Fragile Minds and Vulnerable Souls. Sarah L. Leonard
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the serious study of the apparatuses used to transmit, convey, and preserve knowledge. The ideal of pure, unmediated knowledge collapses in the face of a reality in which we can know only through particular, mediated “arts of transmission.” While this insight might seem more applicable to science and philosophy than to cheap books and pamphlets, I argue that discussions of obscenity were also about knowledge—about what constituted permissible knowledge, who had the authority to produce and consume it, and who should have access to it.
In Prussia the introduction of a uniform system of education during the early decades of the nineteenth century led to increased literacy. Historian Karen Hagemann estimates that in Prussia 25 percent of the population could read in 1800; in 1840 literacy rates had risen to around 40 percent.4 Yet literacy and basic education did not translate into a comprehensive education for everyone. Gymnasia and universities were closed to women, and very few young men from poor backgrounds found their way up through the channels of this elite tier of schools. In the 1840s the German feminist, journalist, and translator Louise Otto responded to criticism that German women’s reading habits lacked distinction: “We [German women] derive our knowledge of geography from travel novels, of history from historical novels; what we know of German language we learn from French grammar.… As long as women are denied a systematic and continuous education, we have to learn everything as playful dilettantes—including politics.”5 Otto suggested that even “trivial” texts could be important sources for those denied access to official knowledge. Important questions were at stake in her defense of women: With what authority do certain people define knowledge? Who is given access to that knowledge, and why? For state and religious authorities, the “arts of transmission” colored the nature of the content. A book printed on vellum, bound in leather, and settled into the upper shelves of the privy councilor’s library was different from the same text bound in paper and circulating in the collection of a lending library. Once again we find that the knowledge contained in books was judged by subjective perceptions of the readers: the privy councilor was thought to be capable of distinguishing fact and fiction; the client of a lending library, on the other hand, could not (or did not want to) distinguish truth from lies.
The history of the illicit book trade in the early nineteenth century is also a lesson in the historical geography of territorial boundaries and social spaces. A study of the illicit book trade in and through the German states in the 1820s and 1830s reveals a geography carved out by print culture that extended to the eastern borders of France and Belgium, to Polish territories under Prussian rule, and to German cities like Altona under Danish sovereignty—all regions that continued to produce illicit publications. Publications passed through spaces and along routes that did not correspond to political, historical, or linguistic borders. Benedict Anderson has famously argued that print capitalism made possible the “imagined communities” of nations; in nineteenth-century Germany print also allowed readers to imagine communities beyond the borders of the kingdoms, duchies, principalities, and free cities they inhabited.6
In comparison to their politically rollicking neighbor across the Rhine, the German states of the 1820s and 1830s seemed to be locked in a semifeudal world of small states, absolutist rule, and bürgerlich domestic comforts and interiority. But important changes were taking place in the 1820s and especially in the 1830s. The geographies that emerged out of the revolutionary period were quite new. James J. Sheehan writes that 60 percent of Germans were under different rulers at the end of the war.7 Most of the thirty-nine remaining states that made up the German Confederation had new borders and territories; they also contended with a recent history of political division. (Some German states sided with Napoleon, others did not.) Even apparently solid political borders were far from stable. Perhaps it was this instability that made states like Prussia so anxious to seal its borders to books, pamphlets, and images moving alongside and across its borders.
Underneath the absolutist political institutions and the anxious comforts of Biedermeier civil society continued to develop during this period; in the liberal state of Baden liberals actively debated Jewish emancipation and women’s rights.8 In Prussia liberal economic policies opened the door to trade and competition, challenging the monopolies (and protections) of guilds. A tension developed between the goals of economic development and free trade (which required fluid borders and liberal trade policies with other states) and the desire for tightly sealed borders and carefully guarded subjects. There was a lot to keep locked down in early nineteenth-century Prussian territories: unrest and discontent in annexed regions of Poland, an increasingly literate population with an appetite for knowledge and entertainment, frustrated democratic and progressive impulses, active debates about the status of woman and Jews, and a population increasingly aware that new ideas and political structures were developing just over the border.
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