The imperial government, like the states and courts, regarded police censorship ordinances as a strictly local matter and refused to become involved. Several influential groups, however, wanted censorship placed under central, imperial control. Soon after courts affirmed the right of local authorities to censor theater performances, the Right attempted to legislate more uniform national standards that could check the independence of local theater censors. In the mid-and late 1890s a right-wing coalition of Catholics, Conservatives, anti-Semites, and moral purity associations, angered over the complete lack of theater censorship in some regions and the laxity of censors where it did exist, made a concerted effort to standardize and toughen theater censorship by bringing it under the provisions of the national Criminal Code. To do this, they sought to attach a special “theater paragraph” to the government's controversial “Lex Heinze”.
Shocked by revelations about urban vice and moral corruption that surfaced during the recent notorious murder trial of a Berlin pimp named Heinze, in February 1892 the imperial government introduced a bill in the Reichstag proposing stiffer punishments for a wide range of morally offensive activities, from prostitution to advertising contraceptive devices. During initial debate over this bill (which was quickly tagged the “Lex Heinze”) the Catholic Center Party complained that despite police censorship many German theaters performed shamelessly immoral and indecent works that were as harmful to the nation's moral fiber as prostitution and pornographic literature.54 In the Reichstag commission to which the bill was referred, anti-Semites like Adolf Stöcker joined Centrists in charging that theater censorship as currently practiced in Berlin and other large cities was “intolerable” and “not worth a penny.” Not only were censors far too lenient, but once they approved a work a theater could then point to the authorities' permission as a defense against anyone who later complained about the material. To goad police into exercising tighter control, the commission's Center and anti-Semitic members proposed adding a special clause to §184 of the Imperial Criminal Code making it a criminal offense for anyone to stage (veranstalten) an indecent theatrical performance. Under this statute any citizen whose sense of shame and morality had been grossly violated by a performance, even one approved by police, could initiate criminal proceedings against the theater owner.55 A Prussian Interior Ministry representative objected that involving the Criminal Code and public prosecutors in administrative matters such as theater censorship would create endless conflicts between police and the courts. Although the commission defeated the Center's proposed theater paragraph by one vote, the bill that did emerge was so extreme in other regards that it proved unacceptable to the government. After declining to promote it in the Reichstag, in 1894 the imperial government allowed the Lex Heinze to die.
But the issue lived on. Infuriated that existing laws could not keep Hauptmanns Die Weber (The Weavers), Sudermann's Sodoms Ende (Sodom's End) and other modernist works off public stages (see chapters 4 and 6), Centrists, private morality associations, and other conservatives continued to complain about the debasement of the theater's noble spiritual and social mission. One Center delegate lamented in the Prussian parliament in early 1895 that the theater had sunk from a place of cultivation and spiritual uplift “to a place for depicting immorality and misconduct, offering sensual stimuli and subversive tendencies, and for mocking religious belief. I think that [in combating such developments] one cannot be too strict.” Rather than providing people with harmless entertainment or literary and artistic stimulation—which was the theater's true purpose—modernist works instead “are promoting and reinforcing wanton ideas about morality and order, irreligion, and various impulses in the state directed toward dissatisfaction, disorder, and revolution.” 56
In January 1895 the Center and its allies in and out of parliament revived the campaign for more repressive theater censorship by reintroducing the Lex Heinze into the Reichstag, but no action was taken on it during the 1895–1897 session. A new draft bill, with an even tougher version of the theater paragraph that had just barely been rejected by the Reichstag commission in March 1893, was submitted by the Center in December 1897. This proposal would add to §184 a clause (§184b) stating: “Whoever stages (veranstaltet) or directs (leitet) public theatrical performances, operettas, choral or declamatory recitals, exhibitions of people, or similar presentations that are capable of provoking a scandal by grossly violating the sense of shame and morality, shall be punished by up to one year imprisonment or by a fine of up to one thousand marks.”57 The Center's demands for a drastic reform of theater censorship laws were seconded by hundreds of citizens, who in January 1898 signed a petition to Emperor Wilhelm II calling for “stricter censorship of theatrical performances, stricter censorship of publications that report on the theater,…passage of the Lex Heinze, and a tightening up (Verschärfung) of the Criminal Code concerning the entire area of immorality.”58
The Center's new Lex Heinze was again submitted to a parliamentary commission, but one now dominated by Center Party members. During deliberations the government's representatives once more objected to dragging judges and the courts into an arena that was the sole prerogative of the police, while the commission's liberal and socialist members warned that placing theaters under the Criminal Code posed a serious threat to modern drama in Germany and to many “classical” works as well. The Centrists and their allies, although claiming the statute was directed primarily against low music halls and vaudeville theaters, indicated they would not mind if it were also applied to certain modern dramatists like Hermann Sudermann and even some immoral classics. In the end the rightist majority on the commission not only refused to exempt serious, legitimate theatrical performances from the proposed law but broadened its provisions still further to punish any performer who appeared in an indecent performance. This law, Center delegates reiterated, was intended to safeguard against the “hardened [police] officials” (abgebrühten Beamten) who were not doing their duty to keep objectionable works off the stage; at the least, they hoped it would persuade the government “to proceed more energetically in this area.”59
When presented to the Reichstag in January 1900, the commission's bill was vehemently opposed by Liberals, Progressives, and Social Democrats. (Social Democratic delegates used several clever obstructionist tactics to prevent quick passage of the bill, allowing its other opponents time to organize.) The measure also provoked a powerful extraparliamentary mass-protest movement that reached well beyond the intellectual and artistic community and soon became one of the broadest-based fronts of public protest ever to arise in the prewar empire. In February and March writers, artists, publishers, journalists, academics, progressive politicians, and even members of the business community hastily organized “Goethe Leagues for the Protection of Free Art and Learning” (Goethebund zum Schutze freier Kunst und Wissenschaft) in Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Breslau, Dresden, Düsseldorf, Stuttgart, Bremen, and four smaller cities. Goethe Leagues sought to unite intellectuals of all political persuasions and intellectual outlooks in order “to protect freedom of art and learning in the German Empire against attacks of every kind”; their immediate task was to combat the “unprecedented repressive attempts against the free spirit” proposed in the Lex Heinze.60 To defeat the bill, throughout the spring of 1900 these liberal pressure groups enlisted prominent representatives of the artistic and scholarly communities, including the heads of respected art academies, against the Lex Heinze; they staged mass protest meetings