In the newly acquired regions in the Catholic Rhineland—territories incorporated into Prussia after the defeat of Napoleon—the decision of the Interior Ministry to institute strict oversight of lending libraries in 1819 inspired mixed responses and some active resistance.29 According to the new police ordinance, lending library proprietors were required to apply for concessions, to produce regular lists of the publications they carried to the local authorities, and to submit to regular inspections by the local police. In Trier, a city in the far western reaches of Prussia’s new territories, the regional government explained that historically, local laws had not authorized restrictions on lending libraries for reasons of “scientific or moral education,” nor did they feel capable, with a small staff and limited knowledge of contemporary literature, of measuring existing literary products according to the standards articulated by the authorities in Berlin.30 Determining the scientific and moral value of “literary products” was best left to experts, they argued; those who did not regularly apply themselves to reading contemporary literature, including the police, could not adequately evaluate the contents of lending libraries. In the western city of Muenster, also newly incorporated into Prussia, resistance to the authorities in Berlin was more direct. Asked about existing regulations of lending libraries, the city’s police commissioner replied that there were no laws on the books. Furthermore he protested the new regulations on the grounds that he was simply too old (over seventy) and too busy to review “all the new literature of the country.”31 In the Rhine city of Coblenz, which boasted at least eight lending libraries in the city and surrounding areas (one with a female proprietor), the regional authorities asked the Interior Ministry for clarification: Did laws regulating lending libraries also apply to reading circles and private clubs, where members could find or borrow books, newspapers, and other publications?32
In addition to regional differences in emphasis and legal language, visions of the imagined victim changed over time. As we saw, Stralsund’s 1802 ordinance imagined the vulnerable reader as the poorly educated and easily manipulated inhabitant of public spaces. By 1824 the authorities in Coblenz had begun to concern themselves with the mental (and moral) vulnerability of elite young men, particularly gymnasium students, and with the private exchange and consumption of books. Writing to Berlin about the supervision of lending libraries, the regional government in Coblenz stated, “We keep this important matter perpetually in mind, and we hope to be supported in this by Gymnasia and high schools. Nothing is more desirable than to see realized the wholesome idea that lending libraries should not be open to school-age students without explicit permission.” It was important, the report continued, to keep young people from reading “dangerous writings or inferior novels, which corrupt the heart and morals, promote distaste for serious studies, and make their mark [on the reader] through the damaging influence of half-truths and precocious, unhealthy emotions.”33 A report from the provincial government in Merseburg, a city on the southeast border of the Prussian territories, described the influence of lending libraries in similar terms: they were particularly dangerous for young people because “they have a detrimental effect on moral feelings; they also inflame the fantasies and spoil them for the pursuit of their own studies.” Using the language of health and healing, the authorities in Merseburg urged people to aid the government in its measures to “protect new generations from moral poison, just as apothecaries guard them against physical
poison.”34
From these disparate sources of law, edict, and commentary, each formulated in particular historical and geographical contexts, we can discern the outlines of a pattern of thought about the dangers of texts and the nature of readers. In almost every case the legal language focused on the potentially faulty development of readers’ habits of mind. The law of 1788 described the crime of immoral texts in terms of the mental effects of reading, condemning publications that “nourish worry and unhappiness in many inadequately educated souls, [and] encourage the gratification of base instincts—defamation, envy, vengefulness.” The 1802 edict in Stralsund defined its task in terms of protecting people from “folly, fanaticism, superstition or [religious] disbelief.” Adolescents in Coblenz could have their heart and morals corrupted “through the damaging influence of half-truths and precocious, unhealthy emotions.” In Merseburg there was concern about books that “inflame the fantasies” of young people and “spoil them for pursuit of their own studies.” Defining the goal of moral censorship as the protection of vulnerable individuals (less often, following the French model, of public mores) rather than the State marked a shift in models of power and authority. The state was now expected to frame its laws and authority for the good of its subjects, who, as imagined in law and police craft, were in need of protection. This growing emphasis on inner life mirrored broad contemporary discussions of reading and inner life—discussions about the nature of the emotions, the dangers of empathy, and the cultivation of the self. Before turning to those broader debates, however, I will take a closer look at the kinds of texts that were singled out as obscene or immoral in the early decades of the nineteenth century.
TRANSLATING THEORY INTO PRACTICE
Armed with broad authority and a set of vague principles governing their surveillance of the trade in texts and images, Berlin’s Police Headquarters, the Censorship Board, and the Interior Ministry crafted a vision of the texts, spaces, and readers that concerned them. Though censors were officially charged with reading and judging the content of texts, the police supervised lending libraries and peddlers, and they had the power to confiscate suspected texts (allowing them to harass booksellers and lending librarians, even if ultimately forced to return the texts). Furthermore, with the aid of the interior minister, the police could challenge the decisions of censors.35
Read carefully, the files kept by the Interior Ministry reveal information about the world of early nineteenth-century print culture and the worldview of the police and officials themselves. The names of the files kept on the book trade provide a glimpse into the way authorities organized knowledge. Between 1810 and 1840 reports were sorted into several categories. Among them, the file on “obscene publications and unproven medical remedies” included reports on “gallant” literature (among them The German Don Juan) as well as books like The Barometer of Love and The Art of Kissing. Other files were organized around “the supervision of lending libraries” and “books and writings of religious mysticism, pietism, as well as those treating sects.” The police kept a file on “the censorship of writings, newspapers, and pamphlets about the cholera illness” and another “concerning songs, pamphlets, and stories of wonder carried by colporteurs.” These files point to the preoccupations of officials. They were anxious about texts that might produce unrest, social disorder, or violence. The file of banned publications on “cholera illness” suggests that anti-Semitism was one potential source of disorder. Some of the confiscated publications (copies of which were pasted into the file) blamed Jews for the spread of illness, on grounds that they were itinerant and carried filthy rags from place to place.36 In the absence of commentary on why such writings were confiscated, we can venture an informed guess: denunciations of Jews in the popular press might lead to spontaneous violence. Controlling anti-Semitic violence during cholera outbreaks was a means of heading off public disorder.37 “Cholera writings” were sent to the medical censor, who had the expertise to comment on the quality of the information presented. Mystical and pietist texts were suspected of promoting “enthusiasm and folly,” emotional states that could result in disorder. The police also worked to differentiate legitimate knowledge about the body, both medical and sexual, from “fraudulent” or unauthorized knowledge. Thus a text like The Authentic Memoirs of Midwife, or the Secret Dispatches from the Moral