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CHAPTER 1

Inventing Fragile Readers

The Origins of Secular Obscenity Law, 1788–1830

A police record has always been the object of a certain reserve, of which we have difficulty understanding that it amply transcends the guild of historians.

—JACQUES LACAN, “Seminar on the Purloined Letter”

It has never been more necessary to shape and consolidate the inner form of character than now, when external circumstances and habits are threatened by the terrible power of universal upheaval.

—WILHELM VON HUMBOLDT (1797), quoted in James J. Sheehan, German History 1770–1866

In his 1826 treatise, On the Moral Influence of Novels, the reform-minded Catholic theologian and author Ignatz von Wessenberg expressed his concerns about pleasurable reading in terms of a carefully articulated topography of inner life. He found himself particularly absorbed with the vicissitudes of human fantasy: “It is something wonderful, amiable, and blissful to have clean, crystal-clear, untainted Fantasy. Through it, the mind views everything in the proper light, imparting moderation to fear and terror, and soothing one’s tendencies and desires.” Wessenberg was an influential administrator of the Catholic diocese in Constanz from 1802 to 1827 and a respected author. In his vision of a mind inhabited by the impulses of reason, intellect, imagination, and fantasy, he suggested that fantasy took pride of place, guaranteeing order if “clean and clear” but also capable of creating tremendous disorder. He explained, “Nothing is more wretched than perverse, disarranged, overgrown and polluted images of wickedness, nothing worse than Fantasy pregnant with baseness.” In the struggle to regulate the mind, two impulses—fantasy and imagination—were deemed capable of counteracting all other impulses, including reason. “Where Fantasy has ruled, Reason can no longer show its face. What else is madness but a breakdown of the Imagination?”¹

In Wessenberg’s view, mental disequilibrium did not originate with an organic defect, a chemical imbalance, or the repression of human instincts. People’s minds were instead distorted by external stimulation that overwhelmed reason, leaving them vulnerable to disturbing visions and mental derangement: “How many lay sick in the hospital without the least inkling that they are exchanging phantoms for phantoms and dreams for other dreams?”² For Wessenberg, solitary reading of secular texts, in this case the novel, was an act that created, shaped, and revealed inner life. Reading created an autonomous world of invisible responses that manifested themselves in external behavior. Novel reading opened up new possibilities for the cultivation of the self, but it also represented a serious threat to inner equilibrium and, by extension, to external behavior.

Wessenberg was not alone in his attempt to understand the nature of inner life. During the first two decades of the nineteenth century Romantic authors, early practitioners of psychology and psychiatry, theologians, and phrenologists were also busy exploring the uncharted spaces of the mind and soul. While they did not agree on the answers, they asked similar questions. What constituted the shape and substance of inner life? How was it cultivated or distorted? What were the causes (and potential cures) for mental distress and inner turmoil? How did the shape of inner life translate into actions and behavior in the world? Writing in the shadow of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, Wessenberg and his contemporaries existed in a world in which human creativity, imagination, and excitability were linked to world-shattering events. He insisted that genres associated with fantasy and pleasure should not to be dismissed as trivial: “Even if [the novel] is seen only as the pasture of fantasy, or if reduced to a means of relaxation (allowing the reader to regain the energy released and depleted through work), or to entertainment, or to amusement—even from this perspective, [the genre] appears to be of decisive importance.”³

Wessenberg suggested that the study of inner life was best pursued through a careful investigation of popular reading habits, in particular the novel—a genre, he explained, that simultaneously shaped and revealed the inner life of an emerging middle-class reader. While reading was not new to the middle classes (German Protestantism had long linked literacy and religious practice) and eighteenth-century middle-class culture stressed the importance of reading as a source of cultivation and edification, it nonetheless struck Wessenberg that something was changing. It seemed that more people were reading than ever before and that they were reading for pleasure rather than edification, alone rather than in groups, and extensively rather than intensively. Women, he believed, were particularly voracious consumers of these new forms of entertainment. “How many small locales exist,” he asked, “in which a new novel does not appear every month—indeed every week—to meet the needs of the female inhabitant of a house, even among the lower classes?” Once they had the novels in their hands, he speculated, they looked for solitude—a particularly dangerous state. Women’s mental topography also made them particularly vulnerable to the magic of these new commodities: “In the case of the female sex, there exists in the inner world [Seele] a stronger tendency toward tender, enthusiastic [schwärmerisch] abandon.”⁴ Schwärmerei, a term that implies flights of enthusiasm, fanaticism, or a falling away from reason, was used liberally in the early nineteenth century as a form of cultural derision. The concept was used in a variety of contexts: in the eighteenth century the term described religious enthusiasm (its original usage); later it was used to describe nonreligious states of heightened emotionalism and “swooning.” In the wake of the French Revolution the term was appropriated to describe political enthusiasm and swooning, or “politische Schwärmerei.” In the age of German Romanticism and the “Storm and Stress” literary movements we often associate with men, Wessenberg thought that the reading habits of semi-educated women and the cult of sensibility attributed to Romantic men were of a piece.⁵ Reading the wrong books, and thus stirring up fantasy and imagination, created inner disorder; once disordered, the mind could rarely be put right. Wessenberg described a world filled with the dangers of schwärmerisch enthusiasm for revolutionary politics, religious mysticism, Romantic fiction, and emotional abandon. At the same time, novel reading opened up possibilities. Because inner life was marked by reading, the novel could play a positive role in the shaping of inner life, rendering men and women empathetic, imaginative, and mutually comprehensible. The novel was also an instrument for the study of inner life; it provided an external record of invisible fantasies and thus allowed people to study an otherwise invisible world of thoughts and impulses.

Wessenberg’s investigation into the mental effects of novel reading provides a starting point for the topic that concerns us in this chapter: the meaning of obscenity and related terms in the German states during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. This vision of a vulnerable and mutable inner life introduces us to German culture at the moment that it gave birth to a body of laws, police ordinances, and material practices that, taken together, provided an early understanding of obscenity. Like Wessenberg, censors and police understood “obscene and immoral publications” as texts that were capable of transforming readers’ minds. They imagined minds (and readers) that were fragile, easily marked, and linked to actions in the world. It was these assumptions rather than a simple policy of repression that animated the practice of censoring texts on grounds that they were immoral or obscene. According to this argument, readers needed protection from their own temptations, and those who produced or sold such texts or images were deemed criminal because of the harm they perpetrated on the mental world of vulnerable readers.

The political implications of this logic were by no means straightforward, as they rested on a complex view of the relationship between inner life (thoughts, emotions, and impulses) and the external behavior of individuals and groups. To evoke one brief example that points to the complexity of this question, police and censors identified texts that promoted “superstition” (Aberglaube) as a threat to the moral tone of inner life. Several kinds of texts—broadsides announcing the spread of cholera, books of dream interpretation, popular medical books offering what we would today call folk remedies—fell under the broad umbrella of unsittliche Schriften. Yet the questions at stake were complex: Who controlled knowledge? What knowledge was useful, reliable, and authoritative? What moved people to act in the world? Did texts accusing Jews of spreading cholera promote anti-Semitic riots? Was group behavior the result of the inner distortion of individuals, and if so, was it up to the state to control such distortion? These questions, rather than simple attempts at repression, haunted the process of identifying and controlling a body of texts deemed morally dangerous.

We must trace the early origins of secular obscenity law in the German states during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. To do this we need to understand how contemporaries defined the terms obscene and immoral. In a world filled with overlapping jurisdictions, vague laws, and police and censors who held different worldviews, our definitions must be generated from law, from practice, and from a close look at the confiscated texts themselves. It is also important to study the concepts that existed adjacent to obscenity, that is, to understand how this concept was positioned vis-à-vis other infractions. It mattered, for example, that “obscene publications” were coupled with texts on “unproven medical remedies” in the early nineteenth-century records of the Prussian censors. The relation of the crime of obscenity to other infractions (its status as a sexual offense after 1851, for example) allows us to see subtle changes in meaning and emphasis.

I begin by examining the body of ordinances, edicts, and laws governing the circulation of printed texts and images on moral grounds. Prior to 1838 we cannot point to one central law or court ruling that codifies a strict definition of obscenity, but we can look at the places where definitions of obscene or immoral texts were evoked or stated in law and police ordinances. Even when clearly articulated legal language exists, we still need to know how such laws were made intelligible to a broader community. The records kept by the Prussian Interior Ministry and generated by the police in cities throughout the German states allow us to see how official vocabulary was put into practice in lending libraries and bookstores and on the street. Religious, legal, and pedagogical commentary help us understand what was at stake in these efforts to categorize and regulate reading. Taken together these strands of law, practice, and commentary provide a picture of the importance attributed to print and to the practice of reading during the first third of the nineteenth century. They reveal contemporary thinking about the mind, soul, and practices of reading.

