Fragile Minds and Vulnerable Souls: The Matter of Obscenity in Nineteenth-Century Germany 9780812291780

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Fragile Minds and Vulnerable Souls

M ATERIAL TEXTS series editors Roger Chartier Joseph Farrell Anthony Grafton

Leah Price Peter Stallybrass Michael F. Suarez, S.J.

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Fragile Minds and Vulnerable Souls t h e m at t er of obsce ni t y in nin et een t h- cen t ury ger m a n y

Sarah L. Leonard

u n i v e r s i t y o f p e n n s y l v a n i a p r e s s   Philadelphia

this book is made possible by a collaborative grant from the andrew w. mellon foundation.

© 2015 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Leonard, Sarah L. Fragile minds and vulnerable souls : the matter of obscenity in nineteenth-century Germany / Sarah L. Leonard. — 1st ed. p. cm. — Material texts Includes bibliographical records and index ISBN 978-0-8122-4670-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Pornography—Germany—19th century— History and criticism. 2. Pornography— Appreciation—Germany—History—19th century. 3. Erotic literature—19th century—History and criticism. 4. Erotic literature—Appreciation— Germany—History—19th century. 5. Underground literature—Germany—19th century—History and criticism. 6. Underground literature—Appreciation— Germany—History—19th century. 7. Books and reading—Germany—History—19th century. 8. Obscenity (Law)—Germany—History— 19th century. 9. Literature and society— Germany—History—19th century. 10. Self— Germany—History—19th century. 11. Sex (Psychology)—History—19th century. 12. Censorship—Germany—History—19th century. 13. Germany—Cultural policy—History—19th century. 14. Germany—Moral conditions—History— 19th century. I. Title. II Series: Material texts HQ472.G3 L46 2015 363.4'7094309034 2014028288

For Trevor and in memory of Mieze

con ten ts



Introduction: The Cultivation of Inner Life and the Dangers of Reading

1

1. Inventing Fragile Readers: The Origins of Secular Obscenity Law, 1788–1830

14

2. Dubious Sources, Dangerous Spaces, Porous Geographies: Understanding the Bookseller’s Crime, 1811–1840

56

3. Defending Forbidden Texts: The Strategies of Editors, Publishers, and Authors

94

4. Liberalism and the Codification of Obscenity Laws in the 1830s and 1840s

127

5. Redefining Obscenity in an Era of “Progress,” 1848–1880

162

Conclusion

206

Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments

213 237 253 257

Introduction The Cultivation of Inner Life and the Dangers of Reading

What kind of society sends its citizens to prison for their fantasies? —l a u r a k i p n i s , Bound and Gagged, 3

In the diverse, decentralized patchwork of states that constituted the German Länder in the decades following the Napoleonic Wars, citizens and subjects were not sent to prison for their fantasies. Yet authorities were increasingly preoccupied with the contents of people’s minds and souls, and those caught producing or distributing “heart-destroying texts” faced confiscations, fines, loss of their business, and even jail. Meanwhile clerics, doctors, and pedagogues occupied themselves with understanding how souls were constructed and minds shaped. As books, pamphlets, and images traveled new routes and found untapped audiences along the way, these readers and texts were scrutinized and categorized. In a world quickened by revolutions and wars, expanding transportation networks, novel ways of living, and widening mental horizons, the circulation of print suggested that visible changes in the material world were accompanied by invisible transformations in the inner lives of individuals. Because people operated with fundamentally different concepts of inner life, both within and across periods, they conceived of the effects of print in various ways. What was consistent, however, was the conviction that exposure to certain kinds of texts and images could transform selves and societies, for better and for worse. Print mattered, and because it did, various groups of people—from police and censors to publishers and pedagogues—devoted their energies to sorting through publications in an effort to identify which ideas, knowledge, and stories should be excluded from circulation. There was no consensus, of course, but together these groups forged 1

2

Introduction

a category of texts flexible enough to include a remarkably diverse assortment of ideas, expressions, stories, and knowledge. Most often referred to as “obscene and immoral texts” (obszöne und unsittliche Schriften or unzüchtige Schriften), the publications and images assigned to this category shifted dramatically over time. So too did the underlying assumptions about mental, physical, and social vulnerability that animated this category and legitimated efforts to eliminate certain ideas, stories, and knowledge from circulation. Conceptions of obscenity and pornography have historically rested (and continue to rest) on a series of assumptions about the harm incurred by individuals and societies exposed to certain narratives, ideas, or images.1 While content matters a great deal when it comes to differentiating acceptable from obscene representations, so too do modes of expression. In contemporary America, for example, a “graphic” or “prurient” quality is often considered decisive in definitions of obscenity and pornography. A style of presentation perceived as “mechanical” may evoke visceral responses ranging from fascination to disgust. Yet such responses are often accompanied by principled concerns; some may perceive such “mechanical” 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

Introduction

3

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,

4

Introduction

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

Introduction

5

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-bynight 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

6

Introduction

readers’ minds and bodies and thus to produce changes in the ways people conducted themselves in the world. In a sense it is precisely these condemnations that I seek to understand, to study in detail what cohered in this heterogeneous body of texts and images, which ranged from “gallant tales” and the “secret dispatches” of midwives to popular medical books and urban crime narratives. There are in fact many reasons to be interested in the history of obszöne und unzüchtige Schriften. To begin, one learns a great deal about the movement of texts and ideas in the German states during the first half of the nineteenth century. Because the authorities were preoccupied with their effects, they worked to trace their origins and movement. A careful study of files on the circulation of books, pamphlets, and other forms of print kept by the Prussian Interior Ministry, for example, reveals a complex network of routes and spaces that emerged to cater to the needs and desires of readers. Books and pamphlets regularly crossed borders, moving between the heterogeneous body of German kingdoms, principalities, electoral units, and free cities, each with its own laws and practices surrounding book production and distribution. They also traveled across the western borders with France and Belgium and the eastern border with Polish-speaking regions. As transportation networks broadened and the book trade quickened in the revolutionary decades of the 1830s and 1840s, so too did authorities’ anxieties about the circulation of French and Polish books as well as books on France and Poland. Their concerns, materialized in an extensive set of files, offer entrée into a world of booksellers and publishers, readers’ practices, and channels of distribution. They also provide us with a list of publications that circulated on the street, in peddler’s boxes, and in the disreputable (but also popular) institutions contemporaries called lending libraries. These libraries offered books to those who could not afford to buy them; to those who could, they offered the kinds of books that people were more inclined to rent than to buy. This record of an alternate world of books and readers, deepened by a careful look at the suspect texts themselves, offers new insights into a topic that has recently sparked a body of important scholarship, namely, the growth of civil society and the role of writing and publishing in this development. Historians Isabel Hull and Ian McNeely have argued that print provided the essential medium for the emergence of civil society in the German lands during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Journals, pamphlets, reports, novels,

Introduction

7

legal codes, dictionaries, and encyclopedias—indeed writings of all kinds—provided a space in which people could formulate and circulate heterogeneous views of the world.11 McNeely has referred to this development as “the emancipation of writing,” for it was during this period that German elites lost their monopoly on writing and publishing and on the attendant ability to define the limits of what could be expressed. Hull argues convincingly that print culture made possible the growth of civil society, a public exchange of ideas that facilitated the development of public opinion as an alternate source of authority in a world still dominated by political absolutism. Print culture generated new types of social knowledge as well as new sources of authority, expertise, and political legitimacy. There was a lot riding on the circulation of print in this period, and not simply for collective forms of public culture. During the first half of the nineteenth century many Germans believed that the individual had much to gain through his or her engagement with books and reading. Just as new forms of social knowledge initiated new social realities (agronomic knowledge, for example, sparked novel uses of land), readers’ engagement with books and journals seemed to hold out the promise of transforming people. In 1824 the introduction to the Brockhaus Conversations-Lexikon, a hugely popular encyclopedia sold in installments, suggested that the publication “should act as [a] key of sorts, to gain entry into educated circles and into the meanings of good authors.”12 Bildung, a contemporary term that referenced both formal education and a broader idea of self-cultivation, became an important cultural ideal. The Brockhaus editors suggested that reading rendered the individual capable of conversing about matters of general interest in a room full of unknown or unfamiliar people. The influence of pietism, a form of Protestant religious practice, also affirmed the importance of reading to the development of the self. Pietism encouraged the development of the individual’s inner life through reading, letter-writing, and self-reflection; the cultivation of interiority made way for an inner church and for a personal relationship with God. Pietism’s focus on inner life also paved the way for the more profane practice of novel reading.13 Protestant religious practices had long focused on literacy, but German Catholics were also not immune to this growing interest in the way reading shaped the self. Writing in the 1820s, Ignatz von Wessenberg, a progressive Catholic cleric and popular author, argued that romantic novels provided an education for the senses, cultivating empathy and rendering men and

8

Introduction

women capable of a good marriage. While he assumed companionate marriage as a cultural ideal, he warned readers that this form of intimacy hinged on a spectrum of emotions accessible through print.14 Given the range of transformations associated with reading in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century it is not surprising that people worried that there was a downside to an engagement with print and images. The many new publications that circulated were imagined as vehicles for positive change, but they were also deemed capable of producing infelicitous social realities, unreliable authorities, and individuals who were distorted by literacy and reading. A self that could be perfected might also be corrupted. These pitfalls were imagined in multiple ways. If representatives of the Prussian state conflated moral and political dangers, clerics, early practitioners of psychology (or Seelenkunde—literally, the care or study of the soul—as it was sometimes called), and publicists framed their concerns in different terms. This book works to understand how various groups described the darker corners associated with the rise of print culture. Their concerns often rested on particular and evolving visions of the self. Questions of inner life—of what it consisted, how it functioned, how it developed—were central to efforts to describe the effects of obscene texts. Critics of all kinds, including such unlikely figures as government ministers and the police, found language to explain how the “heart- or soul-destroying book” accomplished its work. As definitions of obscenity changed over the course of the period treated here, these efforts to describe interiority remained constant. As a result this book also tells a history of the self. Recent scholarship has shed new and important light on concepts of the self generated in the German lands and in neighboring France and England.15 Among other things, this new work has challenged a story about the German national character that has been repeated in multiple contexts over the course of two centuries. This story suggests that Germans have long favored transformations in inner life at the expense of changes in the public world of politics and institutions. An early example of such thinking is found in Germaine de Staël’s 1810 study, On Germany, in which she declared that Germans were “deficient in acts and abundant in thoughts [Tatenarm und Gedankenvoll].”16 By this she meant that Germans allegedly privileged intellectual development and autonomy—freedom of inner life—over collective political action. I complicate this narrative of German particularity. To

Introduction

9

begin to understand the relationship between inner life and material changes as it was framed in the nineteenth century, it is first important to discard the binary that positions intellectual development as the opposite of political action and maturity. In the period examined here Germans imagined a strong interconnection between transformations of the self and transformations in the world; one mirrored the other.17 This book seeks to understand these connections. With important exceptions, historians of the self have looked to the most articulate and authoritative figures of the age for their source material. This is not surprising, as philosophers, theologians, and physicians have had much to say about minds and souls. I take a different route to a history of the self, building this history on the informal and less intentional descriptions of inner life articulated by the police, legal theorists, publicists, critics, and the authors and editors of immoral books. While their definitions, condemnations, and defenses of suspect texts regularly rested on particular visions of inner life, these figures set out first and foremost to describe the effects of immoral print. Indeed the method of this book more generally is to work as often as possible from the bottom up. I strive to formulate an understanding of concepts like “obscene” and “immoral” as they were expressed in the views and actions of multiple parties, from early nineteenthcentury censors who approved certain manuscripts to the police who confiscated the same works, now in published form, sending them back to the censors to challenge their initial approval. Definitions of obscenity were codified by legal theorists in particular ways, but the process of defining what was immoral or obscene did not stop there. Local authorities operated with their own conceptions of what constituted a moral threat, informed by assumptions about who was vulnerable and who was not and about what kinds of spaces, boundaries, and purveyors of texts required surveillance. Authors, editors, and publishers of obscene publications offered their own definitions of immorality and responded to threats of censorship by avoiding (or embracing) expressions and ideas that attracted unwanted attention. Peddlers, booksellers, readers, and lending library proprietors responded to surveillance and confiscations by moving their shops, traveling different routes, and finding new ways to deliver suspect wares to interested readers. These interactions between regulation and improvisation carved a particular set of routes through central Europe that are visible only through a detailed study of multiple

10

Introduction

sources. What Lynn Hunt has written of pornography is also true in this case: in nineteenth-century Germany obscenity was not a thing that was out there to be found; it was something created and re-created through the debates, actions, and practices of authors, censors, booksellers, readers, and legal scholars.18 This fine-grained approach also has the benefit of allowing us to unearth and to reconsider the body of books, pamphlets, advertisements, and images that populated the category obszöne und unsittliche Schriften from 1820 (when the records used here begin) through the 1880s. These texts and their authors, publishers, and distributors tell an important story about how books were produced and distributed to readers and, importantly, about what people read. The texts and their content, origins, and vectors have found their way into this book whenever possible. While we might wish, with Rudolf Schenda, that the nonelite readers who patronized lending libraries would have chosen more intellectually stimulating books, those they did choose nonetheless must have met certain needs. Otherwise they would not have spawned imitations and knockoffs and prompted authors and booksellers to risk fines, concessions, and property loss in their efforts to deliver them to readers. It is therefore valuable to think carefully about the content of these texts and what they offered readers. Luckily scholars of Germany have recently published studies treating erotic, pornographic, immoral, and obscene texts and their consumers, producers, and detractors in other periods. This new body of scholarship will make it possible here to situate early and mid-nineteenth-century developments in context.19 It is important at the outset to mention a limitation of this study. The primary source material is extensive. In order to understand the multiple meanings of obscenity in this period, I consulted police records, legal sources of all kinds, the archives of the booksellers’ guild, contemporary journals, psychiatric and theological works, and every “obscene” text I could find. All these sources point to a history of obscene and immoral texts that stretched across and beyond the borders of the German states. Yet one important set of archival sources, the records of the Prussian Interior Ministry and the Prussian Censorship Board, focus primarily (though not exclusively) on developments in the sprawling and noncontiguous territories that constituted the Kingdom of Prussia in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. Though I conducted research in several other archives in Munich, Leipzig, and Ludwigsburg, the most comprehensive set of sources I

Introduction

11

found for the first three quarters of the century was housed in Berlin, and I decided to use these sources as often and as extensively as possible. Even these sources do not tell an exclusively Prussian story; publications from other German states and from other European countries made their way into Prussian territories. Nonetheless the archival sources are heavily weighted toward one particular state. I have worked to understand developments in other states by using other available sources, but most of the fine-grained archival work is geographically circumscribed. The first three chapters of this book examine the concepts, practices, and texts that constituted immoral and obscene texts in the years before obscenity law was codified as a criminal offense. Chapter 1 investigates early nineteenth-century definitions of immoral and obscene texts expressed in press laws, police codes, and local ordinances; in the works of pedagogues, theologians, and publicists; and in practices of censors and police. Many of these sources identified the moral danger of print as its ability to damage the heart and mind, distort the intellect, and inflame the imagination. I ask how and why readers were thought to be vulnerable—a pressing question in a world recently roiled by war and revolution. Chapter 2 continues to explore the meanings of obscenity through a careful look at the practices surrounding these texts. I argue that passage through certain spaces marked texts as suspect. The police subjected to intense scrutiny books and pamphlets found in lending libraries or peddlers’ boxes or smuggled across borders. At the same time, readers and booksellers forged paths over which prohibited texts could travel. In the process obscene and immoral books acquired a certain physical and moral geography of their own. In Chapter 3 I turn my attention to the authors, editors, and publishers of early nineteenth-century erotic books. Some offered intelligent defenses of their wares in the introductions and afterwords that framed their texts. Well-versed in arguments about reading and inner life, these producers offered their own, often cogent arguments about the meanings of obscenity. They also addressed questions of gender directly, as they assumed women were among their readers. In an effort to illustrate what it was authors and editors sought to defend, this chapter also explores the contents and histories of several early nineteenth-century erotic texts. Despite censorship, immoral and obscene texts circulated widely in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The types of publications assigned

12

Introduction

to this category varied; producers of erotic texts, for example, populated the category differently than did the police. Yet the language of fragile minds and vulnerable souls was shared by critics as well as producers of immoral books. Chapters 4 and 5 examine transformations in the meaning of obscenity between 1830 and 1880. This section begins with the codification of obscenity as a sexual infraction in the late 1830s and 1840s. During this period new criminal codes promulgated in liberal states cast the distribution of obscene texts and images as a criminal offense; these laws separated the moral from the political dangers of print. Obscenity was situated in sections of these codes devoted to sexual crimes and offenses, among them rape, sodomy, prostitution, and incest. Thus an infraction that had been only loosely associated with sex was now squarely situated in the field of sexual offenses. In chapter 4 I argue that this wave of reforms was marked by tensions at the heart of German liberalism. Efforts to recast obscenity as a sexual offense expressed an effort by liberals to limit the paternal and often arbitrary actions of the police. Framing obscenity as a legal offense squarely associated with sexual infractions put the law in the hands of the courts and eliminated the spongy, inchoate categories that left ample room for inconsistent application in the first decades of the century. Yet the separation between the moral and political dangers of print rested on a spatial division between bookstores and lending libraries and by extension between elite and nonelite readers, particularly women and the less educated. Having separated the threats of print into two distinct categories, liberals could call for freedom of the press (to allow political expression) and still support regulations on the moral tone of print culture and public life. Chapter 5 takes up one of the important continuities in nineteenthcentury obscenity law: the tendency to define obscene texts and images in terms of their ability to damage or distort inner life. In its new guise as a sexual infraction codified in the criminal codes of Saxony, Hessen, Baden, and later Prussia, texts and images were deemed obscene if they damaged the reader’s or viewer’s “feelings of morality” (Sittengefühle) or “feelings of shame” (Schamgefühle). Following the promulgation of Prussia’s 1851 Penal Code, efforts were made to clarify these terms. How was the threshold for offense determined? What were the consequences of damage to the impulses of shame? What special characteristics adhered to shame that made its damage so potentially catastrophic? All these questions were debated at length

Introduction

13

in the 1860s and 1870s, both in official texts (legal briefs, court decisions, and the like) and in unofficial texts offered by physicians, psychiatrists, and various others who sought to add their perspectives to these discussions of interiority. If early nineteenth-century discussions of inner life were led by pedagogues and theologians—authors who had imagined inner life in a particular way—by the 1860s and 1870s visions of inner life were increasingly the domain of physicians. In this later period talk of exhausted impulses and distended nerves replaced earlier concerns about overactive imaginations and distortions of reason; the threat was depletion and apathy rather than zealotry and rudderless enthusiasm. While reigning assumptions about the self changed decisively over the period of this study, concepts of obscenity continued to be rooted in visions of damage to inner life; in each case these interior changes were thought to be tied to actions in the world. It is these relationships—between texts and selves, between the shaping of selves and the constitution of the external world—that this book seeks to explore.

chapter 1

Inventing Fragile Readers The Origins of Secular Obscenity Law, 1788–1830

A police record has always been the object of a certain reserve, of which we have difficulty understanding that it amply transcends the guild of historians. —j a c q u e s l a c a n , “Seminar on the Purloined Letter”

It has never been more necessary to shape and consolidate the inner form of character than now, when external circumstances and habits are threatened by the terrible power of universal upheaval. —w i l h e l m v o n h u m b o l d t (1797), quoted in James J. Sheehan, German History 1770–1866

In his 1826 treatise, On the Moral Influence of Novels, the reformminded Catholic theologian and author Ignatz von Wessenberg expressed his concerns about pleasurable reading in terms of a carefully articulated topography of inner life. He found himself particularly absorbed with the vicissitudes of human fantasy: “It is something wonderful, amiable, and blissful to have clean, crystalclear, untainted Fantasy. Through it, the mind views everything in the proper light, imparting moderation to fear and terror, and soothing one’s tendencies and desires.” Wessenberg was an influential administrator of the Catholic diocese in Constanz from 1802 to 1827 and a respected author. In his vision of a mind inhabited by the impulses of reason, intellect, imagination, and fantasy, he suggested that fantasy took pride of place, guaranteeing order if “clean and clear” but also capable of creating tremendous disorder. He explained, “Nothing is more wretched than perverse, disarranged, overgrown and polluted images of wickedness, nothing worse than Fantasy pregnant 14

Inventing Fragile Readers

15

with baseness.” In the struggle to regulate the mind, two impulses— fantasy and imagination—were deemed capable of counteracting all other impulses, including reason. “Where Fantasy has ruled, Reason can no longer show its face. What else is madness but a breakdown of the Imagination?”1 In Wessenberg’s view, mental disequilibrium did not originate with an organic defect, a chemical imbalance, or the repression of human instincts. People’s minds were instead distorted by external stimulation that overwhelmed reason, leaving them vulnerable to disturbing visions and mental derangement: “How many lay sick in the hospital without the least inkling that they are exchanging phantoms for phantoms and dreams for other dreams?”2 For Wessenberg, solitary reading of secular texts, in this case the novel, was an act that created, shaped, and revealed inner life. Reading created an autonomous world of invisible responses that manifested themselves in external behavior. Novel reading opened up new possibilities for the cultivation of the self, but it also represented a serious threat to inner equilibrium and, by extension, to external behavior. Wessenberg was not alone in his attempt to understand the nature of inner life. During the first two decades of the nineteenth century Romantic authors, early practitioners of psychology and psychiatry, theologians, and phrenologists were also busy exploring the uncharted spaces of the mind and soul. While they did not agree on the answers, they asked similar questions. What constituted the shape and substance of inner life? How was it cultivated or distorted? What were the causes (and potential cures) for mental distress and inner turmoil? How did the shape of inner life translate into actions and behavior in the world? Writing in the shadow of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, Wessenberg and his contemporaries existed in a world in which human creativity, imagination, and excitability were linked to world-shattering events. He insisted that genres associated with fantasy and pleasure should not to be dismissed as trivial: “Even if [the novel] is seen only as the pasture of fantasy, or if reduced to a means of relaxation (allowing the reader to regain the energy released and depleted through work), or to entertainment, or to amusement—even from this perspective, [the genre] appears to be of decisive importance.”3 Wessenberg suggested that the study of inner life was best pursued through a careful investigation of popular reading habits, in particular the novel—a genre, he explained, that simultaneously shaped

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and revealed the inner life of an emerging middle-class reader. While reading was not new to the middle classes (German Protestantism had long linked literacy and religious practice) and eighteenth-century middle-class culture stressed the importance of reading as a source of cultivation and edification, it nonetheless struck Wessenberg that something was changing. It seemed that more people were reading than ever before and that they were reading for pleasure rather than edification, alone rather than in groups, and extensively rather than intensively. Women, he believed, were particularly voracious consumers of these new forms of entertainment. “How many small locales exist,” he asked, “in which a new novel does not appear every month—indeed every week—to meet the needs of the female inhabitant of a house, even among the lower classes?” Once they had the novels in their hands, he speculated, they looked for solitude—a particularly dangerous state. Women’s mental topography also made them particularly vulnerable to the magic of these new commodities: “In the case of the female sex, there exists in the inner world [Seele] a stronger tendency toward tender, enthusiastic [schwärmerisch] abandon.”4 Schwärmerei, a term that implies flights of enthusiasm, fanaticism, or a falling away from reason, was used liberally in the early nineteenth century as a form of cultural derision. The concept was used in a variety of contexts: in the eighteenth century the term described religious enthusiasm (its original usage); later it was used to describe nonreligious states of heightened emotionalism and “swooning.” In the wake of the French Revolution the term was appropriated to describe political enthusiasm and swooning, or “politische Schwärmerei.” In the age of German Romanticism and the “Storm and Stress” literary movements we often associate with men, Wessenberg thought that the reading habits of semi-educated women and the cult of sensibility attributed to Romantic men were of a piece. 5 Reading the wrong books, and thus stirring up fantasy and imagination, created inner disorder; once disordered, the mind could rarely be put right. Wessenberg described a world filled with the dangers of schwärmerisch enthusiasm for revolutionary politics, religious mysticism, Romantic fiction, and emotional abandon. At the same time, novel reading opened up possibilities. Because inner life was marked by reading, the novel could play a positive role in the shaping of inner life, rendering men and women empathetic, imaginative, and mutually comprehensible. The novel was also an instrument for the study of inner life; it provided an external record of invisible fantasies and

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thus allowed people to study an otherwise invisible world of thoughts and impulses. Wessenberg’s investigation into the mental effects of novel reading provides a starting point for the topic that concerns us in this chapter: the meaning of obscenity and related terms in the German states during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. This vision of a vulnerable and mutable inner life introduces us to German culture at the moment that it gave birth to a body of laws, police ordinances, and material practices that, taken together, provided an early understanding of obscenity. Like Wessenberg, censors and police understood “obscene and immoral publications” as texts that were capable of transforming readers’ minds. They imagined minds (and readers) that were fragile, easily marked, and linked to actions in the world. It was these assumptions rather than a simple policy of repression that animated the practice of censoring texts on grounds that they were immoral or obscene. According to this argument, readers needed protection from their own temptations, and those who produced or sold such texts or images were deemed criminal because of the harm they perpetrated on the mental world of vulnerable readers. The political implications of this logic were by no means straightforward, as they rested on a complex view of the relationship between inner life (thoughts, emotions, and impulses) and the external behavior of individuals and groups. To evoke one brief example that points to the complexity of this question, police and censors identified texts that promoted “superstition” (Aberglaube) as a threat to the moral tone of inner life. Several kinds of texts—broadsides announcing the spread of cholera, books of dream interpretation, popular medical books offering what we would today call folk remedies—fell under the broad umbrella of unsittliche Schriften. Yet the questions at stake were complex: Who controlled knowledge? What knowledge was useful, reliable, and authoritative? What moved people to act in the world? Did texts accusing Jews of spreading cholera promote antiSemitic riots? Was group behavior the result of the inner distortion of individuals, and if so, was it up to the state to control such distortion? These questions, rather than simple attempts at repression, haunted the process of identifying and controlling a body of texts deemed morally dangerous. We must trace the early origins of secular obscenity law in the German states during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. To do this we need to understand how contemporaries defined the terms

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obscene and immoral. In a world filled with overlapping jurisdictions, vague laws, and police and censors who held different worldviews, our definitions must be generated from law, from practice, and from a close look at the confiscated texts themselves. It is also important to study the concepts that existed adjacent to obscenity, that is, to understand how this concept was positioned vis-à-vis other infractions. It mattered, for example, that “obscene publications” were coupled with texts on “unproven medical remedies” in the early nineteenth-century records of the Prussian censors. The relation of the crime of obscenity to other infractions (its status as a sexual offense after 1851, for example) allows us to see subtle changes in meaning and emphasis. I begin by examining the body of ordinances, edicts, and laws governing the circulation of printed texts and images on moral grounds. Prior to 1838 we cannot point to one central law or court ruling that codifies a strict definition of obscenity, but we can look at the places where definitions of obscene or immoral texts were evoked or stated in law and police ordinances. Even when clearly articulated legal language exists, we still need to know how such laws were made intelligible to a broader community. The records kept by the Prussian Interior Ministry and generated by the police in cities throughout the German states allow us to see how official vocabulary was put into practice in lending libraries and bookstores and on the street. Religious, legal, and pedagogical commentary help us understand what was at stake in these efforts to categorize and regulate reading. Taken together these strands of law, practice, and commentary provide a picture of the importance attributed to print and to the practice of reading during the first third of the nineteenth century. They reveal contemporary thinking about the mind, soul, and practices of reading. To begin, a few words about terminology and language, both the words used to describe crimes and infractions and the terms used to describe inner life, often imagined as the space of the infraction. Unsittlich comes from Sitten, meaning both “customs and manners” (in the sense of agreed-upon codes of behavior) and “morals” (in the sense of sexual morality). The eighteenth-century Sittenpolizei, literally the police who governed Sitten, concerned themselves with gaming, dancing, festivals, and prostitution, and in some cases with the censorship of books, printers, and bookstores.6 In this respect the term Sitten was aligned with secular notions of “civil order” (bürgerliche Ordnung), but it was also rooted in religious traditions stressing moral (and sexual) conduct. The term Unzucht referred to things that

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were unruly or disordered in common speech; in legal language it referred to sexual offenses. While the terms unsittliche Schriften and unzüchtige Schriften were often used interchangeably, they had different resonances. The term obszöne Schriften was used less often, but it was part of the arsenal of official terms used by authorities to describe and condemn texts and images. All three terms evoked both religious and secular authority at the intersection between notions of public order and sexual order and evoked both the power of the state (Zucht) and the authority of collective mores (Sitten). Contemporaries used an equally complex array of terms to describe the mental and emotional states that made up inner life. Seele, for instance, was used to evoke the “soul,” “mind,” or even “spirit.” The term Seelenkunde, used to describe the study of the mind or soul, captures contemporary uncertainty about the substance of inner life. Maintaining this linguistic ambiguity was important in a period marked by heated debates about the seat of the soul, the origin of emotions, and the substance of the mind. Wessenberg himself refers to the “Veredelung des Geistes und Herzens [cultivation of the spirit and heart],” and here the exact location or mental impulses is ambiguous, for Geist can mean both “spirit” and “mind.” Similarly Herz means “heart” in the way we use it today, as both the physical heart and the seat of one’s emotional impulses, where emotions, good and bad, take place. Inner life was also thought to contain “depths,” but depth referred not to a repressed unconscious but instead to a perceived complexity (and darkness, or invisibility) of the mind’s impulses.7 To capture this range of meanings, it makes sense to use the broader term inner life to describe the space and the processes of the mental world. As I noted in the introduction, Germans have long been accused of a particular “inwardness” of orientation and character, and this spiritual and intellectual dynamism has sometimes been seen as the counterpart to political passivity. In his 1784 prize essay, “What Is Enlightenment?,” Immanuel Kant famously defined Enlightenment as a state of inner activity and maturity; according to this logic, freedom of thought and conscience was the primary freedom. Following the French Revolution, some people were at pains to describe the combination of cultural sophistication with allegedly “backward” political forms. Some speculated that Germans privileged inner transformations (those taking place in the mind and soul) over external changes in political rights and institutions. This idea of German inwardness would resonate long after the revolutionary period and would

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continue to provide a potent explanation for those seeking to explain German political “failures.” Yet this argument holds only when one assumes that politics and power are located primarily in governments and institutions. It suggests that the meaningful (and missing) actions are political actions. Furthermore it suggests that the preoccupation with inner life was a retreat from the real conditions of power. This narrative works only when one divides the world into public and private spheres, imagining “the public” as the realm of power and “the private” as a retreat from power; only then is it possible to characterize German debates about inner life as apolitical. Scholars have shown that mental states— assumptions, fantasies, dreams, and shared narratives—are not only responses or reactions to events that take place in the “real” world but are themselves generative because new self-understandings and mental states constitute and shape historical phenomena.8 My argument here is that early nineteenth-century discussions of inner life, as seen through debates over morals and reading, were in fact political. Such debates concerned the autonomy (or lack thereof) of subjects, definitions of official knowledge, and recognition that order was achieved not simply through the maintenance of external forms but also through power over inner life. Shifting our vision of what power is and how it operates allows us to think of the early nineteenth-century battles over inner life as squarely about different kinds of power. Who controlled or monitored the fantasies of subjects? If the imagination was left free to range (without external or internal discipline), how did it transform the individual? Who decided what separated “real” knowledge from “superstitious fantasies”? In early nineteenth-century Germany people were acutely aware that the growing availability of books and other forms of print meant that the inner lives of readers—spaces being visualized and conceived as objects of secular study—were open to new forms of secular culture. In the eighteenth century the soul had often been conceived of as the terrain upon which religious figures and texts could work their magic (though this generated anxiety, as expressed in use of the term Schwärmerei). During the early nineteenth century the expansion of secular reading pointed to both a host of new dangers and pitfalls and to new opportunities to profitably shape inner life. The (often anonymous) booksellers, peddlers, and readers examined in this book existed in a very different world from Kant’s, and the

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freedoms they were seeking—to print, sell, borrow, and read—were of a different variety from the inner states of critique and analysis prized by the philosopher. Nonetheless their commentary and actions suggest that the German tradition of thinking about inner life extended beyond formal philosophy. People were concerned with mental states generated by reading because access to mental states was perceived as a source of power. For figures like Wessenberg and the censors and police determined to regulate reading practices, the right kind of reading, placed in the proper hands, promised an effective means of shaping inner lives and actions in the world. For those who went out of their way to find forbidden texts, and we will see that many did, reading seemed to hold out the possibility that they might pursue ideas, fantasies, and narratives and thereby generate their own forms of interiority.

