The decisions of censors are clearly an important factor influencing the rate at which norms will evolve. The more rigidly censors interpret and defend existing norms and the more intolerant they are of deviations from reigning standards, the more norm evolution will be retarded; the more flexible and tolerant they are of expressions that depart from the traditional, the easier the process of norm adaptation and evolution will be. Censors who perform their function too well—that is, those who suppress all nonconformist expressions and thus block any change in the reigning code of norms—actually pose a threat to a society's long-term stability, especially in periods of rapid social transformation such as imperial Germany was experiencing. For when members of a community begin questioning or dissenting from traditional norms, it usually indicates prevailing norms have not adapted to changing social conditions. Nonconformist expressions, especially of a literary nature, are frequently symptoms of deeper social transformations taking place or that have already occurred. Unless these new underlying circumstances, needs, or problems are recognized and the society's norms are allowed to evolve to meet them, those norms will become unviable and will no longer provide a source of social integration, cohesion, and stability.
If seen simply as a means of preserving a social or political system's indispensable code of norms, censorship seems a justifiable and even beneficial social institution. But it also has a profoundly ideological dimension, both in the stricter sense of reflecting the interests of a particular class, and in the broader sense of being intimately involved with the dynamics of power and domination. Political sociologists and others have persuasively argued that all censorship is simply a method used by politically dominant elites to defend their interests and preserve their sociopolitical dominance by protecting and upholding the code of values on which that dominance is based.29
Self-protection, to be sure, is hardly how censoring authorities conceive of or characterize their actions. Those who exercise censorship or support its use have traditionally claimed they do so for the welfare and protection of others. Censorship is necessary, they maintain, to defend society's weaker, more susceptible, and more easily misled elements: women; the young; the less-educated, naïve, or susceptible readers or theater-goers; certain religious or ethnic groups; a particular social class—the list is extensive. Such justifications for censorship are based on two paternalistic-authoritarian assumptions: first, that some (or most) people, being weak and corruptible, can be saved from evil only by strict rules imposed by external authority; and second, that some social elements, because of their immaturity, inferiority, or some peculiar corruptibility, are not competent to defend themselves against harmful ideas or influences and are thus in need of the censor's tutelage. (“Censorship is guardianship,” observed the Hungarian-German writer Ödön von Horváth; “for guardianship, one needs police; for police, one needs the penitentiary.”30) As guardians or wardens for others, censors of course assume they and a circle of colleagues are safely immune to the moral dangers and corrupting influence of the materials they examine in order to declare them harmful to someone else. The “unsafe,” vulnerable audiences they usually identify are people with no power to answer back: young, uneducated, or politically impotent groups that must accept the status of being unable to make their own decisions.31
Censorship, in other words, protects not society's most defenseless and least powerful members but its most secure, influential, and dominant ones. The prevailing system of values and social norms censors uphold and defend are defined by and serve the interests of that society's most powerful, dominant groups. Attempts to censor public expressions that conflict with, challenge, or violate established norms are, quite simply, attempts to defend and preserve the status quo, the system of relationships, attitudes, and conditions on which the primacy of the dominant elite rests. The institution of censorship, one early analyst observed, existed primarily to defend the established order against dissidents and critics. The most enthusiastic advocates of censorship are defenders of the status quo, those who feel most in harmony with and depend most upon established institutions and values and whose interests would be most harmed if these were radically altered. By contrast, it is those least attached to the status quo—maladjusted outsiders, the underprivileged, radicals, and heretics—who, because of their susceptibility to dangerous notions, are regarded as the greatest threat to the established order. Precisely these groups, because they cannot be trusted with dangerous ideas, are the real targets of censorship; in “protecting” these social outsiders from contact with certain “dangerous” expressions, censors are ultimately protecting the existing social order. As Goethe noted: “The powerful demand and exercise censorship, the underlings want freedom of the press. The former want neither their plans nor activities obstructed by a cheeky, contrary force, rather they want to be obeyed; the latter want to express their reasons in order to legitimize their disobedience.”32
Despite their protestations to the contrary then, censoring authorities use censorship to defend not the weak and vulnerable but rather the strong and powerful. By suppressing challenges to the reigning code of norms—a code that is defined by and serves the interests of the dominant social group—from dissidents, critics, and opponents of the status quo, censorship is a coercive political weapon used to preserve the established sociopolitical order and the dominant elite's primacy within it. From the standpoint of political sociology, the history of censorship is “the history of the struggle for power of dissident groups against the existing interests in politics, religion, and morality, and the banned book is often only a symbol for a more comprehensive struggle over authority.” What is at stake in this struggle is consensus over a system of norms and social rules that promote conformity beneficial to those in authority.33 As one influential censorship scholar notes, all censorship (whether narrowly or broadly defined) is inextricably linked to the control of power and knowledge: it is “a mechanism for gathering intelligence that the powerful can use to tighten control over people or ideas that threaten to disrupt established systems of order” and “a strategy used by the powerful to deny the powerless access to power-knowledge.”34
Interpreting censorship as an instrument of elite or class domination reveals and explains much about its motives, functions, and consequences in imperial Germany, but such an approach is not without its problems. In practice, the sorts of expressions censors attempt to suppress (and the severity of their coercive sanctions) vary greatly. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century this was true not only among different nations with similar social norms, sociopolitical systems, and ruling elites, but also, as we shall see in Germany, among different regions or cities within the same nation. Moreover, different members of the “dominant elite” and different branches of the state apparatus, even at the local level, often disagreed vehemently over whether a particular expression should be prohibited. Identifying a coherent national or local ruling elite, its interests, and a particular code of norms crucial to its social and political power, whether in Germany or elsewhere, can be a dubious undertaking. The picture is further complicated by the fact that conservative segments of the broader German populace frequently pressured governing authorities to censor or prohibit things the latter would have preferred to ignore or tolerate.
As with many human institutions, censorship often produces ironic outcomes that are contrary to, even in mockery of, the intended, expected, or appropriate results. This study will show how in imperial Germany an array of important restraints to state power thwarted the efficient exercise of censorship and made it highly unpredictable. While efforts to censor literature proved effective in some settings, it also had consequences quite different from what the imperial authorities intended.
Notes
1. Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler, trans. William Weaver (San Diego and New York, 1981), 234–35.
2. Quoted in Peter Jelavich, “Paradoxes of Censorship in Modern Germany,” in Enlightenment, Passion, Modernity. Historical Essays in European Thought and Culture, ed. Mark S. Micale and Robert L. Dietle (Stanford, 2000), 277–78. See also Michael Knoche, “Einführung in das Thema,” in Der Zensur zum Trotz. Das gefesselte Wort und die Freiheit Europa, ed. Paul Raabe (Wolfenbüttel, 1991), 23–39.
3. Hans Widman, Geschichte des Buchhandels.