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Chapter 2

THE CENSORS

The German censors _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ idiots _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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—Heinrich Heine, Reisebilder, Zweiter Teil. Ideen. Das Buch Le Grand, Chapter XII (1826)

A censor is a human pencil or a pencilized human, a living blue line scratched across the products of human genius, a crocodile lying in wait along the bank of the river of ideas and biting off the heads of the writers swimming there.

—Ultra, in Johann Nestroy, Freiheit in Krähwinckel, Act I, scene 14 (1849)

Few occupations are as detested as that of the censor. Like the despised medieval hangmen to whom some Germans frequently compared them,¹ modern censors are “literary executioners” with a thankless job. In performing their duties censors meet with near universal condemnation and have long been objects of ridicule and vilification.

To most writers and liberal-minded citizens the very institution of censorship is anathema and those who exercise it personify blind reaction and ignorance in action. If one believed their most outspoken critics in imperial Germany, police censors fell into one or more of the following categories: uncultured, inartistic petty functionaries incapable of recognizing, much less understanding and appreciating, genuine art and learning; puritanical, self-righteous moralists who (as was said of the English stage censor in the 1880s) were convinced the nation was “rushing towards an abyss of national degradation in morals and manners, and only held back on the edge of the precipice by the grasp of a strong hand”;² or benighted obscurants who tyrannically wielded their blue pencils to throttle any stirrings of enlightenment and progress. Yet moderates who reluctantly accepted the need for censorship and conservatives who enthusiastically demanded it were equally critical of the hapless censors who had to apply it: the former continually condemned censors for being too harsh and petty while the latter constantly faulted them for being too lax and tolerant. And everyone complained the decisions of the censors were arbitrary and inconsistent; why, their critics demanded, did censors permit X yet ban Y, or vice versa?

While some police censors, especially in isolated provincial areas, certainly deserved the contempt in which they were held, most, especially those in larger metropolitan areas, were conscientious, university-educated, pragmatic men put in a difficult position. Pulled among many opposing influences and interests—their bureaucratic superiors, the local populace, the nation's literary and artistic community, various political parties, private associations, and pressure groups—the office and work of the empire's censors was as demanding as it was unappreciated.

The Dilemma of Local Standards

Before the revolutions of 1848, when most European states had an extensive system of prior press censorship, the task of censoring publications was often assigned to a specially appointed collegium or commission. Decisions of these central bodies, which typically operated under the supervision of the minister of the interior, generally applied to the entire territory, yielding a single statewide standard for what was permissible. Moreover, within the German Confederation the 1819 Karlsbad Decrees established a nationwide commission on press censorship that coordinated and further standardized the work of the individual states' censorship commissions.

After 1848, however, responsibility for press censorship was increasingly transferred to local police officials. Although the Imperial Press Law abolished prior press censorship, it retained the right of police to oversee and regulate all publications not concerned with art or science and to exercise a punitive, postpublication censorship over them when necessary. Because local police were responsible for supervising theaters and other public amusements, they also handled theater censorship.

Germany's police forces were highly diverse. In a few of the more liberal states like Württemberg, all police were under local municipal control. In Bavaria and Saxony, police in the capital cities of Munich and Dresden were a branch of the state bureaucracy and thus directly under royal control, while in the remaining towns and cities police were controlled by local municipal authorities. In Prussia, by contrast, police in all major and several minor cities were commanded by royal officials appointed by the central state government. Thus, of the fifteen largest cities only police forces in Leipzig, Nuremberg, and Stuttgart were controlled by the city's residents; in the other twelve—and in many other sizeable German cities and towns—police were part of the state civil service.

Most crown-appointed urban police commissioners (who usually held the title of police president or police director) were independent higher civil servants. Usually of noble birth, they had experience in some branch of civil administration, held a rank within the bureaucracy roughly equivalent to other district administrative presidents, answered directly to the state's minister of the interior, and received the majority of their budget from the state, not the city government. This autonomy from the municipal governments of their respective cities had two important consequences. First, because liberal, democratic politics was stronger at the municipal than at the state level, police in most German cities remained strongholds of conservatism largely beyond the control of the urban, liberal, bourgeois elite. Second, although urban police were highly sensitive to local conditions, they were able to remain relatively aloof and insulated from local interests, pressure groups, and party politics.

Censorship duties were usually assigned to the so-called political police, one of many internal police branches concerned with broad questions of public welfare. Whereas English and American police have narrower, more clearly defined duties, in Germany police traditionally handled many aspects of everyday public administration (fire, water, sanitation, health, poor relief, etc.) that elsewhere are normally handled by municipal governments. The urban police governed all aspects of municipal public affairs, intervening continually in many aspects of everyday life. Political police oversaw the diverse forums of civic political life, from collecting information about potential subversives (especially socialists and anarchists), to monitoring public and private clubs and associations (especially those of a political nature) and all public meetings, to regulating public amusements such as theaters and music halls. It was the local political police who exercised prior press censorship before 1874 and punitive press censorship thereafter, and who were responsible for prior theater censorship where this existed. As the system of stage censorship was extended (and became increasingly centralized in the capital cities of the major states), and as the number of works to be examined grew each year, censorship bureaus within the political police division also grew in size, responsibility, and importance. In Berlin, for example, the police units handling theater, film, and other forms of censorship became so large they were eventually separated from the political police division and consolidated into an autonomous administrative division (Abtheilung VIII); the division chief, a senior administrative councilor (Oberregierungsrat) stood directly under the police president in the hierarchy and by 1914 supervised ten other police officials. In Munich the press and theater censorship bureau similarly evolved into a separate office (Referat VI) employing two mid-level officials and a staff of six. In Hamburg, by contrast, which had no formal theater censorship, the political and the commercial police (who oversaw theater licensing) battled over which was responsible for watching over the content of performances. A truce was reached by which commercial police were authorized to raise objections to performances and entertainments that were of “moral, religious, or political concern,” while political police were to be involved only if a performance violated some aspect of the Criminal Code such as libel or incitement to illegal acts.³