The Articulation of Harm in Legal Language In early nineteenth-century Prussia obscenity did not exist as a singular or well-defined legal concept. In 1820 the Prussian Interior Ministry began keeping a file titled “Obscene Publications and Unproven Medical Remedies” (“Obszöner Schriften und ungeprüfter Heilmittel”), but there was as yet no firm consensus on what constituted morally dangerous texts.9 In 1788 the Prussian king, Friedrich I, issued a broad press law that worked in two directions: it established the outside limits of authority by insisting upon the importance of “truth” and “knowledge” but also insisted on the necessity of prepublication censorship and careful regulation of the interstate book trade. The law condemned “malevolent authors” who specialized in “the corruption of morals” by depicting “indecent images and enticing depictions of vice.”10 A central censorship panel was established, and censors were authorized to deny publication and import rights to such texts, and the police in Prussian territories were instructed to confiscate them if they slipped through the censors. Little was said about what constituted “indecent images and enticing depictions of vice.” Other German states developed similar processes for regulating the book trade in the eighteenth century. In 1769 a centralized censorship bureau was established in Bavaria, and censors were directed to prohibit texts that were (among other things) “obscene, frivolous, aggravating, injurious, or included things against good morals” and those that “through thoughtless reading lure the weak, the simple, and those already disposed to evil and all manner of debauchery.”11

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At street level in Prussia an overlapping series of police edicts, rescripts, trade ordinances, and laws governed the circulation of print. Prussian police codes regulated inter- and intrastate commerce and required peddlers and itinerant booksellers, called colporteurs, to apply for permits and to submit lists of the publications they carried.12 Lending libraries, which proliferated during the first third of the nineteenth century, were under the jurisdiction of the Interior Ministry and Berlin’s Police Headquarters; as institutions catering to an increasingly diverse body of readers, lending libraries were subject to especially stringent regulations.13 At the level of the German states and in interstate commerce agreements, laws were passed outlining the procedures for state censorship, defining what was allowed and what was proscribed and creating a framework for monitoring the trade in books between the states.14 The booksellers’ guild in Leipzig also monitored the publishing habits of its members; guild members could be fined or stripped of their membership if they published morally damaging print, engaged in illegal piracy, or engaged in shameful or criminal acts. It was not unheard of for the guild to seize ostensibly obscene publications and publicly burn them.15 Neither laws nor the multiple edicts, rescripts, and ordinances that governed police work were invented out of whole cloth, nor were they necessarily rationalized or coordinated with one another.16 Existing laws and police codes were the product of several generations of thinking about law, regulation, and police-craft, including a body of enlightened reforms produced during the second half of the eighteenth century and a second wave of liberal reforms inspired by Napoleon’s revolutionary legal codes. In the early nineteenth century older laws and edicts remained on the books and took their place alongside new legal language and concepts. Sometimes a pregnant legal concept was simply replaced by a new word, leaving the structure of the law in place. For example, an Austrian “patent” issued by Carl VI in 1714 explained that the trade in texts and images must be controlled on grounds that “manifold innocent youths of both sexes are tempted and enticed into evil, almost every man is provoked as is God the Almighty, when We as the ruler and prince are not moved to put down these things out of Christian zeal.”17 During the wave of secularization and legal reform in the second half of the eighteenth century, “God the Almighty” was replaced by secular principles: “the moral feelings of the population” and “concerns for youth.” Yet the logic and structure of the original patent remained in the reformed

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1767 law.18 A similar process was at work in Prussian law; religious vocabulary and concepts continued implicitly to inform secular judgments of the morality of texts and the harm done to readers. Early nineteenth-century Germans drew upon a variety of moral models as they attempted to articulate the relationship between individual autonomy, the collective good, and the role of the state in defining and enforcing morality. In some quarters absolutist moral models continued to have currency in the early nineteenth century; for example, they often informed the attitudes of local police and provincial governments. The tradition of police work in the German states imagined the role of the police as educational and productive rather than simply juridical and punitive. Describing the moral attitudes that guided police work in the German states, Isabel Hull describes an “absolutist conflation of poverty, idleness, sexual incontinence, and social disorder” that continued to flourish into the Vormärz, the decades leading up to the outbreak of revolution in March 1848.19 This was a vision of immorality focused not strictly (or even primarily) on sexuality but on a vague set of infractions and shortcomings associated with the lower echelons of society. This moral model was alive and well in local contexts in the 1820s and 1830s. A second set of moral models generated by Enlightenment thinkers also informed early nineteenth-century discussions of Unzucht. Tracing the legal development of unzüchtige Handlungen (lewd or obscene acts) in Austrian law, Nikolaus Benke and Elizabeth Holzleithner argue that Enlightenment thinkers initiated a concept of social order that legitimated a new moral regime: “Instead of disappearing from law with the Enlightenment, the concept of Unzucht underwent an astounding differentiation and multiplication.”20 In the German states (of which Austria was one) Kant played an important role in articulating an enlightened basis for the regulation of morality. Kant insisted upon the importance of two principles: autonomy of the individual conscience (and inner freedom) and human dignity; sexual infractions could be imagined as crimes against the integrity and freedom of the individual. Laws regulating sexuality were thus compatible with enlightened insistence on the autonomy of the individual subject; anything that threatened the integrity of the subject’s body was thought to destroy freedom. In this way the censorship of immoral texts was imagined as compatible with the promotion of individual freedom. The 1811 Austrian Criminal Code contained categories for crimes and offenses against freedom, against body and

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life, and against marriage and family. In the context of early nineteenth-century Prussia, protecting the integrity of the subject’s body (and mind) played an important role in justifying the regulation of “immoral texts.” A third and final set of moral models emerged out of liberal thought; these originated in the pre-Napoleonic period and gained influence in the 1830s and 1840s. We will have ample opportunity to explore liberal attitudes toward obscene and immoral texts as we move more deeply into the nineteenth century. For now, it is necessary to make only two points. Liberal thinkers were united in their support for freedom of the press; they therefore condemned political censorship. At the same time, liberals stressed the importance of gender difference and the (related) division between public and private spheres; their focus on sexuality and gender difference made them more inclined to support moral censorship, even as they called for free expression in political matters. All three of these moral models were at work in early nineteenth-century attempts to invent and enforce the specific moral infractions of print. Prussia’s 1788 censorship law reflected the wave of absolutist legal reforms that took place in the German states during the second half of the eighteenth century. Eighteenth-century legal reform had been shaped by cameralism, a body of thinking about law, statecraft, and the role of the police, and though new legal and moral models had since emerged, the 1788 law remained on the books, and the ideas it embodied thus continued to have currency. 21 Cameralist thinkers, who helped to reform legal codes during the second half of the eighteenth century, authorized the extension of broad powers to activist governments and to professional police forces. Cameralism continued to affect legal thought and the self-understanding of the police in the early nineteenth century, even after the French Revolution and the revolutionary wars transformed the political geography of the German states. Napoleon’s wholesale revision of civil and criminal codes, an expression of revolutionary politics, provided new concepts for thinking about the relationship between law and society. The French Code Pénal condemned “tout outrage à la moral publique et religieuse ou aux bonnes moeurs.” (It appears that the original code, issued in 1810, expressed the idea of censorship on moral grounds in general terms, clarifying the language in a law passed in 1819.)22 This definition introduced a new framework for understanding the moral damage done by print: rather than an authoritative state or a fragile

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individual an abstract notion of “the public” was placed at the center of the law. A shared understanding of public decency provided legitimacy for the reintroduction of censorship in the wake of the revolution’s experiment in freedom of the press. An 1819 Prussian police edict mirrored the language of the French law, ordering provincial authorities to check lending libraries for publications that “offended against religion, morality, decency and civil order [gegen Religion, Sittlichkeit, Anstand und bürgerliche Ordnung verstoßen].” Translated into a German linguistic and cultural context, the abstract “public spirit” evoked in the French Code Pénal became bürgerliche Ordnung, the latter meaning both “civil order” and “middle class (or bourgeois) order.”23 In the German states abstract visions of public order and collective mores were embodied by a civil society that coexisted, often uncomfortably, with absolutist political rule. 24 Physicians, lawyers, pedagogues, religious leaders, journalists, and others contributed to a growing body of commentary on topics of concern to a broad public. These new “experts”—many secular, some religious—had much to say on the subject of secular reading and its dangers. Their influence in matters of moral censorship was also surprisingly direct, as local police and governments often combed newspapers and journals, looking for sources of information on the trade in books and images. The police were quick to act on public denunciations of authors, and they were often alerted to the presence of “immoral texts” by newspaper articles or unsolicited denunciations by “interested parties” who kept their eyes open for texts that made it through the censorship process and into peddlers’ boxes, lending libraries, and the shelves of bookstores. Armed with an initial sense of the patterns of thought and the figures involved in framing notions of obscenity in the early nineteenth century, we can take a closer look at the laws and the ordinances on the books. Friedrich’s 1788 censorship law had established a structure for prepublication censorship by establishing a board of professional censors. Publications were divided into categories: religious-theological, legal, medical-surgical, political-historical, schoolbooks and pedagogical works, political newspapers, and a broad category seemingly designed to catch other kinds of publications, including novels, weekly newspapers of mixed content, plays, and other works that didn’t fit neatly into any of the categories. Censors were considered experts in their fields; some held doctorates, and some were

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professors at Prussian universities. Whatever authority was conferred on them by academic titles and positions, censors were not considered infallible, nor did they necessarily share the attitudes of the police and local authorities. As a result the police often confiscated and investigated texts that they perceived as obscene even when the publisher’s imprimatur signaled that the censors had read and approved the manuscript. The law also laid out the punishments for publishing or selling books without an official imprimatur, which included fines, the loss of professional concessions, and confiscation and destruction of illegal works. In keeping with the spirit of persuasion characteristic of enlightened statecraft, the 1788 press law began with a justification for censorship: “The object of censorship is in no way to hinder a respectable, serious-minded, and moderate investigation of the truth, or to otherwise impose any unnecessary or burdensome restraints on writers.” Rather the goal of censorship was “to steer that which is against the broader principles of religion, against the state, as well as that which is against the moral and civil order, or which, through insult to personal honor, is intended to injure the good name of another.”25 In its support for rational inquiry the law expressed the reigning assumption that the state had a responsibility to its subjects to promote population growth, the rational development of trade, scientific agricultural practices, and health and well-being (defined in collective rather than individual terms). 26 Though the state was careful to specify support only for “moderate investigation[s] of truth,” this insistence on the importance of “truth” would be used to argue for the value of publications. The 1788 law posited an innocent (and vulnerable) reader and an unscrupulous writer or publisher with powerful tools (books, pamphlets, images) at his disposal: “These writers create damage by distributing harmful practical errors about important human affairs; they corrupt morals with indecent pictures and alluring depictions of depravity and with malicious derision and spiteful disapproval of public institutions and regulations; through this they nourish worry and unhappiness in many inadequately educated souls, encourage the gratification of base instincts—defamation, envy, vengefulness— that disturb the equanimity of good and useful citizens and offend their regard for the public. This is especially true of so-called Volkschriften, which have been much abused.”27 The law drew a sharp line between useful knowledge that encouraged the well-being of the

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individual and knowledge that promoted worry, superstition, and the “base instincts.” In this formulation the legitimacy of the state rested on its protection of “inadequately educated souls” who might fall prey to unscrupulous authors. Both justifications for censorship evoked a vision of human nature or, more precisely, of the subject’s inner life as vulnerable. Yet this susceptibility was not simply to be the result of the impressions made upon the mind by a harmful text. Rather than a blank slate, the law assumed that base instincts were already there, ready to be activated. According to the law, people were prone to mental weakness, subject to worry and envy, and easily led to defame their neighbors (and thereby to destroy the fragile social equilibrium). Despite the fact that they were cast as the victims of the bookseller’s crime, readers already possessed the potential for corruption and were therefore not entirely innocent. The disequilibrium and vulnerability of the individual translated into an impoverishment of the state, as it introduced elements of disorder by “disturbing the equanimity of good and useful citizens.” Those who crafted the law did not underestimate the power of texts and images; they recognized the growth of secular print (and, for that matter, of so-called fanatical religious print) as a powerful means of crafting subjects. At the local level different definitions of unsittliche Schriften often prevailed; this was the case in part because Prussia had expanded its borders substantially as a result of the revolutionary wars and was still in the process of asserting authority in these regions. During the first few decades of the nineteenth century provincial governments continued to draw on local and regional police regulations and ordinances to assert alternative terms and concepts to describe the moral offenses of print. This was especially true in territories incorporated into Prussia as a result of the Napoleonic Wars, regions with different political and legal traditions and inhabited by residents (and often officials) with different mores and attitudes. Stralsund, a port city on the Baltic coast formerly under Swedish authority, occupied by the French in the early nineteenth century, and incorporated into Prussia in 1815, used a different vocabulary to describe the moral dangers of print. The city’s 1802 ordinance explained that the goal of censorship was “to prevent the distribution of immoral or obscene books, songs, stories, or engravings as well as those that promote folly, fanaticism, superstition, or [religious] disbelief. The same applies whether the sale takes place during, or outside of market times.”28 The language expressed local conditions; public spaces and marketplaces would be

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subjected to particular scrutiny and local concerns about marketplace literature that might include folktales, dream books, penny dreadfuls, or books of prophesy. In its preoccupation with public spaces and with the literature of the marketplace, the 1802 language echoed early modern ordinances that constituted the purview of the Sittenpolizei or Zuchtpolizei, ordinances that, as we saw earlier, focused on festivals, dancing, gaming, and public prostitution. These traditions of thinking about the order and morality of public spaces (particularly the marketplace) would begin to intersect with growing concerns about the reading habits of the Bürgertum, which took place increasingly in private (or semiprivate) spaces. In the newly acquired regions in the Catholic Rhineland—territories incorporated into Prussia after the defeat of Napoleon— the decision of the Interior Ministry to institute strict oversight of lending libraries in 1819 inspired mixed responses and some active resistance. 29 According to the new police ordinance, lending library proprietors were required to apply for concessions, to produce regular lists of the publications they carried to the local authorities, and to submit to regular inspections by the local police. In Trier, a city in the far western reaches of Prussia’s new territories, the regional government explained that historically, local laws had not authorized restrictions on lending libraries for reasons of “scientific or moral education,” nor did they feel capable, with a small staff and limited knowledge of contemporary literature, of measuring existing literary products according to the standards articulated by the authorities in Berlin. 30 Determining the scientific and moral value of “literary products” was best left to experts, they argued; those who did not regularly apply themselves to reading contemporary literature, including the police, could not adequately evaluate the contents of lending libraries. In the western city of Muenster, also newly incorporated into Prussia, resistance to the authorities in Berlin was more direct. Asked about existing regulations of lending libraries, the city’s police commissioner replied that there were no laws on the books. Furthermore he protested the new regulations on the grounds that he was simply too old (over seventy) and too busy to review “all the new literature of the country.”31 In the Rhine city of Coblenz, which boasted at least eight lending libraries in the city and surrounding areas (one with a female proprietor), the regional authorities asked the Interior Ministry for clarification: Did laws regulating lending libraries also apply to reading circles and private

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clubs, where members could find or borrow books, newspapers, and other publications?32 In addition to regional differences in emphasis and legal language, visions of the imagined victim changed over time. As we saw, Stralsund’s 1802 ordinance imagined the vulnerable reader as the poorly educated and easily manipulated inhabitant of public spaces. By 1824 the authorities in Coblenz had begun to concern themselves with the mental (and moral) vulnerability of elite young men, particularly gymnasium students, and with the private exchange and consumption of books. Writing to Berlin about the supervision of lending libraries, the regional government in Coblenz stated, “We keep this important matter perpetually in mind, and we hope to be supported in this by Gymnasia and high schools. Nothing is more desirable than to see realized the wholesome idea that lending libraries should not be open to school-age students without explicit permission.” It was important, the report continued, to keep young people from reading “dangerous writings or inferior novels, which corrupt the heart and morals, promote distaste for serious studies, and make their mark [on the reader] through the damaging influence of half-truths and precocious, unhealthy emotions.”33 A report from the provincial government in Merseburg, a city on the southeast border of the Prussian territories, described the influence of lending libraries in similar terms: they were particularly dangerous for young people because “they have a detrimental effect on moral feelings; they also inflame the fantasies and spoil them for the pursuit of their own studies.” Using the language of health and healing, the authorities in Merseburg urged people to aid the government in its measures to “protect new generations from moral poison, just as apothecaries guard them against physical poison.”34 From these disparate sources of law, edict, and commentary, each formulated in particular historical and geographical contexts, we can discern the outlines of a pattern of thought about the dangers of texts and the nature of readers. In almost every case the legal language focused on the potentially faulty development of readers’ habits of mind. The law of 1788 described the crime of immoral texts in terms of the mental effects of reading, condemning publications that “nourish worry and unhappiness in many inadequately educated souls, [and] encourage the gratification of base instincts—defamation, envy, vengefulness.” The 1802 edict in Stralsund defined its task in terms of protecting people from “folly, fanaticism, superstition or [religious]

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disbelief.” Adolescents in Coblenz could have their heart and morals corrupted “through the damaging influence of half-truths and precocious, unhealthy emotions.” In Merseburg there was concern about books that “inflame the fantasies” of young people and “spoil them for pursuit of their own studies.” Defining the goal of moral censorship as the protection of vulnerable individuals (less often, following the French model, of public mores) rather than the State marked a shift in models of power and authority. The state was now expected to frame its laws and authority for the good of its subjects, who, as imagined in law and police craft, were in need of protection. This growing emphasis on inner life mirrored broad contemporary discussions of reading and inner life—discussions about the nature of the emotions, the dangers of empathy, and the cultivation of the self. Before turning to those broader debates, however, I will take a closer look at the kinds of texts that were singled out as obscene or immoral in the early decades of the nineteenth century.

Translating Theory into Practice Armed with broad authority and a set of vague principles governing their surveillance of the trade in texts and images, Berlin’s Police Headquarters, the Censorship Board, and the Interior Ministry crafted a vision of the texts, spaces, and readers that concerned them. Though censors were officially charged with reading and judging the content of texts, the police supervised lending libraries and peddlers, and they had the power to confiscate suspected texts (allowing them to harass booksellers and lending librarians, even if ultimately forced to return the texts). Furthermore, with the aid of the interior minister, the police could challenge the decisions of censors. 35 Read carefully, the files kept by the Interior Ministry reveal information about the world of early nineteenth-century print culture and the worldview of the police and officials themselves. The names of the files kept on the book trade provide a glimpse into the way authorities organized knowledge. Between 1810 and 1840 reports were sorted into several categories. Among them, the file on “obscene publications and unproven medical remedies” included reports on “gallant” literature (among them The German Don Juan) as well as books like The Barometer of Love and The Art of Kissing. Other files were organized around “the supervision of lending libraries” and “books and writings of religious mysticism, pietism, as well as those treating sects.”

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The police kept a file on “the censorship of writings, newspapers, and pamphlets about the cholera illness” and another “concerning songs, pamphlets, and stories of wonder carried by colporteurs.” These files point to the preoccupations of officials. They were anxious about texts that might produce unrest, social disorder, or violence. The file of banned publications on “cholera illness” suggests that anti-Semitism was one potential source of disorder. Some of the confiscated publications (copies of which were pasted into the file) blamed Jews for the spread of illness, on grounds that they were itinerant and carried filthy rags from place to place. 36 In the absence of commentary on why such writings were confiscated, we can venture an informed guess: denunciations of Jews in the popular press might lead to spontaneous violence. Controlling anti-Semitic violence during cholera outbreaks was a means of heading off public disorder. 37 “Cholera writings” were sent to the medical censor, who had the expertise to comment on the quality of the information presented. Mystical and pietist texts were suspected of promoting “enthusiasm and folly,” emotional states that could result in disorder. The police also worked to differentiate legitimate knowledge about the body, both medical and sexual, from “fraudulent” or unauthorized knowledge. Thus a text like The Authentic Memoirs of Midwife, or the Secret Dispatches from the Moral World of the Upper Class by the French midwife Alexandrine Jullemier warranted careful examination, both to determine the legitimacy of the text and to make sure that it did not contain unauthorized knowledge. The police and censors also worked with an unarticulated hierarchy of offenses. This hierarchy moved in an ascending scale from the lowest level but still serious category “highly frivolous,” through (worse) “morally damaging,” and finally (worst of all) “dangerous publications that ruin heart and mind.”38 The “mindless novel” was bad enough to merit scrutiny and prohibit from circulation in lending libraries, which were thought to be filled with “useless and self-damaging readings.” Other infractions, such as “mockery of religion,” “obscene content,” or “promotion of superstition,” merited confiscation. Colporteurs and lending libraries were particularly suspicious, as they carried books aimed at the “common man.” The Memoirs of Casanova, confiscated from a lending library in Bromberg in 1824, was labeled “destructive of good morals” by the censors. In 1835 Amours secrètes des Bourbons, in the original French, was confiscated in Cologne from a box of books that had been sent from

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Brussels to a local bookseller named Schlesinger. Another French title, La Religion St. Simonienne, was confiscated from the same box. The censors decided that both works should be banned from lending libraries, Amours secrètes because of its “highly immoral” content and La Religion St. Simonienne because it “spread antisocial and anti-Christian lessons.”39 Authentic Memoirs of Midwife was judged only “slightly damaging to the morals” and was therefore allowed in bookstores, but it was banned from lending libraries.40 Gallantries, Adventures and Loves of a Young Woman of Standing, sold in four volumes and reviewed by the Prussian censors in 1834, received similar treatment. The censors decided that the title promised a work that was more titillating than it actually was; yet because the work was “highly frivolous” it was banned from lending libraries and lending circles, but bookstores were free to sell it.41 An implicit class bias informed this hierarchy of offenses and defined the bookseller’s crime as playing on the inherent vulnerability of an uneducated, lower-class reader. This reader was believed to possess an overactive fantasy life and to be subject to “folly and fanaticism” and worry. Colporteurs, who possessed none of the status granted to professional booksellers and who catered to readers at the lowest end of the book trade, were subject to regular searches. A closer look at three specific texts introduces us to the kinds of texts authorities identified as morally dangerous in the first decades of the nineteenth century. In 1817 the police in the city of Halle reported the confiscation of a pamphlet entitled A True Terrifying Horrifying Story of a Mother, Eva Rosina Riedelin from Marienberg, who on February 25 of this year Roasted her own small Child, and with it Managed to assuage the Hunger of her other Five Children. Paying a visit to the local song and picture salesman, the police discovered that the source of the pamphlet was a man named Weimann.42 Under interrogation Weimann gave up two more names: he had obtained the original text from a man named Nicolai and then gave it to a printer named Bantsch. Weimann must have kept the production costs low, as the pamphlet (luckily pasted into the report itself) was bound in plain paper and sold for six pfennig. Composed of six pages in a large font, the story itself is simple to recount. A True Terrifying Horrifying Story tells the tale of Johann and Eva Riedelin and their six hungry children. Johann is a tenant farmer who cannot make an adequate living farming and is therefore forced to take on other jobs to feed his family. He works hard, taking

Figure 1.  Title page of Wahre schauderhaft-schreckliche Geschichte einer Mutter (1817). This copy was confiscated and pasted into the Prussian Justice Ministry’s files on printed songs, pamphlets, and stories of wonder carried by colporteurs. Geheimes Staatsarchiv PK, I. HA Rep. 77, Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 243, Nr. 50, Bd. 1: 57.

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on extra jobs and missing sleep in an attempt to earn money. In spite of his hardship, he never gives up faith in God: In Boden, a sizable village close to Marienberg, lived a poor tenant farmer by the name of Johann David Riedelin with his wife and 6 small children, the eldest around 8 years old and the youngest seven weeks old, who relied on him to work. Even if he denied himself sleep to earn extra in addition to his daily labor, he was still not in the position to earn enough money to feed his family. Nonetheless, untiring and constant in his trust in God, he never lost courage. Not so his wife.

Though Eva Riedelin is presented as a woman who has lost her faith, she is also resourceful. In an effort to feed her family she adopts the habit of borrowing bread on credit from the local baker, who takes pity on her and never presses her to settle her bill. In this way she is able to keep her family from starving. One day, prompted by six children crying for food, Eva resolves once again to ask the baker for bread on credit. Arriving in town, she discovers that the baker is away on business, leaving his wife to take care of the store. When Eva asks timidly if she may borrow some bread, the baker’s wife urges her to return when her husband comes back, for she herself is not authorized to give bread on credit. Despairing, Eva returns home, where she is accosted by hungry children crying “Mommy doesn’t love us anymore” and clawing at her skirts. Pushed over the edge by the cries of her children, Eva kills the smallest child, roasts him, feeds him to his siblings, and hangs herself. Returning home from his trip, the baker hears of Eva’s visit. He urges his wife to carry two loaves—one as a gift, the other on credit—to the Riedelin home. When the wife arrives, anticipating the happy cries of the hungry children, she discovers “the arms and legs of a small child scattered on the floor” and the other children “gnawing on a human hand.” A police investigation into the text revealed that in 1814 a manuscript of the story had been presented to and approved by a censor, Dr. Pfaff, a member of the philosophy faculty at the University of Halle. Questioned by the police in 1817, Pfaff explained that he had approved the manuscript because the story appeared to be based on a true incident. He declared that whereas immoral fiction merited censorship, the truthful depiction of immoral acts did not. (Here we see the censor’s evocation of truth as a value to be protected.)43 The police and interior minister disagreed, reading the story according to the vocabulary and ideas that ran through their own file on colportage,

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condemning “published songs and pamphlets of thoroughly filthy and indecent content, which destroy the morality of the average man,” and “so-called spiritual wares, which exhale the most tasteless superstitions and thereby destroy the good morals of the average man.”44 While Pfaff’s judgment focused on the pamphlet’s content, the police were preoccupied with audience and effects. According to the police, the danger of the story hinged on its tale of a woman who lost her mental equilibrium and, as a result, was capable of unimaginable acts. By provoking strong emotions, the text might lead to the loss of the reader’s moral compass and mental stability. Both Pfaff and the police called upon legal principles articulated in 1788: Pfaff stressed the importance of truth; the police sought to protect readers from “indecent images and enticing depictions of vice.” With no courts to weigh in, the police usually won out in such disagreements. Tom Cheesman has studied the “true crime narratives” that were ubiquitous in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German street literature. These narratives were often performed orally with the aid of poster boards (anyone who has seen the prelude to Threepenny Opera will be familiar with Moritätslieder); during the first half of the nineteenth century it was not uncommon for these oral stories to be published in inexpensive editions. It is likely that the Eva Riedelin pamphlet was such a story, and the narrative is typical of the genre. Cheesman explains, “The shocking ballad tradition is one of dramatic elaborations of this basic legend, the central motif being refusal of a request for food—i.e. ‘hard-heartedness.’” The basic outlines of this story sound familiar: a poor family, often headed by a women, is threatened with starvation. A request is made for charity from someone who is better off, and this request is refused. In the published versions of the story the woman usually kills all the children and herself. Cheesman interprets the “hard-heartedness story” as a reflection of emerging bourgeois norms, particularly ideas of the “self-enclosed” and “self-sustaining family,” newly separated into a public sphere in which the man worked, and a private sphere dedicated to privacy and consumption.45 The story of Eva Riedelin seems to complicate this analysis a bit: the baker’s wife works alongside her husband, and the baker has never before denied Eva bread (so women are not radically isolated). Nonetheless the story does highlight the economic vulnerability of the family, which is in fact so isolated that it must rely on the generosity of strangers to subsist. A True Terrifying Horrifying Story lends itself to further analysis, just as it did in 1817, when the censors and police wrestled over the

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proper reading of the story. On one level the story offers a lesson in the perils of religious unbelief, stressing in the first few lines the fact that Eva, who will become the perpetrator of the unspeakable crime, has lost faith. This is also a story of serious economic hardship, as the family continues to starve despite the husband’s hard work. On another level an adequate account of the story must keep in mind that the themes offered in the story are themselves part of an existing body of narrative tropes, as Cheesman points out. Thus the history of such a text is related to real economic vulnerability of the kind certainly experienced by many tenant farmers, but the story has another history rooted in conventions and tropes dating to the eighteenth century, and probably earlier. A second reading of this story links it directly to the early nineteenth-century concerns I have been exploring about the vulnerability of the subject, the dangers of intense emotions, and the ease of falling into vice. Eva, we learn on the first page, is mentally unguarded. The crucial moment in the story, the moment in which Eva loses her sanity, resonates with a broader preoccupation with suicide, melancholy, Schwärmerei, and the “falling away” from (already fragile) reason. Recall that the 1788 law focused on the fragile mental states of vulnerable subjects, condemning publications that “nourish base instincts—defamation, envy, vengefulness—and disturb the equanimity of good and useful citizens.” In the text the base instincts of the central character emerge as she succumbs to the impulses that make her murderous and suicidal. The law and the text share a common vision of human nature in which dark instincts are barely veiled, easily accessed, and potentially disastrous. Ironically the very emotions the story promises the reader, terror and horror, are precisely the problem. Involving imagination and fantasy, they bypass reason, intelligence, and mental balance. Another confiscated publication, this one recorded in the file concerned with “obscene publications and unproven medical remedies,” provides another example. While we may puzzle at the title of this file, with its combination of morality and medicine, it had contemporary logic. Just as people could easily destroy their mental health by reading, they might corrupt their physical health by consuming poison packaged as medicine or by mistaking lies for legitimate knowledge. The combination of these two dangers—one mental, the other physical—also suggests that just as legitimate knowledge and real medicine would heal the body, the right kind of text might heal the soul. Thus a

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second kind of immoral text offered false, dangerous, or unauthorized knowledge about the body. In April 1824 the police in Magdeburg confiscated a pamphlet entitled The Book of Secrets: A Collection of More Than 200 Magnetic and Mysterious Remedies against Illness, Bodily Defects and Ailments and for the Promotion of Other Useful and Salutary Ends.46 Several copies of the pamphlet, the police reported, had been confiscated from a local bookseller on grounds that the work “promoted superstition, or is partially of an immoral tendency.” Shortly thereafter a report from the police in Düsseldorf noted that the work had been confiscated from a local bookstore, and the government of Saxon-Weimar wrote to the Prussian authorities warning that the work was “wretched, dangerous, and immoral” and the instructions themselves were even “life-threatening.”47 An early nineteenth-century edition of the text, published without a date and with the false imprint of “Bonston,” was bound in paper and contained no illustrations—both signs that the book was inexpensive. The text itself is divided into three parts: a titillating introduction by an unnamed publisher that makes misleading promises about the content; the body of the text, consisting of hundreds of remedies for a variety of ailments and circumstances; and a detailed index. The introduction begins with an account of the publisher’s discovery of a dusty manuscript in “1814 in France, in a completely plundered castle or seigniorial manor, [found] under many other scattered books and papers.” The editor asserts that the unknown author of the manuscript was a medical man of some renown, who engaged in a series of “debates in Latin concerning various medical topics” and in “correspondence with first-rate doctors, who were well known at the end of the last century, among whom Mesmer is particularly worth mentioning” (a reference to Franz Anton Mesmer, whose theories of animal magnetism and hypnosis were the subject of some fascination). The editor writes that the author was a “scientifically educated man and a well-known practicing German physician” and promises that the book will “unlock the secrets of nature,” including “Animal Magnetism, Somnambulism, and Sympathetic Remedies.”48 Here again the very things that aroused the reader—the references to animal magnetism and “sympathetic remedies”—also attracted the attention of the police. Though the introduction promises to reveal the techniques of Mesmerism, the “secrets” that follow show no sign, except for a few

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Latin phrases, of having been written by a prominent doctor or a man of science. The bulk of the pamphlet is dedicated instead to a list of ailments and corresponding remedies, largely focused on sick or wounded bodies of men (rarely women), horses, and dogs. The reader finds solutions to barking dogs, lame horses, smashed limbs, and wet gunpowder. Mentions of virility, as well as advice on how to prolong an erection and avoid nocturnal emissions are squeezed between advice on how to win a duel, avoid “red dysentery,” and cure bladder worms. It also provides advice on how to evaluate the character and intentions of the people sitting around a table and how to “make a piece of paper that a man has burned reappear in his hand.” Readers are instructed on how to make waterproof gunpowder and find a missing relative. The book offers tricks and sleights of hand: how to make a gold piece heavier, how to change the color of a horse’s hair, and how to win a bet. Recommended remedies (for which recipes are provided) call for mercury, mother’s milk, and the bones of humans or various animals. A remedy for use against “red dysentery, particularly for soldiers in wartimes,” reads as follows: “Take a small rib from a hanged criminal, pulverize it, and give it to the sick man in a glass of wine or vinegar.”49 We might be tempted to read the text as a mediated record of experience, though it is just as likely that readers read it because it was sensational. If the remedies speak to the material conditions of readers, the lives of these readers were harrowing, involving illness, the loss of valuable horses, wounds, cold, hunger, and missing friends. Ailments included worms, lice, dysentery, cancer, and melancholy. Based on this content, it seems likely that the body of the text either dates from or was expanded and revised during the Napoleonic Wars. Perhaps its readers occupied a world where tables were filled with strangers whose intentions were difficult to discern; maybe the only way to get along was to know how to make gold heavier and to be able to change the color of a stolen horse. Such concerns as crushed limbs and waterproof gunpowder were in any case very different from the problems that would begin to fill popular medical works at midcentury, when the preoccupations of a respectable middle class would eschew reading about worms, red dysentery, and lost manhood. To read the text with the expectation of continuity between introduction and body fails to account for the historical conventions of the genre of popular medical works—works that today appear cobbled together from texts and introductions produced, borrowed, and

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recycled over decades. In some cases this cobbled-together quality may have been a strategy for attracting readers, throwing the police off the trail of an obscene book, or both. A second example of this kind of discontinuity is the 1821 book Magnetism and Immorality: A Remarkable Contribution to the Secret History of the Medical Practice, attributed to the notorious author Christian August Fischer (who often wrote under the pseudonym “Althing”). 50 In the book the author promises to reveal the “dark secrets” of the relationship between the practitioner of magnetism and the patient, that is, the secret history of magnetism and its relationship to the sexual drive. The story that follows describes the development of a sexual relationship between a woman patient and her Mesmerist doctor, told from several points of view. The first section of the book takes the form of a dialogue between two women. One woman narrates the story of her initial visit to a Mesmerist gathering (complete with the performance of a somnambulist), where she meets a doctor of “Magnetic Medicine.” After a couple of “indecent” sessions with the doctor in a state of somnambulism, the woman discovers that she is pregnant. The story continues with an account of several attempts made by the doctor to induce an abortion, followed by detailed recipes (reproduced in the text) of the abortifacients. The text then turns to a series of three expert witnesses, each asked to comment upon the efficacy of the abortifacients and the likelihood that the recipes in the book would have successfully induced an abortion. In the end the case against the doctor is undecided, and he receives no punishment for his alleged crimes. The story of the abortion attempts and the recipes for abortifacients are hidden in the body of the text. As with The Book of Secrets, the preface to Magnetism and Immorality appears to promise a medical and scientific treatise about Mesmerism; what it offers instead are seemingly unrelated recipes and a titillating and mysterious story, cast almost as a legal narrative. In the eyes of the police, the three texts discussed here were obscene and immoral because they played upon the mental susceptibility of the reader to superstition, emotionalism, and irrationality. Implicit in their judgment was also a notion of what constituted legitimate knowledge—something that these stories, at least from their perspective, did not offer. In A Terrifying Horrifying Story irrationality is embodied in Eva Riedelin’s mental break, followed by murder, cannibalism, and suicide. Her story works on the reader by producing strong emotions of horror and terror (indeed the title

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explicitly promises these emotions). Even in six pages, the text manages to structure the reader as an empathetic witness by aligning him or her with the sympathetic (and horrified) gaze of the baker’s wife. In their files the police and provincial governments expressed their conviction that emotionalism is dangerous because it depletes mental energy (Geisteskraft), rendering subjects useless for “real work.” It seems possible that their concerns were in fact deeper. Emotions are powerful, pleasurable, and potentially disruptive; all three suggest ways subjects might fall into dangerous (and dark) mental states. Such states rendered subjects receptive to destructive, self-destructive, and potentially rebellious actions. The Book of Secrets and Magnetism and Immorality were troublesome not because of the emotions they evoked through narrative structure but because of the way they invented and authorized what was passed off as scientific and medical knowledge. The existence of this kind of popular medical text spoke to readers’ desire for knowledge about the body and, as in the case of Mesmerism, about the mind. But what readers may have perceived as legitimate knowledge looked like superstition and irrationalism to the police. Seen in this light, the link between obscenity and unproven medical remedies begins to crystallize. In both cases subjects were attracted to remedies and knowledge that masqueraded as legitimate, but they lacked the requisite skepticism to navigate the sea of (titillating) information. Thus in battles over obscenity in the early nineteenth century questions of knowledge—how it was produced, authorized, and policed— were at stake. So too were questions about mental disarrangement produced by strong emotions. In the remainder of this chapter I frame these early nineteenthcentury controversies over printed texts and their allegedly vulnerable readers in a broader context of thinking about the intersection between reading, inner life, and the nature of authority. This involves a return to figures we have already encountered. First, in an attempt to understand the conceptual genesis of secular obscenity law in more detail, I look at the principles of eighteenth-century cameralist thought. I then return to Wessenberg’s 1826 treatise, On the Moral Influence of the Novel, as it represents a serious effort to think about the relationship between popular reading habits, moral development, and actions in the world. In stressing the importance of these contexts, I do not wish to reduce the complexity of each individual development; contemporary debates within civil society about the novel,

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for instance, existed adjacent to (rather than in direct contact with) legal discussions of obscene and immoral texts. Wessenberg’s book did not directly inform the Prussian authorities’ judgment of books like The Book of Secrets or A True Terrifying Horrifying Story of a Mother. Wessenberg was also not explicitly concerned about the formulation of law (though he did advocate some kind of police control of secular reading practices). Nonetheless it is worth mentioning that official fantasies about the mental fragility of uninitiated readers developed in a world in which the properties of inner life were under close scrutiny and reconstruction, and had been for some time.

