are publicly disseminated. Since expressions cannot legally circulate publicly until they receive explicit official permission, this is the most rigorous form of censorship, for it theoretically bans everything except what the censors approve. Punitive, repressive, or ex post facto censorship (Nachzensur), by contrast, controls expressions and imposes sanctions only after the expressions have been made public, for example by confiscating, prohibiting, destroying, or mandating the alteration of the offending material and/or by punishing those responsible for the expression or for its public dissemination. Since under punitive censorship materials may presumably circulate freely before a decision is made to permit or ban them, this is a more permissive form of censorship in that all public expressions are tolerated until they are expressly banned. In imperial Germany most theatrical performances were subject to preventive censorship, while printed literature had to contend only with punitive censorship.
Though I approach censorship from a conventional perspective, I hope to avoid some shortcomings of traditional (and contemporary) censorship studies. Like the satirist who characterized it as “the younger of two sisters, the older of whom is Inquisition,”18 those who live from the expression and open exchange of ideas and opinions detest censorship. Artists, scholars, writers, and other people of letters decry censorship as a crude weapon wielded by the forces of ignorance to silence courageous heralds of truth and progress. One of its pioneering historians deemed the struggle of literature against censorship “the eternal conflict of two world views, the struggle of light against darkness, of enlightenment against obscurantism,” while a recent scholar observes “it has become all but impossible to discuss censorship in anything other than pejorative terms.”19 Literary scholar Dieter Breuer notes that many studies of repressive interventions by censors become simplistic “censorship polemics” that reduce the story to a Manichean collision between rigid petty functionaries and unyielding evangelists of freedom. Censors and authors, he points out, actually have considerable latitude in deciding how best to exercise their respective prerogatives: the former to assert the state's need for security in the interest of the common good, the latter to stake out and maintain some free space for the individual.20 Rather than a one-dimensional harangue, this study offers instead a nuanced examination of the motives, practices, limits, and consequences of state censorship of literature in Germany. Such an analysis demands that we look both at the censored and the censors, taking the latter seriously and seeking to understand the complexity of their motives and situation, and it requires us to consider the frequent gap between the intent and the effect of literary censorship. And although focusing on traditional institutional forms of state censorship rather than on broader impersonal processes of cultural regulation and discourse control, I draw on insights from recent literary and social theory (especially reader-response and reception theory and the social control of deviance) to explore some structural features of censorship—without, I hope, succumbing to the tendency of many such analyses to conflate or ignore the significantly different kinds of experiences of those who are subject to censorship.21
One such feature that has intrigued many recent scholars is the inclination of the subjects of censorship to internalize the mechanisms of control. Michael Foucault brilliantly analyzed the implicit systems of power and the constraining mechanisms embedded in modern social institutions (for example, prisons, factories, hospitals, or schools) that serve to discipline, control, and determine our behavior without our knowing it.22 Drawing on his work, many modern studies emphasize how writers and artists are conditioned by constant, omnipresent scrutiny and surveillance to exercise a self-discipline and self-control that makes overt censorship unnecessary. Anxiously anticipating the censor's judgment and hoping to avoid a conflict with the law, some authors may become hesitant or uncertain and may come to practice, either consciously or unconsciously, an inhibiting self-censorship—to write with what one observer has cleverly called a “scissors in the head.”23 Leo Tolstoy, for example, remarked that the “horrible czarist censorship question” always tormented him and caused him involuntarily to abandon many projects he wanted to write; Diderot noted that censorship instills in writers a reticence, uncertainty, and self-doubt so that in the end an author himself no longer knows what he thinks; and John Galsworthy, testifying before a parliamentary committee in 1909 about Britain's theater censorship, quoted letters from many authors who claimed, because of the censor, to have been deterred from writing about something.24 Censorship can thus ultimately create and sustain a power relationship semi-independent of the censors who exercise it: authors and artists caught up in this power situation can themselves become its bearers. Perhaps, as some observers suggest, censorship actually aims at “the internalization of the claims of domination”: regimes seek “to build the secret police into the individual's brain itself and have it assume the position of censor within him,” so that the result of successful censorship is ultimately self-censorship. As the French poet and essayist Paul Valery lamented, “In every way we are circumscribed, dominated by a hidden or obvious regimentation extending to everything, and we are so bewildered by this chaos of stimuli obsessing us that we end by needing it.”25 In examining the experiences of censored German authors, I will look closely at the various ways they responded to, sometimes internalized, and occasionally ended up “needing” censorship.
Even when narrowly defined as formal, overt, and conscious intervention by state authorities, censorship exerts a potent effect upon authors. Whether or not internalized self-censorship actually determines how or what authors think or write privately, it is clear censorship can profoundly influence what they produce for the public, including what subjects they choose and what genres and language they use. Censorship affects if and how their work is disseminated to a wider public and which groups or individuals have access to it. Censorship can have significant personal and financial consequences not only for writers and playwrights but also for the publishers, editors, and booksellers who help distribute their works or the theater owners, directors, and actors who stage them. Finally, censorship can influence how the public reads or understands an author's work or how theatergoers and dramatic critics respond to it. Censorship, in short, must be considered as a constitutive factor of literary life. And so it was in imperial Germany, where official efforts to censor literature and drama had a significant impact on the literary life of the period: as the writer Herbert Ihering observed, until censorship was abolished in November 1918, German police regulations were “an aesthetic principle” that shaped the language and themes of literature and the theater.26
In Germany, as elsewhere, state censorship was a form of social control employed by governing authorities to defend and secure conformity to the shared political, social, religious, and moral norms and values that, in their view, were essential for communal integration, social cohesion, and civic order. While all sociopolitical systems guard their norms and many use censorship to do so, censors must nevertheless permit some modification and adaptation of those norms over time. For norms are historically relative, not eternally fixed: as new existential circumstances emerge in a society, as conditions governing communal interaction and the satisfaction of basic human needs change and evolve, the norms on which the society's identity, cohesion, and stability depend must also change and evolve. New situations demand new norms; no social order will remain stable unless it adapts to changing circumstances and no code of norms will remain viable unless it, too, evolves to meet the changing conditions of social life. A continual dialectical tension thus exists between society's need to defend and uphold its norms on the one hand, and its need to adapt or creatively reformulate its norms to changing circumstances on the other.
Censorship plays a central role in this larger process of the evolution or reformulation of norms (Normenwandel). Any viable social order has—indeed, must have—people, institutions, and processes that promote the evolution and modernization of its norms: by questioning, challenging, and deviating from established norms and by exposing reigning conventions as outmoded, indefensible, or no longer tenable, they encourage the development of new values better suited to the social needs created by new circumstances. As one authority on social norms has observed, “All social change commences as deviant behavior.”27 Since the function of the censor is to uphold existing norms by suppressing public expressions that endanger or subvert them, an inevitable, perpetual conflict exists between the norm-preserving efforts of censors and the efforts of those, especially imaginative writers and artists, who promote norm evolution and adaptation. Confrontations