To begin, a few words about terminology and language, both the words used to describe crimes and infractions and the terms used to describe inner life, often imagined as the space of the infraction. Unsittlich comes from Sitten, meaning both “customs and manners” (in the sense of agreed-upon codes of behavior) and “morals” (in the sense of sexual morality). The eighteenth-century Sittenpolizei, literally the police who governed Sitten, concerned themselves with gaming, dancing, festivals, and prostitution, and in some cases with the censorship of books, printers, and bookstores.⁶ In this respect the term Sitten was aligned with secular notions of “civil order” (bürgerliche Ordnung), but it was also rooted in religious traditions stressing moral (and sexual) conduct. The term Unzucht referred to things that were unruly or disordered in common speech; in legal language it referred to sexual offenses. While the terms unsittliche Schriften and unzüchtige Schriften were often used interchangeably, they had different resonances. The term obszöne Schriften was used less often, but it was part of the arsenal of official terms used by authorities to describe and condemn texts and images. All three terms evoked both religious and secular authority at the intersection between notions of public order and sexual order and evoked both the power of the state (Zucht) and the authority of collective mores (Sitten).

Contemporaries used an equally complex array of terms to describe the mental and emotional states that made up inner life. Seele, for instance, was used to evoke the “soul,” “mind,” or even “spirit.” The term Seelenkunde, used to describe the study of the mind or soul, captures contemporary uncertainty about the substance of inner life. Maintaining this linguistic ambiguity was important in a period marked by heated debates about the seat of the soul, the origin of emotions, and the substance of the mind. Wessenberg himself refers to the “Veredelung des Geistes und Herzens [cultivation of the spirit and heart],” and here the exact location or mental impulses is ambiguous, for Geist can mean both “spirit” and “mind.” Similarly Herz means “heart” in the way we use it today, as both the physical heart and the seat of one’s emotional impulses, where emotions, good and bad, take place. Inner life was also thought to contain “depths,” but depth referred not to a repressed unconscious but instead to a perceived complexity (and darkness, or invisibility) of the mind’s impulses.⁷ To capture this range of meanings, it makes sense to use the broader term inner life to describe the space and the processes of the mental world.

As I noted in the introduction, Germans have long been accused of a particular “inwardness” of orientation and character, and this spiritual and intellectual dynamism has sometimes been seen as the counterpart to political passivity. In his 1784 prize essay, “What Is Enlightenment?,” Immanuel Kant famously defined Enlightenment as a state of inner activity and maturity; according to this logic, freedom of thought and conscience was the primary freedom. Following the French Revolution, some people were at pains to describe the combination of cultural sophistication with allegedly “backward” political forms. Some speculated that Germans privileged inner transformations (those taking place in the mind and soul) over external changes in political rights and institutions. This idea of German inwardness would resonate long after the revolutionary period and would continue to provide a potent explanation for those seeking to explain German political “failures.”

Yet this argument holds only when one assumes that politics and power are located primarily in governments and institutions. It suggests that the meaningful (and missing) actions are political actions. Furthermore it suggests that the preoccupation with inner life was a retreat from the real conditions of power. This narrative works only when one divides the world into public and private spheres, imagining “the public” as the realm of power and “the private” as a retreat from power; only then is it possible to characterize German debates about inner life as apolitical. Scholars have shown that mental states—assumptions, fantasies, dreams, and shared narratives—are not only responses or reactions to events that take place in the “real” world but are themselves generative because new self-understandings and mental states constitute and shape historical phenomena.⁸ My argument here is that early nineteenth-century discussions of inner life, as seen through debates over morals and reading, were in fact political. Such debates concerned the autonomy (or lack thereof) of subjects, definitions of official knowledge, and recognition that order was achieved not simply through the maintenance of external forms but also through power over inner life.

Shifting our vision of what power is and how it operates allows us to think of the early nineteenth-century battles over inner life as squarely about different kinds of power. Who controlled or monitored the fantasies of subjects? If the imagination was left free to range (without external or internal discipline), how did it transform the individual? Who decided what separated “real” knowledge from “superstitious fantasies”? In early nineteenth-century Germany people were acutely aware that the growing availability of books and other forms of print meant that the inner lives of readers—spaces being visualized and conceived as objects of secular study—were open to new forms of secular culture. In the eighteenth century the soul had often been conceived of as the terrain upon which religious figures and texts could work their magic (though this generated anxiety, as expressed in use of the term Schwärmerei). During the early nineteenth century the expansion of secular reading pointed to both a host of new dangers and pitfalls and to new opportunities to profitably shape inner life.

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 attempts to invent and enforce the specific moral infractions of print.

Prussia’s 1788 censorship law reflected the wave of absolutist legal reforms that took place in the German states during the second half of the eighteenth century. Eighteenth-century legal reform had been shaped by cameralism, a body of thinking about law, statecraft, and the role of the police, and though new legal and moral models had since emerged, the 1788 law remained on the books, and the ideas it embodied thus continued to have currency.²¹ Cameralist thinkers, who helped to reform legal codes during the second half of the eighteenth century, authorized the extension of broad powers to activist governments and to professional police forces. Cameralism continued to affect legal thought and the self-understanding of the police in the early nineteenth century, even after the French Revolution and the revolutionary wars transformed the political geography of the German states. Napoleon’s wholesale revision of civil and criminal codes, an expression of revolutionary politics, provided new concepts for thinking about the relationship between law and society. The French Code Pénal condemned “tout outrage à la moral publique et religieuse ou aux bonnes moeurs.” (It appears that the original code, issued in 1810, expressed the idea of censorship on moral grounds in general terms, clarifying the language in a law passed in 1819.)²² This definition introduced a new framework for understanding the moral damage done by print: rather than an authoritative state or a fragile individual an abstract notion of “the public” was placed at the center of the law. A shared understanding of public decency provided legitimacy for the reintroduction of censorship in the wake of the revolution’s experiment in freedom of the press. An 1819 Prussian police edict mirrored the language of the French law, ordering provincial authorities to check lending libraries for publications that “offended against religion, morality, decency and civil order [gegen Religion, Sittlichkeit, Anstand und bürgerliche Ordnung verstoßen].” Translated into a German linguistic and cultural context, the abstract “public spirit” evoked in the French Code Pénal became bürgerliche Ordnung, the latter meaning both “civil order” and “middle class (or bourgeois) order.”²³

In the German states abstract visions of public order and collective mores were embodied by a civil society that coexisted, often uncomfortably, with absolutist political rule.²⁴ Physicians, lawyers, pedagogues, religious leaders, journalists, and others contributed to a growing body of commentary on topics of concern to a broad public. These new “experts”—many secular, some religious—had much to say on the subject of secular reading and its dangers. Their influence in matters of moral censorship was also surprisingly direct, as local police and governments often combed newspapers and journals, looking for sources of information on the trade in books and images. The police were quick to act on public denunciations of authors, and they were often alerted to the presence of “immoral texts” by newspaper articles or unsolicited denunciations by “interested parties” who kept their eyes open for texts that made it through the censorship process and into peddlers’ boxes, lending libraries, and the shelves of bookstores.

Armed with an initial sense of the patterns of thought and the figures involved in framing notions of obscenity in the early nineteenth century, we can take a closer look at the laws and the ordinances on the books. Friedrich’s 1788 censorship law had established a structure for prepublication censorship by establishing a board of professional censors. Publications were divided into categories: religious-theological, legal, medical-surgical, political-historical, schoolbooks and pedagogical works, political newspapers, and a broad category seemingly designed to catch other kinds of publications, including novels, weekly newspapers of mixed content, plays, and other works that didn’t fit neatly into any of the categories. Censors were considered experts in their fields; some held doctorates, and some were professors at Prussian universities. Whatever authority was conferred on them by academic titles and positions, censors were not considered infallible, nor did they necessarily share the attitudes of the police and local authorities. As a result the police often confiscated and investigated texts that they perceived as obscene even when the publisher’s imprimatur signaled that the censors had read and approved the manuscript. The law also laid out the punishments for publishing or selling books without an official imprimatur, which included fines, the loss of professional concessions, and confiscation and destruction of illegal works.