“Where the Eyes of Lawmakers and Even the Penalties of Judges Cannot Reach” Writing in 1769, the influential legal and political theorist Joseph von Sonnenfels advised absolute monarchs that they should keep a close watch on religious leaders and movements, as religion (unlike law) provided access to the deep recesses of the subject’s soul. “Religion,” he explained, “makes up for the deficiencies of legislation: where the eyes of lawmakers and even the penalties of judges cannot reach, religion is present in these transactions, capable of checking evil enterprises through intimidation.”51 Referring to the spaces that elude “the eyes of lawmakers,” Sonnenfels pointed to the importance of consent to the maintenance of power. Something besides external coercion was necessary to the maintenance of civil order and productivity, two of the primary goals of the regent’s governance. What was needed was access to the soul, for only through direct access could evil be checked at the source rather than prohibited once it had already emerged. One place to look, then, for early links between public order and inner life is the cameralists, who contributed to the creation of secular obscenity law by linking the productivity and security of the state to the morality and virtue of the individual subject. 52 Cameralists provided one coherent set of thought about law, statecraft, and modern policing in the German-speaking states during the second half of the eighteenth century. The justification for the state apparatus was being reconceived during this period, and with it the role of law. Legal reform was pursued by the Austrian monarch Maria Theresa and Prussia’s king Friedrich I, both of whom worked to reform legal codes in ways that would centralize authority and reflect this emerging body of thought about law and statecraft. Supported in their endeavors by

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absolutist rulers, cameralist thinkers articulated a vision of the relationship between the state and its subjects that reflected the impulse toward rationalism, codification, and heightened economic productivity. They promoted a broad and positive (that is, not simply prohibitive and punitive) role for the modern state by suggesting that one of the central goals of statecraft was the promotion of the commonweal (Gemeinwohl) and happiness (Glückseligkeit) among the state’s subjects. This conception of happiness bore little resemblance to AngloAmerican property rights and individual freedoms being articulated at the same time. Happiness was defined in terms of collective prosperity and tranquility through state protection from public disorder. Mental equilibrium was believed to be an essential tool for maintaining order, and the power of the state was promoted by carefully maintaining this equilibrium. Two works are particularly helpful in understanding the connection between statecraft and inner life articulated by cameralists: Johann von Justi’s Grundsätze der Policeywissenschaft, popular enough to merit three printings between 1753 and 1782, and Joseph von Sonnenfels’s Grundsätze der Staatspolicey, Handlung und Finanzwissenschaft, published in six German editions between 1769 and 1820. Justi, the influential cameralist and economist, worked in the Austrian civil service under Maria Theresa and later found work in Prussia under Friedrich I. Justi’s work on statecraft helps us understand eighteenth-century thinking about the link between the moral vulnerability of subjects and the nature of state power. What he called the effective state was defined by positive goals of promotion rather than reaction to transgressions. The state should ensure that society was well-run and orderly, so that subjects could pursue productive lives. This was not a vision of individual freedoms and rights; instead these theorists stressed collective well-being and productivity that linked the behavior of each element of society to the broader happiness of all. According to this theory, the best state was that which promoted the health and happiness of the commonweal by assuring the health, fertility, and productivity of its subjects. Justi’s vision of statecraft was broad in its implications: “One understands statecraft as that which is demanded for the smooth functioning of civic life [bürgerliches Lebens] and therefore for the maintenance of good discipline and order among the state’s subjects.” In Justi’s mind, the key to the development of a community was agriculture, trade, and population growth. These in turn served the twin goals of the state: the health

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of the commonweal and the promotion of collective happiness. “One must see to it,” Justi explained, “that the state’s subjects possess abilities and attributes and maintain discipline and order such as promotes the goal of collective happiness.”53 In Justi’s view, discipline and order were dependent upon virtuous subjects. In a passage entitled “On the Moral Condition of Subjects and the Maintenance of Good Discipline and Order,” Justi emphasized the centrality of subjects’ morality to the collective well-being of the state: “It is undeniable that the more perfect the moral state of a people is, the better equipped is the state to promote happiness. . . . Virtue is the universal mainspring of all states, that which harnesses and directs its activities.” And because virtue was key to the collective happiness of the state and community, it fell to the police to protect and encourage virtuous behavior. “The moral condition of the people must be good,” he explained, “so that they are capable of performing their duties, which in turn draws them into collective life.”54 Since virtue was seen as the “wellspring” of such productivity, censorship was necessary—and not only censorship of books but also of speech. Justi wrote that books should be prohibited if they were “clearly against the principles of religion, against the state, and against good morals; and just as an overly stringent censorship of the sciences and the book trade is very detrimental, it is also true that unlimited freedom of the press has very damaging consequences.” On the one hand, the wealth and prosperity of the state depended on literacy, the exchange of ideas, and open intellectual borders. On the other, “censorship is necessary [and] this must apply to domestic books as well as those streaming in from other states.”55 Prussia’s 1788 press laws express this tension between the values of progress and knowledge and the dangers (particularly to happiness and equilibrium) that attended print. There were other, less rational dangers threatening the fine balance of the commonweal, found particularly in the influence of religious heterodoxy. Justi explained that the state must be on guard that no gatherings take place that, “under the guise of religion, spread enthusiastic fantasies and introduce rude debauchery against good morals that can instigate unrest and uprisings among the people, and can finally give rise to rebellion.”56 The logic of this sentence is worth considering. Religious “enthusiasm” and “fantasies” were coupled with “rude debauchery” and “rebellion” (not an obvious pairing). How did he move from religious enthusiasm to uprisings? By linking

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religious enthusiasm to disorder and rebellion, Justi echoed Sonnenfels’s conviction that religious emotions, enthusiasms, and fantasies could easily result in public disorder and undermine the integrity and functioning of the state. This was in part a matter of an alternate source of authority; if subjects harbored heterodox religious beliefs (say, pietist belief in the integrity of the individual’s experience of the Bible, unmediated by external authorities), they had interior traction against the principles promoted by civil society and the state. Once again this was an admission that a crucial key to governance—the creation of productive, “happy” subjects—was, as Sonnenfels put it, beyond the reach of the law. Justi believed that the good state should focus on the maintenance of order, productivity, and discipline. Yet his vision of the well-ordered and productive state, at least as it emerged from his descriptions of statecraft and the science of policing, was full of tensions. There were, for example, tensions between three sources of authority: religion (not to be trusted and yet to be protected), the state (desirous of power and yet careful that that power be gained through the promotion of productivity rather than repression), and civil society, expressed in terms of science and knowledge and, like religion, not always to be trusted to police itself. Justi was concerned about “enthusiastic fantasies” and “rude debauchery,” but it is unclear whether this threat came from renegade priests preaching popular religion or from secular attacks on religion. Furthermore he imagined the consequences of enthusiasm as riots and uprisings against the authority and order of the state. The social order was also endangered by the misanthrope, who was incapable of contributing to the goal of collective well-being (Gemeinwohl). Yet what is important here are the links between the moral discipline of the individual, the harmony of collective society, and the goal of collective well-being. If such discipline and harmony also served the interests of the regent, that was all to the good, but the explicit words of Justi’s program implied that creating a productive, materially comfortable, and disciplined society outweighed all other goals. This was not a liberal vision of society, as freedom was imagined in collective rather than individual terms, and Justi was not concerned with rights or freedoms. Nor was he an advocate of democracy, a position that was consistent with his view that human nature was “imperfect” and therefore in need of external authority. 57 This should not keep us from recognizing what was new about his thought. In Justi’s text

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the legitimacy of the state rested on its ability to promote the maintenance and well-being of all its subjects. According to this schema, the vulnerability of the state’s subjects translated into the vulnerability of social order. If the society was to promote productivity and health and not to define itself in repressive terms, then it left open the possibility that dangerous elements might emerge that would promote “enthusiastic fantasies” and disorder. This is precisely the tension expressed in Prussia’s 1788 press law; the state was obliged to promote the circulation of useful knowledge, yet this need for knowledge had to be balanced against the dangers that might ensue from mental disorder, fantasy, and flights of enthusiasm. Sonnenfels also explored the link between the moral and emotional life of the subject and the stability of the state. He explained that it was the role of the rationalized state to promote good morals. The state should, on the one hand, “work to develop good morals through social instruments” and, on the other hand, “endeavor to abolish . . . everything that can work against the progress of good morals.”58 The social instruments of promoting morality, he explained, were religion, education, and science, apparently in that order. The task of the enlightened state was to promote financial growth in agriculture and mercantile activity and to assure “tranquility, safety, and order” (Ruhe, Sicherheit und Ordnung). When it came to print, Sonnenfels wrote, the benefits of “seriousminded and moderate investigation of the truth” had to be balanced against the need to protect religion, the state, morality, and personal honor. Personal honor and reputation were values to be upheld and legally protected, as they were consistent with the goal of civil order. Sonnenfels suggested that print should not be allowed to disrupt the stability, productivity, and honor of individuals or of institutions. 59 We see the influence of these ideas in the 1788 Prussian law, which warned against “writers [who] create damage by distributing harmful practical errors about important human affairs; they corrupt morals with indecent pictures and alluring depictions of depravity and with malicious derision and spiteful disapproval of public institutions and regulations.” Cameralist theories of the state and the police directly informed the language of Friedrich’s press law. However, it is more difficult to link the language of local ordinances and edicts to cameralist legal theory. Stralsund’s 1802 edict prohibited print that encouraged “religious enthusiasm, superstition, or [religious] disbelief [Schwärmerei,

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Aberglauben, oder Unglauben].” Authorities in Merseburg reported concerns that young people were vulnerable to books that “do not simply work to the detriment of moral feelings, but also inflame the fantasies.” Justi evoked similar terms, warning the police to make sure that “no gatherings take place under the guise of religion that spread enthusiastic ravings or that initiate crude debaucheries against good morals.”60 The language is similar to the 1824 report from Coblenz, expressing concerns about novels “that corrupt the heart and morals.” Cameralism provided one way of linking emotional states to productivity and social order. Asserting that the virtue of the individual subject was the wellspring of the productive state and the happiness of the commonweal, thinkers like Justi and Sonnenfels provided a nonrepressive vocabulary in which to describe the positive benefits of moral legislation. At the same time—and this presents an odd tension in their writings on the subject—they suggested that these necessary interior spaces were usually beyond the reach of the regents and of law. As a result the cultivation of inner life was largely a matter of attempting to control unreliable figures (whether renegade priests or unscrupulous authors) rather than participating actively in the moral development of subjects. The modern reader, perhaps unaccustomed to drawing parallels between the emotional states generated by religious practice and the provocations of profane narratives, might be surprised by this movement from pietist “ravings” and Schwärmerei to the superstition and mental disequilibrium attributed to reading secular texts. Yet it should not be surprising that as the religious monopoly over the soul gave way to an emerging practice of secular reading, vocabulary used to describe the effects of one would provide a starting point to discuss the other. Religion had long provided a language for Seelenkunde, and this language continued to have currency, even as the emerging secular sciences of psychiatry, neurology, and phrenology (each finding their footing in German-speaking states in the early decades of the nineteenth century) invented new terms to describe inner life. Romantic authors were simultaneously in the process of charting the existence of the human psyche and populating it with emotions, passion, imagination, and enthusiasm. German scientists and authors were at the forefront of various explorations of inner life, and some of these ideas found expression in heated discussions of obscene and immoral texts.

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Wessenberg’s Meditation on Reading and Morality More than any other figure, Ignatz von Wessenberg straddled the distance that separated the street-level scuffles of printers and police and the intellectual world of Romantic authors and early psychologists, each preoccupied with inner life (though imagining that space in different ways). Wessenberg studied what we might today term “mentalities”; that is, he worked to understand the assumptions and styles of thought that framed and shaped political, social, and cultural upheavals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. In his 1826 On the Moral Influence of Novels he applied himself with equal rigor to both highbrow and lowbrow texts, from Goethe to Paul de Kock, the French author of racy popular novels, whose work was often evoked by the police when they wanted to indicate that they were speaking of the lowest end of popular reading habits. In 1833 Wessenberg published On Schwärmerei, in which he offered an extended discussion of this pregnant (and, by the 1830s, no longer exclusively religious) contemporary epithet.61 He was also well-versed in contemporary philosophy, combining his analysis of popular literature with the aesthetic insights of Herder. Wessenberg’s thought also reflected the intersection between religious and secular conceptions of the self that characterized so much of early nineteenth-century commentary on books and morality. As a Catholic and cleric, he used the language of the “soul” (Seele) to describe inner life. If he believed in original sin, he did not stress this point. He chose instead to describe an interior world filled with innate capacities and composed like an instrument of multiple notes, which, when artfully played by stimuli from the external world, might result in a well-balanced chord. The opposite was unfortunately also true: play false notes, cultivate the wrong capacities, and emotional distortion would result. For Wessenberg, the popular novel offered a means of both examining and shaping inner life. As the secular genre most closely associated with imagination and the emotions, novels played the crucial role in shaping the inner space of the self. While he did not bemoan the rise of the novel, he did suggest that this shift to secular reading had serious consequences. It is for this reason that he insisted that the study of the novel and its moral effects is crucial work, not to be dismissed as frivolous. Anticipating the criticism of his peers, he wrote, “Is it somehow irrelevant, how we pass the time when we have a moment free, or which images we favor to amuse our fantasies?”62

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Insisting on the importance of fantasy, Wessenberg laid out an analysis of novel reading, grounded in his own articulation of early psychological theory.63 He was, as we have seen, not alone in his attention to the moral effects of secular reading habits, nor was he alone in his fascination with the substance and tenor of the human mind and soul, a problem tackled by the emerging disciplines of psychiatry, anthropology, and phrenology.64 He was joined in his efforts by the police and censors, who also worked to understand and articulate the mental effects of new reading habits. In a sense Wessenberg’s treatise was a book on aesthetics, in which he used the contemporary novel to examine the constitution of human subjects and community. In taking the genre seriously he probably challenged assumptions of his peers, particularly those who decried the frivolity and immorality of the novel. His position was to explore the moral potential of the genre. While he warned of the dangers of “overheated fantasies” and explained that novel reading (particularly in the Romantic vein) might lead to insanity and Schwärmerei, he also saw potential in a genre that might shape and refine inner life. For Wessenberg, the novel was the important modern genre because it provided a means of examining the content of the soul. He assumed that novels provided relatively direct representations of inner states, and because of this they presented an external manifestation of mental topography: “The deepest secrets of human nature, the riddles of love and hate, the greatest depths of character—such as our lives and histories reveal—are most vividly developed in the novel.” The topography of the soul was deep and inaccessible: “That which lies buried in the depths of man, all his natural inclinations and propensities, everything that springs forth from him, can be seen contained in the vivid colors of the novel.” He also advanced a vision of inner life as complex and varied, full of possibilities and inclinations. “This, in fact, is the advantage of the novel’s art,” he wrote, “that it shows life not simply on its surface—as it would strike the sensualist—but instead opens up life in its inner depths.” A close study of the novel provided tools to investigate the moral impulses of the modern subject, which were found in the depths of the human soul, not (at least not first) in actions in the world. This, then, was a vision of morality focused on thoughts and emotions rather than actions. Wessenberg’s vision of morality stressed the content of the soul; morality was not (or at least not initially) a matter of acts performed in the world. Because the novel played upon the fantasies and emotions of the reader with ease,

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it could distort an otherwise “clear” soul: “Indeed, the real element of the novel is the business of the heart. What a blessing [the novel] is when it functions like water and air, imparting clarity and order. Yet how pernicious it is, when it runs wild in the same space, bewildering and clouding [the heart].” The goal of art was to open the soul to light and air, thus making it more transparent. Wessenberg’s vision of morality was marked by a Christian view of the soul, rooted in intentions and thoughts rather than actions.65 The Prussian police also worked with this Christian-inspired model of morality, albeit grafted onto a secular context. Booksellers, peddlers, and lending library proprietors who passed on obscene and immoral texts were believed to be guilty of the crime of “corrupting the mind and soul” of the youth or of “spoiling [them] for real work or real study.”66 The police evoked the consequences of moral corruption (loss of productivity), but the real damage took place inside the reader’s mind. Wessenberg devoted over ninety pages to detailed discussions of individual novels. While he took on a few novels individually—Sade’s Justine merited separate treatment—he often grouped texts together into loose and idiosyncratic categories: English novels in the style of Fielding, horrifying mysterious novels, and French tales of court intrigue. He read and interpreted each novel through the lens of moral development and insisted that the value of a text was strictly a matter of its effects on the reader and had nothing to do with the intentions of the author. Damage took place in the interior space of the reader’s mind and was prompted by several factors, including problematic depictions of female virtue or marriage and descriptions that mystified or aestheticized a straightforward description of events and characters. Far worse, however, were the texts that provoked and distorted the feelings and fantasies of the reader, and in this regard, Wessenberg had to admit, it was German authors who produced the deepest and most “soul-distorting” novels of all. While French novels like Diderot’s The Nun might provoke the reader’s “feelings of shame,” and English novels like Fielding’s Tom Jones could be sexually explicit, they were nonetheless realistic and bracing depictions of human nature. Frankness about sex was not the problem. Commenting on The Nun, a novel that includes explicit references to sex between women, Wessenberg wrote, “As a painting, it shows deep knowledge of the human heart, and though it is painted in very strong colors, it is also executed with sensitivity, and summons moving tones from hidden chasms. It rewards the attentions of the

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observer of men.” Tom Jones, a novel filled with sex and seduction, presented “a masterful depiction of the raw side of human nature.” Though Wessenberg worried that it was dangerous to “show humans how closely they border on the animal world,” he defended Fielding’s novel on grounds that it was “the apotheosis of natural feelings, which constantly tend toward goodness and mildness, rather than toward the arrogance and pedantry of virtue.”67 Wessenberg did not take issue with depictions of sexual rawness (which he believed might in fact be a good thing, restoring health, vigor, and contact with the reality of human feelings). And though it may seem odd to find an early nineteenth-century Catholic cleric arguing for the benefits of frank literary depictions of sex, his position becomes clearer when we understand what really concerned him, namely, the move away from reason and objectivity toward the subjectivity and exploration of human emotions that accompanied Romanticism and the cult of sensibility. Romantic literature, rooted in a deep and unflinching exploration of the subjective states of human consciousness, was in fact what threatened the mental equilibrium of the German reader. Though the two movements were distinct, Wessenberg nonetheless grouped together Romanticism and pietist Schwärmerei because both explored interiority and embraced emotion and fantasy. It was the heightened emotional states associated with Romanticism and pietist “enthusiasm,” not the rollicking good times of Tom Jones nor the lascivious French denizens of the cloister in The Nun, that threatened to distort and disorder the soul. Indeed he preferred the bracing realism of “natural” and “real” physical desire to the frustrated love of Romantic swooning. Accordingly Wessenberg saved his sharpest moral criticism for novels focused on frustrated and unconsummated passion outside of marriage. The popularity of Johanna Schopenhauer’s 1824 novel, Gabriele, was one example of literature in this style. The protagonist of the story enters into a loveless marriage to please her father, while remaining deeply in love with another man. This popular plot of frustrated love stuck Wessenberg as morally distorting. Responding to Gabriele, he expressed concerns about the depiction of love: The most alluring, enticing deceptions of this relationship, based in the ignorance and misrecognition of nature, only serve to increase the dreadful unhappiness produced by the roguish Eros or love that exists outside the moral constraints that govern sexual urges. With forbidden love between two persons of the opposite sex, there is

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certainly also spiritual love [Seelenliebe]. Yet when have a girl or a young woman, an ardent youth or man sought only the soul of his beloved? The lessons of a chaste, ideal love . . . as consolation and substitution for all the suffering caused by an unhappy marriage . . . are among the most dangerous.68

Here we see Wessenberg’s attention to the proper cultivation of love, which might be achieved with the proper choice of novels. “Roguish Eros” requires cultivation and constraints, but the real problems are the illusions and false expectations that lead to a misrecognition of the realities of sexual love. Cultivating a taste for purely spiritual love, such novels distort reality, produce false expectations, and lead to “dreadful unhappiness.” Wessenberg advanced a surprising argument: the realities of sexual love, even in their rawness, are less immoral than strict virtue that leads to illusions and despair when faced with reality. From an unexpected corner we get an argument for de-repression on grounds that realism, even about sexual love, is preferable to virtuous illusions. Wessenberg was especially critical of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, a novel focused squarely on the unruly emotions (unrequited love, empathy, sorrow) of the protagonist. In Werther, he wrote, “love is elevated to an enraptured madness,” and the hopelessness of this love led to desperation and suicide. In the end Werther created inner disorder; the damage did not take place in the world of actions but in the space of souls: “What does Werther leave in the heart of the reader, except wretched melancholy? It only introduces discordant tones; it never resolves them.” The best thing about the book, Wessenberg concluded, was that it provided a “true mirror of the illnesses of the imagination that held sway in that era.”69 Good novels, by contrast, would act as “medicine for the soul” (Seelische Arznei). They would bolster the impulses of reason and intellect, providing traction against the dangerous impulses of imagination and fantasy. Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses, for example, provided a warning about methods of seduction and painted a portrait of feminine virtue. Wessenberg also applauded Germaine de Stael’s novel Johanna, as “on the whole, it springs forth with vitality and clarity that all worthy happiness [Glückseligkeit] is based on inner unity and purity of heart.”70 Wessenberg’s vision of morality was rooted not in the performance of Sitten, or the external forms of manners and customs. Instead morality was found inside the often hidden folds of the human heart,

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which (depending on shape and substance) might result in happiness or despair. It mattered little if the individual had mastered the external forms of civilized behavior; more important, from Wessenberg’s perspective, was the state of the soul. By defining morality in these terms, he mirrored a shift taking place in early nineteenth-century German thought, expressed in the literature of German Romanticism and in the emerging human and medical sciences. A similar shift emerged (somewhat awkwardly) in the work of police and censors who appointed themselves guardians of the vulnerable souls of inexperienced readers. In the process they produced a task for themselves that was practically impossible: regulating invisible spaces and mental effects rather than concrete actions. The opportunities for resistance were, of course, limitless. Yet this was a moral model that made sense within a specifically German cultural context. Inner life had been invested with meaning through forms of pietist practice (or, as some would have it, Schwärmerisch enthusiasm), philosophical engagement with the nature of inner life by philosophers like Kant and Herder in the late eighteenth century, a tradition of Romantic literature that constituted and explored emotional states, and a tradition of legal reform the defined Gluckseligkeit as one of its explicit goals. For a few decades in the early nineteenth century, it was neither the sexual content of the text nor the transgression of public mores that defined a text as obszön but the danger it posed to open, gullible, excitable hearts and minds.

Summary: Inner Life and the Politics of Authority For Wessenberg, disorders of interior states were not separate from the politics of authority. He linked two disparate developments, pietist Schwärmerei and the effects of the French Revolution, by arguing that in both cases people were swept up in waves of emotion that caused them to detach from reason and external authority. In the case of pietism belief in direct revelation of the word of God through the cultivation of an “inner church” allowed the individual to bypass the authority of religious leaders. The Schwärmer was characterized by the desire to penetrate the secrets of the supernatural world, an attempt to distinguish oneself from the common crowd, disdain for others coupled with an overvaluation of fellow believers, and a failure to recognize authority outside oneself: “The Schwärmer spurns all other leadership as false, preferring his imagination; he places the

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sanctity and propriety he attributes to himself above all other sources of authority.”71 Thus the cultivation of interiority and the painstaking preparation of the inner church led the believer to separate from the outer world and to retreat into the autonomous space of the mind. This retreat from external authority, coupled with a rejection of reason, left the individual without a moral compass and without the necessary traction to resist the convincing (and often nefarious) arguments of others. Pointing to the etymology of the word Schwärmen, “to swarm” like bees, Wessenberg suggested that the individual separated form external authority and reason could be easily manipulated. He identified a similar movement away from reason and toward emotionalism in the period following the French Revolution: “After the feverish anger of the Revolution had completed its cycle and man had regained his senses, a perception arose that reason had exercised a destructive influence on religion, and this in turn produced suspicion concerning reason.” Reason was rejected and “feeling” was embraced, giving way to “the emergence of many groups of mystical Pietists who—no matter how divergent in the details of religious practice—were united in their suspicion of reason.”72 To “fall away from reason” was also to fall away from a reliable source of authority, one that was available to the individual himself (less often herself). It was not the Revolution’s transformation of political forms that disturbed Wessenberg, but instead the cultural reaction to the Revolution. He saw the response in Germany as yet another retreat into subjectivity, emotionalism, and the schwärmerisch authority of the imagination. This manifested itself as a kind of cultural hermaphrodism, in which men moved easily from one position to another, incapable of standing firm: “What a swarm of hermaphrodites we see today in every rank, at all levels of society. . . . Their heads nod incessantly to the left side, and their mouths are constantly open trying to take back what they have just said.”73 Wessenberg’s cultural concerns were cast in terms of gender norms. While novels might bring the sexes closer together by educating both in the language of love and empathy, there was also the danger that men would cease to be adequately firm of character. If both sexes consumed and internalized the lessons of novels with equal enthusiasm, he feared that feminized men would be as vulnerable as women, incapable of autonomy and out of touch with reality. Yet Wessenberg’s logic must be taken one step further. Was the real threat of secular reading habits—linking it to pietism and the French Revolution—the fact that they provided an alternative source of

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authority through which the reader could cobble together an understanding of the world and a vision of the good life independent of “official” voices and sanctioned knowledge? This, of course, might work both ways: for those denied access to formal education (or to knowledge of certain kinds), the availability of books made it possible to cobble together an unauthorized understanding of the world around them. Certainly the growth in the secular book trade and the boom in venues for book exchange opened up the possibility that one could pursue knowledge (or pleasure, or both at the same time) without asking one’s priest, teacher, or father. In this sense it offered a secular version of the autonomy enjoyed within pietist religious practice—the autonomy to bypass authorities in the crafting of one’s own inner life. By positing the importance of novel reading in the cultivation of inner life, Wessenberg made an argument for the essential role reading habits could play in the creation of secular culture. If actions in the world proceeded from the impulses found in inner life, and if morality was rooted in the tone and texture of interior spaces, it was essential that authorities not make the mistake of underestimating the texts that held sway in the mind and heart of the reader. Nor should they underestimate the power of fantasy, dreams, and passions, for these inner impulses found expression in external actions and were thus well worth taking seriously. The expansion of secular reading practices constituted not so much an escape from external authority as a shift in where authority came from, that is, a shift in who could speak, in what terms, and on which subjects. This was the dilemma that faced the censors, police, provincial governments, and the interior minister as they sorted through the growing body of texts available in new venues and new forms. Who could write and, more important, who was strong (or educated) enough to read? Early psychological theory, adopted and employed piecemeal by these authorities (who, after all, looked to civil society for moral models), gave them the tools to contemplate a mutable state subject, one that could be crafted and cultivated, leaving him or her vulnerable to others who set themselves up as authorities on subjects that interested readers. This early nineteenth-century understanding of obszöne und unsittliche Schriften was rooted in a set of concerns about politics and the self specific to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Jan Goldstein writes that particular visions of the self become broadly

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relevant at certain moments in time: “One must speculate that at different historical moments, different mental operations—themselves constructed rather than given—are singled out as particularly anxiety-provoking and, hence, as the focus of cultural obsession.”74 In the period roughly between 1810 and 1830 a complex vision of the human subject and of the relationship between inner life and authority informed discussions of secular reading practices. Ironically, amid all the talk of the vulnerability of the individual there was an important subtext: the individual was vulnerable not only because the world was newly filled with nefarious authors and booksellers but also because he or she was finding new sources of autonomy. This autonomy (the corollary of vulnerability) marked an important shift in the way knowledge was produced, identities were crafted, and selves were refined.

chapter 2

Dubious Sources, Dangerous Spaces, Porous Geographies Understanding the Bookseller’s Crime, 1811–1840

Even if our own approach to things is conditioned necessarily by the view that things have no meanings apart from those that human transactions, attributions, and motivations endow them with, the anthropological problem is that this formal truth does not illuminate the concrete, historical circulation of things. For that we have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their form, their uses, and their trajectories. It is only through the analysis of these trajectories that we can interpret the human transactions and calculations that enliven things. —a r j u n a p p a d u r a i , The Social Life of Things

Arts of transmission. . . . The phrase nicely exemplifies a point that Bacon himself was making in coining it: that what we know depends on the practices of communication by which the knowledge comes to us. —j a m e s c h a n d l e r , a r n o l d i . d a v i d s o n , a n d a d r i a n j o h n s , “Arts of Transmission: An Introduction”

Early nineteenth-century definitions of obscenity hinged on a vision of “half-ripe readers” who were easily seduced by fantasies and half truths. Yet a closer look at the habits of readers suggests that they were anything but. During the 1820s and 1830s readers in the patchwork of territories that constituted the newly expanded Prussia invented strategies to get the publications they wanted. They were aided by the liberal press laws of other German states, porous geographical boundaries through which books could pass and bold colporteurs willing to take risks. A new breed of lending library proprietors capitalized on the loosening of guild restrictions and the growth of the reading public and 56

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established new venues for lending books in cities throughout the German states. Political upheaval in France, punctuated by another revolution in 1830, fueled the German market for French books of all kinds. Polish territories under Russian rule staged a failed uprising against the czar in 1830–31; readers in the German states expressed their interest and sympathy by buying (or lending) books like Johann Scheible’s 1834 edition of Roman Soltyk’s Poland and Its Heroes in the Recent Fight for Freedom.1 That same year the Prussian government responded by banning books published in Polish.2 In some German states popular unrest and political agitation allowed liberal parties to extract political concessions from rulers. In the midst of the changes and reorientations that marked this period, readers participated in an expanding market for books, both licit and illicit. In his subtle discussion of what he terms “the social life of things” the social anthropologist Arjun Appadurai reminds us that the meanings that adhere to commodities are historical and local. They can be discerned only when we suspend our own notions of value and try to understand how people in specific contexts understood the movements and meanings of objects. In this chapter I continue to explore early nineteenth-century understandings of what constituted obscene and immoral publications but take a different route. I will explore how assumptions about social spaces—who offered a book, to whom, and in what context—marked a text as a certain kind of object. As publications traveled along new routes in unprecedented numbers, they accrued meanings that branded them as dangerous, even criminal. Decisions about what constituted obscene and immoral publications were not simply a matter of the words on the page. The judgments of police, censors, and members of civil society were inflected by attitudes toward the people who produced, distributed, and consumed books and about the social spaces they passed through and occupied. To understand the meaning of obscenity we must also consider the changing status of knowledge in the 1820s and 1830s. Contemporaries asked a series of questions: Did it make sense to use the term knowledge to describe the content of the popular novels, sensational tales, travel narratives, popular medical remedies, and astrological texts that occupied the energies of police and censors in the 1820s and 1830s? And if so, what forms of knowledge were deemed dangerous or obscene? Today, in part as a response to the dramatic transformations in the way knowledge is constituted and transmitted (via the Internet, wikis), scholars have begun to explore the implications

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of Francis Bacon’s insight that “what we know depends on the practices of communication by which the knowledge comes to us.”3 This idea opens up 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.