As the number of police officials engaged in censorship expanded and censorship divisions of the major police forces in turn developed their own internal subdivisions and administrative units, this branch of police work often became an important avenue of career advancement. The officials who headed the censorship units in Berlin (Kurt von Glasenapp) and Munich (Dr. Dietrich Bittinger) during much of the Wilhelmine era both served also as their city's assistant police commissioner; Bittinger used his post to become police director of Stuttgart in 1911.

Transfer of censorship decisions from unitary state- or nationwide censorship collegia to diverse local police forces produced in the late nineteenth century a decentralized, fragmented system fraught with inconsistencies and contradictory decisions. A work permitted by censors in one city was often banned by those in another, or vice versa. There was, however, a compelling rationale for this lack of uniformity in censorship decisions. Both the government and the courts consistently maintained censorship was justified only for pragmatic, utilitarian social reasons: to protect public peace, order, or security. It was not the content, “truth,” or artistic value of a work that was the censor's concern, but rather its Wirkung, its probable effect upon the public. If an audience was likely to react to a work in a way that threatened public peace, order, or security, the state claimed the right and duty to ban it, regardless of its other intrinsic merits. Given the enormous diversity of the German population, it was obvious an audience in one locale (for example, an urban, heavily Protestant community) would respond to a work quite differently than patrons in another locale (for example, a rural, staunchly Catholic community). The probable Wirkung of any particular work—and therefore its potential to provoke a public disturbance or somehow cause harm to the audience or citizenry—would thus vary greatly from place to place and setting to setting. Any decision to permit or ban a work had to take into account many contingencies such as the type, repertoire, and general reputation of the particular theater, the nature of the audience and of the surrounding community, unique local conditions at the time, and community standards. Since these differed greatly across the empire, so too would censorship decisions about any given work. The more that censors could point to specific local situations as grounds for their decision, the easier it was to defend their action and have it upheld on appeal; where the situation was different, the work might pose no threat to public peace, security, or order and a different decision would be in order. Censorship judgments, the government regularly reiterated, had to be made at the local, not the state or national level. The Prussian minister of the interior, responding to parliamentary complaints about the contradictory decisions of local police censors, declared in 1901 that such disparity is unavoidable:

The most defective arrangement of all would be if one tried to regulate all censorship from Berlin. Too many local conditions come into play, which only local police are in a position to evaluate properly. A work may be unobjectionable when performed on a first-class Berlin stage by excellent actors in a serious manner before an audience with a literary education, but could, under other circumstances, at a second-or third-rate theater, before a less educated audience and performed in a provocative manner, be highly objectionable from the standpoint of morals or public order. The diversity of circumstances must be taken into consideration.⁴

Provincial officials, such as a longtime theater censor with the Munich police, similarly warned against attempts to centralize and standardize censorship decisions because that ignored the crucial role unique local conditions played in the decision-making process.⁵

Yet divergent local rather than uniform national rulings inevitably made theater censorship appear contradictory and arbitrary, which in turn exposed both censorship and censors to frequent ridicule. As we have seen, various governmental and nongovernmental forces tenaciously lobbied to coordinate, rationalize, standardize, and centralize censorship decisions in hopes of eliminating embarrassing contradictions and plugging annoying loopholes. Although efforts to standardize and centralize censorship laws made little headway against the political, legal, and institutional forces that sustained multiformity, pressures promoting more uniformity gradually gained the upper hand in the day-to-day administration of those laws. By World War I the political and bureaucratic advantages of centralization had overcome the logic and traditions of decentralization.

Prussia led in the drive to coordinate and centralize censorship decisions within its boundaries. In 1908 the Ministry of the Interior, embarrassed by a new round of public and parliamentary criticism after Berlin theater censors disagreed with those in other cities about several controversial plays, abandoned its earlier defense of local diversity and now declared it imperative for local authorities to avoid mutually inconsistent decisions. To bring greater conformity and coordination to censorship decisions, the interior minister instructed all royal police commissioners under his authority to have their theater censors, before deciding to permit or ban a particular piece about which they might have the slightest reservations, first inquire of the Berlin police president how the work had been handled there. If, because of unique local conditions, they were convinced a decision was justified that differed from that of the Berlin censor, then they must obtain the local police commissioner's express approval and the commissioner should in turn inform the interior minister before making the decision public. To simplify this process and reduce the voluminous correspondence it would generate, a few months later Berlin police were directed to inform all other royal police commissioners in Prussia whenever the Berlin theater censors banned a work; if that work was later submitted in another Prussian city, police there could then take Berlin's decision into account before making their own decision.⁶ After 1912 the Interior Ministry had the Berlin theater censorship office regularly publish a list of works that had been approved, banned, or passed with significant alterations in the capital, and local police elsewhere in Prussia could approve only works that had been previously passed by the Berlin censor; any deviations generally required the interior minister's approval. These attempts to create more consistency yet accommodate local circumstances left many local Prussian officials perplexed and uneasy about when they could or should deviate from decisions reached in Berlin.⁷