In keeping with the spirit of persuasion characteristic of enlightened statecraft, the 1788 press law began with a justification for censorship: “The object of censorship is in no way to hinder a respectable, serious-minded, and moderate investigation of the truth, or to otherwise impose any unnecessary or burdensome restraints on writers.” Rather the goal of censorship was “to steer that which is against the broader principles of religion, against the state, as well as that which is against the moral and civil order, or which, through insult to personal honor, is intended to injure the good name of another.”²⁵ In its support for rational inquiry the law expressed the reigning assumption that the state had a responsibility to its subjects to promote population growth, the rational development of trade, scientific agricultural practices, and health and well-being (defined in collective rather than individual terms).²⁶ Though the state was careful to specify support only for “moderate investigation[s] of truth,” this insistence on the importance of “truth” would be used to argue for the value of publications.

The 1788 law posited an innocent (and vulnerable) reader and an unscrupulous writer or publisher with powerful tools (books, pamphlets, images) at his disposal: “These writers create damage by distributing harmful practical errors about important human affairs; they corrupt morals with indecent pictures and alluring depictions of depravity and with malicious derision and spiteful disapproval of public institutions and regulations; through this they nourish worry and unhappiness in many inadequately educated souls, encourage the gratification of base instincts—defamation, envy, vengefulness—that disturb the equanimity of good and useful citizens and offend their regard for the public. This is especially true of so-called Volkschriften, which have been much abused.”²⁷ The law drew a sharp line between useful knowledge that encouraged the well-being of the individual and knowledge that promoted worry, superstition, and the “base instincts.” In this formulation the legitimacy of the state rested on its protection of “inadequately educated souls” who might fall prey to unscrupulous authors. Both justifications for censorship evoked a vision of human nature or, more precisely, of the subject’s inner life as vulnerable. Yet this susceptibility was not simply to be the result of the impressions made upon the mind by a harmful text. Rather than a blank slate, the law assumed that base instincts were already there, ready to be activated. According to the law, people were prone to mental weakness, subject to worry and envy, and easily led to defame their neighbors (and thereby to destroy the fragile social equilibrium). Despite the fact that they were cast as the victims of the bookseller’s crime, readers already possessed the potential for corruption and were therefore not entirely innocent. The disequilibrium and vulnerability of the individual translated into an impoverishment of the state, as it introduced elements of disorder by “disturbing the equanimity of good and useful citizens.” Those who crafted the law did not underestimate the power of texts and images; they recognized the growth of secular print (and, for that matter, of so-called fanatical religious print) as a powerful means of crafting subjects.

At the local level different definitions of unsittliche Schriften often prevailed; this was the case in part because Prussia had expanded its borders substantially as a result of the revolutionary wars and was still in the process of asserting authority in these regions. During the first few decades of the nineteenth century provincial governments continued to draw on local and regional police regulations and ordinances to assert alternative terms and concepts to describe the moral offenses of print. This was especially true in territories incorporated into Prussia as a result of the Napoleonic Wars, regions with different political and legal traditions and inhabited by residents (and often officials) with different mores and attitudes. Stralsund, a port city on the Baltic coast formerly under Swedish authority, occupied by the French in the early nineteenth century, and incorporated into Prussia in 1815, used a different vocabulary to describe the moral dangers of print. The city’s 1802 ordinance explained that the goal of censorship was “to prevent the distribution of immoral or obscene books, songs, stories, or engravings as well as those that promote folly, fanaticism, superstition, or [religious] disbelief. The same applies whether the sale takes place during, or outside of market times.”²⁸ The language expressed local conditions; public spaces and marketplaces would be subjected to particular scrutiny and local concerns about marketplace literature that might include folktales, dream books, penny dreadfuls, or books of prophesy. In its preoccupation with public spaces and with the literature of the marketplace, the 1802 language echoed early modern ordinances that constituted the purview of the Sittenpolizei or Zuchtpolizei, ordinances that, as we saw earlier, focused on festivals, dancing, gaming, and public prostitution. These traditions of thinking about the order and morality of public spaces (particularly the marketplace) would begin to intersect with growing concerns about the reading habits of the Bürgertum, which took place increasingly in private (or semiprivate) spaces.

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 World of the Upper Class by the French midwife Alexandrine Jullemier warranted careful examination, both to determine the legitimacy of the text and to make sure that it did not contain unauthorized knowledge.

The police and censors also worked with an unarticulated hierarchy of offenses. This hierarchy moved in an ascending scale from the lowest level but still serious category “highly frivolous,” through (worse) “morally damaging,” and finally (worst of all) “dangerous publications that ruin heart and mind.”³⁸ The “mindless novel” was bad enough to merit scrutiny and prohibit from circulation in lending libraries, which were thought to be filled with “useless and self-damaging readings.” Other infractions, such as “mockery of religion,” “obscene content,” or “promotion of superstition,” merited confiscation. Colporteurs and lending libraries were particularly suspicious, as they carried books aimed at the “common man.” The Memoirs of Casanova, confiscated from a lending library in Bromberg in 1824, was labeled “destructive of good morals” by the censors. In 1835 Amours secrètes des Bourbons, in the original French, was confiscated in Cologne from a box of books that had been sent from Brussels to a local bookseller named Schlesinger. Another French title, La Religion St. Simonienne, was confiscated from the same box. The censors decided that both works should be banned from lending libraries, Amours secrètes because of its “highly immoral” content and La Religion St. Simonienne because it “spread antisocial and anti-Christian lessons.”³⁹ Authentic Memoirs of Midwife was judged only “slightly damaging to the morals” and was therefore allowed in bookstores, but it was banned from lending libraries.⁴⁰ Gallantries, Adventures and Loves of a Young Woman of Standing, sold in four volumes and reviewed by the Prussian censors in 1834, received similar treatment. The censors decided that the title promised a work that was more titillating than it actually was; yet because the work was “highly frivolous” it was banned from lending libraries and lending circles, but bookstores were free to sell it.⁴¹ An implicit class bias informed this hierarchy of offenses and defined the bookseller’s crime as playing on the inherent vulnerability of an uneducated, lower-class reader. This reader was believed to possess an overactive fantasy life and to be subject to “folly and fanaticism” and worry. Colporteurs, who possessed none of the status granted to professional booksellers and who catered to readers at the lowest end of the book trade, were subject to regular searches.

A closer look at three specific texts introduces us to the kinds of texts authorities identified as morally dangerous in the first decades of the nineteenth century. In 1817 the police in the city of Halle reported the confiscation of a pamphlet entitled A True Terrifying Horrifying Story of a Mother, Eva Rosina Riedelin from Marienberg, who on February 25 of this year Roasted her own small Child, and with it Managed to assuage the Hunger of her other Five Children. Paying a visit to the local song and picture salesman, the police discovered that the source of the pamphlet was a man named Weimann.⁴² Under interrogation Weimann gave up two more names: he had obtained the original text from a man named Nicolai and then gave it to a printer named Bantsch. Weimann must have kept the production costs low, as the pamphlet (luckily pasted into the report itself) was bound in plain paper and sold for six pfennig.

Composed of six pages in a large font, the story itself is simple to recount. A True Terrifying Horrifying Story tells the tale of Johann and Eva Riedelin and their six hungry children. Johann is a tenant farmer who cannot make an adequate living farming and is therefore forced to take on other jobs to feed his family. He works hard, taking on extra jobs and missing sleep in an attempt to earn money. In spite of his hardship, he never gives up faith in God:

Figure 1. Title page of Wahre schauderhaft-schreckliche Geschichte einer Mutter (1817). This copy was confiscated and pasted into the Prussian Justice Ministry’s files on printed songs, pamphlets, and stories of wonder carried by colporteurs. Geheimes Staatsarchiv PK, I. HA Rep. 77, Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 243, Nr. 50, Bd. 1: 57.

In Boden, a sizable village close to Marienberg, lived a poor tenant farmer by the name of Johann David Riedelin with his wife and 6 small children, the eldest around 8 years old and the youngest seven weeks old, who relied on him to work. Even if he denied himself sleep to earn extra in addition to his daily labor, he was still not in the position to earn enough money to feed his family. Nonetheless, untiring and constant in his trust in God, he never lost courage.

Not so his wife.

