At the same time, however, the legal peculiarities of some regions and the absence of any uniform national approach to theater censorship created enclaves where censorship was negligible or even nonexistent and islands of tolerance or immunity where it was difficult to convict for a press offense. As shall become clearer in subsequent chapters, this diversity and disunity of censorship laws and practices, while certainly frustrating for German writers and theater operators, served also to protect their freedom of expression.
Although in the years before World War I theater censorship decisions were becoming more centralized within Prussia, Saxony, and Bavaria, and more coordinated between these states, several attempts to establish a more nationally unified censorship system were successfully resisted by various interests. The issue was part of the larger unresolved problem of Germany's national unity and as such was caught up in the empire's constitutional deadlocks, where the powers of the central state (the imperial government) stood against those of the local states (especially Prussia and Bavaria), and the powers of the monarchy, administration, and police contraposed those of the Reichstag and judiciary. Efforts to centralize and standardize censorship laws, particularly theater censorship, miscarried also because ultimately they contravened the legal basis for censorship: to protect public peace, security, and order. To justify banning the public performance of a drama and to have it upheld by the courts, authorities had to argue persuasively that the piece was likely to lead to a public disturbance or somehow cause harm to the audience. This in turn depended upon many contingencies: the nature of the audience; the nature of the surrounding community (or in more modern parlance, “community standards”); unique political, religious, social, or other conditions in that place at that particular time; and so on. Germany was extremely diverse: the populace of Berlin differed enormously from that of Iphofen, Bavaria, and conditions in Hamburg were not like those in Krotoszyn, Posen. The more censors could point to specific local situations as grounds for their actions, the easier it was to defend them; where the situation was different and the work posed little or no threat to public order, a different decision would be in order. However much some groups, whether on the Left or the Right, desired more consistency in censorship decisions, the great diversity of local situations made it difficult (if not impossible) to establish uniform national standards and have all decisions made from one central office. Faced with the difficult choice of local diversity and contradictory censorship decisions on the one hand or more uniformity, consistency, and national predictability on the other, the government usually preferred the former, while many on both the Right and the Left, having lost confidence in local decision making, preferred the latter. Substantial changes to the censorship system became possible only after the outbreak of the war, when the exigencies of national mobilization and the need for more administrative centralization and bureaucratic intervention allowed the military to sweep aside legal technicalities, long-standing constitutional balances, and deference to local considerations. Only then did the system become more uniform and centralized.
Since, in the end, so much about literary censorship in imperial Germany depended on the local censor, it is to these censors we now turn.
Notes
1. Reinhard Frank, ed., Das Strafgesetzbuch für das Deutsche Reich, nebst dem Einführungsgesetze, 8.-10. rev. Aufl. (Tübingen, 1912); Justus Olshausen, Kommentar zum Strafgesetzbuch für das Deutsche Reich, 8. Aufl. (Berlin, 1909); Franz Eduard von Liszt, Lehrbuch des deutschen Strafrechts, 9. Aufl. (Berlin, 1899).
2. Ewald Löwe, ed., Die Strafprozeßordnungfür das Deutsche Reich mit Kommentar, 12. Aufl. (Berlin, 1907); Franz Eduard von Liszt, Das deutsche Reichs-Preßrecht, unter Berücksichtigung der Literatur und der Rechtsprechung (Berlin and Leipzig, 1880), 123–29, 142–44; Heinz-Dietrich Fischer, ed., Deutsche Kommunikationskontrolle des 15. bis 20. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1982), 132–35; Alex Hall, Scandal, Sensation and Social Democracy: The SPD Press and Wilhelmine Germany 1890–1914 (Cambridge, 1977), 46ff., 64–72.