Several other German states undertook similar efforts at centralization. In 1912 Saxony designated the Dresden theater censorship office as Saxony's central clearinghouse for theater censorship (Landesstelle fur Theaterzensur). As such, Dresden censors kept a master list of all works approved or banned throughout Saxony and encouraged local censors to consult it before making their own decisions. Likewise, Bavaria designated the Munich police as the state's central theater censors; after 1910 local police were urged to consult with Munich censors before deciding about a work.

The major states also began cooperating more closely on censorship. Police in various German cities (including Vienna) had long consulted on an informal, ad hoc basis and exchanged information concerning particularly important censorship cases. In 1912 the Berlin, Dresden, and Munich police agreed to systematically exchange their master lists of all works banned and approved in each state, with the aim of better coordinating their decisions.⁸

The perpetual tension between the need for local discretion and the desire for more national uniformity in censorship matters produced an unusual predicament in the final decade of the German Empire. On the one hand, as we have seen, the Prussian and imperial governments staunchly maintained theater censorship was a state and local, not an imperial matter and they thwarted any attempts to replace local jurisdiction with more uniform national legislation. On the other hand, the problems inherent in local decision making drove Prussia and other states to centralize and standardize the way they actually applied censorship. By 1914 the major states of the empire had gone a long way toward removing theater (and also film) censorship decisions from local hands and investing them instead in police censors in the state capital. At the same time, the other major states looked increasingly to Prussia to take the lead and were less likely to approve works not already passed in Berlin. The theater censors of the Berlin police force (and, over them, the Prussian Ministry of the Interior) thus came increasingly to function as a quasi-central censorship office for the entire empire. To the delight of some and dismay of others, in the empire's last years the delicate balance between a uniform national standard and diverse local standards tipped decidedly toward the former and (the interior minister's warning of 1901 notwithstanding) that standard was set primarily by the censors in Abtheilung VIII of the Berlin police.

Censorship as a Vocation

Who staffed these censorship bureaus? What training, qualifications, or experience did they have? How did these men come to be censors? How much independence did they exercise in their duties, and how did they view their unusual vocation?

Under the prior censorship systems of the early nineteenth century, censors had the formidable task of examining all books and periodicals before they went to print (and sometimes all dramas before they were performed) and of writing reports on those considered objectionable. They often oversaw imported printed matter and the offerings of local bookstores and lending libraries as well as watching the foreign press and book trade for dangerous works before they were introduced locally. From their superiors they often received only vague, general instructions for judging specific works and then were frequently rebuked or even punished when their decisions displeased those higher up. In Russia, for example, literary censors were sometimes imprisoned for approving works their superiors thought should have been banned, while in many German states they were commonly fined considerable sums for their misjudgments or held liable for any legal costs their decisions might later incur if challenged and reversed.⁹

Because in most states, especially smaller, poorer ones, they were overworked and underpaid (if indeed paid at all) and seldom given the financial resources and manpower necessary to carry out their assignments, it was often difficult to find men qualified to serve on the censorship collegia. Given the aggravations of the position it is hardly surprising few men chose the job of censor. Rather, they were generally assigned to their office by the monarch, and once pressed into service were often forbidden to resign. Traditionally, they were chosen from the small pool of educated men already in government service whose position involved some familiarity with books and perhaps foreign languages: university professors, royal librarians and archivists, and members of the church hierarchy. Often, they were expected to assume the censor's demanding tasks in addition to their other bureaucratic duties.

As with any institution of social control, if officials who are charged with enforcing rules are to be effective they must have the cooperation and respect, either voluntary or coerced, of those they deal with.¹⁰ Writers, journalists, or artists subjected to censorship were presumably more likely to accept and cooperate with censors who enjoyed some standing in the intellectual and artistic community than with censors who were strangers to it. It was no accident, then, that many men appointed as censors were themselves writers, journalists, or booksellers or had close ties to the literary world. In pre-1848 Germany, for example, authors such as E. T. A. Hoffmann, Jakob Grimm, Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff, and August Friedrich Ernst Langbein were all state censors at one time; Austria and Russia, too, appointed noted dramatists, poets, and journalists to their censorship commissions. Many of these writer-censors not only knew their fellow authors whom they were called upon to censor, but were often on good terms with them. In several cases relations between censor and censored were so close it was difficult to distinguish between them: in Vormärz Prussia, for example, the censor Langbein published his poems in one of the journals he was assigned to censor, while in Hesse, Bernhardi secretly edited a liberal newspaper he and his fellow censors were supposed to be censoring.¹¹ Indeed, far from being ruthless and petty-minded functionaries eager to silence the slightest hint of unorthodox expression, many early nineteenth-century censors were sympathetic toward the authors they had to censor and sabotaged the institution from within by exercising their powers as liberally and tolerantly as possible. “Enlightened” censors like Jakob Grimm and Christian Schubart in Germany or Fedor Tiutchev, A. V. Nikitenko, and Vasilii Odoevski in Russia were often critical of censorship and sought to be as lax as possible when applying it (which is precisely why their governments often found it necessary to hold censors personally or financially liable for their decisions).