Though Eva Riedelin is presented as a woman who has lost her faith, she is also resourceful. In an effort to feed her family she adopts the habit of borrowing bread on credit from the local baker, who takes pity on her and never presses her to settle her bill. In this way she is able to keep her family from starving. One day, prompted by six children crying for food, Eva resolves once again to ask the baker for bread on credit. Arriving in town, she discovers that the baker is away on business, leaving his wife to take care of the store. When Eva asks timidly if she may borrow some bread, the baker’s wife urges her to return when her husband comes back, for she herself is not authorized to give bread on credit. Despairing, Eva returns home, where she is accosted by hungry children crying “Mommy doesn’t love us anymore” and clawing at her skirts. Pushed over the edge by the cries of her children, Eva kills the smallest child, roasts him, feeds him to his siblings, and hangs herself. Returning home from his trip, the baker hears of Eva’s visit. He urges his wife to carry two loaves—one as a gift, the other on credit—to the Riedelin home. When the wife arrives, anticipating the happy cries of the hungry children, she discovers “the arms and legs of a small child scattered on the floor” and the other children “gnawing on a human hand.”

A police investigation into the text revealed that in 1814 a manuscript of the story had been presented to and approved by a censor, Dr. Pfaff, a member of the philosophy faculty at the University of Halle. Questioned by the police in 1817, Pfaff explained that he had approved the manuscript because the story appeared to be based on a true incident. He declared that whereas immoral fiction merited censorship, the truthful depiction of immoral acts did not. (Here we see the censor’s evocation of truth as a value to be protected.)⁴³ The police and interior minister disagreed, reading the story according to the vocabulary and ideas that ran through their own file on colportage, condemning “published songs and pamphlets of thoroughly filthy and indecent content, which destroy the morality of the average man,” and “so-called spiritual wares, which exhale the most tasteless superstitions and thereby destroy the good morals of the average man.”⁴⁴ While Pfaff’s judgment focused on the pamphlet’s content, the police were preoccupied with audience and effects. According to the police, the danger of the story hinged on its tale of a woman who lost her mental equilibrium and, as a result, was capable of unimaginable acts. By provoking strong emotions, the text might lead to the loss of the reader’s moral compass and mental stability. Both Pfaff and the police called upon legal principles articulated in 1788: Pfaff stressed the importance of truth; the police sought to protect readers from “indecent images and enticing depictions of vice.” With no courts to weigh in, the police usually won out in such disagreements.

Tom Cheesman has studied the “true crime narratives” that were ubiquitous in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German street literature. These narratives were often performed orally with the aid of poster boards (anyone who has seen the prelude to Threepenny Opera will be familiar with Moritätslieder); during the first half of the nineteenth century it was not uncommon for these oral stories to be published in inexpensive editions. It is likely that the Eva Riedelin pamphlet was such a story, and the narrative is typical of the genre. Cheesman explains, “The shocking ballad tradition is one of dramatic elaborations of this basic legend, the central motif being refusal of a request for food—i.e. ‘hard-heartedness.’” The basic outlines of this story sound familiar: a poor family, often headed by a women, is threatened with starvation. A request is made for charity from someone who is better off, and this request is refused. In the published versions of the story the woman usually kills all the children and herself. Cheesman interprets the “hard-heartedness story” as a reflection of emerging bourgeois norms, particularly ideas of the “self-enclosed” and “self-sustaining family,” newly separated into a public sphere in which the man worked, and a private sphere dedicated to privacy and consumption.⁴⁵ The story of Eva Riedelin seems to complicate this analysis a bit: the baker’s wife works alongside her husband, and the baker has never before denied Eva bread (so women are not radically isolated). Nonetheless the story does highlight the economic vulnerability of the family, which is in fact so isolated that it must rely on the generosity of strangers to subsist.

A True Terrifying Horrifying Story lends itself to further analysis, just as it did in 1817, when the censors and police wrestled over the proper reading of the story. On one level the story offers a lesson in the perils of religious unbelief, stressing in the first few lines the fact that Eva, who will become the perpetrator of the unspeakable crime, has lost faith. This is also a story of serious economic hardship, as the family continues to starve despite the husband’s hard work. On another level an adequate account of the story must keep in mind that the themes offered in the story are themselves part of an existing body of narrative tropes, as Cheesman points out. Thus the history of such a text is related to real economic vulnerability of the kind certainly experienced by many tenant farmers, but the story has another history rooted in conventions and tropes dating to the eighteenth century, and probably earlier.

A second reading of this story links it directly to the early nineteenth-century concerns I have been exploring about the vulnerability of the subject, the dangers of intense emotions, and the ease of falling into vice. Eva, we learn on the first page, is mentally unguarded. The crucial moment in the story, the moment in which Eva loses her sanity, resonates with a broader preoccupation with suicide, melancholy, Schwärmerei, and the “falling away” from (already fragile) reason. Recall that the 1788 law focused on the fragile mental states of vulnerable subjects, condemning publications that “nourish base instincts—defamation, envy, vengefulness—and disturb the equanimity of good and useful citizens.” In the text the base instincts of the central character emerge as she succumbs to the impulses that make her murderous and suicidal. The law and the text share a common vision of human nature in which dark instincts are barely veiled, easily accessed, and potentially disastrous. Ironically the very emotions the story promises the reader, terror and horror, are precisely the problem. Involving imagination and fantasy, they bypass reason, intelligence, and mental balance.

Another confiscated publication, this one recorded in the file concerned with “obscene publications and unproven medical remedies,” provides another example. While we may puzzle at the title of this file, with its combination of morality and medicine, it had contemporary logic. Just as people could easily destroy their mental health by reading, they might corrupt their physical health by consuming poison packaged as medicine or by mistaking lies for legitimate knowledge. The combination of these two dangers—one mental, the other physical—also suggests that just as legitimate knowledge and real medicine would heal the body, the right kind of text might heal the soul. Thus a second kind of immoral text offered false, dangerous, or unauthorized knowledge about the body. In April 1824 the police in Magdeburg confiscated a pamphlet entitled The Book of Secrets: A Collection of More Than 200 Magnetic and Mysterious Remedies against Illness, Bodily Defects and Ailments and for the Promotion of Other Useful and Salutary Ends.⁴⁶ Several copies of the pamphlet, the police reported, had been confiscated from a local bookseller on grounds that the work “promoted superstition, or is partially of an immoral tendency.” Shortly thereafter a report from the police in Düsseldorf noted that the work had been confiscated from a local bookstore, and the government of Saxon-Weimar wrote to the Prussian authorities warning that the work was “wretched, dangerous, and immoral” and the instructions themselves were even “life-threatening.”⁴⁷

An early nineteenth-century edition of the text, published without a date and with the false imprint of “Bonston,” was bound in paper and contained no illustrations—both signs that the book was inexpensive. The text itself is divided into three parts: a titillating introduction by an unnamed publisher that makes misleading promises about the content; the body of the text, consisting of hundreds of remedies for a variety of ailments and circumstances; and a detailed index.

The introduction begins with an account of the publisher’s discovery of a dusty manuscript in “1814 in France, in a completely plundered castle or seigniorial manor, [found] under many other scattered books and papers.” The editor asserts that the unknown author of the manuscript was a medical man of some renown, who engaged in a series of “debates in Latin concerning various medical topics” and in “correspondence with first-rate doctors, who were well known at the end of the last century, among whom Mesmer is particularly worth mentioning” (a reference to Franz Anton Mesmer, whose theories of animal magnetism and hypnosis were the subject of some fascination). The editor writes that the author was a “scientifically educated man and a well-known practicing German physician” and promises that the book will “unlock the secrets of nature,” including “Animal Magnetism, Somnambulism, and Sympathetic Remedies.”⁴⁸ Here again the very things that aroused the reader—the references to animal magnetism and “sympathetic remedies”—also attracted the attention of the police.

Though the introduction promises to reveal the techniques of Mesmerism, the “secrets” that follow show no sign, except for a few Latin phrases, of having been written by a prominent doctor or a man of science. The bulk of the pamphlet is dedicated instead to a list of ailments and corresponding remedies, largely focused on sick or wounded bodies of men (rarely women), horses, and dogs. The reader finds solutions to barking dogs, lame horses, smashed limbs, and wet gunpowder. Mentions of virility, as well as advice on how to prolong an erection and avoid nocturnal emissions are squeezed between advice on how to win a duel, avoid “red dysentery,” and cure bladder worms. It also provides advice on how to evaluate the character and intentions of the people sitting around a table and how to “make a piece of paper that a man has burned reappear in his hand.” Readers are instructed on how to make waterproof gunpowder and find a missing relative. The book offers tricks and sleights of hand: how to make a gold piece heavier, how to change the color of a horse’s hair, and how to win a bet. Recommended remedies (for which recipes are provided) call for mercury, mother’s milk, and the bones of humans or various animals. A remedy for use against “red dysentery, particularly for soldiers in wartimes,” reads as follows: “Take a small rib from a hanged criminal, pulverize it, and give it to the sick man in a glass of wine or vinegar.”⁴⁹

We might be tempted to read the text as a mediated record of experience, though it is just as likely that readers read it because it was sensational. If the remedies speak to the material conditions of readers, the lives of these readers were harrowing, involving illness, the loss of valuable horses, wounds, cold, hunger, and missing friends. Ailments included worms, lice, dysentery, cancer, and melancholy. Based on this content, it seems likely that the body of the text either dates from or was expanded and revised during the Napoleonic Wars. Perhaps its readers occupied a world where tables were filled with strangers whose intentions were difficult to discern; maybe the only way to get along was to know how to make gold heavier and to be able to change the color of a stolen horse. Such concerns as crushed limbs and waterproof gunpowder were in any case very different from the problems that would begin to fill popular medical works at midcentury, when the preoccupations of a respectable middle class would eschew reading about worms, red dysentery, and lost manhood.

