and sometimes carried an additional housing subsidy. They generally had no particular interest in the world of literature, art, or ideas and few, if any, ties to those who populated that world. Their work as censors was highly routinized, following prescribed guidelines requiring them to judge a work from a narrowly legalistic perspective and leaving little room for considerations such as literary merit. As one fin-de-siècle critic of Central European censorship complained, works were now being judged simply from the “mentality of the bureaucrats,…who in most cases evaluate the intellectual creations entrusted to them the same way that a blind man evaluates colors”; another German parliamentarian, himself a judge, declared that juristically trained civil servants knew as much about art and literature as an elephant about flute playing.13 And as career bureaucrats whose advancement depended on conscientiously performing their duties, these censors were not inclined to question, much less subvert the institution of which they were a part. Even more than the judiciary, professional police administrators who functioned as censors in Germany were recruited from a small, upper-class elite and were, for the most part, staunchly conservative, uncritical supporters of the existing system and its policies. For example Dr. Christian Roth, who became chief of the Munich police department's Referat VI in 1911, was not merely a political conservative but an archreactionary. After the brutal suppression of the Bavarian revolution of 1918–1919, Roth served briefly as Bavarian minister of justice, during which time he acquired the nickname “Böse Christian” (The Evil Christian). He was active in Bavaria's early Nazi movement and a key participant in Hitler's 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.14
Even though the Prussian minister of the interior tried to ensure that “censorship be entrusted only to officials whose knowledge, experience, and mature judgment will guard against blunders,”15 this was not usually the case. Although one young Bavarian law student with literary interests (Robert Heindl) apparently aspired to become a police censor and was briefly employed by the Munich police's censorship bureau, and although Dr. Hermann Possart, son of Ernst von Possart (a famous actor, Berlin theater director, and later intendant of the Bavarian royal theaters) worked from 1901 to 1910 as a respected theater censor with the Berlin police, in general no special qualifications were expected of a censor.16 Police officials assigned those duties were given no particular training for their job, needed demonstrate no particular prior aptitude for it, and often had no particular interest in it. Their only training was the standard, narrowly focused legal training shared by all civil administrators: public and administrative law (Staatsund Verwaltungsrecht). Although some in police administration spent their entire careers there, more often they had been posted to the police after serving in one or more positions elsewhere within the state bureaucracy. For example, Administrative Councilor Dumrath, chosen to head the Berlin police's new Subdivision for Theater Affairs when it was created in 1900 (and thus in charge of theater censorship for the city) had until then served as local prefect (Landrat) in West Prussia. (His unfortunate name, which could mean something like “stupid advice,” became the butt of many jokes, as did another censor named Klotz who was the second highest-ranking censor in the office before and during the war.) In Munich both Dr. Dietrich Bittinger (the city's chief press, theater, and cinema censor until 1911) and Dr. Christian Roth, his successor, had served for a number of years as lower-level officials with various Bavarian district courts and rural administrative districts before being transferred to the Munich police.17
While censors attached to large, urban, state-controlled police forces like Berlin or Munich may have been ill prepared for their tasks, those in some of Germany's smaller cities were often woefully unqualified for theirs. Police forces in Leipzig, Nuremberg, and Stuttgart (as well as those in the city-states of Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck) enjoyed less prestige and a far smaller budget than their counterparts in most other German cities because those forces were locally controlled and police officials there were not part of the state civil service. Many duties that elsewhere were handled by university-trained civil servants were handled in municipally controlled police forces by the uniformed constabulary—that is, by common patrolmen (Schützmänner). These patrolmen, who had to be army veterans with several years service and have attained the rank of corporal (Unteroffizier), were drawn heavily from the peasantry and the petit-bourgeoisie ranks of artisans, small shopkeepers, and minor officials; few had any education beyond the elementary level and virtually none were gymnasium, much less university, graduates. The painfully obvious inadequacies of these patrolmen, who have been aptly described as “reactionaries by profession” were one important reason why censorship responsibilities became increasingly centralized in the hands of better-trained officials in the major metropolitan police forces.
Although German police censors were nearly always narrowly trained jurists who had not chosen to be censors, had (at least at the outset) little understanding of the media and materials they were assigned to censor, and whose relevant training and experience for their task was highly questionable, here and there a censor could be found, especially in major urban areas, who transcended these limitations and performed his difficult calling in a way that won him widespread respect, even from writers and artists. One such man was Kurt [Curt] Karl Gustav von Glasenapp (1856–1937), who headed the Berlin censorship office during the empire's last two decades. Glasenapp, scion of an old Pomeranian noble family,18 studied law and entered the Prussian civil service. Around 1890 he was posted to the Berlin police's political division as an assistant administrative councilor, where his duties included theater censorship and licensing. After promotion to administrative councilor in 1896 he became head of the theater subdivision in 1901 and thereafter served as Berlin's chief theater censor. In 1907 Glasenapp was promoted to senior administrative councilor and in 1910 became director of Abtheilung VIII, which was responsible for all theater, film, and pornography censorship and for the control of other pubic amusements. When a national film censorship board was established for Germany in 1920, it too came under Glasenapp's supervision.
After 1901, when Glasenapp directed all theatrical (and later film) censorship for Berlin, he functioned more and more as Germany's de facto national censor. The growing centralization and standardization of censorship meant other Prussian cities increasingly followed the censorship decisions of the Berlin police and other German states increasingly followed the decisions of Prussia. Thus, Glasenapp gradually emerged as imperial Germany's most influential censor: although local police throughout the nation were theoretically free to reach their own decisions regarding a particular drama or film, by World War I they ordinarily deferred to the decisions made by Glasenapp's unit in Berlin. Since it was in the huge, lucrative Berlin market where most new dramas and films premiered (and thus, where they were first submitted for censorship), Glasenapp and his subordinates normally had the first, and last, word on whether a work would be banned.
Despite growing criticism of censorship, Glasenapp enjoyed much personal respect: his sensitivity, fairness, and prudence as a censor were recognized and valued across the political spectrum (as was that of his assistant, Dr. Hermann Possart).19 Glasenapp, who had a genuine love for and extensive knowledge about the theater and visited other European capitals to learn about and consult on theater censorship abroad, took his responsibilities seriously yet appeared to be fairly broad-minded regarding theatrical censorship. Rather than banning a questionable script outright he often attended a dress rehearsal to see how it would be staged, and on occasion even discussed a work with its author, although this went against prevailing procedures. Directors and stage personnel in the theater industry praised Glasenapp's intelligence and artistic discernment and he appears to have been on friendly, even intimate, terms with some of the authors he censored, including avant-garde writers like Arthur Schnitzler and Frank Wedekind.20 He served on the commission to draft a new theater law in 1912–1913, and when the first draft was released, the liberal theatrical journal Die Schaubühne greeted it as a “most gratifying sign of the great sympathy in official circles toward theater employees…. I see in this draft the expert hand of Senior Administrative Councilor von Glasenapp, to whom all theater employees owe a great ‘thank you.'” 21 Indeed, so strong were his relations with the literary and entertainment community that after he retired from the Berlin police force in the mid-1920s he became managing director of the Association of German Writers (Verband deutscher Erzähler), a lobby group for Germany's literati that sought to improve their working conditions and opposed the censorship of public entertainments.22