civil service.
Most crown-appointed urban police commissioners (who usually held the title of police president or police director) were independent higher civil servants. Usually of noble birth, they had experience in some branch of civil administration, held a rank within the bureaucracy roughly equivalent to other district administrative presidents, answered directly to the state's minister of the interior, and received the majority of their budget from the state, not the city government. This autonomy from the municipal governments of their respective cities had two important consequences. First, because liberal, democratic politics was stronger at the municipal than at the state level, police in most German cities remained strongholds of conservatism largely beyond the control of the urban, liberal, bourgeois elite. Second, although urban police were highly sensitive to local conditions, they were able to remain relatively aloof and insulated from local interests, pressure groups, and party politics.
Censorship duties were usually assigned to the so-called political police, one of many internal police branches concerned with broad questions of public welfare. Whereas English and American police have narrower, more clearly defined duties, in Germany police traditionally handled many aspects of everyday public administration (fire, water, sanitation, health, poor relief, etc.) that elsewhere are normally handled by municipal governments. The urban police governed all aspects of municipal public affairs, intervening continually in many aspects of everyday life. Political police oversaw the diverse forums of civic political life, from collecting information about potential subversives (especially socialists and anarchists), to monitoring public and private clubs and associations (especially those of a political nature) and all public meetings, to regulating public amusements such as theaters and music halls. It was the local political police who exercised prior press censorship before 1874 and punitive press censorship thereafter, and who were responsible for prior theater censorship where this existed. As the system of stage censorship was extended (and became increasingly centralized in the capital cities of the major states), and as the number of works to be examined grew each year, censorship bureaus within the political police division also grew in size, responsibility, and importance. In Berlin, for example, the police units handling theater, film, and other forms of censorship became so large they were eventually separated from the political police division and consolidated into an autonomous administrative division (Abtheilung VIII); the division chief, a senior administrative councilor (Oberregierungsrat) stood directly under the police president in the hierarchy and by 1914 supervised ten other police officials. In Munich the press and theater censorship bureau similarly evolved into a separate office (Referat VI) employing two mid-level officials and a staff of six. In Hamburg, by contrast, which had no formal theater censorship, the political and the commercial police (who oversaw theater licensing) battled over which was responsible for watching over the content of performances. A truce was reached by which commercial police were authorized to raise objections to performances and entertainments that were of “moral, religious, or political concern,” while political police were to be involved only if a performance violated some aspect of the Criminal Code such as libel or incitement to illegal acts.3
As the number of police officials engaged in censorship expanded and censorship divisions of the major police forces in turn developed their own internal subdivisions and administrative units, this branch of police work often became an important avenue of career advancement. The officials who headed the censorship units in Berlin (Kurt von Glasenapp) and Munich (Dr. Dietrich Bittinger) during much of the Wilhelmine era both served also as their city's assistant police commissioner; Bittinger used his post to become police director of Stuttgart in 1911.
Transfer of censorship decisions from unitary state- or nationwide censorship collegia to diverse local police forces produced in the late nineteenth century a decentralized, fragmented system fraught with inconsistencies and contradictory decisions. A work permitted by censors in one city was often banned by those in another, or vice versa. There was, however, a compelling rationale for this lack of uniformity in censorship decisions. Both the government and the courts consistently maintained censorship was justified only for pragmatic, utilitarian social reasons: to protect public peace, order, or security. It was not the content, “truth,” or artistic value of a work that was the censor's concern, but rather its Wirkung, its probable effect upon the public. If an audience was likely to react to a work in a way that threatened public peace, order, or security, the state claimed the right and duty to ban it, regardless of its other intrinsic merits. Given the enormous diversity of the German population, it was obvious an audience in one locale (for example, an urban, heavily Protestant community) would respond to a work quite differently than patrons in another locale (for example, a rural, staunchly Catholic community). The probable Wirkung of any particular work—and therefore its potential to provoke a public disturbance or somehow cause harm to the audience or citizenry—would thus vary greatly from place to place and setting to setting. Any decision to permit or ban a work had to take into account many contingencies such as the type, repertoire, and general reputation of the particular theater, the nature of the audience and of the surrounding community, unique local conditions at the time, and community standards. Since these differed greatly across the empire, so too would censorship decisions about any given work. The more that censors could point to specific local situations as grounds for their decision, the easier it was to defend their action and have it upheld on appeal; where the situation was different, the work might pose no threat to public peace, security, or order and a different decision would be in order. Censorship judgments, the government regularly reiterated, had to be made at the local, not the state or national level. The Prussian minister of the interior, responding to parliamentary complaints about the contradictory decisions of local police censors, declared in 1901 that such disparity is unavoidable:
The most defective arrangement of all would be if one tried to regulate all censorship from Berlin. Too many local conditions come into play, which only local police are in a position to evaluate properly. A work may be unobjectionable when performed on a first-class Berlin stage by excellent actors in a serious manner before an audience with a literary education, but could, under other circumstances, at a second-or third-rate theater, before a less educated audience and performed in a provocative manner, be highly objectionable from the standpoint of morals or public order. The diversity of circumstances must be taken into consideration.4
Provincial officials, such as a longtime theater censor with the Munich police, similarly warned against attempts to centralize and standardize censorship decisions because that ignored the crucial role unique local conditions played in the decision-making process.5
Yet divergent local rather than uniform national rulings inevitably made theater censorship appear contradictory and arbitrary, which in turn exposed both censorship and censors to frequent ridicule. As we have seen, various governmental and nongovernmental forces tenaciously lobbied to coordinate, rationalize, standardize, and centralize censorship decisions in hopes of eliminating embarrassing contradictions and plugging annoying loopholes. Although efforts to standardize and centralize censorship laws made little headway against the political, legal, and institutional forces that sustained multiformity, pressures promoting more uniformity gradually gained the upper hand in the day-to-day administration of those laws. By World War I the political and bureaucratic advantages of centralization had overcome the logic and traditions of decentralization.
Prussia led in the drive to coordinate and centralize censorship decisions within its boundaries. In 1908 the Ministry of the Interior, embarrassed by a new round of public and parliamentary criticism after Berlin theater censors disagreed with those in other cities about several controversial plays, abandoned its earlier defense of local diversity and now declared it imperative for local authorities to avoid mutually inconsistent decisions. To bring greater conformity and coordination to censorship decisions, the interior minister instructed all royal police commissioners under his authority to have their theater censors, before deciding to permit or ban a particular piece about which they might have the slightest reservations, first inquire of the Berlin police president how the work had been handled there. If, because of unique local conditions, they were convinced a decision was justified that differed from that of the Berlin censor, then they must obtain the local police commissioner's express approval and the commissioner should in turn inform the interior minister before making the decision public. To simplify this process and reduce