Dismantling the system of prior press censorship after midcentury brought major changes to the task of the censor and the type of person recruited for the position. Like many other areas of nineteenth-century life, censorship and censors became increasingly bureaucratized. In contrast to the more broadly educated, skeptical, unwilling scholar- or writer-censors of the early century, those who served as censors in imperial Germany were full-time, midlevel career civil servants with a narrow legal training. Because they were primarily administrative bureaucrats, not intellectuals, these police officials were generally afforded little respect from those they censored. As the writer Karl Gutzkow remarked:

Censorship might still be bearable if from the outset it did not, as a branch of administrative bureaucracy, bear the stamp of literary incompetence. An official who has perhaps studied all the commentaries on the laws of the land but has never studied a work of a different scholarly discipline, not to mention art, an official whose thoughts are all directed towards small spaces in administrative buildings, who has only one God, namely his superior, and only one heaven, namely promotion—such a man should pass judgment on your writing?¹²

Censorship officials on major urban police forces like Berlin or Munich normally held the prestigious rank of administrative or police councilor (Regierungsrat, Polizeirat) or assistant administrative councilor (Regierungsassessor, Bezirksamtsassessor), positions that at the turn of the century earned annual salaries of 4,200 to 7,000 marks and sometimes carried an additional housing subsidy. They generally had no particular interest in the world of literature, art, or ideas and few, if any, ties to those who populated that world. Their work as censors was highly routinized, following prescribed guidelines requiring them to judge a work from a narrowly legalistic perspective and leaving little room for considerations such as literary merit. As one fin-de-siècle critic of Central European censorship complained, works were now being judged simply from the “mentality of the bureaucrats,…who in most cases evaluate the intellectual creations entrusted to them the same way that a blind man evaluates colors”; another German parliamentarian, himself a judge, declared that juristically trained civil servants knew as much about art and literature as an elephant about flute playing.¹³ And as career bureaucrats whose advancement depended on conscientiously performing their duties, these censors were not inclined to question, much less subvert the institution of which they were a part. Even more than the judiciary, professional police administrators who functioned as censors in Germany were recruited from a small, upper-class elite and were, for the most part, staunchly conservative, uncritical supporters of the existing system and its policies. For example Dr. Christian Roth, who became chief of the Munich police department's Referat VI in 1911, was not merely a political conservative but an archreactionary. After the brutal suppression of the Bavarian revolution of 1918–1919, Roth served briefly as Bavarian minister of justice, during which time he acquired the nickname “Böse Christian” (The Evil Christian). He was active in Bavaria's early Nazi movement and a key participant in Hitler's 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.¹⁴

Even though the Prussian minister of the interior tried to ensure that “censorship be entrusted only to officials whose knowledge, experience, and mature judgment will guard against blunders,”¹⁵ this was not usually the case. Although one young Bavarian law student with literary interests (Robert Heindl) apparently aspired to become a police censor and was briefly employed by the Munich police's censorship bureau, and although Dr. Hermann Possart, son of Ernst von Possart (a famous actor, Berlin theater director, and later intendant of the Bavarian royal theaters) worked from 1901 to 1910 as a respected theater censor with the Berlin police, in general no special qualifications were expected of a censor.¹⁶ Police officials assigned those duties were given no particular training for their job, needed demonstrate no particular prior aptitude for it, and often had no particular interest in it. Their only training was the standard, narrowly focused legal training shared by all civil administrators: public and administrative law (Staatsund Verwaltungsrecht). Although some in police administration spent their entire careers there, more often they had been posted to the police after serving in one or more positions elsewhere within the state bureaucracy. For example, Administrative Councilor Dumrath, chosen to head the Berlin police's new Subdivision for Theater Affairs when it was created in 1900 (and thus in charge of theater censorship for the city) had until then served as local prefect (Landrat) in West Prussia. (His unfortunate name, which could mean something like “stupid advice,” became the butt of many jokes, as did another censor named Klotz who was the second highest-ranking censor in the office before and during the war.) In Munich both Dr. Dietrich Bittinger (the city's chief press, theater, and cinema censor until 1911) and Dr. Christian Roth, his successor, had served for a number of years as lower-level officials with various Bavarian district courts and rural administrative districts before being transferred to the Munich police.¹⁷

While censors attached to large, urban, state-controlled police forces like Berlin or Munich may have been ill prepared for their tasks, those in some of Germany's smaller cities were often woefully unqualified for theirs. Police forces in Leipzig, Nuremberg, and Stuttgart (as well as those in the city-states of Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck) enjoyed less prestige and a far smaller budget than their counterparts in most other German cities because those forces were locally controlled and police officials there were not part of the state civil service. Many duties that elsewhere were handled by university-trained civil servants were handled in municipally controlled police forces by the uniformed constabulary—that is, by common patrolmen (Schützmänner). These patrolmen, who had to be army veterans with several years service and have attained the rank of corporal (Unteroffizier), were drawn heavily from the peasantry and the petit-bourgeoisie ranks of artisans, small shopkeepers, and minor officials; few had any education beyond the elementary level and virtually none were gymnasium, much less university, graduates. The painfully obvious inadequacies of these patrolmen, who have been aptly described as “reactionaries by profession” were one important reason why censorship responsibilities became increasingly centralized in the hands of better-trained officials in the major metropolitan police forces.

