This fine-grained approach also has the benefit of allowing us to unearth and to reconsider the body of books, pamphlets, advertisements, and images that populated the category obszöne und unsittliche Schriften from 1820 (when the records used here begin) through the 1880s. These texts and their authors, publishers, and distributors tell an important story about how books were produced and distributed to readers and, importantly, about what people read. The texts and their content, origins, and vectors have found their way into this book whenever possible. While we might wish, with Rudolf Schenda, that the nonelite readers who patronized lending libraries would have chosen more intellectually stimulating books, those they did choose nonetheless must have met certain needs. Otherwise they would not have spawned imitations and knockoffs and prompted authors and booksellers to risk fines, concessions, and property loss in their efforts to deliver them to readers. It is therefore valuable to think carefully about the content of these texts and what they offered readers. Luckily scholars of Germany have recently published studies treating erotic, pornographic, immoral, and obscene texts and their consumers, producers, and detractors in other periods. This new body of scholarship will make it possible here to situate early and mid-nineteenth-century developments in context.19
It is important at the outset to mention a limitation of this study. The primary source material is extensive. In order to understand the multiple meanings of obscenity in this period, I consulted police records, legal sources of all kinds, the archives of the booksellers’ guild, contemporary journals, psychiatric and theological works, and every “obscene” text I could find. All these sources point to a history of obscene and immoral texts that stretched across and beyond the borders of the German states. Yet one important set of archival sources, the records of the Prussian Interior Ministry and the Prussian Censorship Board, focus primarily (though not exclusively) on developments in the sprawling and noncontiguous territories that constituted the Kingdom of Prussia in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. Though I conducted research in several other archives in Munich, Leipzig, and Ludwigsburg, the most comprehensive set of sources I found for the first three quarters of the century was housed in Berlin, and I decided to use these sources as often and as extensively as possible. Even these sources do not tell an exclusively Prussian story; publications from other German states and from other European countries made their way into Prussian territories. Nonetheless the archival sources are heavily weighted toward one particular state. I have worked to understand developments in other states by using other available sources, but most of the fine-grained archival work is geographically circumscribed.
The first three chapters of this book examine the concepts, practices, and texts that constituted immoral and obscene texts in the years before obscenity law was codified as a criminal offense. Chapter 1 investigates early nineteenth-century definitions of immoral and obscene texts expressed in press laws, police codes, and local ordinances; in the works of pedagogues, theologians, and publicists; and in practices of censors and police. Many of these sources identified the moral danger of print as its ability to damage the heart and mind, distort the intellect, and inflame the imagination. I ask how and why readers were thought to be vulnerable—a pressing question in a world recently roiled by war and revolution. Chapter 2 continues to explore the meanings of obscenity through a careful look at the practices surrounding these texts. I argue that passage through certain spaces marked texts as suspect. The police subjected to intense scrutiny books and pamphlets found in lending libraries or peddlers’ boxes or smuggled across borders. At the same time, readers and booksellers forged paths over which prohibited texts could travel. In the process obscene and immoral books acquired a certain physical and moral geography of their own. In Chapter 3 I turn my attention to the authors, editors, and publishers of early nineteenth-century erotic books. Some offered intelligent defenses of their wares in the introductions and afterwords that framed their texts. Well-versed in arguments about reading and inner life, these producers offered their own, often cogent arguments about the meanings of obscenity. They also addressed questions of gender directly, as they assumed women were among their readers. In an effort to illustrate what it was authors and editors sought to defend, this chapter also explores the contents and histories of several early nineteenth-century erotic texts. Despite censorship, immoral and obscene texts circulated widely in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The types of publications assigned to this category varied; producers of erotic texts, for example, populated the category differently than did the police. Yet the language of fragile minds and vulnerable souls was shared by critics as well as producers of immoral books.
Chapters 4 and 5 examine transformations in the meaning of obscenity between 1830 and 1880. This section begins with the codification of obscenity as a sexual infraction in the late 1830s and 1840s. During this period new criminal codes promulgated in liberal states cast the distribution of obscene texts and images as a criminal offense; these laws separated the moral from the political dangers of print. Obscenity was situated in sections of these codes devoted to sexual crimes and offenses, among them rape, sodomy, prostitution, and incest. Thus an infraction that had been only loosely associated with sex was now squarely situated in the field of sexual offenses. In chapter 4 I argue that this wave of reforms was marked by tensions at the heart of German liberalism. Efforts to recast obscenity as a sexual offense expressed an effort by liberals to limit the paternal and often arbitrary actions of the police. Framing obscenity as a legal offense squarely associated with sexual infractions put the law in the hands of the courts and eliminated the spongy, inchoate categories that left ample room for inconsistent application in the first decades of the century. Yet the separation between the moral and political dangers of print rested on a spatial division between bookstores and lending libraries and by extension between elite and nonelite readers, particularly women and the less educated. Having separated the threats of print into two distinct categories, liberals could call for freedom of the press (to allow political expression) and still support regulations on the moral tone of print culture and public life.
Chapter 5 takes up one of the important continuities in nineteenth-century obscenity law: the tendency to define obscene texts and images in terms of their ability to damage or distort inner life. In its new guise as a sexual infraction codified in the criminal codes of Saxony, Hessen, Baden, and later Prussia, texts and images were deemed obscene if they damaged the reader’s or viewer’s “feelings of morality” (Sittengefühle) or “feelings of shame” (Schamgefühle). Following the promulgation of Prussia’s 1851 Penal Code, efforts were made to clarify these terms. How was the threshold for offense determined? What were the consequences of damage to the impulses of shame? What special characteristics adhered to shame that made its damage