The Progressive's bill received enthusiastic support from Social Democrats (SPD), who expressed pleasure that bourgeois liberals had finally joined them in the fight against arbitrary, monopolistic police power. All forms of censorship, the SPD agreed, were to be condemned and art and intellectual inquiry must be liberated from censorship and other restrictions.69
The parties of the Right, however, staunchly opposed the bill. Both Conservatives and Free Conservatives, who customarily defended the status quo and resisted any attempt to reduce Prussian state rights or strengthen either the central (imperial) government or the Reichstag, urged the bill's rejection. Prior censorship of theatrical performances was needed now more than ever, they argued, to protect the more susceptible elements of the population from immoral, subversive, and harmful works. Relying simply on the Criminal Code and intervening only after a performance had taken place was foolhardy and dangerous, for by then the harm would already have been done. What was needed was stricter, not looser state control over theaters; and because local police were most familiar with their own city and were in the best position to judge what works may be harmful there, it was they who were in the best position to exercise prior theatrical censorship.70
Like Conservatives, the Center Party of course also wished to tighten, not abolish prior theater censorship. With delicious irony the Catholics pointed out that Progressives were now arguing the antithesis of what they had argued during the recent Lex Heinze debate. To prevent passage of the Center's theater paragraph, Progressives had earlier maintained that the “prophylactic actions” of local police censors and their legal authority to prevent immoral performances from taking place were more than sufficient to control excesses in theatrical life; indeed, Progressives had just argued that prior censorship was far preferable to and more efficient than invoking criminal penalties against theater directors. Yet if the Progressives had reversed themselves on this issue, so too had the Center, which now returned to its traditional position of defending state's rights and opposing any extension of central or federal authority. Regulation of the theater industry and censorship of theatrical performances were state and local matters, the Center speaker declared, one in which the Reichstag and imperial government should not interfere. Indeed, the Center reminded other parliamentarians how during the Lex Heinze debate the government had resisted any judicial and legislative encroachment on administrative matters; even if the Progressives' proposed bill were passed by the Reichstag, the Center warned, it would undoubtedly be vetoed in the Bundesrat, which represented the individual state governments. The Center maintained that rather than preventing local authorities from exercising prior censorship over theaters, the Reichstag should be encouraging them to exercise it more stringently.71
National Liberals were conflicted about the Progressives' bill. On the one hand they agreed police censorship of serious drama was often excessive and ultimately harmful to German culture, and many proscriptions by local authorities had been senseless and unnecessary. Like the Progressives, Liberals objected to the lack of uniform censorship ordinances throughout the Reich and desired a single nationwide standard. But while favoring abolition of prior censorship for the legitimate, serious stage, Liberals insisted it be retained for more popular entertainments such as music halls, vaudeville, and cabarets; and in those states where no censorship currently existed, they wished to see it instituted. Because the Progressives' bill would have abolished all forms of prior stage censorship, National Liberals in the end opposed it.72
Throughout the debate the government maintained the same position as during the controversy over the Center's theater paragraph. Using a concurrent debate in the Prussian Landtag as an opportunity to address the issue, the Prussian minister of the interior defended the legality of existing police censorship ordinances and reiterated that jurisdiction over theater censorship belonged to individual states, not the central government. Centralization or standardization of theater censorship was ill advised, he warned, for conditions varied from locality to locality and only local authorities were in a position to decide what would be harmful in their area. While admitting many mistakes had been made in individual censorship decisions and there was, perhaps, the need for improvement in how censorship was actually practiced, the minister warned that abolishing prior censorship altogether would endanger public order, security, and morality. Moreover, he pointed out to Progressives that a system of prior police approval actually protected theater operators from later arbitrary police intervention.73 (This was precisely what had disturbed the Center about prior censorship and why they had pushed for a special theater clause in the Criminal Code.)
At the end of the lively debate, in late February 1901 the National Liberals moved that the Progressives' bill be sent to a commission for study. After two extremely close and inconclusive votes on this motion produced a deadlock, it was discovered the Reichstag lacked a quorum. No further action was taken on the Progressives' bill, which died on the floor.74
Despite parliamentary defeat of the Right's theater paragraph and of the Left's bill to end all theater censorship, the movement to fundamentally reform and standardize the laws governing the theater industry persisted for another decade and a half. Concerned over fierce competition, declining revenues, strained management-labor relations, and a host of other problems, after the turn of the century representatives of the entertainment industry mounted a campaign for new legislation to eliminate abuses, raise the national status of the theatrical profession, and protect their economic interests. Although disagreeing on specifics, the various associations and unions representing Germany's actors, playwrights, theater owners, theatrical agents, and stage employees were united in their desire for a comprehensive, national theater law, similar to the Imperial Press Law of 1874, which would govern all aspects of the entertainment business—from licensing, censorship, royalty rights, and taxation to actors' contracts, pensions, and the legal status of cinemas, vaudeville, and other forms of popular entertainment.75 As a result of their constant lobbying for a comprehensive reform of theatrical law, beginning in early 1909 the Reichstag formally and regularly petitioned the imperial chancellor to draft and submit to parliament an imperial theater law (Reichstheatergesetz).
While the theater industry campaigned for a centralized codification of theater law, artists and liberal intellectuals renewed their efforts to abolish theater censorship nationwide. Each spring between 1901 and 1904 delegates to the national congress of German Goethe Leagues resoundingly condemned local theater censorship and petitioned the Reichstag to end, by means of national legislation, the “particularistic” local censorship ordinances. Such ordinances, they charged, subverted not only intellectual and artistic freedom but also national unity: one league leader argued the current system encouraged antinational particularism by dividing the empire into a series of isolated police districts, separated from one another by a “Chinese Wall.” These annual Goethe League petitions, although widely and sympathetically reported in the liberal press, were routinely rejected by the Reichstag on the grounds jurisdiction over theater censorship rested with individual states, not the Reichstag.76 As the movement for a comprehensive national theater law grew, however, the Left began to see it as another vehicle for finally abolishing theater censorship in the various states. In 1903 Progressives again condemned the use of theater censorship as a “hideous chapter in the narrow-minded, particularistic, reactionary spirit.” In the Reichstag they expressed hope for a bold new imperial theater law that, besides rectifying other civil and legal problems plaguing theaters, would