Although German police censors were nearly always narrowly trained jurists who had not chosen to be censors, had (at least at the outset) little understanding of the media and materials they were assigned to censor, and whose relevant training and experience for their task was highly questionable, here and there a censor could be found, especially in major urban areas, who transcended these limitations and performed his difficult calling in a way that won him widespread respect, even from writers and artists. One such man was Kurt [Curt] Karl Gustav von Glasenapp (1856–1937), who headed the Berlin censorship office during the empire's last two decades. Glasenapp, scion of an old Pomeranian noble family,¹⁸ studied law and entered the Prussian civil service. Around 1890 he was posted to the Berlin police's political division as an assistant administrative councilor, where his duties included theater censorship and licensing. After promotion to administrative councilor in 1896 he became head of the theater subdivision in 1901 and thereafter served as Berlin's chief theater censor. In 1907 Glasenapp was promoted to senior administrative councilor and in 1910 became director of Abtheilung VIII, which was responsible for all theater, film, and pornography censorship and for the control of other pubic amusements. When a national film censorship board was established for Germany in 1920, it too came under Glasenapp's supervision.

After 1901, when Glasenapp directed all theatrical (and later film) censorship for Berlin, he functioned more and more as Germany's de facto national censor. The growing centralization and standardization of censorship meant other Prussian cities increasingly followed the censorship decisions of the Berlin police and other German states increasingly followed the decisions of Prussia. Thus, Glasenapp gradually emerged as imperial Germany's most influential censor: although local police throughout the nation were theoretically free to reach their own decisions regarding a particular drama or film, by World War I they ordinarily deferred to the decisions made by Glasenapp's unit in Berlin. Since it was in the huge, lucrative Berlin market where most new dramas and films premiered (and thus, where they were first submitted for censorship), Glasenapp and his subordinates normally had the first, and last, word on whether a work would be banned.

Despite growing criticism of censorship, Glasenapp enjoyed much personal respect: his sensitivity, fairness, and prudence as a censor were recognized and valued across the political spectrum (as was that of his assistant, Dr. Hermann Possart).¹⁹ Glasenapp, who had a genuine love for and extensive knowledge about the theater and visited other European capitals to learn about and consult on theater censorship abroad, took his responsibilities seriously yet appeared to be fairly broad-minded regarding theatrical censorship. Rather than banning a questionable script outright he often attended a dress rehearsal to see how it would be staged, and on occasion even discussed a work with its author, although this went against prevailing procedures. Directors and stage personnel in the theater industry praised Glasenapp's intelligence and artistic discernment and he appears to have been on friendly, even intimate, terms with some of the authors he censored, including avant-garde writers like Arthur Schnitzler and Frank Wedekind.²⁰ He served on the commission to draft a new theater law in 1912–1913, and when the first draft was released, the liberal theatrical journal Die Schaubühne greeted it as a “most gratifying sign of the great sympathy in official circles toward theater employees…. I see in this draft the expert hand of Senior Administrative Councilor von Glasenapp, to whom all theater employees owe a great ‘thank you.'” ²¹ Indeed, so strong were his relations with the literary and entertainment community that after he retired from the Berlin police force in the mid-1920s he became managing director of the Association of German Writers (Verband deutscher Erzähler), a lobby group for Germany's literati that sought to improve their working conditions and opposed the censorship of public entertainments.²² Although he had moved from overseeing and controlling writers to representing their interests, in both roles Glasenapp functioned as an intermediary between the artistic community and the state.

If a sensitive, liberal-minded, highly respected censor like Glasenapp inspired confidence and trust within the artistic community and thereby helped legitimize censorship, some of his colleagues did exactly the opposite. Critics frequently charge that those who act as censors of others are blatant hypocrites acting out of questionable or even twisted psychological motives. “Show me a censor,” said one writer, “and I will show you an individual suffering from frustrated desire”; another wit defined a censor as a man who gets paid for his dirty thoughts. The renowned psychoanalyst and Freud biographer Dr. Ernest Jones claimed, “it is the people with secret attractions to various temptations who busy themselves with removing these temptations from other people; really they are defending themselves, under the pretense of defending others, because at heart they fear their own weakness.”²³ Given the often arbitrary way German police officials were assigned to censorship duties, it would be hard to argue such men became censors to satisfy their own dark, unconscious drives. Nevertheless, the issue of moral hypocrisy in censors fascinated many critics of censorship in the last years of the empire. As the cases of Traugott von Jagow and Dietrich Bittinger show, when a censor's embarrassing private moral behavior appeared to conflict with his public role as a defender of morality he quickly became a cause célèbre; when such censors became objects of widespread ridicule and disrespect, especially in the artistic community, they undercut the legitimacy of censorship itself.