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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,

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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. Seen through the lens of the book trade, the German states appear to be bursting at the seams by the early 1830s. For booksellers and publishers living in (or just outside of) the German states, these were decades of rapid expansion and development. August Prinz, a master publisher with a lucrative side trade publishing pornography in the Danish-controlled city of Altona, described 1830 as a watershed year in the history of German publishing and reading. In the days following France’s revolutionary uprisings, he wrote, “everything that could be written, pro and con, was thrust into one’s arms; it was a race and a hunt, a throwing of oneself into the spirit and ideas of the time, constitutional citizenship, etc.”9 The decades leading up to 1830 were instrumental in laying the groundwork for the expansion Prinz described. During the first decades of the nineteenth century patterns of readership emerged surrounding new social spaces that facilitated these patterns. The geography relevant here was a social geography, a coding of certain kinds of spaces and those who inhabited them, whether those people were women, Jews, or unscrupulous characters in pursuit of profit. The police, local governments, and censors involved in defining obscenity made implicit, possibly unconscious calculations about social spaces, the texts that passed through those spaces, and the people who occupied and used them.

Respectable and Disreputable Sources of Print Two cases, the first in 1827 and the second in 1857, introduce the tricky business of judging publications by the status of those who carried them. Writing in his position as self-appointed amateur historian of the less respectable German book trade, Prinz loved a good scandal. Among the stories he related was that of Ernst Klein, a publisher who found himself at the center of controversy at the Leipzig Book Fair in 1827. According to Prinz, Klein brought to the fair Althing’s Short Tales, attributed to “Althing,” the notorious author of erotic books (and the pseudonym of Christian August Fischer). Prinz explained that Klein’s decision to bring the text caused a stir among his colleagues. “The longer the fair lasted,” Prinz explained, “the

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greater the agitation grew,” until calls were made to confiscate and destroy all copies of Althing brought to the fair.10 To defend himself Klein pointed out that the prominent Leipzig publisher Brockhaus had brought copies of their notorious (and banned) best-seller The Memoirs of Casanova.11 Klein contended that Brockhaus’s publications were certainly as obscene as his own. He urged the members of the booksellers guild to be consistent: if they were going to destroy copies of Althing, they must also condemn Casanova. According to Prinz, a representative from Brockhaus rose to defend himself: “Gentlemen! I cannot deny that Casanova’s Memoirs do have an element of the risqué. . . . Alongside this there is much that is moral. Casanova depicts sins, depicts them provocatively, but he never makes a secret of his wretchedness; he never calls his sins anything but vice; he never denies the remorse and sorrow he has fallen into.” Klein’s works were judged “pernicious, profligate work, responsible for public destruction,” and at this, Prinz tells us, copies of Klein’s stories were “torn into a hundred thousand pieces . . . and surrendered to the trash.”12 Representatives of the Brockhaus firm, by contrast, stayed on at the fair and continued to sell illegal copies of Casanova’s Memoirs and another “immoral” book, Boccaccio’s Decameron. Prinz attributed the different fates of the two publishers to professional politics and favoritism: “Althings Kleine Erzählungen is neither worse nor better than Casanova. The difference lies in the fact that the latter is published by Brockhaus, the former by Ernst Klein. Brockhaus’s firm is distinguished, and Klein’s is unloved.”13 The sexologist and historian Paul Englisch, who studied this episode a century later, saw the conflict in terms of the politics of reputation: “Brockhaus, a well-respected publishing house, only published Casanova. Ernst Klein, on the other hand, was justifiably disliked because of many altercations with his colleagues.”14 Though the man who had established the firm, Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus, had died in 1823, his successors continued to reap the benefits of the founder’s standing in the publishing field. Brockhaus was even allowed to continue advertising illicit books in the pages of the Börsenblatt, the official publication of the booksellers guild. “The same publication made its columns available to the publisher of erotic literature, Heilbutt in Altona. Fischhaber in Stuttgart was allowed to look for copies of Grécourt’s Poems and The Memoirs of Herrn von H. undisturbed.”15 Yet Klein and his wares were ostracized. Sorting through the details of

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this story, it seems clear that a good reputation and the favor of one’s colleagues helped. It is difficult to say why Klein did not command the same kind of loyalty. There is no mention of his being Jewish in either account (though it is possible that he was); the only mention of religious difference comes from Prinz, who suggested that Klein’s tormenter, a bookseller by the name of Perthes, was guilty of selfrighteous pietist fervor. While there is much that we cannot know about the case, we do know that both Casanova and Althing were notorious, illegal, and sought-after names in the world or print. Both works were had been banned in other locales, as evidenced by multiple references to their condemnations in police files and newspapers. Englisch speculated that what marked one text as reprehensible and the other as permissible was a series of calculations about the hands they passed through, not about the words on the page. For the members of the booksellers guild, Althing was obscene, but Casanova was not. The difference cannot be attributed to content or legal status; Klein’s book merited destruction because its distributor was suspect. A case involving similar ambiguities took place in the far western reaches of the Prussian territories in the summer of 1857. Two booksellers, both proprietors of lending libraries, were found lending copies of two popular and illegal books: The Memoirs of Casanova von Seingalt (which reappeared in the wake of the 1848 revolution) and The Memoirs of Lola Montez, a racy memoir based on the real-life relationship between the dancer Montez and the Bavarian king, Ludwig I.16 One of the two booksellers, Lintz, was caught lending the incriminating books in Trier. The second, “Sicius of Saarlouis,” was caught offering the texts through the lending library attached to his bookstore. Sicius and Lintz both occupied geographical positions conducive to obtaining illegal books. Trier and Saarlouis were both in the Prussian Rhine Province. Saarlouis was close to French territories, within walking distance of the border. Trier was close enough to the Belgian border to make shipment easy. Both cities were also close to the southwestern German state of Württemberg, which boasted liberal press laws and a booming book trade. It may be that the copies of Casanova passed across the French border, but the copies of The Memoirs of Lola Montez almost certainly came from Johann Scheible, a publisher from Stuttgart who specialized in illegal works of all kinds. In their report the local authorities in Trier explained that they were pursuing an investigation against Lintz. However, they had dropped

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their case against Sicius, who, they explained, was “an upstanding, respectable man who seems incapable of intentionally acquiring such books,” and “not the sort of man to put himself at odds with authority.” Perhaps Sicius was an established and respected member of the community; maybe he had friends in high places or innocently stocked the two texts in his library without understanding their content. Yet this latter scenario seems unlikely; as a seasoned bookseller, Sicius would certainly have known that the books in question were illicit. Casanova had been banned since the 1820s, when Friedrich Brockhaus fled the German states to continue publishing the volumes, first to France, later to Amsterdam. The Memoirs of Lola Montez was equally notorious as a work that was banned from circulation in lending libraries. The second bookseller, Lintz, caught with the same books in a similar context, did not receive the same consideration. Why was Lintz investigated, while Sicius was deemed respectable and incapable of putting himself “at odds with authority”? Why did Klein suffer the opprobrium of his colleagues and public humiliation at the Leipzig Book Fair, while Brockhaus was favored? And how did all of this reflect the meanings attributed to the texts they carried? Books were not neutral objects that maintained their status regardless of their trajectory; instead the meanings attributed to them by the police and to some extent by members of civil society were dependent upon a complex set of associations, assumptions, and presumptions about who published, handled, and read the books in question. In practice these assumptions had consequences: Lintz had his books taken away and was subjected to police investigation; Klein lost face and lucrative copies of Althing. Readers would have to look elsewhere for these best-sellers of the illicit book trade.

Porous Borders, Dangerous Books If texts were inflected by the hands through which they passed, they were similarly marked by the social spaces they occupied as well as the borders they breached. When we consider the evidence presented in the files of the Interior Ministry, Prussia’s attempt to shore up its borders against the influx of foreign print begins to look like a Sisyphean effort. The revolutions of 1830 reinforced the interest of German readers in publications from France and Poland. Publishers like Scheible in Stuttgart were quick to see a business opportunity and began producing translations of French and Polish works, which were

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then shipped across state borders into Prussia. But this was not the extent of Prussia’s problems when it came to monitoring what landed in the hands of readers. Prussian territorial expansion was not without drawbacks for the Prussian authorities, among them difficulties controlling the border regions of the expanded state—borders occupied by residents new to Prussian rule and by cities in close proximity to other states, and therefore to a different set of press laws and to all kinds of publications banned in Prussia. A striking example of the mechanisms by which illicit publications made their way into Prussian territories was revealed in a report to the Prussian interior minister from the provincial government in Merseburg in 1835. In 1815 Merseburg became part of Prussian territory, but because of the way state borders were drawn, the city was close to the Saxon border, on well-traveled roads leading to the major Saxon city of Leipzig. Authorities in these outlying areas of the Prussian territories complained about porous borders. In 1835, for example, the regional government in Merseburg wrote to explain that they found themselves in an untenable position: “As a result of the absence of lending libraries in most provincial towns and the deplorable state of similar institutions in larger cities, the public on this side of the border frequently satisfies its appetite for reading [befriedigt seine Leselust] through their use of foreign lending libraries and foreign reading circles.”17 The residents of Merseburg were resourceful, employing three techniques to move illicit books across the border. First, people would simply cross the border into Saxony, pick up the publications they wanted, and send them back when they had read them. The second method involved couriers, who were sent across the border by the proprietors of Leipzig lending libraries. These couriers were most likely from the lower echelons of society, and like the colporteur and the so-called Lumpenhändler, or “rag-and-bone man,” they were considered foreign and potentially dangerous figures. In his history of erotic literature, Englisch refers to “sneaky Jewish peddlers” carrying illicit books across the border into Austria.18 The third technique involved buying a subscription to foreign reading and journal clubs; as part of their subscription, readers across the border would receive regular visits from foreign couriers, who would exchange the books and newspapers they read for others. The problem, the authorities in Merseburg explained, was that Saxony had more lenient standards when it came to publishing. Many texts and images considered obscene or offensive were printed freely in Saxony

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Figure 2.  Map of the Prussian territories in relation to neighboring German States, 1815–65. The map includes many of the cities and states involved in the circulation of suspect texts into and inside Prussian territories between 1811 and 1840.

and traveled rapidly across borders. This also meant that Merseburg’s lending libraries were under more pressure to carry illegal works in order to compete with their resourceful competitors in Leipzig. The authorities in Merseburg attributed the sneaky maneuvers of the city’s population to the poor quality of local libraries, suggesting that local residents were in fact driven to foreign venues. (This also reveals that they kept a close enough eye on local lending libraries to know the age and quality of what they carried.) Yet they also evoked the language of pleasure and sensual addiction to describe the allure of the books and newspapers found across the border. Prussian readers were attempting to “satisfy” their “desire for reading” (Leselust). Foreign couriers carrying illegal goods across the border were akin to peddlers carrying illegal patent medicines. The proximity of important Prussian cities to Leipzig also presented problems when Saxon authorities took a hard line and banned publications within their borders. If publishers and booksellers acted quickly, they might find a market for their banned wares within Prussian borders. In an 1834 letter addressed to the Prussian king, a preacher in Berlin by the name of Arendt complained about the

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appearance of six “disgraceful broadsides” (Schandblätter) in bookstores, print shops, and even pipe and tobacco stores in and around Berlin. Arendt wrote that at least two of the works in question were originally published in Leipzig, where they were banned for producing “great offense.” Having been banned in Leipzig, they were smuggled across the border into Prussia, reprinted in “thousands of copies” in New-Ruppin, a town northwest of Berlin, and shipped to several distribution centers. In Berlin they were sent to Kühne on the Breitenstraße, Kirchner and Lehmann on the Gertraudenstraße, and several print stores. According to Arndt, the works in question were sent to distribution depots, where they were distributed in small towns by rag-and-bone men.19 Two of the broadsides in question made satirical use of religious forms: “The Ten Commandments of Husbands Everywhere to Their Wives” and “The Seven Petitions of Wives to Their Husbands” were modeled on the Paternoster. Arndt, who claimed to be deeply engaged in religious education, was scandalized by the idea that parishioners would associate the messages of the broadsides with the sacred forms of religious practice. “This summer,” he wrote, I have worked to impress upon my parishioners the depth, richness, and splendor of the Lord’s Prayer, and in the afternoons, I preach continuously on the topic of the Ten Commandments.” Working toward the “stabilization of morals and order” was all in vain when the local newspaper placed his sermon on the Lord’s Prayer on the same page as “the most malicious parody and satire of that prayer.” Arendt perceived Berlin as the dumping grounds for Saxon “dirt”—in this case the dirt of irreligious publications. 20 The reference to foreign influence provided a vocabulary for making a different kind of complaint: the work in question mocked his own work, endangered religion, and transformed sacred texts into secular, humorous commentary on marriage.

The Literary Dangers of Western Expansion The story of German national unification is often told in terms of Prussian military, economic, and cultural expansion. Yet in the 1830s cultural influence via print moved in the opposite direction: Prussia’s territories in the west, east, and south facilitated the movement of outside cultural influences into Prussia. The state doubled its size in 1815, incorporating new territories that, to borrow David Blackbourn’s phrase, needed “to be digested.”21 Along the borders of its

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territories in the west, Prussia encountered a steady stream of illicit books, newspapers, pamphlets, and images, and it was arguably in this region that Prussian borders were most vulnerable. Sharing borders with France and Belgium made it easy to smuggle illicit texts into Prussia’s western provinces. In 1835, for example, the authorities in Cologne inspected a box of books sent to a local bookseller by the name of Schlesinger, most likely from Brussels, which lay just over the Belgian border. They seized two books in French on the grounds that they were “in part immoral, in part damaging to religion,” and send the two works on to the censors for evaluation. 22 Conditions on the western border practically guaranteed the transmission of desirable French-language texts; with no buffer between these countries and Prussian territories, it was almost impossible to stop the flow of print from west to north and east. There were other important reasons for the vulnerability of Prussian territories in the west. The first involved the unintended consequences of Prussian territorial expansion. During the eighteenth century Prussia had controlled small patches of territory in the west, but it was not until the defeat of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna (1814–15) that Prussia gained substantial lands in the Rhineland. In 1824 Prussian territories expanded again, to create the Prussian Rhine Province, which included the cities of Saarlouis, Coblenz, Bonn, Trier, and Cologne. These Prussian territories bordered on the Netherlands, Luxemburg, and France in the west. In the south they bordered on the Bavarian Palatinate, placing them in close proximity to Baden and Württemberg, German states with liberal governments and press laws. In the 1820s and 1830s Prussia was still working to assert control over these new territories. Political control was complicated by confessional differences; the Rhineland was traditionally Catholic, which created tension with Protestant Prussia. In addition, political sympathies in the Rhineland were not necessarily in line with those of the Prussian state. Many residents of the Rhine Province had sided with France during the revolutionary wars, and Jonathan Sperber has pointed to the continued potency of democratic political aspirations in the Rhineland. 23 Residents of Prussia’s western territories were not always quick to abandon their political sympathies, especially in the face of an absolutist, Protestant, and expansionist Prussia. This became obvious in 1819, when Prussia’s minister of the interior and police sent a circular to the twenty-eight regional governments communicating the provisions concerning lending libraries.

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These provisions included the censorship law of 1788, an edict of the trade police from 1811, and a royal edict from 1819. 24 In Prussia’s new western territories the imposition of rules concerning lending libraries was met with resistance. In 1819 the provincial government in Trier, a city close to the Belgian border, wrote to ask if older Prussian regulations concerning lending libraries, particularly those generated prior to 1815, applied in their region. Prior to their absorption into Prussia, they explained, lending libraries had been largely unregulated. Proprietors had not been required to have any particular training if they could make a basic case for the scholarly or moral necessity of the library. Trier’s police, the report explained, knew nothing of the content of the city’s lending libraries, and in 1819 they were not certain that they had the time or requisite knowledge of literature to make judgments about the books there. 25 In the northwest city of Münster local authorities reported that a search of lending libraries would reveal quite a few publications “against religion, morality and bürgerliche Ordnung,” as well as “offensive, suggestive, and indecent writings.” Very little could be done about this, they explained, as the local police commissioner was over seventy years old and therefore “had no knowledge of contemporary literature of this kind and no time [to undertake such a job].”26 Though the letter adhered to the conventions of official correspondence with Berlin—conventions that demanded respect and even supplication—Münster’s response in fact constituted a refusal. Such responses were perhaps moments of resistance on the part of regional governments and populations. In their attempt to create clear categories and to decide what should be under police control, the authorities in Coblenz revealed something of their worldview: reading involved public spaces and private spaces; private spaces were not based on profit but on private association. In their view profit was always problematic when it came to reading. The entrepreneur (presumably the person trying new techniques to generate an interest in his wares) was more dangerous than the private individual distributing books without charge. In using the term entrepreneur the authorities also differentiated newfangled techniques of bookselling from those employed by established proprietors of “respectable” bookstores. They assumed that books taken home and read in private were more dangerous than those read in public venues. Possibly they counted on the surveillance of others, and therefore on greater self-regulation, in public spaces. Books taken home could be read in secret; they were part of a solitary experience

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unmediated by the potentially moderating forces of social pressure. In their antipathy to profit, entrepreneurialism, and solitary reading, the authorities in Coblenz expressed values that were reiterated by authorities in other cities throughout the 1820s and 1830s. Their attitudes were informed by a set of assumptions about social order and the people and things that threatened to destabilize that order. 27 In fact the authorities in Coblenz had every reason to be concerned about entrepreneurial booksellers. For publishers and booksellers interested in delivering their wares to a consuming public, the existence of a Prussian state in the northwest region of the German Confederation presented a series of business opportunities based on crossing borders. The details of where, how, and by whom those borders were breached is worth considering in some detail, as it sheds light on the movement of books, pamphlets, and images and on the meanings that adhered to print as a result of this movement. The case of Scheible in Stuttgart provides an excellent example of the opportunities opened by Prussian expansion. Scheible established his printing business in Stuttgart in 1831, just as the market for French books was at its peak in the German states. Records indicate that he moved to Stuttgart in the 1820s, and it seems likely that he pursued an apprenticeship in publishing, as he later became a member of the booksellers guild. He was thus well-situated in the early 1830s to take advantage of the upturn in the economy and the business opportunities afforded by Württemberg’s liberal press laws coupled with proximity to France. According to Englisch, Scheible employed a sort of triangular trade, importing books from France and producing quick reprints and translations in Stuttgart, which he then moved across state borders into other regions of Germany. 28 He continued to publish and sell books in Stuttgart until his death in 1866, and as far as Stuttgart’s tax collectors were concerned, he ran a legitimate and successful business publishing and selling books. In 1835 his business was so good that Scheible could afford to employ six assistants and pay considerable taxes to the city of Stuttgart. 29 Württemberg’s press laws were more liberal because they did not include prepublication censorship, not because authorities did not keep an eye on the circulation of texts. 30 According to the state’s press law of 1817, publications could be confiscated for several reasons, among them “offenses against morality” (verstoßen gegen die Sittlichkeit) or “scandalous content” (scandalöser Inhalt) and illegal reprint. 31 In the absence of prepublication censorship, however,

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it was possible to produce texts of any kind, which would then be moved across state borders. Under the cover of this legitimate business, Scheible published a remarkable array of illegal books, many pirated and sold in inexpensive, unbound editions. Capitalizing on public interest in the romance between Lola Montez and the Bavarian king Ludwig I (a relationship that led to the latter’s abdication), Scheible produced a quick German translation of a work that appeared in France in 1849, Lola Montès: Memoirs accompagnés de lettres intimes de S. M. le roi de Bavière.32 By reprinting or translating foreign books, Scheible was able to spare himself the cost of paying royalties to authors, and he seems to have passed this savings on to consumers. Writing in the 1930s, Englisch complained that Scheible’s erotic publications were inexpensive and largely stolen. The publisher, he explained, cared little for the production of these works, which were “small, miserably printed and tiny volumes on even more miserable paper, bound in plain, thin, gray covers which served as the distinguishing marks of this kind of product.” Englisch appears to have been equally disapproving of Scheible’s “lack of creativity,” as many of these “thin, gray” volumes were unauthorized reprints of foreign, particularly French, works, which he was able to offer for even less because he avoided paying a royalty to the author. For example, Englisch explained, “whereas Thérèse Philosophe cost 2–3 Louisd’or in its nation of origin, Scheible was able to produce a reprint for 1 Thaler 10 Silbergroschen. It is no wonder that his trade in forbidden wares flourished.”33 Piracy, the practice of printing unauthorized versions of others’ works, was both illegal and professionally frowned upon, but it appears that rules governing copyright did not apply to foreign publications. 34 In 1842 the booksellers guild in Leipzig initiated an investigation of Scheible based on a statute that punished “dishonorable crimes,” namely piracy, passing false banknotes, or conviction of either crime in the publisher’s state of origin.35 The evidence suggests that piracy was the charge against Scheible. Scheible’s official catalogues list only the legal literature he produced and sold. Yet we know that he published far more than he listed, as his illicit publications show up in rare book collections and libraries in Germany and the United States. (The illicit publications appear to be more often kept and collected and are therefore more easily found today than that their legal counterparts.) Scheible’s official catalogues, housed in the archives of the Börsenverein in Leipzig,

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do confirm the fact that Scheible leaned heavily on French originals. In 1832, his second year of business, J. Scheible’s Buchhandlung (one of at least four imprints he used) offered forty-two titles in all, eighteen of which were French, either translated into German or reprints of the original. Those who read French could purchase Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris in two octavo volumes or a travel book about the Congo, Voyage au Congo et dans l’intérieur de L’Afrique equinoxiale, fait dans les annés 1828, 1829 et 1830. Just two years after the 1830 uprisings in France that riveted readers in the German states, Scheible offered Vingt mois ou la révolution de 1830 et les révolutionnaires in unmarked paper binding for 18 Groschen and a German translation with paper binding on vellum for 1 Reichthaler.36 Scheible also made money from dream books, books of popular medical advice, and popular publications about France. The 1832 catalogue, for example, listed six books by J. Morel-Rubempré, including Protection and Help with Venereal Disease, An Important Handbook for Everyone who Protects Himself from Venereal Evil, and one titled Reproduction, or the Strengthening of the Masculine Power, and the Healing of Onanism among both Sexes, a Popular Advice Manual for All Who Seek Advice About this Important Subject. On the topic of France, Scheible offered works by Lamartine and Mme. de Staël, but he also sold French libelle (small, inexpensive, racy tales of public figures) among them Mémoires sur la vie privée de Marie Antoinette and Mémoires d’une femme de qualité sur Louis XVIII.37 It appears that Scheible published a separate catalogue of his reprints of erotic literature and other “curiosities” under the title Catalogue for Bibliophiles (Katalog für Bibliophilen).38 We also know that Scheible became an important editor and publisher of books on magic and the occult in the 1830s and 1840s. In 1839, for example, he published The New Theater of Wonders: The Art and Interesting Phenomena in the Fields of Magic, Alchemy, Chemistry, Physics, the Secrets and Powers of Nature, Magnetism, Sympathy and Related Sciences. In the 1840s he published such books in a series entitled Library of the Secrets of Magic and Books of Revelation, which included The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses.39 As mentioned earlier, many Germans were fascinated by the Polish uprisings in 1830 and 1831. Scheible was especially successful with his translation of Roman Soltyk’s book on the topic. As many Polish émigrés passed through the German states on their way to France, people became interested in their struggles and stories from exile.

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Englisch wrote that Soltyk’s book was one of Scheible’s most profitable publishing decisions: “After the fall of Warsaw, all Germany was fascinated by the Polish liberation movement. In Paris, Roman Soltyk described the misfortune of his people in beautiful language. Scheible translated [the book], and made his fortune on it.”40 Englisch speculated that liberal press laws, the proximity of France, and the relative economy of paper and printing prices in the south—combined, of course, with luck and timing—contributed to the publisher’s success. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s Scheible and his six employees appear to have been working without rest in Stuttgart, publishing, pirating, and reselling an array of works that would be illegal in neighboring states. These works could then be taken across the border into Prussia without too much initial scrutiny. (They would be scrutinized if they were confiscated inside the border.) Scheible’s case highlights the opportunities afforded by the loose association of German states for entrepreneurial types who were willing to capitalize on open markets, porous borders, and curious readers. Publications banned inside Prussian territories nonetheless slipped across borders and found their way into lending libraries and peddlers’ boxes and under the counter in bookstores. Given such opportunities and the reciprocal nature of the illicit book trade, it is no surprise that those within Prussia expressed concern about “the flood of foreign books” exposing vulnerable readers.41 In 1821 an article in the Mainzer Zeitung, a newspaper from the newly Prussian city of Mainz in the Rhineland, expressed a sense of being under siege by an unscrupulous and foreign book trade. In this case the danger was moving west to east, across the Rhine. The source of bad books was the “left side of the Rhine,” the region closest to the French border. “How audacious book makers are in our times, as they find ways to elude or escape the laws. Indeed, a corrupted student of a hungry schoolmaster has patched together a horrifying mix of the most common obscenities and the long over-used scandalous French book into a highly trivial concoction and named it The German Don Juan.” Even worse, the article continued, was the slander perpetrated by the book: the title page named a respected author, a well-known printer, and an established Berlin bookseller as the producers of the book, thus smearing the names of three “men of honor.” The author was also outraged that the book had been printed with a publication date of 1820, which he took as an attempt to bypass the censor by indicating that the book had already received

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an imprimatur. “The sale of damaging—in fact, completely poisonous—plants should be prevented or punished by every good local police . . . ; throughout civilized Europe, communities have erected quarantines against invading disease.”42 Bad books were like a disease that could not be stopped, in spite of efforts to cordon, barricade, and seal the borders. As publications traveled across borders and in and out of states, passed from the proprietor of the lending library to the courier and into the hands of a reader (and perhaps to another reader and back again), they became saturated with meaning. While the meaning stemmed in part from the content of the works, the trajectory of books also played an important role in how print culture came to be understood as something that was potentially dangerous, destabilizing, even poisonous. For others, those who walked to the border of Saxony to meet the courier or the visitor to the lending library in Saarlouis who found a copy of the banned Memoirs of Lola Montez, finding these forbidden books may have been a moment of fear or excitement, for they had managed to obtain a desired and forbidden object. (Perhaps desired because forbidden?) The circulation of print provided a visible reminder that, absolutist rule and Restoration politics aside, many things were changing in the German states between 1820 and 1840. Of the many meanings extrinsic to the content itself that adhered to books as commodities, the ideas of circulation, profit, expansion, and entrepreneurship were among the most important.

Border Crossings and Colporteurs Itinerant booksellers, or colporteurs (a term borrowed from the French in the seventeenth century), carried books, pamphlets, newspapers, songs, and images from city centers like Leipzig, Hamburg, Stuttgart, and Berlin to outlying areas.43 They facilitated the mobility of print and became a potent symbol of its dangers. They also provide an excellent example of the way objects are often marked by the social relationships that include and define them. As Ronald Fullerton discovered in his research on the German mass-market book trade, “[colporteurs] were a fascinating lot, men of varied and sundry pasts, from criminals to men of sleazy cunning to sincere businessmen.”44 Another historian of the book trade, Heinz Sarkowski, explained that throughout the eighteenth century colporteurs sold books in rural areas where peddlers provided the only access to print:

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“Every place where practical advice, information, and entertainment were desired—there the book peddler offered his wares: prayer-books and medical books, books of dream interpretation and fortune telling, pamphlets, songs, pictures and tracts, newspapers with news of the wonders and catastrophes of the world.”45 Colporteurs also met people’s practical needs, bringing schoolbooks and devotional works but also catering to readers’ desire for entertainment with books of prophecy and tales of terror like those discussed in the previous chapter. The works they sold were cheaply produced, often in pamphlet form, unbound, and printed on inexpensive paper. Officials used different terms to describe the varieties of nineteenth-century ambulant booksellers. The term Kolporteur seems to have referred to booksellers who traveled long distances; fliegende Händler was applied more often to sellers on urban city streets. Contemporaries also used the term Hausierer, a seemingly more generic term for “peddler.” Local authorities and the police also referenced judische Kleinhändler (Jewish petty dealers) and occasionally Vagabonden (vagabonds), a derogatory term for peddlers that equated mobility with homelessness and lack of place. In the early nineteenth century the police also mentioned “song and picture sellers,” who presumably produced and sold some of the publications found in the boxes of peddlers and colporteurs. As a profession, colportage appears to have had little to recommend it, and those who did earn their living as itinerant booksellers were socially marginal figures. Prinz, who himself used peddlers to sell the books he published, expressed disdain for these, the lowest members of the book trade: “Among traveling [book] salesmen belonged a very peculiar people with a high degree of brazenness and impudence. If they were thrown out of a house, they were not ashamed to reappear in another form.” Does this mean they resorted to disguises? This seems possible; contemporary characterizations of these figures suggested they would do anything to turn a sale. Prinz asserted, “People like to live well and one generally needs more while on the road, and people live for today and not tomorrow—as a result, when trade is slack, they [colporteurs] are driven to steps of violence and temptation, which are often not entirely honest.”46 Respectable Germans, Fullerton writes, “equated colporteurs with the worst sort of degenerate tramps.”47 In the early nineteenth century ambulant booksellers appear to have been associated with the lowest end of the book trade and the

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allegedly unsavory tastes of the “common man.” Since the official records discussed here mark only the potentially unsavory works that passed through the suspicious hands of colporteurs, we don’t learn about the other kinds of works they probably carried, among them primers, devotional works, and practical texts on letter writing or household skills. In 1810, during the revolutionary wars, the Prussian Interior Ministry was concerned with the circulation of “songs, pamphlets, and tales of wonder.” Gathering information, they asked regional governments to comment on the appearance of such works: If they existed, were they published in the region, or brought in by colporteurs? Did they experience an “influx of immoral songs”?48 What was the nature of this trade? Reports on colportage provide a sense of the ambulant book trade. In the Prussian city of Königsberg the provincial government reported that the trade in pamphlets, tales, and songs seemed bound up with the activities of the local bookbinder and with annual fairs that brought in traders from other regions. The authorities in the eastern city of Leignitz reported something similar, explaining that religious festivals and annual fairs provided spaces where “so-called spiritual wares are sold—wares that exude the most tasteless superstition, and ruin the good morals of the common man.” (This language of morals and the common man is constantly repeated and seems to have been suggested by the authorities in Berlin.) A response from the Prussian city of Marienwerder explained that itinerant booksellers fell under “the broader police scrutiny of all vagabonds.” Strict local policies of concessions for publishing, bookselling, and prepublication censorship translated into a managed field of book production, but they would not hesitate to confiscate “songs, fairy-tales, or pamphlets” that “instigate immorality, indecency, or vulgar . . . superstition.” They only way to control the content of imported print, they explained, was careful scrutiny of outside vendors to provide documentation to the local police, who would check that “every single publication” was authorized.49 Consider the language describing colporteurs and their offenses. Who, for example, was the “common man,” referenced repeatedly, whose susceptibility to “offensive and intolerable publications” threatened to result in “immorality, lack of manners, and base superstition”? And what of those who supplied these works, those who were practically “vagabonds” and the “Jewish petty traders” who occupied the edges of public fairs, church festivals, and the streets of the

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capital city? The threat was simultaneously imagined as internal and external. An internal population existed whose adherence to certain values—morality, orthodox religious beliefs, decorum, high-mindedness, unwavering belief in the state—was alarmingly unstable. When coupled with profit-seeking vendors, who were associated with Jews, vagabonds, and the pettiest of traders, this internal threat suggested that the edifice that maintained stability was fragile at best. Though the language suggested that outsiders were the source of the threat, the real point of potential fracture seems to have been the uncertain loyalties, morals, and decorum of the common man. We will see that these institutions posed dangers of their own. Patrons were imagined as borrowing “frivolous,” time-wasting texts from “unscrupulous” lenders bent on providing entertainment to “reading-hungry” consumers. Itinerant peddlers were also associated with particular kinds of social spaces: markets and festivals that brought foreigners. What kinds of texts were capable of depriving men and women of their reason (or orthodox religious beliefs) and manners? Despite overlapping methods designed to regulate the circulation of print— concessions for printers and booksellers, prepublication censorship of manuscripts, permits for foreign vendors—illicit publications regularly slipped through the cracks. Between 1810 and 1836 these texts included the story of the murdering mother, Eva Riedelin, found in Halle in 1817. In the same year the police in Berlin confiscated another pamphlet, The Story of the New Prophet, attributed to J. A. Mueller (himself the “new prophet”), “being sold by the calls of itinerant vendors on the streets of the capital city” and dangerous because it “promoted the most base superstition and belief in miracles in opposition to contemporary political relationships.”50 The New Prophet tells the story of a man, Mueller, who has a vision about the outcome of the revolutionary wars and sets out to warn the Prussian king about the premonitions he has had. Texts carried by colporteurs also include the cartoon-like Witzblätter, or comic broadsides, brought to the attention of Berlin’s police department in 1837 by the “preacher Arndt.” He took issue with “The Ten Commandments of Husbands Everywhere to Their Wives” and “The Seven Petitions of Wives to Their Husbands” on grounds that they offended against religion. According to the records of the police, multiple illegal copies of a work entitled 24 Astrological Prognosticators were found circulating in 1811.51 The work was not pasted into the files, as others were, nor could it be found in libraries; it is likely that the book provided advice on reading

Figure 3.  Title page of Geschichte des Neuen Propheten (probably published around 1816). This book was among those confiscated and pasted unbound into the files of the Prussian Ministry of Interior concerning colportage. Geheimes Staatsarchiv PK, I. HA Rep. 77, Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 243, Nr. 50, Bd. 1, 63.