To read the text with the expectation of continuity between introduction and body fails to account for the historical conventions of the genre of popular medical works—works that today appear cobbled together from texts and introductions produced, borrowed, and recycled over decades. In some cases this cobbled-together quality may have been a strategy for attracting readers, throwing the police off the trail of an obscene book, or both. A second example of this kind of discontinuity is the 1821 book Magnetism and Immorality: A Remarkable Contribution to the Secret History of the Medical Practice, attributed to the notorious author Christian August Fischer (who often wrote under the pseudonym “Althing”).⁵⁰ In the book the author promises to reveal the “dark secrets” of the relationship between the practitioner of magnetism and the patient, that is, the secret history of magnetism and its relationship to the sexual drive. The story that follows describes the development of a sexual relationship between a woman patient and her Mesmerist doctor, told from several points of view. The first section of the book takes the form of a dialogue between two women. One woman narrates the story of her initial visit to a Mesmerist gathering (complete with the performance of a somnambulist), where she meets a doctor of “Magnetic Medicine.” After a couple of “indecent” sessions with the doctor in a state of somnambulism, the woman discovers that she is pregnant. The story continues with an account of several attempts made by the doctor to induce an abortion, followed by detailed recipes (reproduced in the text) of the abortifacients. The text then turns to a series of three expert witnesses, each asked to comment upon the efficacy of the abortifacients and the likelihood that the recipes in the book would have successfully induced an abortion. In the end the case against the doctor is undecided, and he receives no punishment for his alleged crimes. The story of the abortion attempts and the recipes for abortifacients are hidden in the body of the text. As with The Book of Secrets, the preface to Magnetism and Immorality appears to promise a medical and scientific treatise about Mesmerism; what it offers instead are seemingly unrelated recipes and a titillating and mysterious story, cast almost as a legal narrative.

In the eyes of the police, the three texts discussed here were obscene and immoral because they played upon the mental susceptibility of the reader to superstition, emotionalism, and irrationality. Implicit in their judgment was also a notion of what constituted legitimate knowledge—something that these stories, at least from their perspective, did not offer. In A Terrifying Horrifying Story irrationality is embodied in Eva Riedelin’s mental break, followed by murder, cannibalism, and suicide. Her story works on the reader by producing strong emotions of horror and terror (indeed the title explicitly promises these emotions). Even in six pages, the text manages to structure the reader as an empathetic witness by aligning him or her with the sympathetic (and horrified) gaze of the baker’s wife. In their files the police and provincial governments expressed their conviction that emotionalism is dangerous because it depletes mental energy (Geisteskraft), rendering subjects useless for “real work.” It seems possible that their concerns were in fact deeper. Emotions are powerful, pleasurable, and potentially disruptive; all three suggest ways subjects might fall into dangerous (and dark) mental states. Such states rendered subjects receptive to destructive, self-destructive, and potentially rebellious actions.

The Book of Secrets and Magnetism and Immorality were troublesome not because of the emotions they evoked through narrative structure but because of the way they invented and authorized what was passed off as scientific and medical knowledge. The existence of this kind of popular medical text spoke to readers’ desire for knowledge about the body and, as in the case of Mesmerism, about the mind. But what readers may have perceived as legitimate knowledge looked like superstition and irrationalism to the police. Seen in this light, the link between obscenity and unproven medical remedies begins to crystallize. In both cases subjects were attracted to remedies and knowledge that masqueraded as legitimate, but they lacked the requisite skepticism to navigate the sea of (titillating) information. Thus in battles over obscenity in the early nineteenth century questions of knowledge—how it was produced, authorized, and policed—were at stake. So too were questions about mental disarrangement produced by strong emotions.

In the remainder of this chapter I frame these early nineteenth-century controversies over printed texts and their allegedly vulnerable readers in a broader context of thinking about the intersection between reading, inner life, and the nature of authority. This involves a return to figures we have already encountered. First, in an attempt to understand the conceptual genesis of secular obscenity law in more detail, I look at the principles of eighteenth-century cameralist thought. I then return to Wessenberg’s 1826 treatise, On the Moral Influence of the Novel, as it represents a serious effort to think about the relationship between popular reading habits, moral development, and actions in the world. In stressing the importance of these contexts, I do not wish to reduce the complexity of each individual development; contemporary debates within civil society about the novel, for instance, existed adjacent to (rather than in direct contact with) legal discussions of obscene and immoral texts. Wessenberg’s book did not directly inform the Prussian authorities’ judgment of books like The Book of Secrets or A True Terrifying Horrifying Story of a Mother. Wessenberg was also not explicitly concerned about the formulation of law (though he did advocate some kind of police control of secular reading practices). Nonetheless it is worth mentioning that official fantasies about the mental fragility of uninitiated readers developed in a world in which the properties of inner life were under close scrutiny and reconstruction, and had been for some time.

“WHERE THE EYES OF LAWMAKERS AND EVEN THE PENALTIES OF JUDGES CANNOT REACH”

Writing in 1769, the influential legal and political theorist Joseph von Sonnenfels advised absolute monarchs that they should keep a close watch on religious leaders and movements, as religion (unlike law) provided access to the deep recesses of the subject’s soul. “Religion,” he explained, “makes up for the deficiencies of legislation: where the eyes of lawmakers and even the penalties of judges cannot reach, religion is present in these transactions, capable of checking evil enterprises through intimidation.”⁵¹ Referring to the spaces that elude “the eyes of lawmakers,” Sonnenfels pointed to the importance of consent to the maintenance of power. Something besides external coercion was necessary to the maintenance of civil order and productivity, two of the primary goals of the regent’s governance. What was needed was access to the soul, for only through direct access could evil be checked at the source rather than prohibited once it had already emerged.

One place to look, then, for early links between public order and inner life is the cameralists, who contributed to the creation of secular obscenity law by linking the productivity and security of the state to the morality and virtue of the individual subject.⁵² Cameralists provided one coherent set of thought about law, statecraft, and modern policing in the German-speaking states during the second half of the eighteenth century. The justification for the state apparatus was being reconceived during this period, and with it the role of law. Legal reform was pursued by the Austrian monarch Maria Theresa and Prussia’s king Friedrich I, both of whom worked to reform legal codes in ways that would centralize authority and reflect this emerging body of thought about law and statecraft. Supported in their endeavors by absolutist rulers, cameralist thinkers articulated a vision of the relationship between the state and its subjects that reflected the impulse toward rationalism, codification, and heightened economic productivity. They promoted a broad and positive (that is, not simply prohibitive and punitive) role for the modern state by suggesting that one of the central goals of statecraft was the promotion of the commonweal (Gemeinwohl) and happiness (Glückseligkeit) among the state’s subjects. This conception of happiness bore little resemblance to Anglo-American property rights and individual freedoms being articulated at the same time. Happiness was defined in terms of collective prosperity and tranquility through state protection from public disorder. Mental equilibrium was believed to be an essential tool for maintaining order, and the power of the state was promoted by carefully maintaining this equilibrium.

Two works are particularly helpful in understanding the connection between statecraft and inner life articulated by cameralists: Johann von Justi’s Grundsätze der Policeywissenschaft, popular enough to merit three printings between 1753 and 1782, and Joseph von Sonnenfels’s Grundsätze der Staatspolicey, Handlung und Finanzwissenschaft, published in six German editions between 1769 and 1820. Justi, the influential cameralist and economist, worked in the Austrian civil service under Maria Theresa and later found work in Prussia under Friedrich I. Justi’s work on statecraft helps us understand eighteenth-century thinking about the link between the moral vulnerability of subjects and the nature of state power. What he called the effective state was defined by positive goals of promotion rather than reaction to transgressions. The state should ensure that society was well-run and orderly, so that subjects could pursue productive lives. This was not a vision of individual freedoms and rights; instead these theorists stressed collective well-being and productivity that linked the behavior of each element of society to the broader happiness of all.