Archconservative Traugott von Jagow was appointed police president of Berlin in 1909 and was Glasenapp's immediate superior. Although Glasenapp's division normally handled most questions of theater censorship, unique or difficult cases were sometimes passed up to the police president for final decision. When the censorship division was reluctant to pass Carl Sternheim's drama Die Hose (Underpants) in February 1911 on moral grounds, Max Reinhardt, director of the Deutsches Theater, appealed to von Jagow and invited him to attend a dress rehearsal to see for himself how inoffensive the performance would be. (On the Die Hose case, see chapter 6.) Leaving little to chance, Reinhardt also asked Tilla Durieux, one of his most attractive and popular actresses, to sit next to von Jagow during the performance and distract him with conversation whenever the language or action on stage became a little racy. The stratagem worked and von Jagow approved the play. He also sent this personal note to Ms. Durieux: “Dear Madam: Since I must exercise censorship over the theaters, I would like some personal contact with actors' circles. It would be a pleasure for me if we could continue our conversation of today. Would you mind if I paid you a visit? Perhaps Sunday at 4:30 PM? Respectfully, von Jagow. (Please address personally).”²⁴

Von Jagow did not know Durieux was married to Paul Cassirer, publisher and coeditor of the radical, avant-garde journal Pan. A few weeks earlier von Jagow had ordered two issues of Pan confiscated and charged Cassirer and his colleagues with obscenity. (On the Pan affair, see chapter 6.) Cassirer and his coeditors Wilhelm Herzog and Alfred Kerr decided to exploit the incident, hoping von Jagow would drop the charges against them or perhaps even resign from office. Cassirer sent the police president a note accusing him of behaving boorishly toward his wife and challenging him to a duel.²⁵ The next day an imposing military officer in full uniform appeared in Cassirer's office with von Jagow's apology: “Herr Cassirer, my friend, His Excellence the police president of Berlin, Herr Traugott von Jagow, has instructed me to apologize to you in his name. On his word of honor, he did not know that Ms. Durieux was your wife. He assumes this embarrassing incident is now settled.” Cassirer indicated he was satisfied, but could not guarantee that others (namely, the firebrand Alfred Kerr) wouldn't discuss it further in the press. Indeed, over the next weeks Kerr and others published several caustic articles, poems, and cartoons about the affair, castigating von Jagow for cynical moral hypocrisy and abusing his office and ridiculing the double standards in respectable Wilhelmine society. The scandal was quickly picked up by the Social Democratic press and even by papers in the US, Argentina, England, and Hungary.²⁶ Although he remained Berlin police president until 1916, the affair embarrassed von Jagow and added fuel to a growing anticensorship movement in Germany on the eve of the war.²⁷

As the von Jagow affair was dying down in Berlin, another scandal involving a police theater censor and an actress flared up in Munich. In late 1911 an obscure Munich journalist published an article charging Dr. Dietrich Bittinger, head of the Munich Police Department's Referat VI, with making indecent advances on an actress who visited him in his office, supposedly to discuss a matter of theater censorship. Bittinger successfully sued for libel but the journalist appealed the decision and won a retrial. At this second trial (February 1912) another actress testified that at a ball three years earlier, Bittinger had grabbed her under her skirt—something Bittinger claimed he didn't remember and which at any rate, he said, happened all the time at a bal paré. Although upholding the journalist's original conviction for libel, the court reduced his fine from four hundred marks to fifty, implying Bittinger's reputation was less sterling than previously thought. Munich's liberal and socialist press quickly publicized the miniscandal, drawing attention to this guardian of morality's own lack of morality. Bittinger, meanwhile, had left Munich to assume the position of police director of Stuttgart.²⁸

Although neither of these scandals found much resonance beyond the local left-wing press, both raised questions about the moral standards of censors who professed to uphold public morality by banning immoral materials. For those who already opposed censorship in principle as either ineffectual or unnecessary, these two incidents merely confirmed their worst opinions about arrogant censors and provided further proof the institution of censorship had to be abolished.

The Censor's Work

Like most work of public welfare divisions in the police forces in larger cities, that of the censors was highly routinized. After visiting the Berlin police in 1913–1914, one American observer commented on the “over-organization” he found:

There are bureaus and sub-bureaus, specialties and sub-specialties, with an interminable line of reports and documents proceeding through official channels to the [Police] President's office. Every official method is carefully prescribed; every action, even to the smallest detail, is hedged about with minute rules and regulations. Police business is reduced to a methodical and, as far as possible, automatic routine…. [It is] a piece of machinery from which the human element has been completely eliminated, leaving no room for individual initiative or imagination…. [A]s one surveys the entire organization of the Berlin department, the impression becomes firmly fixed that it is a huge, ponderous machine, impeded by its own mechanical intricacy and clogged with work.²⁹

While bureaucratic organization was less systematized and routines less rigid the further one got from Berlin and Prussia, censors everywhere operated within a highly structured setting that imposed significant institutional constraints on their work.

Since artistic and scholarly publications were exempted from censorship under the Press Law, officials in the press censorship bureau were rarely involved in literary censorship. In scrutinizing the extensive outpouring of the periodical press, however, press censors also clipped and filed articles and references to anything that might be of use to other police divisions. Thus, they often forwarded to the theater censor newspaper items about dramas in which the latter might have an interest—for example, reports about controversial plays banned in another cities, or reviews of dramas performed elsewhere that raised questions about those works' suitability for the public stage.