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horoscopes and predicting the future, which would have placed it squarely in the category of “texts that encouraged superstition.” The 1811 decision to ban 24 Astrological Prognosticators was overturned in 1844 after an appeal by the publisher, signaling a shift in attitudes toward what counted as immoral and obscene. Yet in the earlier context all of these texts ran afoul of the authorities on moral grounds: Eva Riedelin’s story demonstrated the loss of mental equilibrium; The New Prophet and 24 Astrological Prognosticators both suggested a relationship to the future that was not articulated by a priest or the king; and the broadsides poked fun at marriage and religion, institutions that were central to the maintenance of order. But these texts and the qualities attributed to them were also marked by obscure origins (anonymous authors, false imprints, booksellers without guild membership or concessions) and disreputable social spaces and figures. The status of the knowledge contained between the (usually paper) covers of such texts was marked by their “arts of transmission.”52 The practitioners of communication were, in this case, Jews, petty traders, foreign publishers—all of whom occupied the fringes of communities. Yet it was knowledge nonetheless—knowledge sought by readers and deemed dangerous enough to concern officials, who were (at least officially) afraid that too much of the wrong kind of knowledge would produce a population that no longer adhered to social conventions, religious orthodoxies, or clear hierarchies of where knowledge came from and who had access to it. The arts of transmission were not neutral but actively marked texts as knowledge of a certain kind.

Lending Libraries Colporteurs, then, were associated with the loss of moral bearings and the potential instability of borders, both the borders of the state and (increasingly) the borders between home and street and between rural and urban areas. Lending libraries were associated with the moral dangers of frivolity, the loss of time, and the cultivation of fantasy. More than any another venue of book exchange, the early nineteenthcentury lending library occupied the attentions of the police and local authorities, who were preoccupied with the success of these apparently fly-by-night operations, often simply run out of an established bookstore. Indeed the term library seems to have referred to a collection of books to be loaned for a fee rather than a dedicated space

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in which to read. 53 For booksellers, their bookstores could double as spaces to lend books and pamphlets, but it is unclear where those who did not already have shops housed and distributed their wares. Some may have rented spaces to accommodate their collections; others seem to have employed couriers to deliver books to their subscribers. 54 By the 1820s lending libraries had sprung up in cities and towns throughout the German states. In 1826 the city of Magdeburg and surrounding areas (with a population of eighty thousand, according to an estimate by an applicant for a lending library) supported five lending libraries, and there were still more requests for concessions. The authorities in the Rhine city of Cologne reported three lending libraries in their immediate jurisdiction, including one in Mühlheim that carried light novels, plays, and a potentially dangerous catalogue of prohibited books. The region surrounding Coblenz supported eight lending libraries in 1824, including one run by a woman proprietor by the name of Julia Holbacher. 55 In Coblenz the authorities were also concerned about a variety of other institutions where people could find books, pamphlets, and newspapers. They wrote the authorities in Berlin to ask about restrictions on other venues, some of which they deemed more like lending libraries than others. 56 There were, for example, private casinos and clubs where books were available, as well as private collections and “reading circles for books and journals.” Of this latter category, they explained, there were two varieties: private reading circles composed of individuals who bought and circulated books collectively, and a second variety of reading circle initiated by an entrepreneur for a distinct group of subscribers and run for profit.57 The profit motive was often decisive in drawing legal distinctions, though it is not immediately clear why this should have been the case, as so-called dangerous books would seem to have been dangerous no matter how or where one found them. Yet context was all important when it came to marking a text as morally dangerous. Price appears to have been important to both the success and the potential danger of the lending library. In 1825 the Berlin bookseller Adolph Wolff announced on the front of his catalogue that the books in his store “could be borrowed under cheap terms.” In his application for a concession to open a lending library in Magdeburg in 1826, M. Morgenstern suggested the relationship of his projected prices to those of his competitors. 58 Morgenstern left many details unarticulated, so we have to rely on guesswork to piece together the pricing structure. The three-month

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For 3-month subscription

Competitors’ price

Morgenstern’s proposed price

1 Book 2 Books 3 Books

22 Silbergroschen 1 Thaler, 5 Silbergroschen 1 Thaler, 15 Silbergroschen

15 Silbergroschen 22.5 Silbergroschen 1 Thaler

Table 1.  Proposed prices for a subscription to his lending library submitted to the Prussian Interior Ministry in 1824 by M. Morgenstern in his application for a concession to open a lending library in Magdeburg

subscription seems to have limited the number of books the reader could borrow at one time but probably did not limit the number of times the reader could exchange those books for new ones. Reading at the rate of a book a week, a person with a one-book subscription could read twelve books in three months for less than the price of buying one inexpensive book. 59 The second pricing structure offering one book at a time would probably appeal to the reader who did not anticipate reading several books over a three-month period. Under this second set of terms one could rent a whole book for 2.5 Silbergroschen, about one-eighth the price of buying even the least expensive book. And all of this was before Morgenstern’s proposed price reduction, a gesture he explained on grounds that reading contributed to the “moral and spiritual elevation” of the public and should therefore be available to everyone. For their part, the authorities imagined an inverse relationship between price and danger: lower prices signaled greater potential harm. The police in Berlin wrote, “Our supervision of lending libraries must be more rigorous than our supervision of bookstores, for the former caters to a more mixed and numerous public—a public that, for the most part, lacks basic knowledge and judgment.” Through the books obtained in lending libraries, they explained, people “attempt to secure some kind of education [Bildung], the result of which is often malformation and demoralization.” This “malformation” spread because lending libraries offered access to an almost unlimited supply of books at a reasonable price. “Because they charge so little money, the reading-hungry public gravitates to the lending library, and for every 50 readers who pay market prices to buy their own books, lending libraries probably supply 1,000 subscribers.”60 Was the harm done by lending libraries simply more extensive and therefore more dangerous? (One thousand “malformed” readers would seem more

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Per book without subscription

Competitors’ price

Morgenstern’s proposed price

Whole book Half the book

2.5 Silbergroschen 1.25 Silbergroschen

1.5 Silbergroschen 8 Pfennig

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Table 2.  Proposed price per book to be offered to the clients of Morgenstern’s lending library

pressing than fifty.) It seems instead that the police thought of those who patronized lending libraries as different kinds of readers. They were perceived as at the mercy of their desires (at least for books), less capable of making judgments, and more subject to moral and spiritual distortion. As we saw in the previous chapter, the idea that some readers were particularly fragile authorized greater supervision, and the police began to scrutinize lending libraries with particular zeal. Because of their efforts we know something about the books carried in early nineteenth-century lending libraries. Due to the nature of the sources, we know the most about the books and other texts that transgressed the boundaries of what was permissible for lending libraries to offer their prodigious and vulnerable readers; these were books that offended against religion, morality, or decency, that lacked deference to the regents and to the laws of the land, or that aroused discontent with the government. As a result lending libraries were subject to a variety of controls. To begin, those who wanted to establish a lending library had to appeal to the local government for a concession. A full list of the books included in the collection had to be submitted to the police for their review, and new books could not be included without the permission of the police. If proprietors broke these rules, they could be stripped of their concessions and subject to fines or to jail sentences.61 In their regulation of lending libraries, the police focused on particular kinds of texts. Some were popular works, like the famous story of the thief, Rinaldo Rinaldini, and Brockhaus’s Memoirs of Casanova, both confiscated in 1824, presumably on grounds that they would harm the morality of readers. A year later a bookseller and proprietor of a lending library by the name of Wilhelm Vieweg wrote to complain that the local police had confiscated works from his library that had been sold openly for thirty years. He defended his collection on grounds that he had “a substantial display of good, important works” rather than “inferior novels.” He asked the police to return

Figure 4.  A printed catalogue of the books carried in the lending library of Berlin bookseller Adolph Wolff. The proprietors of lending libraries were required to submit lists of their inventories to the Interior Ministry and to note additions to their circulating collections if they were not in the printed catalogues. Geheimes Staatsarchiv PK, I. HA Rep. 77, Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Nr. 1, Bd. 1, 93.

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his confiscated books, among them German translations of Boccaccio, Diderot, Voltaire, and Crebillion. This suggests that through the lens of at least one member of Berlin’s police corps, French books, in this case in translation, warranted suspicion in 1825. Justifying their decision to confiscate certain texts, Berlin’s police headquarters commented on other dangers contained in Vieweg’s lending library, namely, texts whose “political tendencies” moved in three (potentially dangerous) directions: toward the “division of Poland, . . . the French Revolution,” and, in the older works, a discussion of the (apparently Prussian) government’s demagoguery and machinations in the face of these two events. Wolff, whose lending library catalogue was pasted into the files of the interior minister, carried some questionable titles, including six copies of Boccaccio’s Decameron, five copies of The German Don Juan, and a copy of the regularly confiscated pamphlet, Napoleon and His Court.62 Reading these police reports against the grain and looking for traces of the readers who used these spaces, one imagines the excitement that probably accompanied subscriptions to lending libraries— subscriptions that offered a seemingly limitless supply of books and occasional access to forbidden texts (if readers could find them before they were confiscated). For men and women shut out of guild professions and emboldened by the new Prussian commitment to principles of free trade and competition, which was one reason for the boom in new lending libraries, a concession represented a business opportunity that needed to be protected. At the same time it most likely created incentives to keep “hot” items safely hidden but nonetheless available to readers. As competition increased one could distinguish oneself with a reputation for having illegal works. This, at least, would go some way toward explaining why so many proprietors (even allegedly “upstanding” businessmen like Sicius in Saarlouis) were caught with illegal books in their collections. The expansion in book consumption appears to have been marked by the social spaces of lending libraries, even though the details of the actual spaces remain obscure. Porous borders and colporteurs threatened to blur carefully protected borders between states, linguistic groups, and urban and rural spaces. Lending libraries suggested that these blurred borders threatened inner states. Unseasoned but undeniably curious readers with little formal education were flocking to libraries; once there, they gravitated toward publications that pointed to the emergence of a new set of values that asserted the pleasure

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Figure 5.  A list of the books confiscated from the lending library of bookseller Wilhelm Vieweg in Berlin in 1825. Vieweg asked the police to return his confiscated wares, among them German translations of Boccaccio, Diderot, Voltaire, and Crebillion. Geheimes Staatsarchiv PK, I. HA Rep. 77, Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Nr. 1, Bd. 1, 93.

of solitary reading. If authorities wrung their hands at the “frivolous” and “time-wasting” attributes of novels, they were also forced to acknowledge that their popularity was spreading. The frivolous was also connected to more dangerous pursuits, texts that, sometimes simply in passing, made mention of historical events the government would rather people forgot. The appeal of a book like Casanova’s Memoirs, for example, was not simply a matter of sex. The Memoirs

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also provided a certain kind of education about European governments, the French Revolution, geography, and the cultural mores of other states and countries. Indeed the energy expended keeping an eye on lending libraries and the attention devoted to scrutinizing “frivolous texts” suggests that this epithet was disingenuous. The “frivolous” pursuit of entertainment was part of a pursuit of knowledge. How else can we understand the endless attention to these books if they were in fact so frivolous? The anxieties surrounding lending libraries and colporteurs were, at least in part, about what constituted “real” knowledge. The democratization of print—for this is ultimately what the cheap pamphlets, colporteurs, and lending libraries amounted to—opened the possibility for the broader dispersal of knowledge. At stake, then, were the nature and effects of this knowledge. Based on this evidence, we can begin to think about the kinds of knowledge that provoked both the interest of readers and the concern of officials in the 1820s and 1830s. Sexual knowledge was dangerous, especially when combined with politics in a “frivolous” concoction typical of early nineteenthcentury texts. Knowledge of the conditions in France and Poland, again often combined in popular publications with a variety of other narrative pleasures, as in The Secret Love Affairs of the Emperor Napoleon, was also particularly sensitive. Popular medical treatises were subject to confiscation because, like unproven medical remedies, they presented potential harm to the body. If the state imagined itself as promoting the health and well-being of the individual bodies—and thereby the collective public body—then texts that endangered that body were dangerous. Finally, books that claimed to see into the future, including fortune-telling books, dream books, and books of wonder and prophesy, were also deemed dangerous on the grounds that they distorted the intellectual integrity of the reader. Yet it is nonetheless interesting to consider why the secular state was concerned with the views of the future harbored by the population. Perhaps state officials sensed that imagining other routes to the future produced people more willing to take risks or less invested in a vision of fate tied to hard work, religion, and social order. If the deeper disquiet that sparked this careful scrutiny of reading habits remained unarticulated and perhaps largely unconscious, the state understood that allegedly frivolous cultural artifacts could have profound effects on the minds and attitudes of readers. “Obscene and immoral publications” did not form a discrete category, carefully sectioned off

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from other kinds of injuring texts; instead the meaning of this category emerged from a set of relations to other kinds of dangers: bodily harm, mental distortion, and political subversion. These categories existed in proximity to one another, creating a broad sense of danger via the printed text.

Figures at the Margins of the Book Trade Printed texts were also marked by the hands that touched them. During the 1830s questions about who could be trusted with the presumably delicate minds of Prussian readers took the form of debates over the status of Jews as colporteurs and as proprietors of lending libraries. In the German states publishing, printing, and bookselling were guild professions, subject to the training, privileges, and protections enjoyed by members. Guilds generally excluded women (with the exception of widows) and Jews, and the booksellers’ guild was no exception. Fully vetted members of the booksellers’ guild were expected to be educated in the principles of business and to have knowledge of several languages (at least enough to read titles and précis in Latin, French, and English). Their training consisted of an apprenticeship under a master publisher or bookseller, and a Wanderjahr, a period during which journeymen (advanced now from apprentices) traveled and worked in the publishing houses of established professionals.63 By contrast no formal training or guild membership was required to establish a lending library. In early nineteenth-century Prussia all that was technically required to establish a lending library was an official concession, handed out at the discretion of local authorities on the basis of a written application. Yet to apply for that concession required a high degree of literacy, as those applying had to write a letter describing their life experience, knowledge of literature, and qualifications for establishing a lending library. M. Morgenstern, who was denied a concession by the authorities in Magdeburg, appealed to the Prussian authorities in 1826 to overturn this local decision. His appeal included a long narrative about his life experiences, interest in literature, and commitment to the intellectual and spiritual life of “the people.”64 Those who applied for concessions without first having their own bookstore were usually men excluded from guild professions, and in the 1830s and 1840s this included Jews. In the late 1850s (and probably even before this) women joined the ranks of aspiring businesspeople hoping to obtain a concession.

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It is impossible to say how many Jews were involved in the book trade (illicit or licit), but the records I examined document the stories of a few, and it is likely that there were many others. Jews would have occupied the periphery rather than the center of the book trade. The “respectable” and less dangerous center was still occupied by wellestablished booksellers who were members of the booksellers’ guild and proprietors of respectable bookstores and who diversified their business (and profit) with a concession to lend books. Prussian sources make it clear that Jews were allowed (and possibly even encouraged) to apply for lending library concessions. Jews also inhabited the lowest end of the book trade as itinerant colporteurs, and they were probably inclined to take chances carrying illegal publications because of the profit involved. They were not alone in their willingness to take chances, but they were unprotected by respectability, local connections, and reputation; they were therefore more vulnerable to police harassment, confiscations, and fines. The perception that Jews were physical outsiders who traveled from place to place was compounded by the fact that they were also social outsiders; however, we can also imagine the excitement generated by their appearance in towns, carrying publications like The Secrets of Nature and The German Don Juan. The Prussian authorities in Berlin, as we will see, made it a policy to allow concessions to Jewish applicants. At the local level officials balked at the idea of granting lending library concessions to Jews and harassed those with concessions. This was especially true in the eastern provinces, where Jews regularly worked as peddlers, selling clothes, buying rags, and probably also carrying “penny dreadfuls” as well as anything else they could sell at a profit. There are also hints from adjacent sources that suggest an association between Jews, the mobility of abject objects (often rags), and contagion. The Interior Ministry’s 1830s collection of confiscated “cholera publications” provides some insight into the dangers associated with mobility, and specifically the mobility of Jews. German cities experienced serious cholera outbreaks in the 1830s, and the Prussian government kept tabs on the publications that treated these outbreaks.65 In one of these pamphlets Jewish peddlers are associated with spreading disease. An edition of the Cholera-Newspaper from the Doctors of Königsberg accused Jewish rag-and-bone men of spreading cholera: “Many Jews peddle old clothes / With time, old clothes become rags / Rags breed toxins / Therefore the Jew has imported Cholera.”66 The pamphlet went on to blame Jews for the

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Black Death and questioned whether they belonged to the human race. Such evidence is only suggestive, not firm enough to draw any conclusions. However, the pamphlet introduces themes that are borne out in other sources; Jews in the eastern Prussian territories were considered particularly suspect, and they were often associated with the process of circulating potentially dangerous germs, rags, pamphlets, books, and images. Here too the danger attributed to print was inseparable from the sense that it was introduced by outsiders—foreign, subversive, and dangerous to the individual body and to the community. Whether rags or pamphlets, the imported object was particularly dangerous, and the danger that clung to such objects was imagined to be physical as well as mental. Like cholera, the poison of print was often thought to originate on the outside of a healthy and coherent community, whether that community was a family, a town, or the Prussian state. It is hardly a revelation that early nineteenth-century residents of the German states associated Jews with mobility and danger. But this was only one side of the equation; whatever the perceived danger of this geographic mobility, the rights of Jews to establish and conduct businesses were protected by Prussian laws. In some documents the authorities made it clear that they were trying to facilitate assimilation by encouraging Jews to enter “respectable trades” (as opposed to the “disreputable” trades of peddling and money lending). These impulses pulled in different directions: while local authorities were quick to place the blame for internal problems on perceived outsiders (and confessional differences produced excellent scapegoats, whether the problem was ultramontane Catholics or Jews), the government in Berlin pursued a different agenda, one that involved support for competition, innovation, and, perhaps by extension, Jewish assimilation. In the files pertaining to unsittliche Schriften the first reference to Jews is found in a report from 1817 on colportage. The authorities in Berlin were concerned that “Jewish petty dealers” were distributing morally harmful publications and Catholic prayer books in Polish, thereby encouraging superstition.67 Presumably these concerns were particularly acute in the far eastern provinces of the Prussian territories, where the circulation of Polish-language books and books on Poland were carefully monitored. Prussian annexation of Polish lands was accompanied by (seemingly unsuccessful) attempts to crush the circulation of books in Polish or German that challenged the political, cultural, or religious domination of these territories. In this case,

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ironically, it was a Jewish peddler who was seen as the conduit for illegal Catholic books in Polish. The fact of their circulation challenged the authority of the Prussian government. It did so first by suggesting that Polish print and, by extension, Polish culture were not so easily stamped out, and second, by revealing the extent to which expansion (in this case into the east) opened up a range of possibilities for the circulation of print via Jewish peddlers who functioned outside of official channels. Finally, the decision to prohibit the circulation of publications in Polish or in German on the “Polish problem” shows that the Prussian authorities themselves were aware of the power of print. The association of colportage with Jewish retailers and vagabonds marked this trade as something that was fluid, mobile, and foreign. Local discomfort about the presence of Jewish peddlers and “vagabonds” was only one side of the story. Though there continued to be resistance to the new, less legible (or less respectable) branches of the book trade, there were also countervailing currents of liberalism and support for open trade and Jewish emancipation in the 1820s and 1830s, and these currents promoted competition rather than guild monopolies, as well as the integration of Jews into the economy. In 1826 a privy councilor in Minden wrote to the authorities in Berlin asking if they could clarify a few points pertinent to a case he had been asked to decide. He began by asking if the principles of free trade and open competition applied to lending libraries. Should qualified applicants be given concessions regardless of the number of similar businesses in a given area? Or were lending libraries more like apothecaries or other businesses whose “disproportionate increase could be guided by police control”? In his opinion the unconditional growth of lending libraries should not be a matter of indifference to the state, as they encouraged “useless and self-destructive reading among the lower classes of civil society.” The second question, and his answer to it, occupied the remaining three pages of the letter: “Can a Jew, given the usual personal qualifications, be authorized to establish a lending library?” In favor of the inclusion of Jews in this branch of business seem to be: 1. The absence of existing laws prohibiting [their inclusion]. 2. The consideration that, if one believes that the improvement of Jews depends on diverting them from petty dealing, it is therefore consistent to be more liberal and to allow them more ways to earn a living.

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chapter 2 Speaking against [the inclusion of Jews], and predominant, appear to be: 1. . . . Their unqualified and overweening taste for profit, and also the difficulty of police control, particularly in cases concerning lending libraries, in which the vision of great profit can result in a disregard for police orders. 2. Concern that Jewish proprietors of lending libraries will have fewer scruples than Christian proprietors about distributing publications that attack the Christian religion under-the-hand.68

Several things are worth noticing about the privy councilor’s letter. The most obvious are the assumptions he makes about Jews, stereotypes expressed without genuine qualification. Jews engage in “petty dealing”; they are ruled by a desire for profit so strong that they are willing to disregard the orders of the police and pricks of conscience as they undermine religious belief. What he does not say, but rather implies, is that Jews are outsiders to civil society. They exist on the margins and are therefore not invested in the values of mainstream society, which they are quite willing to undermine if it suits their financial interest. While he begins with a historical explanation for the lack of Jewish integration, this analysis is quickly dropped in favor of categorical statements about Jewish “tendencies” and lack of investment in the tenets of a Christian community (obedience to police orders seemingly among these tenets). The vision of unscrupulous lending library proprietors getting rich off the public’s growing taste for inexpensive books was not exclusive to Jews. This vision was evoked repeatedly by critics as they tried to articulate what was so unnerving about the spread of print culture beyond the boundaries of the respectable and immobile bookstore. Perhaps it was easier to apply these epithets about overweening desire for profit, disregard for religion, and lack of respect for the law to Jews. But there was a larger population of people on the move, especially in the book trade, who were willing to change places and enter new communities in search of business opportunities. These people, Jewish or not, marked the texts they carried with a certain aura of the illicit, the unofficial, and the dangerous. From the perspective of the state authorities in Berlin, different values were at stake: there was no law against granting concessions to Jewish applicants, and there was no limit set on the number of lending libraries that could be established in a given community. Presumably the free market could regulate competition, and Jews were not to be excluded from professions. While we do not have Berlin’s response to Minden’s privy councilor,

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we do have the evidence of their response in a similar case a year later, this time involving a Jewish lending librarian in the town of Lissa, in the eastern province of Posen (formerly Poland). In July 1827 a lending library proprietor by the name of Abraham Pitschpatsch submitted a petition to the authorities in the regional government in Posen, asking for permission to have an employee fill in for him while he was away in Königsberg.69 It appears that Pitschpatsch’s petition was originally turned down by the Posen authorities.70 The authorities in Berlin, however, expressed their support; they argued that he had asked only for a month’s coverage, which they deemed reasonable. “The fact—or so it appears—that Pitschpatsch is a Jew, cannot change one’s perspective on the matter,” they wrote, implying that the authorities in Posen had denied the request because the petitioner was a Jew. The reason for this comment is elusive, as there is no mention of Pitschpatsch being Jewish in any of the correspondence from Posen. It may be that Pitschpatsch speculated in his letter to Berlin that his petition was denied because he was Jewish. However they came upon the information that Pitschpatsch was Jewish, the authorities in Berlin clearly asserted that Jewish businesses were legally protected. The case did not stop there, as more evidence was presented against Pitschpatsch, this time from a type of witness who appeared frequently in denunciations of lending libraries: the local teacher at the Gymnasium (an elite high school). According to a letter from the director of the Gymnasium in the town of Lissa, Pitschpatsch had been caught lending books to students which were “not free from offensive, morally destructive content.” In particular he was accused of circulating The Gypsies (Die Zigeuner). The book in question had been checked out by a student and was being passed from person to person. “Yesterday,” the school director’s letter explained, “Pitschpatsch had delivered the book to the daughter of Jankowiki [the local tailor].” By early the next day The Gypsies had already found its way to another student. “The book,” the letter continued, “is full of filth.” Some of this filth had been underlined by a “lunatic hand” in order to make it easier to find. The guilty students had already been punished for their infraction against the rules of the school, which stipulated that before students could lend books, they had to obtain permission from their father or the school director. The letter concluded with an urgent plea to confiscate the books in question and strip Pitschpatsch of his concession.71

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This is a rare instance in which we find references to real readers, as opposed to the many varieties of imagined readers that preoccupied the authorities. It is therefore worth stopping for a moment to consider the case. Did it matter, for instance, that the reader in question was a girl, the daughter of a skilled craftsman, and part of a circuit of readership that entailed passing a book from hand to hand? The reference to the tailor’s daughter may have been made for effect; perhaps the authorities in Posen thought they would have more traction if they intimated that Pitschpatsch the Jew was corrupting the morals of a girl. It seems probable that the tailor’s daughter in fact read the book, thus being exposed to (or perhaps producing?) the underlining in a “lunatic hand,” before returning it to a student named Schmeigel one morning in the winter of 1827. The gymnasium director’s report suggests that books borrowed from lending libraries sometimes passed through more than one hand. It also pointed to the fact that reading could be part of a more complex social interaction; the book was passed from one reader to another, key passages were underlined, and it seems likely that students discussed the book, if only long enough to recommend it to another reader. Without the “lunatic” marginalia in question (such things are unfortunately lost to the historical record), it is impossible to know what the students said about The Gypsies, but it is clear that something caught their interest. In the end the authorities in Berlin defended Pitschpatsch and his right to appoint a surrogate while he traveled on business. They placed the case back into the hands of the authorities in Posen, whom they reminded of their ability to strip the bookseller of his library concession if he was found guilty of distributing immoral books. The records of the case stop there, and we are left to wonder if the local authorities ultimately found a way to put Abraham Pitschpatsch out of business. We are also left to consider what was at stake in Berlin’s defense of Pitschpatsch on the grounds that being a Jew should not affect his status. Did the officials in Berlin imagine that they were facing particularly virulent local anti-Semitism in the annexed regions of Poland, or were they simply insisting on the universality of Prussian law and asserting their authority over the far reaches of their territories? The best answer to this question is to recognize the complexity of this world, in which the expansion of trade, support for competition with the concomitant extension of opportunities, and the politics of

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territorial expansion engendered things that circulated. Among these were books, pamphlets, songs, and images that appealed to readers as objects saturated with interest and meaning. They were at once objects that one could hold in one’s hand and things invested with the power to terrify, distort, and corrupt those who consumed them, as well as educate, enlighten, and inform. Books from lending libraries could not function as markers of status the way a personal book collection distinguished its owner. Yet in spite of their impermanent physical presence in the hands of the reader, these books offered access to pleasure and knowledge, some of it deemed illicit by teachers, censors, and police. The evidence of colporteurs, lending libraries, and the works they carried allows us to see how definitions of obscenity were generated through a network of adjacent definitions and practices. Rather than a clearly defined definition focused on sexuality, we find a category invested with meaning because of proximity to related dangers: political disorder, mental distortion, bodily harm, poisonous substances, and the malformation of vulnerable minds. The term intersects with wider questions about what constituted knowledge and who created, distributed, and consumed it. Obscenity was similarly shaped by practices, including the entrepreneurial activities of creative publishers and booksellers, the active and resourceful pursuit of texts and knowledge by readers, the risks taken by itinerant booksellers, and the opportunities seized by lending librarians. As the face of the reading public changed in the 1820s and 1830s, the idea of immoral and obscene texts constituted one way of making sense of these changes in moral terms. At the same time, the undeniable circulation of forbidden knowledge of all kinds (sometimes all mixed together in one subversive and entertaining text) opened possibilities for imagining a world beyond the confines of one’s immediate location. Even if other places were imagined via the travels of the German Don Juan or one of the many popular travelers that populated illicit literature, these texts nonetheless constituted a kind of knowledge for readers, and one they actively sought.

chapter 3

Defending Forbidden Texts The Strategies of Editors, Publishers, and Authors

The right-thinking person will only deem something scandalous when he observes that it encourages depravity, wantonness, a desire to injure, and a disinclination to help—such that he has to avert his eyes. —j o h a n n w o l f g a n g v o n g o e t h e , quoted in Wilhelm von Schütz, “Vorrede des deutschen Herausgebers”

For the producers of “immoral and obscene” publications, censorship offered both frustrations and opportunities. Those who produced or distributed forbidden texts were threatened with confiscations, rejected manuscripts, fines, and police harassment. Exposure could undermine profits and reputations; publishers and booksellers might be stripped of their membership in the booksellers’ guild or reduced to bankruptcy, and the proprietors of lending libraries could lose their concession and thus their livelihood. Yet censorship also offered opportunities for authors, publishers, editors, booksellers, and book lenders; forbidden texts were often desired texts, and those who profited from the book trade wanted to encourage and capitalize on that desire. The threat of censorship also offered the producers of unzüchtige Schriften an opportunity to defend their wares and to make a case for the value of books dismissed as frivolous or morally damaging by the police, pedagogues, journalists, and others. Crafting careful discussions of their books, publishers, editors, and authors added their voices to contemporary debates about the nature and status of unzüchtige und obszöne Schriften. Well-versed in the vocabulary of moral education and interiority, they used it to write principled defenses of erotic texts. Others addressed themselves directly to their readers (especially women), offering assurances that reading 94

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their books would not undermine moral integrity. The textual frames offered by authors and editors in the form of prefaces, forewords, and epilogues provided opportunities to engage with contemporary discussions of morality and print. Authors, translators, and editors also expressed representational boundaries through omission and generic limits, by stopping short, using indirect language, or eliding certain acts or expressions. Occasionally bold publishers and authors took a principled stand against censorship informed by the language of Bildung and by a fertile conception of the public sphere. In this chapter I move beyond the voices government officials, legal theorists, publicists and journalists who played a key role in forging official definitions of obscene and immoral texts during the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Listening to authors, editors, and publishers moves us a bit closer to the attitudes and experiences of readers. Those who produced books addressed readers directly in ways that government officials did not. The frames they chose to introduce and defend their works provide us with one side of a dialogue that involved readers. Above all, readers were engaged by the content of these texts, so it is also valuable to take a closer look at the subject matter and narrative conventions of unzüchtige Schriften. Between 1800 and 1830 a substantial number of texts circulated in the German states that fell within a loose category variously referred to as unzüchtig, obscene, or erotic.1 The contents of this category depended upon those who populated it. Publishers and authors often used the term erotische Schriften to evoke racy memoirs as well as books of advice for lovers or newlyweds. Government officials employed the phrase immoral and obscene publications broadly, focusing less on the content of books than on the quality of reading they generated and the spaces in which such books were found. Given the number of texts and the rather predictable conventions of the genre, a list of titles and plot lines would be lengthy and repetitive. Nonetheless it is useful to begin by considering some examples of erotische Schriften, paying attention both to the categories generated in the period and to the content and style of these works. I begin with a broad introduction to the genre and to some of the texts attributed to it, then turn to a close study of three specific cases, chosen because they were well known in the early nineteenth century and because their producers had much to say about questions of reading and morality. The first involves the notorious publications attributed to the author “Althing,” six works originally published between

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1799 and 1801. In the early nineteenth century—and beyond—books “in the style of Althing” became synonymous with erotische Schriften and inspired a string of imitators who hoped to capitalize on the popularity of the originals. 2 The Althing texts did not include prefaces or introductions and therefore did not offer direct commentary on the thorny problems of seductive texts and vulnerable readers. Yet the content of these books, the stories themselves, reveal an author working within strict representational boundaries and therefore commenting indirectly on the limits of expression. Two other case studies provide more direct evidence about the attitudes held by the producers of erotic texts, expressed in thoughtful textual frames that accompanied the offending books themselves. Der deutsche Don Juan was published pseudonymously and under false imprint in 1821 and framed by a foreword and an epilogue designed to address the moral anxieties of the reader. The final case examines the sophisticated defenses of the original publication of Casanova’s Memoirs produced by the editor Wilhelm von Schütz and the publisher Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus. No discussion of early nineteenth-century erotic texts would be complete without a careful look at Casanova and his defenders. Brockhaus’s edition of Casanova’s Memoirs (the first version to be published in any language) was one of the most famous erotic texts published in German in the nineteenth century. Schütz and Brockhaus understood the importance of the manuscript; in their efforts to contextualize and explain the Memoirs they produced sophisticated, detailed discussions of reading and morality. Before examining these texts in detail, however, I want to take a broader look at the genre itself and the kinds of texts that populated it.

