Banned in Berlin. Gary D. Stark

and hard work, to lift themselves up and be inspired by ideals,…to elevate themselves to the beautiful and rise above the constraints of their everyday thoughts. But when art, as so often happens today, shows us only misery and shows it even uglier than misery is anyway, then art sins against the German people…. [Art must] hold out its hand to raise people up, instead of descending into the gutter.8

      The emperor's notion that art should elevate and show only the beautiful reflected and reinforced attitudes widely held in imperial Germany. His conservative conception of art also became the semiofficial one because his opinions—and many of his stock platitudes on the subject—were in turn dutifully repeated in the reports of the empire's censors, the arguments of its public prosecutors, and the verdicts of its judges. Whether this was done out of genuine conviction or out of a desire to avoid the kind of royal reprimand given to a few of their more liberal-minded colleagues is largely irrelevant; contemporary observers were convinced that had Wilhelm II taken a less-hostile stance toward modern German drama, “then surely many actions by the censorship authorities—who have proven to be genuine enemies of art, shackles on the mighty, rushing development of our artistic life—would not have taken place.”⁹

      This conservative artistic idealism stood in sharp, even irreconcilable conflict with modern artists' conception of the function of their art and their relation to society. Like their counterparts elsewhere, avant-garde German artists and writers rejected traditional aesthetic norms, repudiating the classical conception of art in which some timeless beauty was the revered touchstone and artists strove for the ennoblement and uplift of the human spirit. For modernist writers especially, truth now became the central axiom of art and the artist's task was to make art conform to real life. Rather than glossing over unpleasant realities or attempting to beautify and idealize what was base or unattractive in life, mid-nineteenth-century German Realists (and the Naturalists who soon followed them) believed that truth in art demanded the acknowledgement and examination of the negative as well as the positive in nature. Using scientific observation and objective analysis in order to portray and reproduce reality as exactly and naturalistically as possible, they hoped finally to lay bare the raw, naked truths about modern society and human existence. Moreover, beginning with Naturalism, and becoming ever more pronounced in the avant-garde movements that followed it, modernist artists proclaimed the autonomy of art and the absolute independence of the artist. In fin de siècle Germany, as elsewhere, many modernist artists and writers embraced a vaguely anarchistic, extremely subjectivist cult of elite aestheticism and commitment to “art for art's sake” that emphasized the creative artists' spiritual and intellectual superiority over ordinary people and insisted on their immunity from normal social conventions and obligations.

      As the remarks of Wilhelm II illustrate, these new conceptions of art met with strong resistance from wide segments of the general public as well as from state officials. Imperial authorities, for example, confiscated the work of some writers and artists, prosecuted others for violating the laws against obscenity, blasphemy, or lèse majesté, and police in most cities regularly prohibited the performance of certain dramas. Accordingly, some historians have argued that modernist writers, at least in the short term, were “effectively bridled and isolated” by legal and administrative controls; that legal penalties exerted an effective “restraining influence on writers” by “punishing or preventing the expression in literature of facts or opinions that demanded expression”; or that writers, satirists, and other cultural figures in Wilhelmine Germany existed in some “no-man's land between repression and liberality.”¹⁰ Others maintain that “ideas flowed freely” and the empire's “arts and literature were flourishing”; pointing to the “great latitudes of freedom and protection” artists and writers enjoyed, they argue the state's efforts at literary censorship were “largely ineffectual” and “official attempts to exert influence on the theater repertoire and on modern literature came to naught.”¹¹ A leading textbook on twentieth-century European history flatly declares individual rights in the empire were carefully protected and “[t]here was no censorship.”¹²

      To determine what role formal state controls did in fact play in the literary and political life of imperial Germany, this book examines the laws, institutions, personnel, and everyday practices of literary censorship at both the central/national and the local/regional level. Taking a comparative perspective—noting where the empire's literary censorship resembled and where it differed from that of other European nations—it can also shed light on the issue of Germany's relative “backwardness” or “normalcy,” particularly in its response to modernist literature.

       Censorship

      The study of censorship is an interdisciplinary field where political, legal, religious, and literary histories intersect with those of the book trade, libraries, the press, theater, and film. Traditionally, studies of censorship have focused on efforts to muzzle particular authors, artists, publications, or ideas, or on the censorship policies and practices of particular regimes or time periods. Since the late 1960s, however, “censorship studies” has expanded considerably and now flourishes as never before. Seminal systematic analyses by Ulla Otto, Hans Fügen, Dieter Breuer, Klaus Kanzog, Annabel Patterson, Reinhard Aulich, and others have explored the theoretical, historical, sociopolitical, and literary dimensions of censorship as a concept and as an institution.¹³ Other scholars (including Annette Kuhn, Sue Curry Jansen, Richard Burt, Michael Holmquist, Michael Levine, Robert Post, and Beate Müller), drawing on new insights from literary, communication, and media theory; on a growing interest in the external determinants and social dimensions of literary life broadly defined; and on theories about the evolution of the public sphere (Öffentlichkeit), have turned from the study of explicit acts of “repressive intervention” by identifiable regulatory authorities to more latent, generalized structural processes of communications control and cultural regulation. These newer approaches see censorship not as a series of discrete acts by specific institutions and external agents to silence a subject, but rather as an ongoing process or system of power relationships between a variety of censorious forces and agents that transcend time and place. Censorship is omnipresent and inescapable, an inherent structural necessity, they argue, because all expression is constrained by underlying psychic and social forces, internalized perceptions and inhibitions, diverse and dispersed techniques of domination, and by discursive practices of exclusion, selection, differentiation, or demarcation.¹⁴ The vast reach of contemporary censorship research is reflected in the recent four-volume Censorship: A World Encyclopedia, which defines censorship as any process, “formal and informal, overt and covert, conscious and unconscious, by which restrictions are imposed on the collection, display, dissemination, and exchange of information, opinions, ideas, and imaginative expression.” Its entries range from the areas of ethics, law, languages, media studies, and philosophy to politics, psychology, the physical sciences, religion, and sociology.¹⁵

      As censorship studies have expanded, however, the term has been so broadly applied that scholars no longer agree on what censorship is. When the term is used so freely that it includes any attempt by any group or individual, public or private, to “control communication between people” (Berger) or anything, including free market forces, that limits what we can read, hear, or know (Jansen), or any “discourse control” or “use of semantic domination” (Kienzle and Mende)—including the use of professional or expert language (Schauer)¹⁶—then the term is virtually devoid of meaning. As Peter Dittmar observed even before the field's postmodern turn: “The inflation of the word ‘censorship' into a meaningless term of vilification [Allerweltschimpfwort] has become irreversible. Since ‘censorship' has come to serve as an excuse for every rebuff that can befall an author, including those that are self-inflicted, that word can hardly be used rationally any more.”¹⁷

      In this study, the term censorship will be used in its narrower conventional sense, for acts of “repressive intervention”: those formal, overt, and conscious attempts to control the public expression of opinions. It is an institutionalized, usually legally sanctioned form of social control involving systematic state examination and judgment of expressions intended for public dissemination. Preventive or prior censorship (Vorzensur) occurs when authorized agents of the state claim the prerogative of inspecting expressions and either approving or prohibiting them