According to this theory, the best state was that which promoted the health and happiness of the commonweal by assuring the health, fertility, and productivity of its subjects. Justi’s vision of statecraft was broad in its implications: “One understands statecraft as that which is demanded for the smooth functioning of civic life [bürgerliches Lebens] and therefore for the maintenance of good discipline and order among the state’s subjects.” In Justi’s mind, the key to the development of a community was agriculture, trade, and population growth. These in turn served the twin goals of the state: the health of the commonweal and the promotion of collective happiness. “One must see to it,” Justi explained, “that the state’s subjects possess abilities and attributes and maintain discipline and order such as promotes the goal of collective happiness.”⁵³

In Justi’s view, discipline and order were dependent upon virtuous subjects. In a passage entitled “On the Moral Condition of Subjects and the Maintenance of Good Discipline and Order,” Justi emphasized the centrality of subjects’ morality to the collective well-being of the state: “It is undeniable that the more perfect the moral state of a people is, the better equipped is the state to promote happiness…. Virtue is the universal mainspring of all states, that which harnesses and directs its activities.” And because virtue was key to the collective happiness of the state and community, it fell to the police to protect and encourage virtuous behavior. “The moral condition of the people must be good,” he explained, “so that they are capable of performing their duties, which in turn draws them into collective life.”⁵⁴

Since virtue was seen as the “wellspring” of such productivity, censorship was necessary—and not only censorship of books but also of speech. Justi wrote that books should be prohibited if they were “clearly against the principles of religion, against the state, and against good morals; and just as an overly stringent censorship of the sciences and the book trade is very detrimental, it is also true that unlimited freedom of the press has very damaging consequences.” On the one hand, the wealth and prosperity of the state depended on literacy, the exchange of ideas, and open intellectual borders. On the other, “censorship is necessary [and] this must apply to domestic books as well as those streaming in from other states.”⁵⁵ Prussia’s 1788 press laws express this tension between the values of progress and knowledge and the dangers (particularly to happiness and equilibrium) that attended print.

There were other, less rational dangers threatening the fine balance of the commonweal, found particularly in the influence of religious heterodoxy. Justi explained that the state must be on guard that no gatherings take place that, “under the guise of religion, spread enthusiastic fantasies and introduce rude debauchery against good morals that can instigate unrest and uprisings among the people, and can finally give rise to rebellion.”⁵⁶ The logic of this sentence is worth considering. Religious “enthusiasm” and “fantasies” were coupled with “rude debauchery” and “rebellion” (not an obvious pairing). How did he move from religious enthusiasm to uprisings? By linking religious enthusiasm to disorder and rebellion, Justi echoed Sonnenfels’s conviction that religious emotions, enthusiasms, and fantasies could easily result in public disorder and undermine the integrity and functioning of the state. This was in part a matter of an alternate source of authority; if subjects harbored heterodox religious beliefs (say, pietist belief in the integrity of the individual’s experience of the Bible, unmediated by external authorities), they had interior traction against the principles promoted by civil society and the state. Once again this was an admission that a crucial key to governance—the creation of productive, “happy” subjects—was, as Sonnenfels put it, beyond the reach of the law.

Justi believed that the good state should focus on the maintenance of order, productivity, and discipline. Yet his vision of the well-ordered and productive state, at least as it emerged from his descriptions of statecraft and the science of policing, was full of tensions. There were, for example, tensions between three sources of authority: religion (not to be trusted and yet to be protected), the state (desirous of power and yet careful that that power be gained through the promotion of productivity rather than repression), and civil society, expressed in terms of science and knowledge and, like religion, not always to be trusted to police itself.

Justi was concerned about “enthusiastic fantasies” and “rude debauchery,” but it is unclear whether this threat came from renegade priests preaching popular religion or from secular attacks on religion. Furthermore he imagined the consequences of enthusiasm as riots and uprisings against the authority and order of the state. The social order was also endangered by the misanthrope, who was incapable of contributing to the goal of collective well-being (Gemeinwohl). Yet what is important here are the links between the moral discipline of the individual, the harmony of collective society, and the goal of collective well-being. If such discipline and harmony also served the interests of the regent, that was all to the good, but the explicit words of Justi’s program implied that creating a productive, materially comfortable, and disciplined society outweighed all other goals. This was not a liberal vision of society, as freedom was imagined in collective rather than individual terms, and Justi was not concerned with rights or freedoms. Nor was he an advocate of democracy, a position that was consistent with his view that human nature was “imperfect” and therefore in need of external authority.⁵⁷ This should not keep us from recognizing what was new about his thought. In Justi’s text the legitimacy of the state rested on its ability to promote the maintenance and well-being of all its subjects. According to this schema, the vulnerability of the state’s subjects translated into the vulnerability of social order. If the society was to promote productivity and health and not to define itself in repressive terms, then it left open the possibility that dangerous elements might emerge that would promote “enthusiastic fantasies” and disorder. This is precisely the tension expressed in Prussia’s 1788 press law; the state was obliged to promote the circulation of useful knowledge, yet this need for knowledge had to be balanced against the dangers that might ensue from mental disorder, fantasy, and flights of enthusiasm.

Sonnenfels also explored the link between the moral and emotional life of the subject and the stability of the state. He explained that it was the role of the rationalized state to promote good morals. The state should, on the one hand, “work to develop good morals through social instruments” and, on the other hand, “endeavor to abolish … everything that can work against the progress of good morals.”⁵⁸ The social instruments of promoting morality, he explained, were religion, education, and science, apparently in that order. The task of the enlightened state was to promote financial growth in agriculture and mercantile activity and to assure “tranquility, safety, and order” (Ruhe, Sicherheit und Ordnung).

When it came to print, Sonnenfels wrote, the benefits of “serious-minded and moderate investigation of the truth” had to be balanced against the need to protect religion, the state, morality, and personal honor. Personal honor and reputation were values to be upheld and legally protected, as they were consistent with the goal of civil order. Sonnenfels suggested that print should not be allowed to disrupt the stability, productivity, and honor of individuals or of institutions.⁵⁹ We see the influence of these ideas in the 1788 Prussian law, which warned against “writers [who] create damage by distributing harmful practical errors about important human affairs; they corrupt morals with indecent pictures and alluring depictions of depravity and with malicious derision and spiteful disapproval of public institutions and regulations.”

Cameralist theories of the state and the police directly informed the language of Friedrich’s press law. However, it is more difficult to link the language of local ordinances and edicts to cameralist legal theory. Stralsund’s 1802 edict prohibited print that encouraged “religious enthusiasm, superstition, or [religious] disbelief [Schwärmerei, Aberglauben, oder Unglauben].” Authorities in Merseburg reported concerns that young people were vulnerable to books that “do not simply work to the detriment of moral feelings, but also inflame the fantasies.” Justi evoked similar terms, warning the police to make sure that “no gatherings take place under the guise of religion that spread enthusiastic ravings or that initiate crude debaucheries against good morals.”⁶⁰ The language is similar to the 1824 report from Coblenz, expressing concerns about novels “that corrupt the heart and morals.”

Cameralism provided one way of linking emotional states to productivity and social order. Asserting that the virtue of the individual subject was the wellspring of the productive state and the happiness of the commonweal, thinkers like Justi and Sonnenfels provided a nonrepressive vocabulary in which to describe the positive benefits of moral legislation. At the same time—and this presents an odd tension in their writings on the subject—they suggested that these necessary interior spaces were usually beyond the reach of the regents and of law. As a result the cultivation of inner life was largely a matter of attempting to control unreliable figures (whether renegade priests or unscrupulous authors) rather than participating actively in the moral development of subjects.

The modern reader, perhaps unaccustomed to drawing parallels between the emotional states generated by religious practice and the provocations of profane narratives, might be surprised by this movement from pietist “ravings” and Schwärmerei to the superstition and mental disequilibrium attributed to reading secular texts. Yet it should not be surprising that as the religious monopoly over the soul gave way to an emerging practice of secular reading, vocabulary used to describe the effects of one would provide a starting point to discuss the other. Religion had long provided a language for Seelenkunde, and this language continued to have currency, even as the emerging secular sciences of psychiatry, neurology, and phrenology (each finding their footing in German-speaking states in the early decades of the nineteenth century) invented new terms to describe inner life. Romantic authors were simultaneously in the process of charting the existence of the human psyche and populating it with emotions, passion, imagination, and enthusiasm. German scientists and authors were at the forefront of various explorations of inner life, and some of these ideas found expression in heated discussions of obscene and immoral texts.