Naming Immoral Texts During the first decades of the nineteenth century, contemporaries used several terms to describe the motley assortment of pamphlets, multivolume narratives, and books of advice considered, for a variety of reasons, morally dangerous. The police and other government officials used terms like frivolous books and lending-library literature, describing the genre with reference to particular readers, reading practices, and social spaces. Publicists and journalists intent on condemning these texts evoked categories that described effects, such as “mind- and heart-destroying books” and “morally destructive writings.”

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Members of the book trade evoked another contemporary term, chronique scandaleuse, cautiously. Schütz, for example, insisted that Casanova’s Memoirs should not be considered a chronique scandaleuse. Books in this category, he wrote, subordinated aesthetic, philosophical, and narrative values to the goal of arousal. He wrote that the chronique scandaleuse was also marked by the type of reading practice it fostered: a focus not on the whole of the narrative but on salacious passages mined for sensual pleasure. 3 In a characteristically sophisticated formulation, Schütz wrote that a bad reader might render a book scandaleuse through obsessive, single-minded reading practices, while a good reader would remain attentive to the whole and not linger on titillating moments. The nature of the text depended on the quality of the reader’s interactions with it. In Casanova’s Memoirs, he argued, sexual episodes were not presented for their own sake; they were merely one part of a broader story, integrated into the “heterogeneous world” inhabited by the author. Though a poor reader might read the book selectively and in the process make the book scandaleuse, a broader and more generous reader would understand sexuality as one of many interesting human experiences treated in Casanova’s encyclopedic work.4 In the 1820s the Brothers Franckh in Stuttgart advertised works in this category in the back pages of their publications with titles like Memoirs of Madame du Hausset, Chambermaid of Madame du Pompadour; Secret Love Affairs of Women of the Parisian Court; and The Oracle of Love. Almost all the Franckhs’ texts in this category were attributed to the author Friedrich Wilhelm Bruckbräu. We know these books circulated beyond Württemberg’s borders because the Prussian Interior Ministry condemned the “scandalous and immoral writings” of Bruckbräu in 1832.5 The benefits of advertising erotische Schriften, a term that could ignite the interest of the police and censors, must have outweighed the risks. It may also be that the firm had little to fear from censors and police, given the notoriously lenient publishing standards that attracted so many publishers to Württemberg in the late 1820s and 1830s. The term erotische Schriften appears to have been used to alert readers that they were being offered a certain kind of text. Earlier in the century two of the most popular Althing books were packaged together and sold in a five-volume work entitled Erotische Schriften. The publisher, Heinrich Gräff, would not have risked using such a title (certain to attract the attention of police) if he had not believed it would help sell the book.

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What did the term promise readers? To begin, early nineteenthcentury erotische Schriften suggested rather than explicitly described sexual encounters. These narratives lingered on seduction and intrigue, the pursuit of sex and romance rather than the culmination of the sexual encounter. The eroticism of these texts focused primarily on the prehistory of a sexual encounter, followed either by a terse reference to its consummation or (just as likely) frustration. An example of this style was offered in Napoleon Bonaparte’s Secret Love Affairs, translated from the French, published in 1815, and attributed (almost certainly falsely) to Bonaparte himself.6 The two-volume book presented readers with a fast-paced succession of seductions and amorous conquests, but the sexual encounters themselves were elided or referred to only indirectly. The Lover of Twelve Thousand Young Women, falsely attributed to Christian Althing and published in 1804 without imprint, told the story of a young male protagonist, Rudolf, who is forced to take up a peripatetic life as singer after his father’s death leaves him penniless. Moving from town to town in pursuit of a livelihood, he has sexual encounters with women of all kinds, but the details of these encounters are left to the imagination. For example, on the rebound from a frustrated infatuation with a young and virtuous woman of standing, Rudolf seduces the wife of an innkeeper. He describes the encounter in characteristically indirect terms: “The reader will easily guess that we did not spend the whole night chatting.”7 The conventions of the genre promised readers carefully observed limits. This was not simply a matter of pleasing the censors; The Lover of Twelve Thousand Young Women would have been promptly banned simply because it did not have a proper imprint. We therefore need to look further to understand the reasons for the author’s reticence and for the general reticence of the genre when it came to actually describing sexual encounters. Sharing an episodic structure with travel literature (another popular genre of the early nineteenth century), erotische Schriften had little to say about sustained romantic relationships and cast a critical eye on marriage. (This is interesting in the context of an early nineteenth-century burgeoning of romantic love and companionate marriage as cultural ideals.) The episodic structure of these texts privileged newness and quick pursuit rather than the continuous plot lines required to develop a narrative of romantic love. Marriage was often cast as a liability, especially for women. In Secret Love Affairs of Women of the Parisian Court, translated from the French and

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published by the Brothers Franckh in 1828, marriage serves mainly as a cover for adulterous affairs and courtly intrigue. Within these books marriage threatens to trap women in cloistered lives with controlling men, renders husbands indifferent to the considerable attractions of their wives, and paves the way for lies and intrigue. Three kinds of women roam the pages of these texts: beautiful, married women ripe for seduction; young and virtuous maidens; and women left unsatisfied and sexually voracious by inattentive or philandering husbands. In a series of erotic vignettes written by Althing-Fischer and published in 1800, young, desirous women are caught up in affairs with gallant men.8 In Napoleon Bonaparte’s Secret Love Affairs Napoleon goes to great lengths to seduce pious wives, using unscrupulous techniques with unhappy results, including death, pregnancy, and permanent loss of honor. Yet these books do not linger on the consequences; characters are inconvenienced, but not ruined, by seduction. This absence of serious consequences may provide clues about the intended readership of these texts. So-called erotic texts focused primarily, though not exclusively, on heterosexual sex. Same-sex desire was usually mentioned only in cases of cross-dressing and resulting gender confusion. In Althing-Fischer’s Erotic Tales, for example, the tension of the story is generated by the fact that the main character, Hanne, is a young woman dressed as a man. Because she must maintain this secret, she cannot act on her desire for men or engage the efforts of women to seduce her. Crossdressing in this text does little to challenge the privilege of heterosexual desire; if anything, Hanne’s disguise helps the author assert, over and over, the impossibility of same-sex eroticism. In Napoleon Bonaparte’s Secret Love Affairs the protagonist becomes romantically involved with Charlotte, an intellectual woman of great political and military acumen. Reluctant to be parted with the young Bonaparte when he goes off to war, Charlotte dons men’s clothing and joins him on the battlefield. Highly intelligent, intent on friendship rather than marriage, and free from the inner constraints of shame, the character of Charlotte evokes the gallant women who populated the literature of gallantry in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century. Charlotte and her gallant predecessors suggested that women could be learned in letters, politics, and in sex. Bethany Wiggin explains, “[Although] it is somewhat difficult to generalize about the heroines of [eighteenth-century] gallant tales, it is safe to say that they did not stay at home. Far from striving to establish a peaceful domestic

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life, they often voice a strong aversion to marriage, preferring instead to pursue exploits beyond the confines of home.”9 If characters like Charlotte were a mainstay in eighteenth-century gallant texts, they had largely disappeared by the 1820s (and probably earlier).10 Though the literature of gallantry found its way from France into the German book market in the late seventeenth century, the term gallant literature continued to be used in the nineteenth century to describe sexually titillating narratives, especially those featuring worldly and seductive protagonists (often but not always men). In the early nineteenth century erotische Schriften offered knowledge (though not the kind vetted by peer review) of foreign customs, life in exotic locales, social conventions among French aristocrats, and the military career of Napoleon. This knowledge cannot be dismissed simply as frames on which to hang stories of sexual intrigue, just as the plots of pornographic films are not meaningless vehicles for staging sex.11 Though we cannot know how early nineteenth-century readers processed these texts, it seems likely they were interested in their stories and the knowledge they conveyed. These books were alluring for multiple reasons, and titillation did not preclude interest in subject matter. Early modern erotic literature makes it clear that knowledge and sex, or for that matter philosophy and sex, are not mutually exclusive categories. Above all, early nineteenth-century erotische Schriften were marked by a narrative structure in which characters experienced constant mobility, moving from town to town, up and down the social ladder (often through a sudden loss of status), from one lover to the next in quick succession. Interactions with compelling, unpredictable strangers dominate these stories, and the authors favored plots that facilitated constant change. Rudolf, the protagonist of The Lover of Eleven Thousand Young Women, has encounters with women of all classes. The social world he occupies is remarkably flexible, but this open world is also dominated by self-interest and social indifference. Despite her status as an aristocrat married to a wealthy fur trader, Rudolf’s mother is dropped by everyone when her husband dies. Rudolf learns the harsh lessons of self-preservation, and he counsels his reader to be wary of the allure of love and sentiment. In Secret Love Affairs Napoleon pursues sexual relationships with women without concern for the consequences that will attend their seduction. As his lovers get pregnant, lose honor, and even die, Napoleon simply barrels forward into the next seduction and the next military conquest.12

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Such texts cannot be read as sociography, for they did not in any direct manner mirror or represent the social world of the early nineteenth century. It is temping to seize upon representations of social dystopia, seen in eighteenth-century texts like Fanny Hill and Justine, to see in them critical commentary on early capitalism or modernity. In the case of the German states, one might work to find connections between these texts and the political upheavals, social dislocations, and wars that marked the early century. Yet such simple connections are probably too easy. These books point to the structure of fantasies and help us understand some part of the narrative vocabulary of early nineteenth-century Germans (of which these texts offer only a limited view). Yet it is worth considering the fact that such texts occupied a cultural space directly adjacent to romantic (and Romantic) novels and “scary stories.” While romantic novels and erotische Schriften appear opposed in readings by cultural historians, critics of popular reading habits often put these genres together. From their perspective, they all threatened to produce an overheated and hypertrophic imagination and encouraged the reader to dwell in fantasy rather than in reality. Above all, they were associated with social institutions like the lending library and with the integration of nonelite readers and women into the world of books and reading. A careful examination of three cases reveals more about the texts and how they were situated in the world of early nineteenth-century German letters. One means of addressing the threat of censorship (as well as readers’ anxiety or distaste) was to impose limits on one’s own texts; these limits should be seen as a form of commentary on the boundary between erotische Schriften and obscenity; indirect commentary takes its place alongside the more direct statements of book producers and sellers.

The Althing Texts: Forging Representational Limits The six Althing books were originally produced and published between 1799 and 1801. It has long been assumed that these were the pseudonymous work of Christian August Fischer, a prolific and popular author famous for novels and travel narratives as well as works of history and geography. Though Fischer’s biographers concede that no direct evidence links him to the Althing texts, they name him as the author and write that all of his contemporaries assumed the same.13

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The notoriety of the Althing works appears oddly disproportionate with the brief period Fischer devoted to their creation, two years, in which he also published several other books, constituting a professionally fruitful and never replicated period of productivity. Though Fischer undoubtedly profited financially from sales of the Althing texts, he scrupulously kept his distance from them. The caution paid off; during a subsequent period of academic openness generated by the political transformations of the revolutionary wars, Fischer was appointed to a stable post as a professor at the University of Würzburg in 1804. Hired as a cultural historian, he owed his good luck to the popular and critical reception of his travel literature and to political transformations in the southwestern German states that opened positions to Protestants even in the Catholic stronghold of Würzburg and to members of the educated middle classes. Neither the political climate nor Fischer’s luck held, however. Though he was guaranteed an income for life, he was dismissed from his professorship in 1809. A depression in the German book market between 1806 and 1813 meant that he could not make a living as an author, and he was therefore forced to stay in Würzburg, where he collected his salary and was temporarily reinstated in his professorship. A major dispute with a powerful university administrator, Maximilian Freiherr von Lerchenfeld, led Fischer to publish A Stone’s Throw from Frankfurt am Main to Munich in 1821 under the pseudonym Felix von Fröhlichsheim. The book castigated Lerchenfeld and exposed the politics of the university. The book was promptly condemned in the German Confederation; Fischer was arrested and convicted of the crimes of slander and opposition to the government; after serving a two-year sentence he moved to Bonn, where he scratched together a modest living as a writer and translator before his death in 1829. Fischer came to the attention of the Prussian censors and the Prussian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1824 through correspondence from the Bavarian government, which recorded that Dr. Christian August Fischer, former professor at the University of Würzburg, had been tried and sentenced to jail by a Bavarian court for publishing a “slanderous book.” Fischer had since left Bavaria and was living in Bonn. The Bavarian government explained that they were particularly concerned that Fischer would use his time in Bonn to write and publish an account of his trial. Such an account, they wrote, was sure to contain “all varieties of distortion.” They were hoping to make an arrangement with Fischer, writing, “As a condition of continuing his

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quiet stay in Bonn, he will write nothing against the Royal Bavarian Government.” They explained that Fischer could expect “a certain reversal” if he agreed to remain silent about his trial. The Prussian government agreed to cooperate; if Fischer presented a manuscript, the Prussian censors were directed to reject it outright. If the censors still had doubts about the permissibility of the content, they were directed to seek instruction from local officials.14 Fischer seems to have had a powerful weapon at his disposal: the power of publicity and the pen. His renown meant that he could command a publisher and an audience for his publications; however grudgingly, the Bavarian government had to acknowledge Fischer’s access to print and ready audience as a source of power. If the six Althing texts occupy a relatively small place in Fischer’s abundant oeuvre, they played an important role in producing the conventions of erotic literature in the early nineteenth century. In his 1822 Letters from Berlin Heinrich Heine wrote, “Lending libraries must be submitted to review by the police and must submit their catalogues; all totally obscene books [ganz obszöne Bücher], like most of the novels from Althing, A. v. Schaden, and the like, will be confiscated.”15 Five years later in Bavaria the works of Althing were forbidden and banned from libraries on grounds that they “endangered morality through the appeal and temptation of sensual pleasure.”16 The association of Althing with literary obscenity in Germany has been oddly enduring. When the Bavarian State Library broke up its famous collection of obscene literature—the notorious “poison closet” based on the private collection of Franz von Krenner—the Althing works remained in a special, “remote” collection, while a variety of other texts were folded into the regular collection.17 The Althing texts were so notorious that they even had an unexpected afterlife in postwar West Germany. Accused of writing pornography and blasphemy in 1955, West German author Arno Schmidt stumbled across the story of Fischer-Althing and set out to write a book “in the manner of Althing.” Fischer’s biographers explain, “Schmidt knew that at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the name Althing had become, ‘in certain circles, a concept.’” They push back against this characterization and insist that he was not “just any writer of ‘the dirtiest, most indecent trash,’ as some contemporaries, literary historians, and Arno Schmidt himself took him to be.”18 A closer look at the AlthingFischer texts is needed; despite the scandal associated with Althing’s works, they were in many ways cautious and circumspect.

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A detailed look at two of these works, Drowsy Tales and Erotic Tales: Hanne’s Adventures Here and There, Alongside the Stories of Three Wedding Nights, points to the self-imposed representational limits followed by Althing-Fischer.19 These limits were almost certainly not meant as a response to censorship; the Althing works were widely condemned in spite of Fischer’s reserve. It may even be true that they attracted more opprobrium because they bore the stamp of their bürgerlich author and proximity to genres like the novel and the respectable travel narrative. Whatever the reason, these were (and continued to be) iconic texts of “literary trash,” and their style and limits are worth consideration. Hanne’s Adventures Here and There focuses on the adventures of a fifteen-year-old girl, the daughter of a merchant, who is driven out of her father’s home when she discovers her stepmother in bed with another man. Forced to make her way in an inhospitable world, Hanne dons men’s clothing and has the good fortune to be hired as a jockey by a handsome aristocrat. (While the bulk of the text reads like a novel, the introduction to the book evokes the conventions of the folktale.) The intrigues that ensue bring Hanne again and again to the brink of seduction (revealing the fact that she is masquerading as a man), but fear of exposure always militates against consummation of the sexual act. When at the end of the book Hanne loses her virginity (at the end of three volumes, hundreds of pages, and many failed seductions), she is a newlywed, once again dressed as a woman, and the details of the encounter are elided. The author delivers the “three wedding nights” promised by the title, but in each case the reader’s desire to know what takes place on a wedding night is frustrated. The book promised wedding nights because it would sell books; readers were clearly interested in the topic. The reasons for this interest are mirrored in the story, as Hanne herself wants to know what happens on a wedding night. When she speaks to another young woman, it becomes clear that neither Hanne nor her interlocutor have any knowledge of the topic, yet they want to know. Hanne tries to clear up the mystery, explaining to her friend that the bride and groom simply “spend the evening chatting together, and then go to sleep.” The young lady is unsatisfied: “I don’t believe it! I once asked Papa, and he said that I don’t need to know what happens.” The two speculate that the events of such an evening “must be dangerous—why else would brides always cry so?” They are systematically denied the knowledge they

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Figure 6.  Frontispiece and title page of the first volume of Erotische Schriften von Christian Althing (1807). The works attributed to Althing were almost certainly the work of the well-known author and professor Christian August Fischer. Courtesy of Special Collections, The Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University.

seek. (The young woman’s married sister refuses to tell her anything.) Hanne’s interior monologue continues: “‘A wedding night!’ I thought to myself. . . . ‘A wedding night!’—What the thousands must do with each other?” Hanne conspires to listen in on a young couple on their wedding night and is treated only to the sound of the husband berating his new wife about the cost of the wedding, the argument ending with the sound of his snores. Hanne (dressed as a man) and her young friend decide to play out the scene as they imagine it; they stage a wedding night full of tenderness and sensibility, adopting the vocabulary of the romantic novel. A kiss between the two is interrupted by the young woman’s father, and Hanne is sent away. The two part with tears and sighs: “I didn’t know what I had done, but I now had much to fear. ‘What if you have to leave?’— I thought, and my tears fell continuously. What should I begin? Where would I wind up? What would my good, dear lady say? Oh, I was in this moment so unhappy that I could have died.”20 Separations, sighs, and tears substitute for the theatrical “wedding night” performed by the two novices.

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Like Hanne and her friend, Althing’s readers are promised—and consistently denied—the knowledge they seek. Over the hundreds of pages of seduction and intrigue, there are only a few moments when the author’s reserve begins to lapse, and these passages are marked by an odd switch from the tone and conventions of the novel to the folktale. The first scene in the book, for example, is uncharacteristically rough and terrifying. The reader is told the story of Hanne’s exile from her father’s home. After her mother’s death, Hanne is plagued by a rich and hostile stepmother. When her father is away on business, the stepmother starves her and locks her in the shop all night. During one such evening she awakes to find a man on top of her. It turns out to be her stepmother’s lover, a hangman who has found his way into the shop and accosted the young Hanne. Fleeing the house, she feels pain between her legs and discovers blood on her thighs. This is an uncharacteristically graphic moment in the book, and one that would seem to promise a tale of a different kind, not the piquant but consistently reserved story that follows. A passage with a similar tone takes the form of a story told to Hanne by a young woman. In the story a farmer’s wife takes a long journey to collect an inheritance. Told that she cannot collect the inheritance without a man’s presence, the farmer’s wife asks a male acquaintance to pose as her husband. All goes well until the male acquaintance demands sexual favors in exchange for his cooperation and threatens to expose her if she does not comply. The woman is distraught to be forced into sex; her mother dismisses her concerns, advising her not to make too much of it, and the story ends. 21 Set against the tone of restrained intrigue that characterizes most of the book, such passages seem incongruous, almost as though stories in an oral tradition broke through the fabric of a distinctly literary (albeit racy) text. It is perhaps fitting that the scenes involve people of humble social circumstances. These momentary eruptions of a different narrative style serve to highlight the author’s typical reserve. In most of the three volumes the reader is comfortably settled in a predictable series of courtly intrigues and flirtations; the threat (or the promise) of further revelations is always delayed. Drowsy Tales adheres to similar standards of reserve but takes a different narrative approach. Presented as a series of short, easily digestible vignettes, the two-volume work reads less like a novel and more like the brief stories of intrigue offered by a text like Secret Love Affairs of Women from the Parisian Court. While Hanne’s Adventures is cast in the language of the bourgeoisie, Drowsy Tales

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is steeped in the gallant intrigues of aristocratic men, princes and barons intent on seduction. The text is peppered with passages in French and English, emphasizing the class status of these men. Many of the interactions are homosocial, as men of standing spend much of the book sharing tips on seduction. The text is further populated by cheating wives who are neglected by husbands indifferent to their charms. A prince explains that his beautiful young wife has ceased to attract him: “If she was not my wife, I would also fall in love with her. Ah, but the human heart! Vous me comprenez.” When discovered, the consequences of extramarital sex are primarily loss of male honor; the rigorous lightness of the text has no place for unwanted pregnancies, outcast women stripped of social standing, or public shame. The text proceeds as if these consequences did not exist. 22 Lurking beneath these notorious examples of “literary trash,” one detects an author working to provide readers with texts that skirt the limits of bourgeois sensibilities without moving beyond. Fischer was thoroughly familiar with those limits. In the five-volume Erotic Tales only the episode in which Hanne is accosted makes reference to sexual anatomy; for that matter, this is one of the only direct references to the body. (Bodies are remarkably absent from the Althing texts; references are made to “well-formed figures,” but physical descriptions stop there.) In Althing’s texts sexual mores vary according to class. In schematic terms that turn out to be useful, the upper classes pursue gallantry and seduction with loss of honor as the most serious consequence, and members of the middle classes have sexual knowledge but do not engage in sex itself. More grave ramifications of sex, insofar as they are treated at all, fall to the lower classes. Despite his enduring reputation for titillation, Althing-Fischer offered works that both established and adhered to careful limits. Insofar as these limits were consciously forged, they worked to spark readers’ appetites for sexual knowledge while simultaneously assuring them that the answers to such questions would be deferred. Continued interest in Althing’s stories depended on it.

Framing Immoral Texts The representational limits employed by authors of unzüchtige Schriften tell us something about the meaning of obscenity in this period, if only because they point to prohibitions in expression and tone. Similarly the textual frames offered by authors and editors

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should be seen as contributions to early nineteenth-century definitions of obscenity. In the first few decades of the nineteenth century authors, editors, and translators of unzüchtige und obszöne Schriften worked to defend their texts in print. They used prefaces, forewords, and epilogues as a way to frame their work. It is likely that they intended these frames to address a mixed audience of readers, censors, police, and booksellers. Two things were important when writing for censors and police. First, it was essential to establish the physical origins of the text: who wrote it, when and where it was published. Pseudonymous texts or those without proper imprints were immediately suspect. (Though the use of certain false imprints, such as Pierre Marteau/Peter Hammer in Cologne, was a way to communicate a text’s forbidden status to a bookseller or potential reader.)23 Second, whenever possible it was important to establish the truth of a narrative. The censor’s reason for approving the manuscript of Eva Riedelin’s tale was that nothing “true” could be considered immoral. Thus authors and editors worked to bolster the veracity and material history of their tales. Forewords and prefaces were also directed at readers who were interested in the origins and veracity of a story. The foreword to Secret Love Affairs of Women of the Parisian Court, for example, established the authenticity of the text by tracing the origins of the manuscript. 24 It explained that the author was Prince Bussy-Rabutin, who had written “a satirical novel” to read aloud to his friends. One of these friends borrowed the manuscript, made a copy, and delivered it to a publisher. In the foreword to Napoleon Bonaparte’s Secret Love Affairs the editor explained that he had obtained the manuscript from a man named H. von * * *, who had received it from Napoleon himself during the last years of his reign. 25 According to the story, Napoleon entreated Herr von * * * to publish the manuscript in the case of his fall from power. The pleasure of these texts rested on the illusion that the reader enjoyed a privileged view into a secret world of love and intrigue. 26 Forewords therefore established the credibility of a story and explained how and why such private stories had made their way into print and onto the shelves of bookstores and lending libraries. The German Don Juan, published in 1820, provides another example of how an unzüchtige Schrift could be framed, in this case by a foreword and an epilogue. This editorial work seems to have been the work of Don Juan’s pseudonymous author. The Prussian minister

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of interior and police was alerted to the circulation of the book by an article in the Mainzer Zeitung published in January 1821. The author of the article condemned the work as outrageous and was also offended by the author’s efforts to argue for the importance of the text. “In his epilogue, [the author] has the shameless impudence not only to excuse his infamy, but also to extol the use value of his book.” In this way “Belladonna and Arsenic are presented as the most effective methods for presenting contagion!”27 The Prussian police followed up on the information. They concurred that the work was “obscene and immoral” and added that it “mocked religion.” The censorship board in Berlin pursued an investigation; it revealed that one of the censors, Minister Grano, had given his imprimatur to the publication in 1819. The original manuscript was consulted, and it was revealed that the sections crossed out by Grano had in fact been left out of the printed text. Correspondence from a member of the Censorship Board named Beckendorff recommended that the text be confiscated from lending libraries and reading circles because of “obscene content and because it mocked holy religious mysteries.” He suggested a “serious punishment for the censor Grano.”28 There is no record of Grano’s defense of his decision to approve the manuscript for publication. 29 The plot of The German Don Juan involves the adventures of a young orphaned aristocrat, Louis, and his development and education in the ways of love and the world. Morally speaking, the trajectory of this development is down instead of up: Louis begins his young life as an idealist and romantic open to adventure and dedicated to finding true love. Through a series of misadventures and disappointments, he replaces self-sacrifice with self-interest, virtuous love with pleasure seeking. His youthful idealism is revealed as a fantasy, and those he trusts—a general who becomes his mentor, his first love—turn against him when it serves their interests. These experiences are often interpreted through the lens of his lover and mentor, an older woman named Emilie von Falkenau. His conversations with her amount to an education of sorts. Louis falls into a state of melancholy and misanthropy when his first love, a young aristocrat named Cäcilie, marries another man. An encounter with her is described in terms of its inner effects: “After his unexpected meeting with Cäcilie, the deeply humbled youth sunk into an even deeper state of melancholy. He lived in a state of numb indifference, rarely went out, and hatred toward all mankind filled his breast.” His recovery is cast as a

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reconstruction of the soul; if his inner life was originally full of virtue, enthusiasm, and love, disappointments transformed the qualities of his inner life. “That indescribable happiness, which Louis experienced once (like the lovely Cäcilie) as total love and devotion—upon the second construction of his soul he found nothing there—and only the youth himself felt this plainly.”30 Such lessons lead Louis to a hard-headed approach to the realities of life, guided (the author tells us) not by the illusions of virtue but by the facts of life. Though we cannot crawl inside the censor Grano’s head, we can explore several possible reasons for his original decision to approve the manuscript. Throughout the text and in the editorial frame, the author of Don Juan has remarkable control of the language surrounding fantasy, inner life, and character development and engages selfconsciously with contemporary anxieties about reading and morality. The body of the text is peppered with comments on reading. A few pages into the novel, for instance, the author mentions women’s taste for novels; female characters are busy devouring the novels of Sophie la Roche. In one section Louis and Emilie come up with a moneymaking scheme involving a “lottery for girls and women seeking marriage,” with Louis as the prize. After writing up a contract and obtaining initial funding from a Jewish moneylender, they discuss publicity. The narrator addresses the reader with a brief aside on the reading public: “Germany in those days was in a state of peace—there were no religious or political sects to attract the attention of the public; one heard nothing about horrifying murder stories or other extraordinary things. Naturally, under such conditions, the lottery for girls and women seeking marriage . . . attracted a lot of attention.” In a comment on novel writing the author of Don Juan explains that attempts at realism are dismissed as invention: “When the novel writer depicts the corrupt ideas that occupy the minds of real people, he is sure to be accused of laughable exaggeration and unnatural descriptions.”31 Though the official rhetoric of censorship asserted that illusions and fantasies corrupted heart and mind, this author suggested that reality was just as threatening. The authors of erotische Schriften regularly made self-referential comments about the power of books and reading. In Napoleon Bonaparte’s Secret Love Affairs, for example, the young Napoleon seduces a young woman by introducing her to voluptuous reading: “Her happy innocence encouraged me to choose a book for her whose dangerous charms would ignite the first sparks of desire and

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voluptuousness in her soul.” The book, Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse, immediately has the desired effect. 32 Even the authors of forbidden books employed the language of fragile minds and vulnerable souls! In a carefully crafted epilogue (the one that prompted the ire of the Mainzer Zeitung critic), the author argues that Don Juan was designed to provide moral instruction, using reality rather than illusion to promote moral behavior in the reader. The logic, he explains, is clear. Soft, virtuous love stories are products of the imagination; it is far better and more effective to reveal life as it really is and through such means to educate readers on the real consequences of immoral actions: “If it is possible that the portrayal of a love story might in fact serve real needs, I am of the opinion that those [texts] in which the exuberant child of nature is given over to life will achieve their goal before those unnatural depictions which extravagant or crazy minds offer a reading-hungry public by the bushel at every market or fair.” Presenting softened fictions and cloaking important realities, he argues, authors failed to serve the interests of their readers: “If one passes off poison cherries as though they were apples of paradise, inexperienced girls and boys will eventually be destroyed by the poison fruit. . . . Give up the dreamer to Chimera . . . and he will perceive truth and reality as illusions that only exist in a foolish imagination.”33 The author was able to turn the language of interiority on its head, making a case that what was moral education required reality rather than illusion. In the process of defending his text, the author revealed the tension at the heart of early nineteenth-century discussions of obscenity. Critics and censors worried about the dangers of an overactive imagination, arguing that texts would damage minds and separate readers from reality. Yet they also argued that unveiled reality might lead to mental distortion. It was Wessenberg, after all, who warned that people needed to be shielded from the knowledge of how closely they bordered on the animal world. Sexual love must be civilized by the cultivation of romantic love, which served to heighten and ennoble relations between people. We should nonetheless consider the value of the argument made by the anonymous author of Der deutsche Don Juan that women readers were not well served by texts that obscured the real consequences of extramarital sexual liaisons. Paul Englisch directed his readers to a discussion of this topic contained in what he considered one of the great “masterpieces” of German erotic writing: The Memoirs of a Singer, published by August Prinz in 1862 and attributed (probably

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falsely) to the famous opera singer Wilhelmine Schroeder-Devrient. The book was allegedly based on the real memoirs of SchroederDevrient, and thus the text was supposed to reflect the attitudes of an intelligent female narrator. The singer explains that she has worked to produce a realistic memoir, rejecting the “strange inconsequence” of other, similar tales. Such stories “are true poison for unmarried women. They all depict the thing itself in the most enticing, inspiring terms, yet none speak of the consequences or what happens to the girl when she recklessly gives herself to a man. They fail to mention the remorse, the disgrace, the loss of reputation, even the physical pain that can result.”34 The singer was correct; there were in fact very few erotic texts in the early nineteenth century that spoke directly to the material consequences of extramarital sex for women. This absence may tell us something about the presumed readers of these texts; perhaps authors and publishers assumed they were really writing for men and thus felt no need to address the everyday realities of female readers. Yet the corpus of erotic literature included compelling examples of how an author might address the consequences of sex for women. The important eighteenth-century erotic book Thérèse Philosophe actively thematized the dangers of sex for unmarried women (pregnancy, loss of reputation, and the resulting consequences for marriage prospects and social position). 35 Seen in these terms it was not realistic depictions of serious consequences that threatened to endanger women readers but rather softened, unrealistic tales. It is characteristic of the early nineteenth century that such a thoughtful commentator as Wessenberg offered conflicted advice on the realism of texts. He was not alone in his insistence that sociability rested on the softening and cultivation of human drives; depictions of romantic love prepared the way for happiness and fidelity in marriage. Yet he also valued the works of Sade because they revealed the realities of the human heart.

Defending Casanova Among the many thoughtful defenses of unzüchtige Schriften written by authors and editors in the early nineteenth century, none rival the breadth and scope of Wilhelm von Schütz’s introductions to the Brockhaus edition of Giacomo Casanova’s Histoire de ma vie. Though the original manuscript was written in French, it was first published in German translation. According to the Casanova scholar J. Rives Childs, Brockhaus acquired Casanova’s original manuscript

Figure 7.  Frontispiece for the first edition of Aus den Memoiren des Venetianers Jacob Casanova de Seingalt, published by F. A. Brockhaus in twelve volumes in 1822–28. Houghton Library, Harvard University, 62–859 v.1.

