Banned in Berlin. Gary D. Stark
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allows one to identify the nations where literature enjoys true consideration better than the sums appropriated for controlling and suppressing it? Where it is the object of such attentions, literature gains an extraordinary authority, inconceivable in countries where it is allowed to vegetate as an innocuous pastime, without risks.”1 Calvino is certainly not the first writer to suggest that when artists enjoy total freedom of expression they are not being taken seriously. Alfred Döblin, remarking in the 1920s on demands by some in Germany for absolute artistic freedom, maintained that artists and writers were part of society and had a right to be treated like everyone else; allowing them to say whatever they want is to ignore or dismiss them as one would a child or idiot. “Art is not sacred, and artworks should be allowed to be banned,” he said; “We [writers] want to be taken seriously. We want to have an impact, and thus we have—a right to be punished.”2
As the proverbial land of Dichter und Denker (poets and thinkers), Germany in the imperial era (1871–1918) devoted enormous resources to creating, editing, publishing, distributing, marketing, reading, interpreting, and reviewing serious (and not-so-serious) literature. In 1900, for example, the German Empire published nearly twenty-five thousand book and journal titles, with an average run of about one thousand copies each—nearly twice as many titles as published in France, nearly three and a half times as many as in England, and nearly four times as many as in the US. Of these titles, one in nine were classified as “Schöne Literatur” (belles lettres), a portion that had risen to one in seven by 1908.3 With an estimated six hundred theaters, Germans were also heavily invested in producing, staging, directing, rehearsing, and performing drama.4 At the same time state and local authorities—right up to the final days of World War I—expended much time and money prosecuting and trying writers; supervising, controlling, regulating, and censoring literature and the public stage; and hearing and arbitrating frequent appeals of their censorship decisions. The national Reichstag, several state parliaments, various government commissions, and the press, meanwhile, studied and debated at length the empire's censorship decisions, policies, and laws. And legions of private citizens within and outside of the literary community mobilized and organized to protest the nation's censorship practices and agitate for their change. Although some, like the liberal-left journalist Bernhard Kellermann, believed no country disdained literature and everything spiritual more than did the German Empire,5 in Germany literature in general—and theater in particular—clearly enjoyed true consideration, was the object of great attention, and commanded an extraordinary authority. Writers there were taken seriously indeed and several were punished for what they wrote. Whether or not imperial Germany would have qualified as a “police state” in Calvino's eyes, it certainly went to great lengths to control and suppress some of its literature and drama. This is a study of how and why that literary censorship occurred and what consequences followed.
Imperial Germany and Modernist Literature
Historians have long argued about the nature of the German Empire, and since the 1960s their conflicting interpretations have often been vehemently debated. Many scholars characterize the Kaiserreich as a backward, rigid, pseudoconstitutional, semiabsolutistic and militaristic autocracy—a solidly authoritarian society where a strong interventionist Obrigkeitsstaat (a state based on monarchical, authoritarian principles) repressed or restricted civil rights and freedoms, including freedom of expression. Germany's weak, illiberal, and semifeudalized bourgeoisie (these observers argue) was unable to establish the kind of liberal, modern, middle-class political system their British and French counterparts had. Instead, the empire was controlled by a narrow, premodern, antiliberal, reactionary elite of agrarian-military aristocrats and archconservative industrialists who protected their domination by coercing opponents, manipulating political life and public opinion, and successfully blocking all progressive elements.
This “orthodox” view has been increasingly challenged by revisionists who argue imperial Germany was in many ways as liberal and “normal” as its Western neighbors. According to this school, the German bourgeoisie was actually strong and growing in influence; liberal bourgeois values had triumphed in many areas, and in the political realm had created a genuine Rechtsstaat (a state based on a rule of law). In some respects, such as its social security system, universal male suffrage, world-class universities, and exemplary municipal administration, Germany was more advanced than any other nation. New populist movements and ideologies within the lower middle classes were not fostered and manipulated by the elites from above, but rather arose from below through the autonomous political self-mobilization of previously subordinate social groups. After the 1890s, revisionists argue, modernizing and reformist forces in the empire were making headway; German society was becoming more progressive and pluralistic; the liberal public sphere, civil liberties, and freedom of the press were all expanding; and elections were fair and political culture was becoming more democratic. “[D]efenders of the ‘people's rights' were clearly more numerous and more powerful than scholars once believed.”6
Whether one believes traditional, antimodern forces still overpowered those of modernity, or that the latter were prevailing over the former, it is clear imperial Germany was a society in “restless movement” 7 undergoing fundamental and at times overwhelming economic, social, and cultural changes. The rapid shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy, while making Germany Europe's leading industrial power, also brought greater social stratification, class conflict, and industrial strife. A population explosion was accompanied by massive internal and external migration and rapid urbanization. Secularization, the modernization of the school curricula, and greatly expanded access for the middle and lower middle classes (and women) to a university education were altering many worldviews. New forms of mass entertainment, from the popular press and Schundliteratur (“trashy” pulp fiction) to the cinema, were rapidly changing popular culture. The growth of Europe's strongest socialist movement and of a middle-class feminist movement, as well as the growing assertiveness of various ethnic and religious minorities, heightened the level of social, religious, cultural, and political conflict. Everywhere traditional norms and values seemed to be colliding with newer, more modern ones.
This was true especially of art, where defenders of the traditional clashed with avant-garde proponents of new styles, techniques, and subject matter. The conventional, idealistic view of art and literature prevalent in imperial Germany was a conservative, backward-looking one that worshipped classical notions of the true, the good, and the beautiful and viewed innovation with profound suspicion. Artistic and literary traditionalists preached adherence to certain eternal, unchanging principles, including order, harmony, regularity, and a disinterested enjoyment of beauty. Rejecting notions of elite aestheticism, traditionalists also believed art had a social mission—indeed duty—to ennoble and uplift the broader populace, to elevate the spirits of common men and women and inspire them with noble, idealistic sentiments. For art to fulfill its social responsibilities required that artists and writers represent recognizable and potentially inspiring subjects in an intelligible and uplifting way.
No better articulation of this idealist conception of art can be found than in the pronouncements of Emperor Wilhelm II, especially his famous December 1901 speech at the dedication of the Berlin Siegesallee, at which he lectured the assembled sculptors about the nature of true art and the dangers of artistic modernism. Art, Wilhelm II proclaimed, takes its models from nature and God's eternal laws and the artists of classical antiquity expressed most perfectly these eternal, unchanging laws of beauty, harmony, and aesthetics. “[D]espite all our modern feelings and knowledge, we are proud when it is said of a particularly fine artistic achievement: ‘that is nearly as good as the art of 1900 years ago.' But only nearly!” Warning against the corruption of pure art by “so-called modern tendencies,” the emperor implored German artists not to be led astray by passing fads or to abandon the principles on which art is built. “An art that transgresses the laws and limits I have outlined ceases to be art,” he proclaimed. Artists who march behind the seductive banner of “freedom” frequently fall into unbounded license and overweening presumption. For Wilhelm II, “Whoever strays from the law of Beauty and from the feeling for the aesthetic and harmonious…sins against the fountainhead of art.”
Finally, Wilhelm II expounded on art's social mission: art should help educate the nation: