The (often anonymous) booksellers, peddlers, and readers examined in this book existed in a very different world from Kant’s, and the freedoms they were seeking—to print, sell, borrow, and read—were of a different variety from the inner states of critique and analysis prized by the philosopher. Nonetheless their commentary and actions suggest that the German tradition of thinking about inner life extended beyond formal philosophy. People were concerned with mental states generated by reading because access to mental states was perceived as a source of power. For figures like Wessenberg and the censors and police determined to regulate reading practices, the right kind of reading, placed in the proper hands, promised an effective means of shaping inner lives and actions in the world. For those who went out of their way to find forbidden texts, and we will see that many did, reading seemed to hold out the possibility that they might pursue ideas, fantasies, and narratives and thereby generate their own forms of interiority.
THE ARTICULATION OF HARM IN LEGAL LANGUAGE
In early nineteenth-century Prussia obscenity did not exist as a singular or well-defined legal concept. In 1820 the Prussian Interior Ministry began keeping a file titled “Obscene Publications and Unproven Medical Remedies” (“Obszöner Schriften und ungeprüfter Heilmittel”), but there was as yet no firm consensus on what constituted morally dangerous texts.9 In 1788 the Prussian king, Friedrich I, issued a broad press law that worked in two directions: it established the outside limits of authority by insisting upon the importance of “truth” and “knowledge” but also insisted on the necessity of prepublication censorship and careful regulation of the interstate book trade. The law condemned “malevolent authors” who specialized in “the corruption of morals” by depicting “indecent images and enticing depictions of vice.”10 A central censorship panel was established, and censors were authorized to deny publication and import rights to such texts, and the police in Prussian territories were instructed to confiscate them if they slipped through the censors. Little was said about what constituted “indecent images and enticing depictions of vice.” Other German states developed similar processes for regulating the book trade in the eighteenth century. In 1769 a centralized censorship bureau was established in Bavaria, and censors were directed to prohibit texts that were (among other things) “obscene, frivolous, aggravating, injurious, or included things against good morals” and those that “through thoughtless reading lure the weak, the simple, and those already disposed to evil and all manner of debauchery.”11
At street level in Prussia an overlapping series of police edicts, rescripts, trade ordinances, and laws governed the circulation of print. Prussian police codes regulated inter- and intrastate commerce and required peddlers and itinerant booksellers, called colporteurs, to apply for permits and to submit lists of the publications they carried.12 Lending libraries, which proliferated during the first third of the nineteenth century, were under the jurisdiction of the Interior Ministry and Berlin’s Police Headquarters; as institutions catering to an increasingly diverse body of readers, lending libraries were subject to especially stringent regulations.13 At the level of the German states and in interstate commerce agreements, laws were passed outlining the procedures for state censorship, defining what was allowed and what was proscribed and creating a framework for monitoring the trade in books between the states.14 The booksellers’ guild in Leipzig also monitored the publishing habits of its members; guild members could be fined or stripped of their membership if they published morally damaging print, engaged in illegal piracy, or engaged in shameful or criminal acts. It was not unheard of for the guild to seize ostensibly obscene publications and publicly burn them.15
Neither laws nor the multiple edicts, rescripts, and ordinances that governed police work were invented out of whole cloth, nor were they necessarily rationalized or coordinated with one another.16 Existing laws and police codes were the product of several generations of thinking about law, regulation, and police-craft, including a body of enlightened reforms produced during the second half of the eighteenth century and a second wave of liberal reforms inspired by Napoleon’s revolutionary legal codes. In the early nineteenth century older laws and edicts remained on the books and took their place alongside new legal language and concepts. Sometimes a pregnant legal concept was simply replaced by a new word, leaving the structure of the law in place. For example, an Austrian “patent” issued by Carl VI in 1714 explained that the trade in texts and images must be controlled on grounds that “manifold innocent youths of both sexes are tempted and enticed into evil, almost every man is provoked as is God the Almighty, when We as the ruler and prince are not moved to put down these things out of Christian zeal.”17 During the wave of secularization and legal reform in the second half of the eighteenth century, “God the Almighty” was replaced by secular principles: “the moral feelings of the population” and “concerns for youth.” Yet the logic and structure of the original patent remained in the reformed 1767 law.18 A similar process was at work in Prussian law; religious vocabulary and concepts continued implicitly to inform secular judgments of the morality of texts and the harm done to readers.
Early nineteenth-century Germans drew upon a variety of moral models as they attempted to articulate the relationship between individual autonomy, the collective good, and the role of the state in defining and enforcing morality. In some quarters absolutist moral models continued to have currency in the early nineteenth century; for example, they often informed the attitudes of local police and provincial governments. The tradition of police work in the German states imagined the role of the police as educational and productive rather than simply juridical and punitive. Describing the moral attitudes that guided police work in the German states, Isabel Hull describes an “absolutist conflation of poverty, idleness, sexual incontinence, and social disorder” that continued to flourish into the Vormärz, the decades leading up to the outbreak of revolution in March 1848.19 This was a vision of immorality focused not strictly (or even primarily) on sexuality but on a vague set of infractions and shortcomings associated with the lower echelons of society. This moral model was alive and well in local contexts in the 1820s and 1830s.
A second set of moral models generated by Enlightenment thinkers also informed early nineteenth-century discussions of Unzucht. Tracing the legal development of unzüchtige Handlungen (lewd or obscene acts) in Austrian law, Nikolaus Benke and Elizabeth Holzleithner argue that Enlightenment thinkers initiated a concept of social order that legitimated a new moral regime: “Instead of disappearing from law with the Enlightenment, the concept of Unzucht underwent an astounding differentiation and multiplication.”20 In the German states (of which Austria was one) Kant played an important role in articulating an enlightened basis for the regulation of morality. Kant insisted upon the importance of two principles: autonomy of the individual conscience (and inner freedom) and human dignity; sexual infractions could be imagined as crimes against the integrity and freedom of the individual. Laws regulating sexuality were thus compatible with enlightened insistence on the autonomy of the individual subject; anything that threatened the integrity of the subject’s body was thought to destroy freedom. In this way the censorship of immoral texts was imagined as compatible with the promotion of individual freedom. The 1811 Austrian Criminal Code contained categories for crimes and offenses against freedom, against body and life, and against marriage and family. In the context of early nineteenth-century Prussia, protecting the integrity of the subject’s body (and mind) played an important role in justifying the regulation of “immoral texts.”
A third and final set of moral models emerged out of liberal thought; these originated in the pre-Napoleonic period and gained influence in the 1830s and 1840s. We will have ample opportunity to explore liberal attitudes toward obscene and immoral texts as we move more deeply into the nineteenth century. For now, it is necessary to make only two points. Liberal thinkers were united in their support for freedom of the press; they therefore condemned political censorship. At the same time, liberals stressed the importance of gender difference and the (related) division between public and private spheres; their focus on sexuality and gender difference made them more inclined to support moral censorship, even as they called for free expression in political matters. All three of these moral models were at work in early nineteenth-century