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in 1821 for the sum of 200 Taler.36 He then hired Schütz, a student of A. W. Schlegel and a respected intellectual and author in his own right, to translate and edit the manuscript. The result was a twelvevolume work published between 1822 and 1828.37 Brockhaus wrote a publisher’s preface for the first volume, and Schütz wrote extended introductions to the first three volumes. It is not an exaggeration to say that Casanova’s Memoirs held an iconic status in the German states throughout much of the nineteenth century. With the first edition in the early 1820s, it took the Prussian authorities a few years to discover and condemn the first volumes; once they had, the Memoirs were often evoked as an example par excellence of the moral dangers of print. By the 1840s the work seems to have disappeared from broad circulation in Prussia, perhaps due to successful censorship efforts. Nonetheless it was one of the first forbidden texts to reappear in Prussian territories after the abolition of censorship in 1848.38 We know that the first two volumes arrived in Berlin bookstores by 1822, but there is no indication that the Memoirs were confiscated in Prussia until 1824, when police in the city of Bromberg reported finding four volumes in a local a lending library.39 The president of Prussia’s Censorship Board discovered Casanova’s Memoirs in December 1824, and he wrote anxiously to the interior minister, “We have it from the reliable undersigned person that Die Casanovaschen Mémoires [sic] is a book that corrupts good morals.” He worried, however, that “in the case of a book like this, which is already known and distributed, an attempt to ban it comes too late.”40 He was particularly concerned that the German translation be confiscated from lending libraries. A response from the Ministry explained that the text had been banned from lending libraries for well over a year.41 Even so, this meant that the Memoirs had circulated for two years before it was banned from lending libraries, and three before being noticed by censors. It is odd that officials failed to notice the circulation of the book; all of Brockhaus’s texts that passed into Prussian territory were subject to special scrutiny beginning in September 1820, and it seems that rigorous censorship continued at least until Brockhaus’s death in 1823.42 Archival sources show that Brockhaus was locked in a fierce battle with the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm himself, who was offended by what he perceived as “anti-monarchical” opinions expressed in Brockhaus’s publications. The publisher pushed back in print, in long letters to the Censorship Board, and

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by finding ways to ship his texts into Prussian territory despite censorship.43 Perhaps because they were looking for political transgressions in Brockhaus’s texts, censors failed to notice the first volumes of Casanova’s Memoirs. Before we turn to Schütz’s editorial work with Casanova’s manuscript, it helps to have a sense of the text he was charged with defending. Casanova’s Memoirs tells the story of the famous protagonist as he develops from a child into a mature man. Though he is the son of two actors, he has the opportunity to go to school, improving his ability to move in multiple social circles. This ability proves essential to the story that unfolds, as Casanova moves in and out of multiple milieus interacting with social groups from high to low. Along the way he gives detailed accounts of his travels—to Dresden, Istanbul, and Paris, to name only a few of the many places he visits—providing encyclopedic descriptions of the material conditions and political alignments he encounters. (When his grandmother dies, for example, the reader is treated to a detailed inventory of the objects she leaves behind.) Casanova encounters Jews and Turks, merchants and slaves, priests and prostitutes. With each encounter the author gives descriptions of character and appearance, each with the same attention to detail, describing high-born senators and lowly prostitutes with an almost clinical lens. He punctuates these encounters with philosophizing, usually prompted by a turn of luck or events in the narrative. While Casanova’s Memoirs appear to be based on his real-life experiences (and Casanova scholars and bibliographers have devoted considerable effort to matching the people he mentions in his text with real historical figures), the narrative style is borrowed from fiction, particularly eighteenth-century “gallant narratives.” Casanova’s life, of course, involves sexual relationships with many women. Consistent with his approach to all aspects of the material world, he describes his female friends and lovers in great detail. In Schütz’s translation Casanova’s encounters with women stress emotion, attachment, and desire, but there are also occasions when love affairs are convenient or strategic. The protagonist does not discriminate, pursuing affairs with women of all kinds: a Turkish slave, a housekeeper aboard a ship, a sixteen-year-old virgin from a bourgeois family, and a woman with whom he exchanges sex for his services as a scribe. Sex itself is alluded to rather than explicitly described, though it is made clear that Casanova does in fact have sex with many of the women he encounters. He moves from love to love as he does

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from place to place; he is grateful for these experiences but suffers no regret at having to move on. In his reception history of Casanova’s Memoirs, the literary scholar and historian Gerd Forsch suggests that Schütz (the original translator and editor) was responsible for rendering Casanova’s originally earthy and explicit sex scenes suggestive rather than explicit. He argues that Schütz also injected depth of feeling and interiority in ways that were inconsistent with the style of the original manuscript: “With an inclination toward scarcity, occasionally with only a concealed paraphrase, [Schütz] attended to the far too risqué erotic scenes. It seems that only inadvertently did a few scenes of raw indecency slip through. Customarily, the more or less detailed love scenes of the original text, insofar as they were not entirely expunged, were softened into a vague, generally sober formulation. Now and then he injected a more soulful [Seelenvollere] note, which served to inject a certain improvement of character in the author-hero.”44 This was one way to address the threat of censorship: cutting and softening the sex scenes addressed fears of obscenity; infusing the characters with depth of feeling responded to readers’ sensibilities. Undoubtedly such editorial decisions were also intended to make the book palatable to 1820s readers. As he set out to defend volumes 2 and 3 of Casanova, Schütz worked to digest criticism of the volumes that had already been published; by the end of 1822 negative reviews of volume 1 were already circulating in literary journals. Relating news of his trip to Leipzig in May 1822, the author Achim von Arnim wrote to his wife, Bettina, that he had bought several books, including the first two volumes of “die Mémoiren Casanova [sic], which are nothing other than bragging about debaucheries that an old man uses to embellish his youth in order to please himself or his patron.”45 Yet Arnim’s dismissal of the texts may have been somewhat disingenuous. He was willing to spend a considerable sum on the volumes (the first volume cost 2 Taler and 2 Silvergroschen; the second was probably about the same price), and he went on to buy at least one other volume of the work.46 Those without the resources to spend 4 or 5 Taler on the first two volumes of the Memoirs could find them in local lending libraries. In 1824 four volumes were confiscated from a lending library in Bromberg.47 In 1828 a short entry in an important liberal newspaper reported that Brockhaus’s illegal volumes were circulating in lending libraries: “A reliable source has reported that the immoral Casanova’s Memoirs

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are being distributed to everyone in every lending library. . . . In Berlin, the writings of Casanova, and many other less harmful works like Boccaccio’s Decameron, are forbidden. Yet the continued confiscations of such works only reveal the lack of success enjoyed by censorship measures in the German States.”48 Another article, written by the journal’s publisher, compared the “gallantry” of Casanova’s Memoirs to a famous eighteenth-century text, Das galante Sachsen: Casanova’s Memoirs are on par with The Gallant Saxony when one compares content; regarding the personages, however, it is like comparing a scoundrel with an honest man. The hero of the The Gallant Saxony is a prince, who is only able to quell love through adventure. Casanova is not simply the most common Wollüstung; he is also a crook, con man, bandit and vagabond. A stronger moral poison than these Memoirs* does not exist. . . . * There are also knockoffs of this text; they are published by German booksellers, stamped by the German censors and with German modesty—surely not the disgracefulness of profit—in order to accustom young men and women to the virtues of chastity.49

In response to Casanova’s critics, real and imagined, Schütz framed an extended defense of the text and its author. In the introduction to volume 1 he insists that the work is not a chronique scandaleuse because sex is only one of many life experiences described by the author, only one part of the true description of his life. Casanova’s text is encyclopedic and offers descriptions of all kinds, shrinking neither from religious debates nor from bawdy and bodily descriptions of food, wine, clothing, illness, and (in muted form) sex: “In this way, one lays claim to truth and to candid counternarrative with an audacity that often borders on impudence and impropriety; yet the true nature of the thing is rendered precisely because it maintains this quality in the way one encounters words.”50 Schütz thus argues that the direct impact of the words helps convey the truth of the matter; things are not concealed but expressed directly. The direct presentation of real stories distinguishes the work from erotische Schriften, which offer titillating, veiled descriptions of fictional stories. The expression of truth in clear direct language, Schütz suggests, is never obscene. In his efforts to establish the legitimacy of the Memoirs, Schütz turns to Goethe. In particular he takes up Goethe’s ideas about the identification of readers with literary texts, which provide vocabulary for Schütz’s subsequent discussion of women readers and their

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relationship to female characters. In Goethe’s judgment the “scandalous text” is defined as such because of its effect on the reader; the truly scandalous would encourage violence, lack of empathy, and apathy in the reader. Continuing his focus on the effect of texts on readers, Goethe also describes what he thinks a “good” text would do. He praises stories in which “unanticipated intentions, wishes and hopes arise, are fulfilled and confirmed; in which accidents play with human weakness.” Here the “reader engages in his favorite calm contemplation, and the heroes, whose stories he follows, should neither worry about condemnation, nor look for praise.”51 Schütz suggests that Casanova calls for just this kind of reading: calm contemplation, with no expectation that the protagonist will always be heroic. And though Casanova provides excitement with bawdy stories, he also invites empathy and identification, and his work does not inspire violence or apathy toward the suffering of others. Schütz offered his most original and extended defense in his foreword to the second volume of the Memoirs, published in 1822. Written in response to early reviews of the first volume, the foreword takes up the question of women readers and women characters. More than any single text from the 1820s, Schütz’s foreword to volume 2 exteriorizes the gender politics often implicit in discussions of “obscene and immoral texts.” He identifies central questions about gender and the text he translated and edited. The first concerned readership: Are the Memoirs appropriate reading material for women? The second is a matter of representation: how best (and without offense) to depict women’s actions and lives within a literary text. The two questions lead to a third: Are women readers likely to try to emulate the female characters they encountered in print? And if so, does this mean that authors have to be particularly careful about how they depict women’s experiences in their texts? To answer these questions, Schütz offers a systematic discussion, drawing on vocabulary borrowed from contemporary condemnations of unzüchtige Schriften. Addressing the question of women readers, he explains that they need to be divided into two groups. Some women readers prefer to have all of life filtered through poetic language. Casanova would not be to their liking: “For them, the intensity of life and its vicissitudes can offer no great amusement, and the book is not for them—not simply because of the erotic [scenes] that crop up, but also because of the political, philosophical, literary content and the reflection of the author’s intentions.”52 Schütz thus refuses to cast

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women as passive victims, suggesting instead that they are discerning and intelligent readers, capable of preferring one kind of text to another. Women who prefer Schiller to Goethe, for example, would be unlikely to enjoy Casanova. For fans of Schiller, Schütz writes, Casanova’s texts are simply too earthy, too frank and too close to the body. Yet he casts this as a matter of serious preference and thereby elevates rather than denigrates women’s literary tastes, setting himself apart from contemporaries who never tired of complaining about women readers’ tastes for trivial literature. A second set of women are well suited to be readers of Casanova: “Who can deny that there are also women who simply do not want to allow themselves to be held back by a narrow conception of their disposition, who believe that they are entitled to a view of life not only in literature and history, but also in government, who feel authorized and even obliged to pay attention to every literary production?” To deny people access to all varieties of literature (and thus to knowledge) amounts to tyranny. The desire for sexual knowledge is only one small part of a greater longing to understand the world in its complexity.53 Schütz also demonstrates fluency in the vocabulary of inner life and emotional development central to contemporary understandings of obscenity. He suggests that readers not allow “a few racy passages to disturb the equilibrium of the soul [Gleichgewicht der Seele].” Defending one of the most controversial episodes in the first volume, involving Casanova’s affair with a mature wife of an attorney named Lucrezia, Schütz comments on the mental effects of such a depiction: “Frightful and shocking consequences cannot follow on the later adventure with the attorney’s wife; no consequences that trigger melancholy in the mind of the reader through meditations on the sadness and emptiness of all existence or on the instability and falseness of all beauty. Genuinely dreadful situations produce no calamitous changes.” No matter how difficult, it is not truth that distorts minds, but fiction—and Casanova told real stories. In the same passage Schütz suggests that the danger to the reader is not sadness but nihilism and indifference. Turning from the question of women readers to the depiction of women in Casanova’s text, the editor suggests that the inner transformation of a character in a book does not necessarily cause the reader to experience the same mental transformation: “It is also impossible that the conscientious reader will be disturbed by the facts, by the destruction of mind and soul experienced by Lucrezia

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and her sister.”54 Uncoupling the actions of a character from the transformation of the reader was key to the editor’s defense of the text. His analysis of Lucrezia’s affair also suggested that women readers were capable of reading such passages without falling into adultery themselves. The story of Lucrezia suggested a second set of questions about the appropriate way to represent women’s lives. Schütz writes that the episode, arguably the most frank (though still not explicit) description of a sexual encounter in volume 1, was condemned by critics. 55 In his opinion this condemnation is unjustified. The relationship between Lucrezia and Casanova was unique. Lucrezia had lived a long, disciplined life as faithful (and somewhat neglected) wife and mother. Her affair with Casanova did not signal a turn from virtue to vice but instead represented one chance in her life to experience love: “For a long time she lived happily with her husband (who himself made little of her love) without ever being unfaithful, and he was happy that she had found an admirer.”56 Though Schütz was capable of moral disapproval, Lucrezia’s case was defensible for several reasons: the affair involved love; it did not fundamentally change Lucrezia (that is, she did not become a promiscuous woman); and it provided one opportunity in life to experience pleasure and drunkenness. Another passage, however, gave the editor pause. It involves two young sisters seduced and abandoned by Casanova. Schütz admits that the passage concerned him precisely because it seemed to do to these girls what Lucrezia’s affair did not: it threatened to change them, to condemn them to a life of sexual lassitude. He did some research, he reports, and was relieved to discover that the lives of the two girls were not ruined by their seduction. One became the wife of a successful man, the other a nun, and both forgave Casanova for his transgressions. Schütz judges the morality of an act by the extent to which it permanently marks the character of the persons involved. Readers too, he argues, may encounter a disturbing passage or a seductive scene without sudden and irreparable change; distance and autonomy are possible, for women as well as men. Schütz argues that things are obscene when they depict alluring untruths; realistic depictions of the truth, however painful or offcolor, do not distort the reader. In this he differed from Wessenberg. Like Schütz, the Catholic cleric worried about the overheated imagination, but he also hoped that fiction would serve to soften and “civilize” the world through the cultivation of emotion and empathy.

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Schütz had more confidence in the reader: smart people (men and women) could maintain mental equilibrium and avoid a “darkening of the mind and soul” by keeping an eye on the broader story and not lingering too carefully on potentially disturbing details. Women were not especially prone to mental disturbance; if anything, they were especially hungry for knowledge of all kinds and just as entitled to it as their male counterparts. Acknowledging that representations of women were potentially dangerous because of the threat of identification, Schütz wrote that the litmus test was transformation: Was the woman in question permanently degraded by her encounter, or was this one experience among many that did not define her life? Finally, he wrote that women (Lucrezia, the woman reader) longed for some freedom from the “tyranny” of limited conceptions of their character, and the rich and varied knowledge offered in Casanova’s Memoirs appealed to women precisely for this reason. Schütz added a final point: Casanova’s careful observations and descriptions of women, his desire to describe them each as unique and complex, was an effort akin to natural science, likening Casanova’s amorous adventures to a scholarly investigation. In his foreword to the third volume (his final major contribution to Brockhaus’s publication) Schütz focuses on the philosophical and political value of Casanova’s writings. Here the erudite editor set himself the task of proving his assertion that Casanova possessed a “deep philosophical consciousness.” He begins by qualifying this statement; it is not that Casanova set out to write a philosophical treatise. And the philosophy he did offer cannot be separated from experience, that is, from the life experiences he described. Casanova arrived at philosophy in practice, through living rather than abstractions: “These Memoirs contain truth and depth. Yet these were arrived at unintentionally, and they simply welled up from his soul, without any deliberate attempts to direct them.”57 Schütz shared his vision of creativity with contemporary Romantics, valorizing love, emotion, and experience as sources of truth and philosophy. In many ways Casanova’s eighteenth-century text, focused less on interiority than on external behavior and on detailed descriptions of the material world, provided an awkward fit for Schütz’s Romantic defense of truth and interiority. Yet Schütz offered a bold defense of the Memoirs in language that spoke to contemporaries. In his prefaces (and, according to Forsch, in the adaptation and translation of the original manuscript) Schütz offered an alternative view of human

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life still in keeping with an emerging bürgerlich culture. He valorized the quest for knowledge and experience and praised depth of feeling and philosophy generated from life. Rather than scoff at virtue, Schütz reframed it and in the process managed to confirm the notion that books both revealed and shaped the soul. In this sense, though not in others, Casanova’s editor agreed with those who would become detractors of the book.

The Struggles and Strategies of F. A. Brockhaus While Schütz was busy translating and editing the first volumes of Casanova’s manuscript, his publisher spent the last three years of his life engaged in a fierce battle with the Prussian authorities. 58 This history of Brockhaus’s struggle has been thoroughly documented in a three-volume biography written by the publisher’s grandson. Here the files kept on Brockhaus by Prussian officials between 1820 and 1823 provide further insights into the strategies used by members of the book trade to defend their wares. Brockhaus provoked the anger of King Friedrich Wilhelm and the scrutiny of Prussian censors in September 1820 because of entries in his popular encyclopedia, the Brockhaus Conversations-Lexikon. Prussian censors complained that the publisher allowed his authors free rein and thus passages in the Lexikon were “written with tremendous candor and certainly constituted an offense against censorship laws.”59 They were particularly focused on two passages in the encyclopedia. The first concerned the young Karl Sand, member of the German national movement, who had perpetrated a politically motivated murder of the reactionary playwright and publicist August von Kotzebue in 1819. Sand was tried and executed for his crime, but his loose association with the German national group served as an excuse to crack down on political radicalism of all kinds.60 The second was an entry on the Spanish Revolution. From the perspective of the Prussian authorities, both encyclopedia entries challenged the principles of monarchy. In May 1821, following a direct order from the Prussian king, the decision was made to place the publications from Brockhaus’s press and his commissions under strict scrutiny. Meanwhile the foreign minister reached out to the authorities in Saxony, hoping the neighboring state would take a firmer hand in regulating Brockhaus’s production within their borders.61 In practice these measures meant that Prussian censors reviewed every publication Brockhaus

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wanted to sell within Prussian borders. The police were notified to keep a close eye out for his publications, and all Prussian bookstores and lending libraries receiving books from Brockhaus were obliged to present these texts to officials. As a result of the Prussian government’s careful surveillance, we know a great deal about Brockhaus’s efforts to defend his publications. He wrote long, direct letters to the censors themselves, reminding them of the principles articulated in the Prussian Press Code. He also capitalized on ready access to print, using his own publications to defend himself and to launch a principled argument against censorship. These writings reveal his fluency in the language of mental fragility and moral education; they also illustrate his efforts to engender a more expansive vision of the public sphere. Brockhaus understood his audience (he was one of the most successful publishers of his day), and he presumably knew what kind of language he could use to make himself understood. It is therefore worth paying attention to the content of his appeals to a public he had helped to create.62 It is useful to understand the logic of the Prussian king’s preoccupation with Brockhaus and his publications.63 In a letter to the Censorship Board, Friedrich Wilhelm urged the censors to keep an eye out for certain kinds of publications: “So often in this or other publishing houses, a publication appears that preaches principles in popular terms, in which insurrectionism shines through, or which simply arouses agitation and displeasure—such texts can bewilder the concepts of youths and the less educated class of people.” The remainder of the letter made it clear that the king was particularly concerned about books and periodicals that threw the legitimacy of monarchy into question, texts that “promote so-called liberal factions and cast hatred and suspicion on all defenders of monarchical principles.” The king worried not about the general “bewilderment” and “confusion” of youths and the less educated but rather about their political loyalties. Yet he associated these shifts in political loyalties with a more general state of emotional upset and confusion, which might be generated by “immoral” as well as politically subversive texts.64 It becomes easier to see how emotional disorder in general was thought to have politically disruptive effects. Brockhaus addressed these concerns in two ways. First, he reminded the Prussian authorities that their own law articulated a commitment to the free circulation of knowledge. “It is stated in the [Prussian] Censorship Edict,” he wrote, “that censorship cannot

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hinder any serious and modest investigation of the truth.”65 He took this further in a second letter: “It is not simply my interests that are at stake here, it is also a matter of literature and scholarly knowledge, a matter of distributing a considerable body of scholarly texts inside Prussia, a land whose reputation and pride are based on the idea that the state supports the arts and sciences in all ways, a land that allows this light to shine without hindrance.”66 Brockhaus thus appealed to the censors’ pride and to the principles set out by Prussia’s authorities themselves. Brockhaus saved his best and most sophisticated arguments for the readers of the Literarisches Conversations-Blatt, a literary journal published by his press. In a review of two books on Sand’s murder of Kotzebue, Brockhaus wrote a detailed defense of his censored encyclopedia entry on Sand. Perhaps, he wrote, it would have been more cautious to have held back the detailed descriptions of Sand’s court case offered by the trail records: “One believes that feelings are already too agitated, that the participation of the unhappy youth [Sand] has already spoken too loudly, that the judgment of the masses (who are ruled by emotional impressions) is not yet clear and the feelings of youths are too easily agitated.” The fear of reigniting insurrection was one reason to hold back on publishing such a text. Brockhaus rejected this logic, but he made it clear that he understood what was at stake. He also understood the assumptions being made about youthful and uneducated readers: they were emotional and child-like, easily agitated and prone to escalating conflicts. He disagreed with these assumptions and presented an alternative view of the reading public: The best remedy for the diseased mind is the daylight of truth—that is, if the people believe that the complete truth can be offered to them. For free will, however, one needs the experience of reason. God has given each individual the moral freedom to gain wisdom through rational contemplation of the examples of others. So must the state offer the people—who can be led into temptation through ignorance and self deception—the opportunity to look clearly into the matter and to recognize the reasons for its occurrence through the comprehensive exposure of a crime based on self deception and error.67

Readers did not need protection from depictions of error; rather such representations formed the basis of moral education. One could only cultivate a clear mind and a free will by contemplating the examples of others, even (or perhaps only) if those examples involved self-delusion or human error. If the “masses” (Menge) were susceptible, that

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was perhaps all the better, for this meant that their sensibilities were malleable and could be crafted by rational contemplation. An uneducated or half-educated public, he insisted, was far more dangerous; exposure to the full range of human experiences—missteps and errors included—fostered emotional and intellectual equilibrium. Defending the public airing of Sand’s trial, Brockhaus’s logic intersected with that of Schütz, the man he had hired to translate and edit Casanova’s Memoirs. Both Schütz and Brockhaus insisted that moral development rested on exposure to the fullness of human experience. “More susceptible” readers—women, youth, less educated people— deserved access to knowledge of all kinds; to deny them amounted to tyranny. Readers (even these) were not simply imitative; youths who read the transcripts of Sand’s trial would not run out and commit murder, just as the women readers of Casanova’s Memoirs would not read the story of Lucrezia and use it as justification for adultery. The relationship between readers and narratives was more complicated than visions of imitation or emotional disruption implied. With practice people could become better readers, learning to maintain a critical distance from the stories they read, learning how to contemplate human error with reason. They presented, in other words, a more optimistic vision of the moral education engendered by reading: reading would discipline unruly impulses, refine the sensibilities, and further the development of reason.

Summary It is perhaps surprising to find that those who defended erotische Schriften (and sensational stories in general) shared a conceptual vocabulary with the detractors of these texts. Authors and editors defended their texts on grounds that they promoted Bildung, the cultivation of the emotions and intellect. The producers of erotische Schriften framed and softened texts not only to meet the strictures of the censors but also to appeal to the sensibilities of would-be readers and perhaps to the scruples of booksellers and proprietors of lending libraries (though most contemporaries would not have attributed any scruples to the latter). They shared with the authorities a conviction that reading mattered, that stories—even those dismissed as trivial, and perhaps especially these—played an important role in the development of the self. Such convergences between the producers of forbidden books and those who would condemn them surprise those of

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us accustomed to the flamboyant (and certainly oppositional) antics of a figure like the First Amendment booster Larry Flint. AlthingFischer, the most infamous early nineteenth-century author of erotic books in German, hewed closely to the limits of bürgerlich sensibilities, as did the respected editor of Casanova’s Memoirs. August Prinz, who would become the most outrageous German publisher of erotic literature of the midcentury, armed with a poison pen to match, was still finishing his apprenticeship as a publisher and bookseller in the 1830s and was yet to appear on the scene. In comparison with their radical eighteenth-century counterparts (especially those in France and England), these early nineteenth-century figures seem tame. However, this should not blind us to differences in tone and conception between the attitudes of police and censors and those advanced by figures like Schütz and Brockhaus when it came to the defense of so-called vulnerable readers. It is important that both made their most sophisticated arguments against censorship in publications directed at their readers, enacting the very vision of a literary public sphere advocated in their writings. They could make a reasoned appeal in writing, and chances were good that they would find an audience receptive to their arguments. Both saw reading as central to moral development, but they argued that readers cultivated their moral sensibilities by exposure to all varieties of human experience; what was needed was broader and deeper exposure, not half-truths and paternalist protection. By the late 1830s and 1840s such arguments would begin to enjoy broad support, and censors and police alike would be forced to admit that “negative censorship” (prohibiting certain texts) only strengthened interest in forbidden texts. More important, such prohibitions also failed to address the importance of reading in the process of moral education. Here government authorities and the producers of books would eventually find a point of agreement.

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Liberalism and the Codification of Obscenity Laws in the 1830s and 1840s Obscene acts that lead the individual to transgress inner duties to himself and to the dictates of morality, yet do not injure the rights of others or cause public offense, are not to be threatened with punishment. —a n s e l m v o n f e u e r b a c h , quoted in Wilhelm Thilo, Strafgesetzbuch für das Großherzogthum Baden mit Motiven der Regierung und den Resultaten der Ständeverhandlungen im Zusammenhange dargestellt, likely from Feuerbach’s introduction to his Bavarian Criminal Code of 1813

Liberalism as a principle of government is only possible for a people that practices rigorous moral discipline. —Report from the Citizens of Hamburg, 1909, GStA PK, I. HA, Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 380, Nr. 7, adh. 2, Bd. 1

German legal scholars often begin their histories of unzüchtige und obszöne Schriften in the 1830s and 1840s with a series of liberal criminal codes that introduced obscenity as a moral offense to be tried in courts of law. The Saxon Criminal Code of 1838 was the first to include such a law. In a section of the code devoted to “actions that arouse public offense” and situated between sodomy and public torture of animals, paragraph 309 reads, “Moral injury through obscene, publicly offensive acts and distribution of obscene writings or visual images is punishable by up to one year in prison.” The liberal states of Hesse (1841) and Baden (1845) followed suit; Hesse defined obscenity as an injury to modesty (Verletzung der Schamhaftigkeit). Baden’s liberal government issued a new press law that guaranteed freedom of political expression, but the kingdom’s 1845 Criminal Code outlawed “the arousal of public offense through the distribution of immoral texts or public display of images that depict obscene acts.”1 These

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were not, as we have seen, the first official codes to name unzüchtige Schriften as a problem meriting legal intervention. Yet they were the first German laws to separate “immoral texts and images” from other offending texts, to situate obscenity in relation to sexual offenses, and to place final decisions about obscenity under the legal jurisdiction of courts. 2 While the police would continue to play a role in identifying and confiscating morally suspect texts and images, judgments would have to stand up to the scrutiny of legal experts. The invention of obscenity as a distinct offense, separate from assaults on the state, the sovereign, and religion, therefore happened in the decades before the revolution of 1848 (the Vormärz), a period of liberalization and growing expectations for reform. These laws were not adopted by reactionary governments but by states whose population had recently achieved liberal concessions. Indeed one of the goals of legal reforms in this era was to produce a uniform law that would protect individuals from the arbitrary decisions of local authorities and the coercive paternalism of the police. Anselm von Feuerbach, the most influential German legal theorist of the period, left “obscene and immoral texts” out of his 1813 Bavarian Criminal Code. This was part of his broader effort to minimize, and even eliminate, state intervention in moral matters that he believed were best left to the conscience of the individual. 3 Though a draft of the police code that would have accompanied Feuerbach’s criminal law would have outlawed “immoral writings,” the draft was not ultimately adopted.4 To say that the invention of obscenity law in the Vormärz was part of a process of liberal reforms is not to say that these new laws were emancipatory. Rather this period produced a new logic for condemning texts on moral grounds; it also produced a conceptual vocabulary (itself not entirely new) to describe the effects of immoral print. The logic and vocabulary would be enduring and continue to animate discussions of obscenity into the twentieth century; perhaps it is for this reason that German legal histories so often begin their discussions of obscenity law in 1838. Beginning this story earlier, as I have done, allows us to see what was new in the liberal invention of obscenity law. It also draws our attention to continuities between late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conceptions of reading, morality, and the self. If part of the liberal project in Germany involved an effort to carve out more space for individual development (expressed in the language of Bildung), liberals were also attuned to the relationship between the individual’s emotional tenor and the process of political

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reforms. The links between reading and moral development therefore mattered for German liberals, just as they had for theorists and practitioners of enlightened absolutism. Scholars suggest that we should not be surprised to find links between liberalism and obscenity. Writing in 1917, the German legal scholar H. Josef Haubach identified what he thought was innovative about obscenity law articulated in the Vormärz: this was the first time in German law that feelings were identified as a quality meriting legal defense. He traced the origins of this impulse to one of the high-water marks of political liberalism: the French Revolution. A 1791 Parisian municipal police code identified obscenity as that which publicly offended “aux bonnes moeurs par l’outrage à la pudeur des femmes.” Saxony’s 1838 code punished “public offense.” Hesse’s 1841 code was even more specific about the feeling involved, defining obscenity as an “injury to modesty.” It is likely that Hesse borrowed its language from the French model. Haubach was particularly struck by the fact that Saxony’s new criminal code placed obscenity adjacent to the torture of animals. Both laws, he explained, rested upon an attempt to protect the emotional impulses of the human witness. According to the logic of the law, witnessing animal torture could render the viewer rough, insensitive, and prone to cruelty. In the same way, written or visual obscenity might permanently blunt or destroy the impulse of shame: “The human impulse of empathy is the object under attack and the object to be protected.”5 Liberal theory as articulated by John Locke famously attended to the inviolability of the human body, and this has become one of the foundations of both human rights theory and property rights.6 In a related move, Kant insisted on the integrity and autonomy of the human conscience, a principle that informed German legal reforms in the 1830s and 1840s. It seems likely that the insistence on protecting the individual from emotional assaults in public spaces—the assaults of witnessing brutality or obscenity— was part of an emerging liberal concern with individual emotional integrity. These laws also expressed the fear, articulated by Haubach and others, that exposure to certain acts and texts would lead to the diminishment of certain essential impulses. For Haubach, this impulse was empathy; for others, it was shame. In the past few decades scholars of other national cultures have linked liberalism and obscenity. In the 1970s the literary scholar Steven Marcus wrote that preoccupations with abundance, scarcity, and exchange typical of a capitalist worldview permeated the

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pornographic texts of Victorian England. The art historian Lynda Nead has argued that modern concepts of obscenity in Europe grew out of nineteenth-century processes of urbanization, increasing literacy, innovations in publishing, and the growth of libraries and museums. In its modern incarnation obscenity must be seen in the context of an emerging popular culture rooted in the industrial urban landscapes of the mid-nineteenth-century European city. Writing about the Russian context, the historian Laura Engelstein has shown that anxieties about sexually explicit texts, or “boulevard literature,” were linked to urbanization and growing expectations for political and social reform in fin-de-siècle Russia.7 In her recent work on obscenity and the British Empire, the historian Deana Heath provides insight into this conceptual shift.8 Heath links new definitions of obscenity to changes in the nature of power in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. In the early modern period power was thought to function through the sovereign’s monopoly on violence and the attendant ability to compel compliance. Seen in this light, late eighteenth-century press laws combining political, religious, and moral dangers make sense, as all three threatened the sovereign’s power.9 In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, however, power began to operate in new ways, shifting from coercion to discipline, from the threatened violence of the sovereign to “governmentalism.” This latter form of power operated through knowledge (statistics gathered on the population, for example) and by producing disciplined bodies and desired subjectivities. “Discipline” of this variety, Heath writes, was exercised through law and through sexuality, methods that intersected in modern definitions of obscenity. If power functioned by shaping or “disciplining” subjects’ sexual desires, it is no surprise that obscenity law would be severed from political and religious concerns and situated squarely in the world of sexual infractions. The shifts outlined by Heath do not capture developments specific to the German states in the period between 1830 and 1848, but they do encourage us to think about links between liberal political culture and changing definitions of obscenity. To understand the particularities of the case that concerns us here, we need to know a lot more about the assumptions and aspirations of German liberals in the Vormärz. We must also keep our eyes trained on the way contemporaries imagined the relationship between inner life and action in the world and remain alert to continuities between the early nineteenth century and the decades before 1848.