WESSENBERG’S MEDITATION ON READING AND MORALITY

More than any other figure, Ignatz von Wessenberg straddled the distance that separated the street-level scuffles of printers and police and the intellectual world of Romantic authors and early psychologists, each preoccupied with inner life (though imagining that space in different ways). Wessenberg studied what we might today term “mentalities”; that is, he worked to understand the assumptions and styles of thought that framed and shaped political, social, and cultural upheavals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. In his 1826 On the Moral Influence of Novels he applied himself with equal rigor to both highbrow and lowbrow texts, from Goethe to Paul de Kock, the French author of racy popular novels, whose work was often evoked by the police when they wanted to indicate that they were speaking of the lowest end of popular reading habits. In 1833 Wessenberg published On Schwärmerei, in which he offered an extended discussion of this pregnant (and, by the 1830s, no longer exclusively religious) contemporary epithet.⁶¹ He was also well-versed in contemporary philosophy, combining his analysis of popular literature with the aesthetic insights of Herder.

Wessenberg’s thought also reflected the intersection between religious and secular conceptions of the self that characterized so much of early nineteenth-century commentary on books and morality. As a Catholic and cleric, he used the language of the “soul” (Seele) to describe inner life. If he believed in original sin, he did not stress this point. He chose instead to describe an interior world filled with innate capacities and composed like an instrument of multiple notes, which, when artfully played by stimuli from the external world, might result in a well-balanced chord. The opposite was unfortunately also true: play false notes, cultivate the wrong capacities, and emotional distortion would result. For Wessenberg, the popular novel offered a means of both examining and shaping inner life. As the secular genre most closely associated with imagination and the emotions, novels played the crucial role in shaping the inner space of the self. While he did not bemoan the rise of the novel, he did suggest that this shift to secular reading had serious consequences. It is for this reason that he insisted that the study of the novel and its moral effects is crucial work, not to be dismissed as frivolous. Anticipating the criticism of his peers, he wrote, “Is it somehow irrelevant, how we pass the time when we have a moment free, or which images we favor to amuse our fantasies?”⁶² Insisting on the importance of fantasy, Wessenberg laid out an analysis of novel reading, grounded in his own articulation of early psychological theory.⁶³ He was, as we have seen, not alone in his attention to the moral effects of secular reading habits, nor was he alone in his fascination with the substance and tenor of the human mind and soul, a problem tackled by the emerging disciplines of psychiatry, anthropology, and phrenology.⁶⁴ He was joined in his efforts by the police and censors, who also worked to understand and articulate the mental effects of new reading habits.

In a sense Wessenberg’s treatise was a book on aesthetics, in which he used the contemporary novel to examine the constitution of human subjects and community. In taking the genre seriously he probably challenged assumptions of his peers, particularly those who decried the frivolity and immorality of the novel. His position was to explore the moral potential of the genre. While he warned of the dangers of “overheated fantasies” and explained that novel reading (particularly in the Romantic vein) might lead to insanity and Schwärmerei, he also saw potential in a genre that might shape and refine inner life.

For Wessenberg, the novel was the important modern genre because it provided a means of examining the content of the soul. He assumed that novels provided relatively direct representations of inner states, and because of this they presented an external manifestation of mental topography: “The deepest secrets of human nature, the riddles of love and hate, the greatest depths of character—such as our lives and histories reveal—are most vividly developed in the novel.” The topography of the soul was deep and inaccessible: “That which lies buried in the depths of man, all his natural inclinations and propensities, everything that springs forth from him, can be seen contained in the vivid colors of the novel.” He also advanced a vision of inner life as complex and varied, full of possibilities and inclinations. “This, in fact, is the advantage of the novel’s art,” he wrote, “that it shows life not simply on its surface—as it would strike the sensualist—but instead opens up life in its inner depths.” A close study of the novel provided tools to investigate the moral impulses of the modern subject, which were found in the depths of the human soul, not (at least not first) in actions in the world. This, then, was a vision of morality focused on thoughts and emotions rather than actions. Wessenberg’s vision of morality stressed the content of the soul; morality was not (or at least not initially) a matter of acts performed in the world. Because the novel played upon the fantasies and emotions of the reader with ease, it could distort an otherwise “clear” soul: “Indeed, the real element of the novel is the business of the heart. What a blessing [the novel] is when it functions like water and air, imparting clarity and order. Yet how pernicious it is, when it runs wild in the same space, bewildering and clouding [the heart].” The goal of art was to open the soul to light and air, thus making it more transparent. Wessenberg’s vision of morality was marked by a Christian view of the soul, rooted in intentions and thoughts rather than actions.⁶⁵ The Prussian police also worked with this Christian-inspired model of morality, albeit grafted onto a secular context. Booksellers, peddlers, and lending library proprietors who passed on obscene and immoral texts were believed to be guilty of the crime of “corrupting the mind and soul” of the youth or of “spoiling [them] for real work or real study.”⁶⁶ The police evoked the consequences of moral corruption (loss of productivity), but the real damage took place inside the reader’s mind.

Wessenberg devoted over ninety pages to detailed discussions of individual novels. While he took on a few novels individually—Sade’s Justine merited separate treatment—he often grouped texts together into loose and idiosyncratic categories: English novels in the style of Fielding, horrifying mysterious novels, and French tales of court intrigue. He read and interpreted each novel through the lens of moral development and insisted that the value of a text was strictly a matter of its effects on the reader and had nothing to do with the intentions of the author. Damage took place in the interior space of the reader’s mind and was prompted by several factors, including problematic depictions of female virtue or marriage and descriptions that mystified or aestheticized a straightforward description of events and characters. Far worse, however, were the texts that provoked and distorted the feelings and fantasies of the reader, and in this regard, Wessenberg had to admit, it was German authors who produced the deepest and most “soul-distorting” novels of all.

While French novels like Diderot’s The Nun might provoke the reader’s “feelings of shame,” and English novels like Fielding’s Tom Jones could be sexually explicit, they were nonetheless realistic and bracing depictions of human nature. Frankness about sex was not the problem. Commenting on The Nun, a novel that includes explicit references to sex between women, Wessenberg wrote, “As a painting, it shows deep knowledge of the human heart, and though it is painted in very strong colors, it is also executed with sensitivity, and summons moving tones from hidden chasms. It rewards the attentions of the observer of men.” Tom Jones, a novel filled with sex and seduction, presented “a masterful depiction of the raw side of human nature.” Though Wessenberg worried that it was dangerous to “show humans how closely they border on the animal world,” he defended Fielding’s novel on grounds that it was “the apotheosis of natural feelings, which constantly tend toward goodness and mildness, rather than toward the arrogance and pedantry of virtue.”⁶⁷ Wessenberg did not take issue with depictions of sexual rawness (which he believed might in fact be a good thing, restoring health, vigor, and contact with the reality of human feelings). And though it may seem odd to find an early nineteenth-century Catholic cleric arguing for the benefits of frank literary depictions of sex, his position becomes clearer when we understand what really concerned him, namely, the move away from reason and objectivity toward the subjectivity and exploration of human emotions that accompanied Romanticism and the cult of sensibility. Romantic literature, rooted in a deep and unflinching exploration of the subjective states of human consciousness, was in fact what threatened the mental equilibrium of the German reader. Though the two movements were distinct, Wessenberg nonetheless grouped together Romanticism and pietist Schwärmerei because both explored interiority and embraced emotion and fantasy. It was the heightened emotional states associated with Romanticism and pietist “enthusiasm,” not the rollicking good times of Tom Jones nor the lascivious French denizens of the cloister in The Nun, that threatened to distort and disorder the soul. Indeed he preferred the bracing realism of “natural” and “real” physical desire to the frustrated love of Romantic swooning.