3. For negative assessments of the imperial legal system see Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire 1871–1918, trans. Kim Traynor (Dover, NH, 1985), 127–29; Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte. Dritter Band: Von der ‘Deutschen Doppelrevolution bis zum Beginn des Ersten Weltkriegs 1849–1914 (Munich, 1995), 857, 1238–39; and Albrecht Funk, Polizei und Rechtsstaat. Die Entwicklung des staatlichen Gewaltsmonopols in Preussen 1848–1914 (Frankfurt, 1986). More positive appraisals are offered by Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1866–1918. Band I: Arbeitswelt und Bürgergeist (Munich, 1990), 655–65, and Band II: Machtstaat vor der Demokratie (Munich, 1992), 118–34, 182–93; Retallack, Germany in the Age of Kaiser Wilhelm II, 34–42; and Kenneth F. Ledford, From General Estate to Special Interest: German Lawyers 1878–1933 (Cambridge, 1996), 1–85. Nipperdey states unequivocally, “The German Empire of 1871 was a Rechtsstaat. That is a central part of its constitutional reality…. The rule of law—despite some breakdowns—was entirely beyond doubt; the German order remained a just, legally-determined one in which even the little man, far more than seventy years earlier, was able to claim his rights and be afforded after all a modicum of justice.” (2: 182, 193).
4. For example Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 744.
5. Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 2: 133–34.
6. In the 1870s the overall acquittal rate in press cases was 18.5 percent, while for those heard by the Bavarian Geschworengerichte the rate was 30.3 percent. By the 1880s the acquittal rate of the nonjury courts in press cases was 30 percent. Fischer, Deutsche Kommunikationskontrolle, 141.
7. Ludwig Thoma, “Gegen die Staatsanwälte,” in Gesammelte Werke (Munich, 1932), 7: 369–70; Robin J. V. Lenman, “Censorship and Society in Munich, 1890–1914, With Special Reference to Simplicissimus and the Plays of Frank Wedekind,” (PhD diss., Oxford University, 1975), 7–8, 11–12.
8. Korfiz Holm to Albert Langen, 22 Mar. 1899, Das Kopierbuch Korfiz Holms (1899–1903). Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Albert Langen Verlags und des “Simplicissimus, ” ed. Helga Abret and Aldo Keel (Berne, 1989), 58; Heine to Holm, 15 Jul. 1899, StBM, Nachlaß Thomas Theodor Heine.
9. The case involved Hardens article “König Otto” in Die Zukunft VI Jg., no. 29 (16 Apr. 1898): 97–102. See chapter 3.
10. StAM/PDM 1046. The case involved the May 1903 cartoon “Gesandtenerziehung.” See chapter 6.
11. The Catholic Bayerische Kurier, for example, urged the Bavarian government to use §360 sect. 11 against Simplicissimus since §184 had proven so unsuccessful in the past. Lenman, “Censorship and Society,” 94, n. 3.
12. Thoma quoted in Ann Taylor Allen, Satire and Society in Wilhelmine Germany: Kladderadatsch and Simplicissimus 1890–1914 (Lexington, KY, 1984), 184. For more on this case, see chapter 5. Thoma later crusaded relentlessly to have such questionable legal practices stopped. See his “Gegen die Staatsanwälte,” 370–373.
13. Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 1998), 34. For an example of how independent-minded deputy commanding generals resisted implementing some censorship policies even when pressured by the War Ministry, see Karl Brunner's report to the PrIM, 29 July 1916, LAB A, Rep 30 Berlin C, Tit. 121, Bd. 16985.
14. Quoted in Wolfgang G. Natter, Literature at War, 1914–1940: Representing the “Time of Greatness” in Germany (New Haven, CT, 1999), 44.
15. PrIM to local police, 9 Feb. 1915, quoted in Kurt Koszyk, “Entwicklung der Kommunikationskontrolle zwischen 1914 und 1918,” in Pressekonzentration und Zensurpraxis im Ersten Weltkrieg. Text und Quellen, ed. Heinz-Dietrich Fischer (Berlin, 1973), 164; and definition of Burgfrieden in Oberzensurstelle's 1917 Zensurbuch, reprinted ibid., 210.
16. Kurt Mühsam, quoted in Ernst Fischer, “Der ‘Schutzverband deutscher Schriftsteller' (19091933),” Archiv für Geschichte