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CHAPTER 2

Dubious Sources, Dangerous Spaces, Porous Geographies

Understanding the Bookseller’s Crime, 1811–1840

Even if our own approach to things is conditioned necessarily by the view that things have no meanings apart from those that human transactions, attributions, and motivations endow them with, the anthropological problem is that this formal truth does not illuminate the concrete, historical circulation of things. For that we have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their form, their uses, and their trajectories. It is only through the analysis of these trajectories that we can interpret the human transactions and calculations that enliven things.

—ARJUN APPADURAI, The Social Life of Things

Arts of transmission.… The phrase nicely exemplifies a point that Bacon himself was making in coining it: that what we know depends on the practices of communication by which the knowledge comes to us.

—JAMES CHANDLER, ARNOLD I. DAVIDSON, AND ADRIAN JOHNS, “Arts of Transmission: An Introduction”

Early nineteenth-century definitions of obscenity hinged on a vision of “half-ripe readers” who were easily seduced by fantasies and half truths. Yet a closer look at the habits of readers suggests that they were anything but. During the 1820s and 1830s readers in the patchwork of territories that constituted the newly expanded Prussia invented strategies to get the publications they wanted. They were aided by the liberal press laws of other German states, porous geographical boundaries through which books could pass and bold colporteurs willing to take risks. A new breed of lending library proprietors capitalized on the loosening of guild restrictions and the growth of the reading public and established new venues for lending books in cities throughout the German states. Political upheaval in France, punctuated by another revolution in 1830, fueled the German market for French books of all kinds. Polish territories under Russian rule staged a failed uprising against the czar in 1830–31; readers in the German states expressed their interest and sympathy by buying (or lending) books like Johann Scheible’s 1834 edition of Roman Soltyk’s Poland and Its Heroes in the Recent Fight for Freedom.1 That same year the Prussian government responded by banning books published in Polish.² In some German states popular unrest and political agitation allowed liberal parties to extract political concessions from rulers. In the midst of the changes and reorientations that marked this period, readers participated in an expanding market for books, both licit and illicit.

In his subtle discussion of what he terms “the social life of things” the social anthropologist Arjun Appadurai reminds us that the meanings that adhere to commodities are historical and local. They can be discerned only when we suspend our own notions of value and try to understand how people in specific contexts understood the movements and meanings of objects. In this chapter I continue to explore early nineteenth-century understandings of what constituted obscene and immoral publications but take a different route. I will explore how assumptions about social spaces—who offered a book, to whom, and in what context—marked a text as a certain kind of object. As publications traveled along new routes in unprecedented numbers, they accrued meanings that branded them as dangerous, even criminal. Decisions about what constituted obscene and immoral publications were not simply a matter of the words on the page. The judgments of police, censors, and members of civil society were inflected by attitudes toward the people who produced, distributed, and consumed books and about the social spaces they passed through and occupied.

To understand the meaning of obscenity we must also consider the changing status of knowledge in the 1820s and 1830s. Contemporaries asked a series of questions: Did it make sense to use the term knowledge to describe the content of the popular novels, sensational tales, travel narratives, popular medical remedies, and astrological texts that occupied the energies of police and censors in the 1820s and 1830s? And if so, what forms of knowledge were deemed dangerous or obscene? Today, in part as a response to the dramatic transformations in the way knowledge is constituted and transmitted (via the Internet, wikis), scholars have begun to explore the implications of Francis Bacon’s insight that “what we know depends on the practices of communication by which the knowledge comes to us.”³ This idea opens up the serious study of the apparatuses used to transmit, convey, and preserve knowledge. The ideal of pure, unmediated knowledge collapses in the face of a reality in which we can know only through particular, mediated “arts of transmission.” While this insight might seem more applicable to science and philosophy than to cheap books and pamphlets, I argue that discussions of obscenity were also about knowledge—about what constituted permissible knowledge, who had the authority to produce and consume it, and who should have access to it.

In Prussia the introduction of a uniform system of education during the early decades of the nineteenth century led to increased literacy. Historian Karen Hagemann estimates that in Prussia 25 percent of the population could read in 1800; in 1840 literacy rates had risen to around 40 percent.⁴ Yet literacy and basic education did not translate into a comprehensive education for everyone. Gymnasia and universities were closed to women, and very few young men from poor backgrounds found their way up through the channels of this elite tier of schools. In the 1840s the German feminist, journalist, and translator Louise Otto responded to criticism that German women’s reading habits lacked distinction: “We [German women] derive our knowledge of geography from travel novels, of history from historical novels; what we know of German language we learn from French grammar.… As long as women are denied a systematic and continuous education, we have to learn everything as playful dilettantes—including politics.”⁵ Otto suggested that even “trivial” texts could be important sources for those denied access to official knowledge. Important questions were at stake in her defense of women: With what authority do certain people define knowledge? Who is given access to that knowledge, and why? For state and religious authorities, the “arts of transmission” colored the nature of the content. A book printed on vellum, bound in leather, and settled into the upper shelves of the privy councilor’s library was different from the same text bound in paper and circulating in the collection of a lending library. Once again we find that the knowledge contained in books was judged by subjective perceptions of the readers: the privy councilor was thought to be capable of distinguishing fact and fiction; the client of a lending library, on the other hand, could not (or did not want to) distinguish truth from lies.

The history of the illicit book trade in the early nineteenth century is also a lesson in the historical geography of territorial boundaries and social spaces. A study of the illicit book trade in and through the German states in the 1820s and 1830s reveals a geography carved out by print culture that extended to the eastern borders of France and Belgium, to Polish territories under Prussian rule, and to German cities like Altona under Danish sovereignty—all regions that continued to produce illicit publications. Publications passed through spaces and along routes that did not correspond to political, historical, or linguistic borders. Benedict Anderson has famously argued that print capitalism made possible the “imagined communities” of nations; in nineteenth-century Germany print also allowed readers to imagine communities beyond the borders of the kingdoms, duchies, principalities, and free cities they inhabited.⁶

In comparison to their politically rollicking neighbor across the Rhine, the German states of the 1820s and 1830s seemed to be locked in a semifeudal world of small states, absolutist rule, and bürgerlich domestic comforts and interiority. But important changes were taking place in the 1820s and especially in the 1830s. The geographies that emerged out of the revolutionary period were quite new. James J. Sheehan writes that 60 percent of Germans were under different rulers at the end of the war.⁷ Most of the thirty-nine remaining states that made up the German Confederation had new borders and territories; they also contended with a recent history of political division. (Some German states sided with Napoleon, others did not.) Even apparently solid political borders were far from stable. Perhaps it was this instability that made states like Prussia so anxious to seal its borders to books, pamphlets, and images moving alongside and across its borders.

Underneath the absolutist political institutions and the anxious comforts of Biedermeier civil society continued to develop during this period; in the liberal state of Baden liberals actively debated Jewish emancipation and women’s rights.⁸ In Prussia liberal economic policies opened the door to trade and competition, challenging the monopolies (and protections) of guilds. A tension developed between the goals of economic development and free trade (which required fluid borders and liberal trade policies with other states) and the desire for tightly sealed borders and carefully guarded subjects. There was a lot to keep locked down in early nineteenth-century Prussian territories: unrest and discontent in annexed regions of Poland, an increasingly literate population with an appetite for knowledge and entertainment, frustrated democratic and progressive impulses, active debates about the status of woman and Jews, and a population increasingly aware that new ideas and political structures were developing just over the border.