Where theater censorship existed, theater directors were usually required to submit to police two copies of the script (Textbuch) of any work to be performed publicly, and had to do so at least two weeks before it premiered. Pieces previously approved and publicly performed were routinely reapproved; all “new” works (that is, those never before submitted to police or approved for public performance in the city) had to be individually examined. In Berlin and other large cities each text was assigned to a lower-level official (the Lektor, or reader) who wrote a brief synopsis and analysis of the piece and marked (usually in blue pencil) any dialogue, stage action, or other aspect that might be objectionable or impermissible. (One of the more pedantic readers in Berlin also marked grammatical and spelling errors he found.³⁰) This report then passed to a superior who decided whether to approve the piece, approve it provided certain alterations were made, or forbid its performance completely. In highly sensitive or particularly controversial cases the matter was sometimes referred to the police president for final judgment. A letter, under the police president's signature, informed the theater or music hall of the decision. One copy of the script was returned to the theater, containing the censor's blue markings of passages or scenes that had to be cut or altered; the second copy was kept in police files. (By 1901 the Berlin police had collected over eleven thousand Textbücher.31) For future reference the Berlin police also kept a huge card file of all works submitted for censorship there; a separate card for each drama indicated what action had been taken as well as other pertinent information (for example, whether the work was “Social Democratic”). Before reading a newly submitted drama, censors referred to this card file to see if it had been previously approved or banned in the city. They also frequently consulted whatever press clippings had been collected concerning the work to see if it had been banned elsewhere or what audience reaction had been when it was performed. After the move to centralize and coordinate theater censorship beginning in 1908, provincial police also began checking the master lists of bans and approvals distributed by the Berlin, Munich, or Dresden censors.

If unable or unwilling to decide from the script alone—for example, if they wanted to see exactly how a sensitive scene or action would be staged—censors sometimes insisted on attending the dress rehearsal, to which theaters were obligated to admit them.³² Once a script was approved a police official or simple constable from the censorship bureau might also attend the opening and/or subsequent performances to ensure they corresponded exactly to the approved script; any deviations (for example, extemporaneous comments by the actors or inclusion of dialogue that had been ordered removed) were grounds for a fine or rescinding approval for the play. With particularly sensitive or controversial pieces a constable was often sent to the premier and wrote a report on audience reaction; if there were outbursts or disturbances, permission for the play might be withdrawn. Contemporaries report that at many theatrical performances a policeman was “often the most attentive listener in the hall, constantly comparing the spoken words with the manuscript in his hands.”³³

Although their work might appear to outsiders as highly routinized, German theater censors actually had relatively wide discretionary power to decide which works were suitable for public performance. They were not given a detailed checklist of forbidden topics, situations, language, or other items against which to evaluate a script. Rather, they were guided by a broad mandate to prevent the performance of any material that, because of its general tendency, the manner of its depiction, or its probable effect upon an audience, was likely to pose a danger to public peace, security, or order. In Prussia and most other states this included material that violated various provisions of the Criminal Code, attacked the existing state order or state religion, attacked the social order or the family, offended public morality by grossly violating the sense of shame and morality, depicted “notorious” situations from private life, or portrayed concrete events from the life of a person still living. Individual states sometimes imposed additional specific interdictions for public entertainments; in Prussia, for example, policemen and other public officials could not be portrayed in an “obscene or inappropriate manner” and neither deceased members of the Hohenzollern dynasty nor characters from the Bible could appear on stage without express government approval.³⁴ (See chapters 3 and 5.)

Different officials in different settings necessarily applied these general and specific taboos differently. For censors, like many other social-control agents, are “definition controllers” or “judges of normality” (Foucault) who decide (usually on the basis of subjective value judgments rather than objective criteria) what conforms to acceptable norms. Their power to name or label, their ability to determine what range of behavior is to be designated as obscene, blasphemous, inflammatory, or otherwise intolerable uniquely positions them not only to identify but also actually to “produce” what they claim to suppress. When the law regarding obscenity and morally offensive materials was broadened after 1900, for example (see chapter 6), one contemporary observer remarked: “The impossibility of concretely defining [obscenity] has the inevitable consequence that the judge's individual interpretation is given wide latitude, that subjective judgment occupies a large place in the evaluation, analysis, and investigation of inculpated works. The penalties imposed for [such] transgressions…thus differ greatly, and no other legal regulations yield such divergent judicial verdicts as these.”³⁵ (It was no coincidence that from 1902 until World War I, the annual number of prosecutions and convictions for obscenity was about 50 percent higher than during the 1890s.³⁶)

