Censorship also became increasingly centralized and geographically uniform after 1914, as deputy commanding generals in the various Army Corps districts exchanged information and coordinated their policies concerning publications.17 This near absolute control over printed materials continued until 12 November 1918, when Germany's new republican government lifted the official state of siege, abolished all censorship, and restored the civil rights suspended during the war.
Control of the Theater
Theaters were central to the empire's cultural life; they received generous support from local rulers and municipalities and were enthusiastically attended by a broad spectrum of the populace. The English writer Henry Vizetelly, a frequent visitor to Berlin in the 1870s, observed, “The Berlinese of to-day are steady playgoers, and pass much of their time at the theatres, which, on Sunday evenings especially, are filled to overflowing.”18 On the eve of World War I the nation's theater association listed a total of 463 theaters in Germany. Along with 116 privately owned commercial theaters (the majority of which were founded after 1871), 132 were operated by city or town governments, serving as a source of civic pride. German princes sponsored some twenty royal or “court” theaters (Hoftheater) that functioned as dynastic showcases and prominent centers of social life, especially in the smaller princely residences; some sovereigns, such as Duke Georg II of Saxe-Meiningen, devoted their lives and resources to their beloved theaters. In addition to the many permanent theaters, there were also 84 traveling troupes and 112 that operated only in the summer or showed films.19 At the turn of the century, Berlin, with a population of 1.9 million and the “theater capital” of the nation, hosted three royal theaters and over twenty-five conventional commercial theaters (not counting scores of less-reputable vaudeville and variety halls) while its primary rival Munich (population nearly six hundred thousand) claimed two royal and fourteen commercial theaters.20
In contrast to the relative freedom enjoyed by print media, most theaters were subject to a number of special legal restraints including stringent prior censorship. Because of the powerful and potentially dangerous impact of the spoken word upon an audience, governments have always regarded the stage with particular concern.21 In nineteenth-century Germany, however, state interest in theater was all the more pronounced because of a widespread “cult of the theater” that ascribed to this medium a unique moral, spiritual, educational, and even political mission. In his famous 1784 address “The Stage Considered as a Moral Institution,” Friedrich Schiller venerated the theater as a source of moral enlightenment and civic education for the broad populace, an agent of social progress, and a source of national self-consciousness and unity. Its unique power and appeal was comparable to that of religion, he believed, and he foresaw a day when the stage would replace religion as a moral force in public life.22 Popular enthusiasm for the theater flourished and spread in the nineteenth century. While local theaters may not have become sites of public worship (as the dramatist Franz Grillparzer once predicted), in many places they did become centers of public life. Prior to 1848, when political assemblies and associations were forbidden or tightly regulated, theaters provided one of the few arenas outside the church where regular mass gatherings were allowed; for middle-class audiences theaters were not merely vehicles of entertainment but sometimes served also as substitute parliaments or places where ideas and news could be exchanged.
By the imperial era, Schiller's idealized cult of the theater as an institution of personal cultivation and national consciousness was so pervasive that nearly every social stratum expressed reverence for the stage's uplifting spiritual power and national mission. At the pinnacle of the social pyramid, for example, Emperor Wilhelm II, whose aesthetic values were notoriously conservative, aggressively endorsed the “noble, idealistic viewpoint” of Schiller's famous essay. The Hohenzollern monarchy, he affirmed, had always regarded theater as a powerful weapon in the “struggle against materialism and un-Germanness (undeutsche Wesen)”; Wilhelm II believed the function of the stage, like the school and university, was to cultivate idealism and character in the younger generation, to ennoble their moral views, and to “prepare them for their task of preserving the highest spiritual values of our wonderful German fatherland.”23 The educated bourgeoisie that formed the backbone of imperial culture held similar views. Left-liberals like Ernst Müller-Meiningen viewed the stage as a powerful political tribune comparable to parliament where, when parliamentary discourse is blocked, the popular spirit resorts to “the sharpest, most dangerous weapons of political battle: parody, travesty, satire, in short, to scorn and mockery.”24 At the same time various cultural outsiders—Naturalist critics of the established culture, radical avant-garde modernists, and committed Social Democrats—also acknowledged the theater's unique spiritual power and rhapsodized over its importance as an institution that could help spark a national cultural, social, and political transformation.25 This idealistic cult of the theater was regularly invoked to justify extensive state controls over theatrical productions. Prussian ministers of the interior regarded it their duty to protect the stage as “a place of cultivation and spiritual uplift for wide segments of the population” and to prevent “any performance that the uneducated ‘common man' might misconstrue”; similarly, Munich's police director considered police censorship of theaters “a positive, state-sustaining, national, and monarchical institution.”26
But authorities in Germany (and elsewhere) were especially vigilant toward the theater because live theatrical performances, unlike dead printed texts, could stir an audience's emotions and thus posed a more immediate threat to public order and security. Schiller had noted how spoken dialogue on stage exercised a more profound impact and lasting influence on the senses of theatergoers than even morality or law, especially when combined with physical action and when actors directly address the audience. Dramatic art, and especially tragedy, also has a cathartic element: for centuries, dramatists have sought to create an illusion of reality that arouses the audience's empathetic identification with the characters on stage and stimulates and vicariously satisfies spectators' emotions. Viewing a theatrical production can be an intense emotional experience and a skillfully staged piece can provoke strong audience reaction. This experience, moreover, takes place within a public, social setting. Unlike the private, solitary act of reading, which the reader ultimately controls (if enraged or disturbed by what he or she reads, the experience can be immediately terminated), people who attend the theater are not isolated individuals but members of an assembled public group participating in a collective experience over which they have little control. Above all, as members of an assembled group—as part of a crowd—theatergoers are susceptible to the powerful influences of crowd psychology.
After the Paris Commune of 1870, the psychology and behavior of crowds worried many in fin-de-siècle Europe because crowd behavior was governed by potent, largely unconscious forces that easily overpower the individual personality. Gustave Le Bon articulated these fears in his influential 1895 study La psychologie des foules (The Psychology of the Crowd), where he argued an assembled group assumes new, entirely different characteristics than those of the individuals who compose it. Members of a crowd lose their individual identities, inhibitions, and the rational self-control exercised by their conscious personality, becoming automatons whose behavior is now governed by larger, irrational, unconscious forces. According to Le Bon, crowds are highly impulsive, excitable, impressionable, and sentimental; simplistic in their thinking, incapable of logical thought, they can no longer distinguish between illusion and reality. The anonymity of the crowd often gives its members a sense of unlimited power that inspires them to attempt the immediate realization of the most fantastic ideas or schemes suggested to them: “To the solitary individual, it is clear that alone he cannot burn down palaces or plunder shops, and he hardly even dreams of doing so. But as a member of a crowd, he is overcome by a sense of omnipotence that the group lends him, and he will immediately succumb to the first incitements to murder and plunder.” 27 To political reactionaries like Le Bon who feared the emergence of mass or crowd politics after 1870, the crowd represented an ominous threat not only to public order and security, but to civilization