Accordingly Wessenberg saved his sharpest moral criticism for novels focused on frustrated and unconsummated passion outside of marriage. The popularity of Johanna Schopenhauer’s 1824 novel, Gabriele, was one example of literature in this style. The protagonist of the story enters into a loveless marriage to please her father, while remaining deeply in love with another man. This popular plot of frustrated love stuck Wessenberg as morally distorting. Responding to Gabriele, he expressed concerns about the depiction of love:

The most alluring, enticing deceptions of this relationship, based in the ignorance and misrecognition of nature, only serve to increase the dreadful unhappiness produced by the roguish Eros or love that exists outside the moral constraints that govern sexual urges. With forbidden love between two persons of the opposite sex, there is certainly also spiritual love [Seelenliebe]. Yet when have a girl or a young woman, an ardent youth or man sought only the soul of his beloved? The lessons of a chaste, ideal love … as consolation and substitution for all the suffering caused by an unhappy marriage … are among the most dangerous.⁶⁸

Here we see Wessenberg’s attention to the proper cultivation of love, which might be achieved with the proper choice of novels. “Roguish Eros” requires cultivation and constraints, but the real problems are the illusions and false expectations that lead to a misrecognition of the realities of sexual love. Cultivating a taste for purely spiritual love, such novels distort reality, produce false expectations, and lead to “dreadful unhappiness.” Wessenberg advanced a surprising argument: the realities of sexual love, even in their rawness, are less immoral than strict virtue that leads to illusions and despair when faced with reality. From an unexpected corner we get an argument for de-repression on grounds that realism, even about sexual love, is preferable to virtuous illusions.

Wessenberg was especially critical of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, a novel focused squarely on the unruly emotions (unrequited love, empathy, sorrow) of the protagonist. In Werther, he wrote, “love is elevated to an enraptured madness,” and the hopelessness of this love led to desperation and suicide. In the end Werther created inner disorder; the damage did not take place in the world of actions but in the space of souls: “What does Werther leave in the heart of the reader, except wretched melancholy? It only introduces discordant tones; it never resolves them.” The best thing about the book, Wessenberg concluded, was that it provided a “true mirror of the illnesses of the imagination that held sway in that era.”⁶⁹

Good novels, by contrast, would act as “medicine for the soul” (Seelische Arznei). They would bolster the impulses of reason and intellect, providing traction against the dangerous impulses of imagination and fantasy. Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses, for example, provided a warning about methods of seduction and painted a portrait of feminine virtue. Wessenberg also applauded Germaine de Stael’s novel Johanna, as “on the whole, it springs forth with vitality and clarity that all worthy happiness [Glückseligkeit] is based on inner unity and purity of heart.”⁷⁰

Wessenberg’s vision of morality was rooted not in the performance of Sitten, or the external forms of manners and customs. Instead morality was found inside the often hidden folds of the human heart, which (depending on shape and substance) might result in happiness or despair. It mattered little if the individual had mastered the external forms of civilized behavior; more important, from Wessenberg’s perspective, was the state of the soul. By defining morality in these terms, he mirrored a shift taking place in early nineteenth-century German thought, expressed in the literature of German Romanticism and in the emerging human and medical sciences.

A similar shift emerged (somewhat awkwardly) in the work of police and censors who appointed themselves guardians of the vulnerable souls of inexperienced readers. In the process they produced a task for themselves that was practically impossible: regulating invisible spaces and mental effects rather than concrete actions. The opportunities for resistance were, of course, limitless. Yet this was a moral model that made sense within a specifically German cultural context. Inner life had been invested with meaning through forms of pietist practice (or, as some would have it, Schwärmerisch enthusiasm), philosophical engagement with the nature of inner life by philosophers like Kant and Herder in the late eighteenth century, a tradition of Romantic literature that constituted and explored emotional states, and a tradition of legal reform the defined Gluckseligkeit as one of its explicit goals. For a few decades in the early nineteenth century, it was neither the sexual content of the text nor the transgression of public mores that defined a text as obszön but the danger it posed to open, gullible, excitable hearts and minds.

SUMMARY: INNER LIFE AND THE POLITICS OF AUTHORITY

For Wessenberg, disorders of interior states were not separate from the politics of authority. He linked two disparate developments, pietist Schwärmerei and the effects of the French Revolution, by arguing that in both cases people were swept up in waves of emotion that caused them to detach from reason and external authority. In the case of pietism belief in direct revelation of the word of God through the cultivation of an “inner church” allowed the individual to bypass the authority of religious leaders. The Schwärmer was characterized by the desire to penetrate the secrets of the supernatural world, an attempt to distinguish oneself from the common crowd, disdain for others coupled with an overvaluation of fellow believers, and a failure to recognize authority outside oneself: “The Schwärmer spurns all other leadership as false, preferring his imagination; he places the sanctity and propriety he attributes to himself above all other sources of authority.”⁷¹ Thus the cultivation of interiority and the painstaking preparation of the inner church led the believer to separate from the outer world and to retreat into the autonomous space of the mind. This retreat from external authority, coupled with a rejection of reason, left the individual without a moral compass and without the necessary traction to resist the convincing (and often nefarious) arguments of others. Pointing to the etymology of the word Schwärmen, “to swarm” like bees, Wessenberg suggested that the individual separated form external authority and reason could be easily manipulated.

He identified a similar movement away from reason and toward emotionalism in the period following the French Revolution: “After the feverish anger of the Revolution had completed its cycle and man had regained his senses, a perception arose that reason had exercised a destructive influence on religion, and this in turn produced suspicion concerning reason.” Reason was rejected and “feeling” was embraced, giving way to “the emergence of many groups of mystical Pietists who—no matter how divergent in the details of religious practice—were united in their suspicion of reason.”⁷² To “fall away from reason” was also to fall away from a reliable source of authority, one that was available to the individual himself (less often herself). It was not the Revolution’s transformation of political forms that disturbed Wessenberg, but instead the cultural reaction to the Revolution. He saw the response in Germany as yet another retreat into subjectivity, emotionalism, and the schwärmerisch authority of the imagination. This manifested itself as a kind of cultural hermaphrodism, in which men moved easily from one position to another, incapable of standing firm: “What a swarm of hermaphrodites we see today in every rank, at all levels of society…. Their heads nod incessantly to the left side, and their mouths are constantly open trying to take back what they have just said.”⁷³ Wessenberg’s cultural concerns were cast in terms of gender norms. While novels might bring the sexes closer together by educating both in the language of love and empathy, there was also the danger that men would cease to be adequately firm of character. If both sexes consumed and internalized the lessons of novels with equal enthusiasm, he feared that feminized men would be as vulnerable as women, incapable of autonomy and out of touch with reality.

Yet Wessenberg’s logic must be taken one step further. Was the real threat of secular reading habits—linking it to pietism and the French Revolution—the fact that they provided an alternative source of authority through which the reader could cobble together an understanding of the world and a vision of the good life independent of “official” voices and sanctioned knowledge? This, of course, might work both ways: for those denied access to formal education (or to knowledge of certain kinds), the availability of books made it possible to cobble together an unauthorized understanding of the world around them. Certainly the growth in the secular book trade and the boom in venues for book exchange opened up the possibility that one could pursue knowledge (or pleasure, or both at the same time) without asking one’s priest, teacher, or father. In this sense it offered a secular version of the autonomy enjoyed within pietist religious practice—the autonomy to bypass authorities in the crafting of one’s own inner life.

By positing the importance of novel reading in the cultivation of inner life, Wessenberg made an argument for the essential role reading habits could play in the creation of secular culture. If actions in the world proceeded from the impulses found in inner life, and if morality was rooted in the tone and texture of interior spaces, it was essential that authorities not make the mistake of underestimating the texts that held sway in the mind and heart of the reader. Nor should they underestimate the power of fantasy, dreams, and passions, for these inner impulses found expression in external actions and were thus well worth taking seriously.

The expansion of secular reading practices constituted not so much an escape from external authority as a shift in where authority came from, that is, a shift in who could speak, in what terms, and on which subjects. This was the dilemma that faced the censors, police, provincial governments, and the interior minister as they sorted through the growing body of texts available in new venues and new forms. Who could write and, more important, who was strong (or educated) enough to read? Early psychological theory, adopted and employed piecemeal by these authorities (who, after all, looked to civil society for moral models), gave them the tools to contemplate a mutable state subject, one that could be crafted and cultivated, leaving him or her vulnerable to others who set themselves up as authorities on subjects that interested readers.

This early nineteenth-century understanding of obszöne und unsittliche Schriften was rooted in a set of concerns about politics and the self specific to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Jan Goldstein writes that particular visions of the self become broadly relevant at certain moments in time: “One must speculate that at different historical moments, different mental operations—themselves constructed rather than given—are singled out as particularly anxiety-provoking and, hence, as the focus of cultural obsession.”⁷⁴ In the period roughly between 1810 and 1830 a complex vision of the human subject and of the relationship between inner life and authority informed discussions of secular reading practices. Ironically, amid all the talk of the vulnerability of the individual there was an important subtext: the individual was vulnerable not only because the world was newly filled with nefarious authors and booksellers but also because he or she was finding new sources of autonomy. This autonomy (the corollary of vulnerability) marked an important shift in the way knowledge was produced, identities were crafted, and selves were refined.