Once censors decided to permit or prohibit a drama's public performance, the theater director was informed in writing. Police were not required at this time to explain the reason for a ban or identify what they found unacceptable, beyond stating generally that it was proscribed on “moral,” “religious,” or “public-order” grounds; only if the decision were appealed did police explicate what was objectionable and why. In reaching a decision censors seldom discussed or negotiated scripts with the theater director, and almost never with the playwright. Like most bureaucrats, police resisted any external, unofficial interference in their area of jurisdiction (in this case, pending censorship matters) and much preferred to confine their interaction with the public to formal, prescribed legal procedures. More importantly, playwrights had no legal role or rights in the censorship process. In nineteenth-century Germany, dramatists generally gave their new works to agents, who in turn sold the scripts to theaters after negotiating the royalties, advances, and other compensations due the author. Since, under the law, it was the theater director who submitted the work for censorship, police dealt only with him and only he had the right to appeal a ban. Some directors had a censored dramatist participate in the appeal process as a co-plaintiff or witness, or worked closely with an author in revising the banned work so it would pass censorship, but directors had no obligation to do so and they could (and frequently did) refuse to appeal a police ban despite the author's wishes. Directors were often less inclined than authors to appeal a ban because they knew they had to deal with the censors on numerous future submissions. They probably knew also that officials in agencies of social control tend to be easier on those who are respectful and cooperative and deal more harshly with those who are not. Although both the Prussian Ministry of the Interior and the German Stage Association (Deutscher Bühnenverein) after the turn of the century pushed to give authors a larger, more direct role in the censorship and appeals process, it was the theater directors with whom the police dealt almost exclusively.³⁷

In exercising their professional judgment to approve a work or not, censors were subject to various overt and covert pressures, some from outside the official bureaucracy, others from within. First, a censor could be penalized for mistakes—for example, approving a work he should not have. Although they were not fined or imprisoned for “wrong” decisions as in Russia, a few did lose their positions after their too-lax or too-stringent rulings caused embarrassing controversy. The Stettin police official who foolishly banned Emil Augier's Les Fourchambaults in 1878, sparking outcries from liberals and a debate in the Prussian parliament, was quickly put on “leave for an undetermined time,” and soon thereafter resigned. Conversely, at the turn of the century Administrative Councilor Dumrath, new head of the Berlin theater censorship office, was removed from his position after only nine months because his decision to approve Max Dreyer's Volksaufklärung (Popular Enlightenment, which dealt with sexual and reproductive topics) aroused the wrath of the conservative press and conservative delegates condemned his decision in the Reichstag.³⁸

More significantly, German censors (like those everywhere) had an incentive to find something objectionable in what they scrutinized. For once censorship becomes institutionalized and censors are assigned to identify and suppress nonconformist expressions, they develop a vested interest in the existence of such material. If the raison d'ètre of an undertaking depends on finding and controlling a certain deviant behavior—when its power and authority, its budget, its employees' jobs, and its continued existence is contingent upon the pursuit of this behavior—then that behavior will indeed be found, especially when the seekers themselves can define what constitutes deviance. Thus an antivice society or morality league organized for the purpose of identifying and combating obscenity, if it is to be successful (and if it is to continue receiving contributions from supportive patrons), must find obscenity—and always does.³⁹ The same is true for other agencies, private or public, whose function it is to identify and combat other stigmatized behavior, be it witchcraft, “un-American activity,” official corruption and waste, “secular humanism” in textbooks—or supposedly dangerous, nonconformist expressions that violate established norms and must therefore be censored. And the more of this it can find the more the agency's existence is legitimatized and the easier it becomes to demonstrate its effectiveness and justify expanding its power, activities, staff, and budget. As one contemporary critic bluntly put it, “The censor must, from time to time, promulgate a ban in order to justify the existence of his office.”⁴⁰ This was not mere speculation: Ludwig Sendach, a fin de siècle theater censor in neighboring Austria, confided in his memoirs that no matter how lenient and tolerant he wished to be, in his office “from time to time something ‘objectionable' had to be found in the submitted works, for otherwise censorship would soon have been suspected of being unnecessary! [emphasis in original]” The institutionalized pressure Sendach felt to “produce” was reinforced by the internal competition and rewards of the hierarchical bureaucracy in which he served: he soon realized the more passages he red-lined and the stricter a reputation he acquired, the more trust and respect he received from his superiors.⁴¹ In Hamburg competition between political and commercial police over control of theater performances meant the former, to justify their involvement, frequently claimed a performance violated some aspect of the Criminal Code. (In such cases, however, the police director sided with the commercial police, who found nothing objectionable in the works that political police sought to incriminate.⁴²)

So Germany's censors always found much to do. As the number of theaters proliferated, so too did their work. Quantitative data in this area is sketchy and incomplete, but some does exist. (See tables 2.1—2.6.) In the later 1870s, for example, Berlin theaters submitted an average of over 530 dramas annually to police for censorship. By the 1890s this number had risen to about one thousand, although nearly three-fourths of these were works that had been previously approved there, leaving an average of about 275 “new” works needing the censors' scrutiny each year. Even in Frankfurt (whose population was about one-sixth that of Berlin), prior to World War I theaters were submitting about 240 dramas to the police each year.

Table 2.1 Dramas Submitted and Banned in Berlin, 1876–1880

Table 2.2 Dramas Submitted and Banned in Berlin, 1891–1900

Table 2.3 New Dramas Banned in Berlin, 1900–1917

Table 2.4 Dramas Banned or Withdrawn in Berlin, 1901–1903

Table 2.5 Dramas Submitted and Banned in Frankfurt, 1909–1914

Table2.6 Dramas Banned in Munich, 1908–1918

	Total Banned
1908–1914	50
1914–1918	28
Total	78
	(of these, 58 banned for moral reasons)

Source: Michael Meyer, Theaterzensur in München 1900–1918, 154