticism, Romantic fiction, and emotional abandon. At the same time, novel reading opened up possibilities. Because inner life was marked by reading, the novel could play a positive role in the shaping of inner life, rendering men and women empathetic, imaginative, and mutually comprehensible. The novel was also an instrument for the study of inner life; it provided an external record of invisible fantasies and thus allowed people to study an otherwise invisible world of thoughts and impulses.
Wessenberg’s investigation into the mental effects of novel reading provides a starting point for the topic that concerns us in this chapter: the meaning of obscenity and related terms in the German states during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. This vision of a vulnerable and mutable inner life introduces us to German culture at the moment that it gave birth to a body of laws, police ordinances, and material practices that, taken together, provided an early understanding of obscenity. Like Wessenberg, censors and police understood “obscene and immoral publications” as texts that were capable of transforming readers’ minds. They imagined minds (and readers) that were fragile, easily marked, and linked to actions in the world. It was these assumptions rather than a simple policy of repression that animated the practice of censoring texts on grounds that they were immoral or obscene. According to this argument, readers needed protection from their own temptations, and those who produced or sold such texts or images were deemed criminal because of the harm they perpetrated on the mental world of vulnerable readers.
The political implications of this logic were by no means straightforward, as they rested on a complex view of the relationship between inner life (thoughts, emotions, and impulses) and the external behavior of individuals and groups. To evoke one brief example that points to the complexity of this question, police and censors identified texts that promoted “superstition” (Aberglaube) as a threat to the moral tone of inner life. Several kinds of texts—broadsides announcing the spread of cholera, books of dream interpretation, popular medical books offering what we would today call folk remedies—fell under the broad umbrella of unsittliche Schriften. Yet the questions at stake were complex: Who controlled knowledge? What knowledge was useful, reliable, and authoritative? What moved people to act in the world? Did texts accusing Jews of spreading cholera promote anti-Semitic riots? Was group behavior the result of the inner distortion of individuals, and if so, was it up to the state to control such distortion? These questions, rather than simple attempts at repression, haunted the process of identifying and controlling a body of texts deemed morally dangerous.
We must trace the early origins of secular obscenity law in the German states during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. To do this we need to understand how contemporaries defined the terms obscene and immoral. In a world filled with overlapping jurisdictions, vague laws, and police and censors who held different worldviews, our definitions must be generated from law, from practice, and from a close look at the confiscated texts themselves. It is also important to study the concepts that existed adjacent to obscenity, that is, to understand how this concept was positioned vis-à-vis other infractions. It mattered, for example, that “obscene publications” were coupled with texts on “unproven medical remedies” in the early nineteenth-century records of the Prussian censors. The relation of the crime of obscenity to other infractions (its status as a sexual offense after 1851, for example) allows us to see subtle changes in meaning and emphasis.
I begin by examining the body of ordinances, edicts, and laws governing the circulation of printed texts and images on moral grounds. Prior to 1838 we cannot point to one central law or court ruling that codifies a strict definition of obscenity, but we can look at the places where definitions of obscene or immoral texts were evoked or stated in law and police ordinances. Even when clearly articulated legal language exists, we still need to know how such laws were made intelligible to a broader community. The records kept by the Prussian Interior Ministry and generated by the police in cities throughout the German states allow us to see how official vocabulary was put into practice in lending libraries and bookstores and on the street. Religious, legal, and pedagogical commentary help us understand what was at stake in these efforts to categorize and regulate reading. Taken together these strands of law, practice, and commentary provide a picture of the importance attributed to print and to the practice of reading during the first third of the nineteenth century. They reveal contemporary thinking about the mind, soul, and practices of reading.
To begin, a few words about terminology and language, both the words used to describe crimes and infractions and the terms used to describe inner life, often imagined as the space of the infraction. Unsittlich comes from Sitten, meaning both “customs and manners” (in the sense of agreed-upon codes of behavior) and “morals” (in the sense of sexual morality). The eighteenth-century Sittenpolizei, literally the police who governed Sitten, concerned themselves with gaming, dancing, festivals, and prostitution, and in some cases with the censorship of books, printers, and bookstores.6 In this respect the term Sitten was aligned with secular notions of “civil order” (bürgerliche Ordnung), but it was also rooted in religious traditions stressing moral (and sexual) conduct. The term Unzucht referred to things that were unruly or disordered in common speech; in legal language it referred to sexual offenses. While the terms unsittliche Schriften and unzüchtige Schriften were often used interchangeably, they had different resonances. The term obszöne Schriften was used less often, but it was part of the arsenal of official terms used by authorities to describe and condemn texts and images. All three terms evoked both religious and secular authority at the intersection between notions of public order and sexual order and evoked both the power of the state (Zucht) and the authority of collective mores (Sitten).
Contemporaries used an equally complex array of terms to describe the mental and emotional states that made up inner life. Seele, for instance, was used to evoke the “soul,” “mind,” or even “spirit.” The term Seelenkunde, used to describe the study of the mind or soul, captures contemporary uncertainty about the substance of inner life. Maintaining this linguistic ambiguity was important in a period marked by heated debates about the seat of the soul, the origin of emotions, and the substance of the mind. Wessenberg himself refers to the “Veredelung des Geistes und Herzens [cultivation of the spirit and heart],” and here the exact location or mental impulses is ambiguous, for Geist can mean both “spirit” and “mind.” Similarly Herz means “heart” in the way we use it today, as both the physical heart and the seat of one’s emotional impulses, where emotions, good and bad, take place. Inner life was also thought to contain “depths,” but depth referred not to a repressed unconscious but instead to a perceived complexity (and darkness, or invisibility) of the mind’s impulses.7 To capture this range of meanings, it makes sense to use the broader term inner life to describe the space and the processes of the mental world.
As I noted in the introduction, Germans have long been accused of a particular “inwardness” of orientation and character, and this spiritual and intellectual dynamism has sometimes been seen as the counterpart to political passivity. In his 1784 prize essay, “What Is Enlightenment?,” Immanuel Kant famously defined Enlightenment as a state of inner activity and maturity; according to this logic, freedom of thought and conscience was the primary freedom. Following the French Revolution, some people were at pains to describe the combination of cultural sophistication with allegedly “backward” political forms. Some speculated that Germans privileged inner transformations (those taking place in the mind and soul) over external changes in political rights and institutions. This idea of German inwardness would resonate long after the revolutionary period and would continue to provide a potent explanation for those seeking to explain German political “failures.”
Yet this argument holds only when one assumes that politics and power are located primarily in governments and institutions. It suggests that the meaningful (and
