Fragile Minds and Vulnerable Souls. Sarah L. Leonard
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representations as threats to humanistic and egalitarian values because they encourage a tendency to view humans as objects of use and consumption. “Obscene” representations may be categorized as such because they are perceived as antithetical to the ethical and political aspirations of a society.2 And while the tendency to view other people as objects might legitimately hold sway in some spheres of life, it is perceived as intolerable in others.
The “obscenity” of a representation may also hinge on the quality of a consumer’s engagement with a text; for example, obsessive, voyeuristic, prurient reading and viewing is often suspect.3 In such cases it is the nature of the interaction between the viewer and the text that elicits concern. The historian Karen Halttunen has argued that viewing the pain of others was deeply loaded in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Anglo-American culture. Contemporaries believed that the visual experience of other people’s suffering was essential to the development of moral sentiments; the eye was perceived as the organ of empathy. Yet people also worried that regular encounters with pain might also lead to sadism or indifference. Here there was a presumed link between engagement with certain images and the cultivation of undesirable acts or attitudes. Today the anxiety that the consumption of certain images in particular marks or distorts the mental makeup of the individual continues to animate discussion of obscenity and pornography. So too does the related concern that such exposure may render the individual incapable of engaging in forms of intimacy—such as conjugal and parental love, as well as the emotions necessary to engage in civil society and citizenship—that undergird certain expressions of political culture.4 Societies cultivate certain forms of intimacy and discourage others, and they depend upon individuals to learn and to enact these forms of intimacy in particular ways. Practicing desirable forms of intimacy is not simply a matter of “private” choices; these practices also have bearing on multiple forms of “public” life.
Space matters as well in definitions of obscenity; representations welcome in one geographical or social location may be threatening or arousing (or both) in another space. In a modern Western context such spatial concerns are often expressed in terms of public and private; actions and expressions considered valuable in private (sexuality is one example, but there are many others) are sometimes deemed obscene when practiced in public. Boundaries between public and private are historically specific, and shifting definitions of obscenity often accompany such changes. In broad strokes historians of Europe have suggested that a shift from early modern to modern culture entailed a privatization of the body. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth century the ability to regulate the boundaries of the body became symbolic of the ability to self-govern. In such contexts the representation of bodies once deemed fecund now became obscene, out of place in public.5 Space is important in other ways as well. The movement of texts and images from one national or geographical space to another may render obscene or pornographic what is acceptable in the original context. For example, in 1970s America an issue of Playboy was arguably mainstream fare, whereas in the Soviet Union the same magazine was considered deeply subversive and (at least in some circles) intensely desired, having both the allure and the perceived excesses of American “freedoms” and consumer culture.6 As texts move across borders, they often carry associations with their place of origin; their movement can render them matter out of place.
At stake in definitions of obscenity and pornography, then, are a series of historically specific investments in the cultivation of certain kinds of people capable of interacting with other human beings—and, more broadly, with their world—in particular ways. At stake too are important disputes about legitimate and illegitimate knowledge, appropriate modes of cultural expression and consumption, and spatial boundaries and their attendant meanings. While such general observations do not map neatly onto the history of obscenity in nineteenth-century Germany, they do begin to suggest why such a study promises to shed light on multiple aspects of this society.
In this volume I investigate a category of print, “immoral and obscene texts,” as it was made and remade in the German states during the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, attempting to understand three interconnected histories. First, I examine the legal history, tracing the concept of “obscene and immoral texts” as it was created by censors and police in the early part of the century, codified in the politically dynamic decades of the 1830s and 1840s, and reframed surrounding unification in the 1860s and 1870s. Second, I seek to understand the underlying social, cultural, and political preoccupations that animated definitions of obscene and immoral print. Among these were a set of evolving ideas about the tone and texture of inner life—the soul, the mind, and (eventually) the nerves. Nineteenth-century Germans imagined this interior world as deeply marked by print, accessible only indirectly, and vulnerable to distortion. Discussions of obscenity often rested on particular visions of inner life and perceived links between interiority and actions in the world. Thus a history of obscene and immoral texts also tells a story about changing concepts of the mind and soul. Third, I take a careful look at the body of books condemned as obscene by contemporaries, tracing their production and circulation, the routes they traveled, the hands through which they passed, and the human needs they were designed to serve. Understanding this last point requires attention to the content of publications dismissed as “trivial” and “filthy,” a heterogeneous body of works that included “gallant tales,” popular medical works, memoirs, racy novels, books of prophesy, and a broad assortment of other texts that came in and out of view over the course of the century. These three related histories shed new light on important topics: on conceptions of the self as they were invented and reinvented over the course of the nineteenth century, on the geographical routes and social spaces through which “obscene print” (however lowbrow) passed, and on the evolution of print culture and civil society.
The history of German obscene and immoral books, their readers, producers, and detractors, has been hazy at best. This is perhaps fitting, as most of the books discussed here were designed to be inconspicuous and disposable; they did not often make it into the literary canon or onto the shelves of research libraries.7 They were also ignored or found wanting by generations of scholars. Even the folklorist and philologist Jacob Grimm, a figure we would expect to be sympathetic to such expressions of popular print culture, dismissed them. Serving as a censor for the principality of Hesse in the 1820s, he wrote that the frightening and seductive tales circulated in fly-by-night lending libraries and aimed at a popular audience were so poor that they did not even merit the attention of censors.8 The German sexologist Paul Englisch agreed. Working on his comprehensive history of erotic literature in the 1930s, Englisch divided these works into two categories: those of high quality and creativity and those that catered to the lowest desires of readers.9 The quality of editions mattered a great deal to Englisch. He even condemned the great nineteenth-century German publisher of illicit books, Johann Scheible, because he published poor, inexpensive editions of erotic works, sold at prices that many readers could afford. (Here Scheible will receive some of the attention he deserves.)
Even Rudolf Schenda’s ambitious study of “trivial literature,” published in West Germany in the late 1960s (a moment of scholarly sympathy for popular and illicit literature), bemoaned the paucity of “good books” available to popular audiences in the nineteenth century. Schenda blamed this on German elites, who produced a powerful cautionary rhetoric around the reading practices of women, the poor, and the less educated. This rhetoric conflated moral instability with vulnerability to dangerous political views and translated into ongoing efforts by elites to control the reading practices of ordinary people. As a result, he argued, poor and uneducated Germans were rendered “a people without a book,” lacking a literary culture because of censorship, limited distribution networks, and the vocal disapproval of people in positions of authority.10 Thus even scholars positively inclined toward “low” texts of various kinds experienced disappointment in the face of cheaply produced, derivative, poorly written, and politically uninspiring books and pamphlets.
Why unearth such allegedly degraded material? Why scrutinize handwritten police files trying to trace the routes these books traveled and comb through library catalogues for rare extant copies? These were, after all, texts condemned by contemporaries and scholars alike as filthy, frivolous, morally poisonous, or mind- and heart-destroying. They exist as a category only because of their alleged ability to distort readers’