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Writing in 1893, the jurist Rudolf Schauer compared developments in German obscenity law with those of other countries: “It is worth remarking that England and America, the most liberal countries, are the strongest in their punishment of the offense.”10 Yet there are reasons to think that there were important connections between German liberalism and the creation of obscenity law in the Vormärz. Understanding these connections involves a close look at several related developments. I will begin by considering what liberalism meant in prerevolutionary Germany then turn to legal developments between 1813 and 1848, a process that produced new vocabulary for identifying and describing unzüchtige Schriften. These changes were visible in the criminal codes of Saxony, Hesse, and Baden; they took somewhat different form in revisions to the Prussian press law in the 1830s and 1840s. Liberalism also signaled the loosening of traditional trade relations, a process that marked the German book trade (and with it the lives of readers). The 1830s witnessed the emergence of a new breed of entrepreneurial publishers and booksellers, some of whom I have already discussed. Publishers like Johann Scheible and Friedrich and Johann Franckh in Stuttgart exploited business opportunities opened by loosened guild restrictions, pockets of regional liberalism, and rising literacy rates. Publishers in the southwest began to sell inexpensive editions of popular texts aimed at a broad audience, and in the process transformed the German book trade. Finally, I will examine attitudes about the moral effects of reading expressed in journals and newspapers and in ongoing discussions of lending libraries. These sources point to the development of new vocabulary for discussing reading and inner life. German obscenity law was not invented out of whole cloth in 1838; that much is clear. Yet it is also true that the developments of the 1830s and 1840s reshaped discussions surrounding reading, morality, and inner life. If obscenity was no longer adjacent to attacks on the sovereign and religion, it was still linked to assaults on the emotional equilibrium of the reader and, by extension, with injuries to the social order. Thus to understand the meanings of obscenity as they emerged in this period, we must explore liberal visions of the social order as they began to unfold in the decades before the revolutions of 1848–49. These visions were not necessarily consistent. Emphasis on Bildung and the extension of education was coupled with fears that the wrong texts in the wrong hands could lead to corruption of the mentally vulnerable and less educated. Calls for an end to censorship

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came just at the moment when “immoral and obscene” publications were separated from other press crimes and associated with sexual offenses, making it possible to open the liberal public sphere to political expression while maintaining tight restrictions on morally dangerous texts, images, and acts.

Liberalism in the German States Liberal social attitudes and political and social forms in the German states did not lead to a national revolution on the model of France or America, and historian Dieter Langewiesche cautions that we should not assume that liberalism in Germany followed the same forms it did in England. German liberals were not, by and large, ideologically opposed to state intervention in economic development, nor did they generally embrace the values of self-interest and individualism that were central (at least in theory) to classical English liberalism. To understand early German liberals, Langewiesche writes, it is best to start with their self-concept: “What does bürgerlich mean?” To be bürgerlich was to be capable of being a citizen. “The liberal image of the citizen contained a promise and a task for all: this status would be accessible to everyone through their own economic, cultural and political efforts.”11 Another historian of liberalism, James Sheehan, writes that members of the liberal bourgeoisie were linked not by political institutions but by “a family of ideas and behavior patterns” that “allowed liberals to recognize one another.”12 Central to this family of ideas was the concept of Bildung, a term that encompassed education, moral development, and personal cultivation. Bildung was one of the keys to being bürgerlich, a means of proving oneself capable of self-governance and, by extension, worthy of citizenship. An article published in a liberal journal shortly before the 1848 March uprisings entitled “What Should the Bürger Read?” urged Germans to capitalize on their national inclination toward reading and learning. According to the author, the German “nation” was an aspiration. Freedom was to be found first in the liberation of one’s mind: “Only an educated, enlightened spirit can also be called free. . . . Only a rich heart, a spirit in which heavenly clarity has prevailed, can situate itself in the correct relationship to humankind. We must read extensively, and in so doing finally learn how to think and speak abundantly.” The author suggested that the best works of literature, and thus the tools for cultivating and educated the self, should

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be available to men of all kinds—farmers and craftsmen, merchants and businessmen.13 Ian McNeely explains that the concept of Bildung suggested a kind of universalism, as status was based on behavior and the development of inner values rather than social hierarchies: “Bildung was a universal ideal, a way of governing one’s behavior by reason, utility, and culture, not by social convention, hierarchy, or development.”14 By the 1840s some German liberals were arguing that censorship was incompatible with Bildung, as the proper cultivation of the individual involved exposure to all varieties of human experience and knowledge. One liberal-minded author wrote in an 1841 article on novel reading, “Young people could do worse than to stick their noses in a good novel and have a long cry. What of busy participation in the drives of the world? Everyone grasps for luck and profit! But to have something to say in public, one must know something of the world.”15 Real cultivation of the self involved embracing subjects beyond one’s professional expertise. In an 1842 report to the provincial governments the Prussian interior minister acknowledged that reading was becoming a necessity for more and more people and that lending libraries were one of the primary sources of material for this “education of the people” (Volksbildung). As efforts to control the kinds of books that circulated in libraries were largely unsuccessful, new strategies had to be found to promote the reading of “good books” among the less educated classes. It was important that the knowledge gathered from reading was not “mechanical.” Instead such reading should promote “the lively impulse of the people’s spirit toward further education.” The minister proposed the creation of open libraries filled with edifying books as a more effective alternative to the “negative” (and largely ineffective) practice of censoring the books in lending libraries.16 Invested in practices of education and moral development, liberals were concerned with what people read. They were unlikely to argue that the essential processes of mental, emotional, and moral development should be left to market forces or to members of the book trade who stood to profit from selling as many books as possible. Sheehan explains that liberals associated politics with Bildung, insofar as both education and self-cultivation were necessary to successfully participate in public life.17 Bildung required guidance. But as the Prussian officials meditating on the regulation of lending libraries in the early 1840s acknowledged, such guidance could no longer take the form

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of prohibition. What they termed “negative censorship” had to be replaced with a “positive” approach designed to encourage people to choose good books and print. While German liberals called for an end to government censorship and counted freedom of the press as a civil right, they were also worried about what people read, for if education and moral development constituted the means by which one became bürgerlich and worthy of citizenship and inclusion in civil society, then the content of books and the moral tenor of the publishing trade mattered a great deal. Historians of gender have had much to say about the growth of liberal ideas and social forms in the Vormärz. Dagmar Herzog and Isabel Hull have argued that liberalism seemed to hold out the promise of emancipation for energized minorities, among them women, Jews, and other nonelites. A self-conscious feminist movement arose in the German states, and liberals hotly debated the subject of Jewish emancipation. In the liberal legal reforms of the early nineteenth century, Hull explains, jurists made efforts to limit the state’s incursion into the lives of subjects and citizens and to promote consistent and neutral application of the law, thus limiting the class-based or arbitrary judgments of courts or police. Many Germans in the 1830s and 1840s maintained close ties to agriculture, and farmers inspired by liberal economic theory and English models adopted entrepreneurial, competitive farming practices that transformed the division of labor in rural families.18 The strength of guilds and support for open and competitive trade varied from state to state. By 1835 only 17 percent of production in Württemberg was organized by guilds, possibly one reason why the kingdom became a center for entrepreneurial publishers and booksellers, who could establish publishing houses without guild training or approval. The situation was different in Prussia and other states, where guild structures remained strong in some fields.19 Nonetheless freedom of trade (Gewerbefreiheit) and economic competition continued to develop and to exert pressure on traditional patterns of organizing business and labor. Liberalism appealed to people in the 1830s and 1840s because it promised greater personal and economic freedoms, widespread social inclusion, and political participation. Yet historians of gender like Hull, Herzog, and Marion Gray argue that there were significant downsides to these developments. Liberalism based its claims to inclusion on a theoretically neutral and autonomous subject who would reap rewards based on merit. In practice this meant the

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political subject was imagined as rational and independent, and the legal subject was theoretically abstracted from differences in material reality, just as the entrepreneurial farmer was abstracted from the social household unit that had traditionally involved a partnership between husband and wife. If liberals sought to eliminate inequalities, they simultaneously attributed importance to religious, educational, and sexual difference. Such differences were thought to render individuals insufficiently rational and dependent and thus incapable of participating in public life. Furthermore, Herzog argues, liberals in the Vormärz were invested in marriage as central to their vision of happiness, personal fulfillment, and self-development for male citizens. 20 The ideal political subject was autonomous, dynamic, and rational. This implicitly excluded those who were perceived as dependent, passive, or insufficiently rational, among them women, the uneducated, and Jews. Gray’s work on rural life and agriculture in the German states points to a similar shift in gender relations. The eighteenth-century agricultural ideal of economic stability encouraged rural men and women to work in concert, each partner playing essential roles in the maintenance of the household and agricultural output. The rise of entrepreneurial, competitive farming practices inspired by liberal economic theory had the consequence of relegating rural women to a newly articulated “private sphere,” thereby discounting their economic role in the rural economy. The economic unit was reimagined as the individual rather than the household or pair, and profit rather than stability was touted as the goal of successful farming. Formal insistence on an abstract legal subject held out the promise of inclusion. In practice, however, theoretical erasure of difference did not reliably translate into equality. Instead liberal assumptions about education, sexuality, marriage, gender, and religion helped determine who was perceived as sufficiently prepared to participate in civil society, economic innovation, and political life. Such assumptions also determined whose reading practices required supervision. Discussions of morality and print took on new forms just as the German book trade went through an important period of expansion. There was, on the one hand, a growing consensus that the modes of censorship initiated in the late eighteenth century were neither justified nor effective. Legal reformers in the Vormärz worked to pry the regulation of print out of the hands of the police and to place it in the courts, where, presumably, judicial oversight would

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assure consistency. Yet, on the other hand, anxieties about the vulnerability of readers and viewers remained. Links between Bildung and Bürgerlichkeit, cultivation of self and citizenship, affirmed the crucial importance of what and how people read. During this period jurists and government officials forged a distinction between political censorship and obscenity that had not existed during the early decades of the century. The threat of immoral or obscene texts was not bound up with a threat to sovereign or religious authority, as it had been in the legal reforms of the 1789s and 1790s. So-called political threats could be separated from moral threats, and this second term was gendered, bound up with women and other “vulnerable” groups who frequented lending libraries. We see this in the rough taxonomy proposed by a Prussian justice minister working on revisions to the press law in the early 1840s, a taxonomy that had already begun to crystallize in the 1820s: Here it is really a matter of two different categories of writings, which could without further thought be subjected to the same treatment: 1) Pamphlets of politically or religiously objectionable character, dangerous through their distribution among the masses; 2) The whole mass of literature for lending libraries—that is, most of the ordinary novels and plays—here we are primarily concerned with the immorality of content. 21

The justice minister spoke shorthand: “literature for lending libraries” evoked a particular kind of text (foreign novels, penny dreadfuls, popular medical works, and erotic memoirs) as well as a certain kind of reading (for pleasure, with abandon). More important, the minister assumed a division between the kind of reader involved in political and religious debates and the kind who ran off to lending libraries in search of entertainment. If these categories did not divide neatly between male and female readers, they were nonetheless gendered, and “literature for lending libraries” continued to be associated with women (of multiple classes) and with the poor and less educated. This conceptual division helps us understand why the first obscenity laws appeared in sections of criminal codes devoted not to the press but to sexual or moral offenses.

Legal Transformations In the early decades of the nineteenth century liberal jurists categorized obscenity as a Sittlichkeitsdelikte, a crime or offense against

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morality. This situated obscenity in conceptual legal proximity to incest, prostitution, rape, sodomy, and (as we saw in the case of Saxony’s code) torture of animals.22 Both the inclusion of obscenity in this category and the existence of Sittlichkeitsdelikte as a distinct subset of crime were controversial matters in the 1820s and 1830s. Feuerbach’s code, a touchstone of liberal criminal law reforms, did not include the category of Sittlichkeitsdelikte. Hull explains that Feuerbach forged his jurisprudence under the influence of the Enlightenment and therefore worked to produce a strictly secular code, free from all traces of canon law. 23 In a discussion of obscene acts Feuerbach argued that it was not the role of the state to protect individuals from self-inflicted moral injury: the law should provide the broadest possible scope for individual conscience insofar as the acts of one person did not injure the freedoms of another. A moral transgression in private that did not injure the freedom of others was not a punishable crime. As we have already seen, such principles reflected the influence of Kant on early nineteenth-century legal reform, particularly the philosopher’s preoccupation with the individual’s freedom to exercise reason and to develop an independent conscience. 24 Kant’s insistence on intellectual autonomy found direct expression in Feuerbach’s legal theory. Though the state could compel outward compliance with social and political order, it should not interfere with the moral deliberations of the subject. The goal of criminal law was preventative. Individuals should be aware of the causal connection between crime and punishment; this knowledge would thus act as a rational deterrent to crime. There was a tension in these legal principles: Feuerbach worked to protect a sphere of moral autonomy for the individual, yet his vision of preventative law rested on the individual’s recognition of cause and effect and the resulting internalization of authority. Feuerbach’s secularism also led him to reject vestiges of canon law expressed, for example, in links between religious “crimes of the flesh” and (later) sex crimes and offenses. The role of secular law, Feuerbach argued, was neither to punish sin nor to protect God from injury. Eberhardt Schmidt quotes Feuerbach’s influential Lehrbuch: “It is impossible that the Godhead should be injured, that He should take revenge on men as a result of this injury is unthinkable, that men should appease His injury through their laws is folly.” All remnants of religious values and laws were to be stripped from criminal law: “As a result, blasphemy, heresy, superstition, sins of the flesh, marital infidelity and the like were only legally punishable if they injure the rights

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of another.”25 The influence of Feuerbach’s legal theory meant that German jurists formulating criminal codes in the 1820s and 1830s were forced to think carefully about criminalizing sexual offenses. If law was not designed to protect the sovereign or God but instead the rights of individuals, then a new logic had to be invented for condemning immoral texts and images. This was in fact what liberal jurists accomplished in the 1830s and 1840s. France’s Code Pénal contributed to the conceptual vocabulary employed in the first German obscenity laws. The 1810 French code condemned “toute exposition ou distribution de chansons, pamphlets, figures ou images contraires aux bonnes moeurs.” A revised version of 1819 provided slightly different language, condemning “tout outrage à la morale publique et religieuse, ou aux bonnes moeurs.”26 German legal reformers probably borrowed two key concepts from the French: injured feelings or morals and public offense. Outrage aux bonnes moeurs became “injury to morals” (Verletzung der Sittlichkeit) and “injured modesty” (die Schamhaftigkeit verletzt). Tout outrage à la morale publique became “public nuisance” (öffentlichen Ärgerniß) and “public presentation of obscene acts” (öffentliche Vornahme unzüchtiger Handlungen). German legal theorists therefore borrowed language from the French, but they also added their own. Hesse’s Criminal Code made the interior injury a specific feeling, shame, that was caused by the “exhibition or distribution of immoral representations.” French law focused exclusively on texts and images (chansons, pamphlets, figures ou images); German laws added acts. Saxony added the torture of animals as a police offense directly adjacent to obscenity—an important conceptual pairing that sheds light on the logic of both laws. Two themes animated German obscenity laws drafted in the 1830s and 1840s: a concern with protecting people from moral offense in public spaces and fear that exposure to obscene texts and images might damage the interior impulses of empathy and shame. Hesse’s law expressed this dual concern: “He who injures shame through distribution of obscene representations or through the public performance of obscene acts will be sentenced to a fine or detention, and in cases of coarse [grob] injury to morals, to a prison term of up to six months.”27 Public display and performance were seen as key to injured shame, for, presumably, shame could be injured in private as well. The meaning of “coarse” injury remained unclear; perhaps the adjective pointed to the extent of the damage (semipermanent damage to one’s original impulses), or perhaps it was the “crudeness” or

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“rudeness” (for grob also implies these things) of the assault on morals that made for the more serious crime. Both concerns—one about damaged moral impulses, the other about crudeness (rawness) in public—were consistent with the spirit of these laws. The commentary that accompanied published legal codes in the 1830s and 1840s provides insights into the process that produced these laws. Reformers, for example, worked to differentiate between offenses properly assigned to the police code and those better treated by the criminal courts. In part the production of new criminal codes represented an effort to limit the power of the police; important cases would be decided by court cases. Yet offenses of lesser magnitude were often relegated to the police code. In the case of Saxony’s new code, for example, concubinage (included under “obscene acts”) and torture of animals were deemed matters for the police code rather than the courts. 28 Commentary by the nineteenth-century legal scholar Adolph von Hartitzsch explained, “Concubinage cannot be prosecuted as a crime because it is nothing more than a ubiquitous, simple sexual offense and as such is not subject to [criminal] punishment; one also cannot say that it contributes to public offense.” The police were nonetheless directed to prevent extramarital sexual unions and the torture of animals—the latter, according to Hartitzsch, “not only works against the feelings of public morality” but also “promotes roughness and blunts empathy.”29 According to another legal commentary, Chapter 16 of the Saxon Code enumerating “Crimes against Morality” was the last to chapter to be drafted.30 Further, all crimes in this section, with the exception of obscenity and torture of animals, had, under canon law, been “crimes of the flesh.” Crimes in this category deemed serious enough to merit criminal prosecution included incest, prostitution, sodomy, and publicly offensive acts, including the distribution or display of obscene texts and images. Other offenses, among them public drunkenness, were subject to punishment only if they caused public offense. In their efforts to distinguish prosecutable crimes from moral transgressions, it was only necessary to establish that injury might be done (theoretically) to a witness. On the subject of paragraph 309 of the Saxon Code, “Acts arousing public offense,” commentary by Christian Weiss explained that “acts” had to be understood in broad terms to include such things as a public speech. The law did not require that offense to a third party did in fact occur; it was enough that offense was possible. Furthermore, Weiss explained, “not all acts causing public offense are

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included here, instead only those that have an obscene character and in this way produce moral injury.” Drunkenness in public spaces, which might in theory cause offense, was a police infraction rather than a crime. Of the acts arousing public offense covered by paragraph 309, most common were the distribution of obscene texts and visual images, “for example from tobacco stores, and . . . the proprietors of lending libraries can be prosecuted according to this paragraph, insofar as they had knowledge of the content of the obscene texts in question.”31 Another act that provoked concerns on moral (but not sexual) grounds was paragraph 310, which made “malicious and wanton torture of animals” a police offense rather than a crime to be prosecuted by the courts. According to Weiss, “Insofar as neither maliciousness nor wantonness take place, but only an overstepping of the bounds of reason in the treatment of animals, [this crime] falls to the judgment of the police.” This was a complex infraction, involving the intentions (or attitude) of the perpetrator and the perceptions and responses of the person observing the abuse. Weiss explained that those who drafted the law agreed that “malicious and wanton torture of animals was criminally punishable because of public offense and the attendant danger that others may grow wild.”32 The danger of observing cruelty—Verwilderung, becoming wild, unruly, or bestial—provides some insight (albeit oblique) into the dangers attending public exposure to obscenity. In Baden’s Code, paragraph 358 criminalized the “provocation of public offense through the distribution of obscene texts, or through the public display of images that display obscene acts.” According to commentary, those involved in drafting the law were worried about how to limit the moral zeal of the “particularly modest judge, who can easily be enticed into labeling obscene pictures that simply offend the more tender feelings through their naked depiction of nature.” Appeals were made to exclude texts from criminal prosecution and to limit prosecution of images to those representing obscene acts. The latter appeal was approved, but the distribution of obscene texts was counted as a crime rather than a police offense on grounds that “the poison, with which the writer undermines morality, can easily spread far and wide before the police become aware of it, and because the limited authority of the police was not deemed adequate for the punishment of an offense carrying such substantial consequences.”33 According to the logic of these laws, texts, images, and acts created a punishable offense when they were encountered in public.

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Commentary offers no insights into the focus on public spaces; moral damage and the “deadening” of empathy or shame were possible in spaces of all kinds. Forced to speculate, we might begin with the conceptual division between private and public spaces solidifying in the 1820s and 1830s. For liberals, public space was supposed to be conducive to rational discourse and the open exchange of ideas; such a vision was predicated on the relegation of unruly and offensive elements to invisibility or at least to the margins. Liberal lawmakers in the 1820s and 1830s were also concerned that the state not overstep its bounds and interfere with the private concerns of individuals; it was reasonable to compel the individual to observe public forms and public order, but it was not the place of the state to interfere with the “private” moral choices of the individual. Finally, legislators and legal reformers formulating a category of crimes against morality were particularly attentive to publicity and the position of the observer. It seems likely that they imagined an unwitting observer who stumbled by accident onto scenes or into stories or accounts that threatened to undo him or her, to weaken or damage his or her sense of shame, to evoke “wild” or “rough” impulses. We can see the importance attributed to publicity and protecting the public sphere in Feuerbach’s discussion of one of the few moral crimes he included in his 1813 code: widernatürliche Unzucht, or sodomy. Feuerbach was particularly preoccupied with the problem of publicity surrounding cases of sodomy: “The offense aroused in the public when cases of sodomy in the sense of the law (bestiality and pederasty) are publicized, as well as the further reflection that sodomy weakens the body and deadens or destroys the intellect, and further the fact that the harmful consequences for body and mind are not confined to the person who has committed the crime but rather extend to satisfying the scandalous desires of misused persons—taken together, these things appear to be adequate grounds . . . to count it in the circle of crimes meriting civil prosecution.” Feuerbach stressed the importance of publicity, of damage done to a third party, and a deadening or destruction of one’s physical and mental integrity. At the end of the paragraph he took his concern with publicity one step further, arguing that sodomy cases should be prosecuted only if the public was already aware of their occurrence: “In accordance with the spirit of the law, however, the intervention of the court is determined by requirements: first, that in the investigation of the act and its consequences, offense did occur; and that news of the act has already

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reached the public—otherwise, the evil one is working against and the related evil of public offense, is actually called forth by the court proceedings themselves.”34 Feuerbach deemed it more important to avoid public offense through the publicity surrounding a trial than it was to prosecute the offender. Exposure to the crime of sodomy, he suggested, might actually “call forth” the crime again. Just as exposure to obscenity and cruelty might produce “crudeness” and dampen empathy, exposure to the details of a sodomy trial could call forth moral degeneration.

Changes to the Prussian Press Law Press laws were another place states condemned obscene texts and images. As officials in the Prussian Justice Ministry gathered information on other legal codes that might serve as models, they wrote down the text of Baden’s 1832 law on the policing of the press. According to their files, Baden’s law condemned the “arousal of public offense through the representation of obscene matters in text or in image.”35 Württemberg’s 1839 Criminal Code did not name obscenity as a crime, but the state’s 1817 press law condemned any “utterances about moral matters, which betray the malignant intention to incite others to perform acts that the State and Church recognize as crimes or vices.”36 Though Prussian officials produced their first draft of a new criminal code in the 1820s, the final version was not complete until 1851.37 In the meantime the Ministry finished a new press law and kept detailed records on the revision process. The revision of press laws was not always marked by the liberal principles that characterized criminal law reform in the period. In the 1840s Prussia moved from a preventative system involving a board of censors who approved texts prior to publication to a repressive system that monitored publications once they were already in circulation. This involved the creation of press courts composed of appointed judges, and it meant articulating the lines between these new courts and the regulatory authority of the police. 38 To aid them in the process of drafting a new press law, Prussian justice ministers consulted press laws from France, England, Baden, and Württemberg. A series of drafts written and revised between 1845 and 1850 (with a break in the files between March 1848 and 1850) provide a sense of the questions that preoccupied them. They were particularly concerned with monitoring the content of newspapers and periodical texts, and a

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cabinet order from 1842 relieved all printed works over twenty sheets from censorship. Early drafts, probably from 1845 and 1847, reveal a preoccupation with protecting the honor and integrity of the sovereign and his family, employees of the state, the Church and recognized religious groups, morality broadly defined (more on this below), and respectable individuals threatened with libel. During the drafting process ministers worked to find language to describe the moral damage done by unzüchtige Schriften. It appears that the first stab at the language of the law was made by Justice Minister Friedrich Karl von Savigny himself in 1845. Positioned between laws condemning press infractions against religion and the state, the draft described the moral crimes of the press, condemning “injuries to decency and good morals [Verletzungen der Zucht und guten Sitte], as well as representations that arouse sensuality.” Savigny’s draft followed the French model, emphasizing the importance of decorum and collective standards of morality. Official comments on the draft expressed concern about the final phrase condemning “representations that arouse sensuality.” Commentary on the draft pointed to the weakness of this proposed language: “Our best poets . . . might easily fall into this category.”39 In the next draft the phrase was eliminated. By the 1830s worries about socialism and communism crept into legal discussions of unzüchtige Schriften in Prussia; both were perceived as threats to the integrity of the family and the concept of the household and thus were associated with moral transgression. An 1835 report on the reorganization of censorship decried the dangers of French socialist and atheist texts: “There is no inventory of the army of texts from Paris involved in the strategic poisoning of the collective mentality,” among them the works of the French utopian socialist Saint-Simon, which were smuggled in from Brussels in the early 1830s.40 Anxieties about communism lingered at the edges of efforts to reform the press law. By 1847 or early 1848 Savigny’s original language had been replaced by two paragraphs describing the moral danger of print in new terms. Paragraph 7 condemned “attacks on property and family that form the basis of the social order, which overstep in content and form the sphere of academic consideration.” This offense, the draft explained, could not be criminally prosecuted but was instead to be suppressed because of the collective danger it posed. Paragraph 8 simply outlawed “coarse immorality.”41 A final draft, the last to be written before the revolution in 1848, expanded on this idea of the foundations of the social order. It condemned anyone “who injures

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morality through publications in a manner that betrays the intention to instigate crime and vice in others, or that exposes moral institutions—namely marriage, the family, property and oaths—to hatred, contempt, or ridicule.”42 In 1850 the Justice Ministry again took up the work of drafting a press law, and while they dropped the language of inciting crime and vice in others, they kept the new language of “moral institutions” and reiterated the need to protect marriage, the family, property, and oaths from ridicule or contempt.43 In the months before the outbreak of revolution in 1848, a moment of rising liberal sentiment, a new draft of the Prussian Press Law framed moral foundations of society in new terms. In the law concerning unzüchtige Schriften the individual was shored up not through religious belief or collective norms of behavior but rather through “marriage, family, property, and honor.” Immoral and obscene publications were those that threatened to undermine the moral foundations of society and, by extension, the state. Here liberal emphasis on the inviolability of property and the importance of marriage and honor coincided with the preoccupations of the state, which feared the criticism against property leveled in forceful terms by socialists and communists. Three central themes emerged from efforts to produce a new language to describe the moral harm done by books, images, and acts between 1838 and 1850. The first was a danger of witnessing or exposure. Rough, raw, brutal texts and acts, contemporaries thought, might permanently damage crucial impulses—in the case of obscene texts, the impulses of shame and decency; in cases of torture, the feeling of empathy. If early nineteenth-century discussions of the effects of print stressed the dangers of overstimulation and fanaticism, midcentury concerns focused on the loss or blunting of certain impulses. Bildung, or self-development, was crucial, but the individual open to transformation was also subject to distortion. A second theme focused on the integrity of public spaces. The goal of Sittlichkeitsdelikte, among them new obscenity laws, was not to dictate what people did beyond the eyes of others but instead to protect “innocent” inhabitants of public spaces from the immoral or crude intrusions of others. Publicity was a source of anxiety, as it might cause contagion or undermine the impulses or honor of exposed individuals. Finally, for a brief moment in the 1840s the Prussian Justice Ministry proposed language to describe unzüchtige Schriften that articulated an emerging vision of a social order maintained not by religion or by the

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authority of the state but by the bourgeois values of marriage, family, and property. If blasphemy laws had aimed at protecting religion from ridicule and dishonor, the proposed language of the Prussian Press Law sought to do the same for the secular values of an emerging bourgeoisie.

Transformations in the Book Market While liberal ideas informed efforts to reframe definitions of obscenity in the Vormärz, economic liberalism helped transform the book trade. Many of the established practices of the book trade were challenged, among them guild-based training, concessions limiting competition, and careful decisions about what to print based on an established record of success. In their place some in the book trade eschewed membership in the booksellers’ guild, found ways to forge new markets, and speculated on untried titles by offering no-risk options for booksellers concerned with taking on inventory that they could not sell. Liberal states offered space for innovation. The 1830s brought a new type of bookseller into the market, one without guild training who was willing to experiment with new texts and new techniques for printing and distributing them. These entrepreneurial publishers and booksellers also benefited from the political upheavals of the early 1830s. Revolution in France in 1830 sparked a series of uprisings in the German states and a failed Polish effort to overthrow the Russian czar. Publishers in the southwest were in an excellent position to capitalize on public fascination with and desire for news about developments in France. Belgium gained its independence from the Netherlands in 1831, a change that would have important consequences for the German book market as Brussels became an important center for the production and exportation of unauthorized reprints of French-language books, which found a ready audience just across the border in the Rhineland.44 In the German states the protests of 1830 took many forms, including local clashes with the police, bread riots, attacks on machines by journeymen who feared they would be put out of work, and substantial liberal gains in elections.45 During these years publishers in the southwest began experimenting with new techniques for producing and distributing print. August Prinz asserted that proximity to France, loose censorship restrictions, and the relatively low cost of living drew publishers and printers to

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the southwest: “In 1830, France breathed new life into politics, and German spirits were also roused and with that came censorship. Baden, Rheinish Bavaria and Württemberg—always the vanguard of German struggles for freedom—were also in this case the most enterprising.”46 Though it is not clear why Württemberg became a major center of the book trade, it seems that momentum and critical mass played a role. During the first two decades of the nineteenth century the city of Reutlingen in Württemberg became a center for the production of popular books and print. The city’s publishers turned out calendars, practical handbooks, and popular fiction. Historian Ronald Fullerton explains that the majority of these books were sold through colporteurs and book binders and not through bookstores.47 Württemberg’s officials were also lenient with policies involving book production. Piracy was allowed until the late 1830s, and even then, some Stuttgart publishers like Scheible continued publishing unauthorized reprints. In the 1830s Stuttgart’s speculative publishers faced fierce competition from presses in Brussels, who also seized on an opportunity to send illegal books in French across the border into Prussia’s Rhine Province. Württemberg did not engage in prepublication censorship, meaning that publishers were not required to submit manuscripts for approval before they could be printed. Yet postpublication (or repressive) censorship did exist and was actively enforced.48 The government monitored the bookstores and lending libraries, at least in the capital city. We find evidence of this in the extensive records kept on the government’s efforts to regulate the book trade between 1818 and 1865.49 Files kept on censorship show that Scheible was under constant scrutiny by the police in Stuttgart. In 1834, for example, he was investigated for publishing Fragments from the Writings of a Prisoner; his name appears in censorship files again 1836, this time for some unspecified role in circulating lectures on the situation in France by Heinrich Heine. 50 He also experienced raids on his bookstore, and in 1833 four copies of a forbidden book, The Political Poet’s Prize, were confiscated from his store. Later in the century Scheible’s name appeared again, this time because his original publication, The Sixth and Seventh Book of Moses, was confiscated in Stuttgart. 51 In the 1830s the authorities in Stuttgart struggled to identify the local publisher working under the false imprint Literarische Comptoir zu Stuttgart, a firm, they wrote, “that simply does not exist.” The cover firm came under scrutiny in 1836, when a copy of Ludwig Börne’s Letters

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from Paris was confiscated from local bookstores. 52 Scheible may very well have been the offender, as he made regular use of cover firms to publish illegal erotic books. The extensive records on the regulation of the book trade in prerevolutionary Stuttgart merit extended study, but a selective look at their files is enough to conclude that police surveillance of the local book trade was alive and well in Württemberg. Yet censorship within the state did not affect the exportation of books and pamphlets to other German states. The export trade was left to the demands of the market, and there was a growing market in regions of the German states for the popular, inexpensive, and illegal books that Stuttgart’s publishers were happy to supply. The revolutions of 1848–49 failed to generate a unified nation, yet the circulation of books across state borders provided ample evidence that the geographical borders that defined political states failed to hold in the face of eager readers and resourceful booksellers. By the early 1840s Württemberg had become an infamous source of illicit print and of inexpensive popular books directed at an audience of new readers, but the transformations in reading habits and in official and unofficial attitudes toward censorship were broader phenomena with multiple centers. The urban area comprising the neighboring cities of Hamburg and Altona rapidly became another such center in the 1840s. Brussels was another source; inexpensive and pirated French books like Amours secrets des Bourbons and La Religion St. Simonienne were confiscated from a bookseller in Cologne in 1835, and Les Secrets de la Génération was banned by Prussian censors in 1837.53 If certain regions became hubs of a new kind of book market, cities all over the German states played a role in the transformation of the book markets. A list of titles condemned by Prussian censors on the grounds of obscenity between 1835 and 1841 included books published in Meisen, Berlin, Rotweil, Brussels, Leipzig, and Carlsruhe. Between 1830 and 1848 a second, somewhat dishonorable but successful speculative book trade developed in the German states. These changes resulted in the publication of more titles available at lower prices, sold using innovative practices. Lending libraries continued to expand and thrive, taking advantage of a rise in literacy and a boom in the availability of inexpensive editions of popular titles. Fullerton provides a wealth of information about the expansion of the German book trade in the Vormärz. He estimates that the number of titles published in Germany rose 147 percent between 1822 and 1842, and the number of German book dealers rose from 450 to 1,274. Lending

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libraries also expanded. Before 1820 few lending libraries could boast more than ten thousand volumes in their collection; by the late 1830s and early 1840s it was not unusual for lending libraries in even medium-size cities to carry fifteen thousand or even thirty thousand volumes. Fullerton attributes these changes in the book market to the rise of a new kind of book producer who was willing to take risks, speculate on new and untried titles, and experiment with selling books in new ways. He argues that the transformation in the book market did not occur naturally, as part of an anonymous modernization process, but was the result of human agency and innovation, and in particular the agency of what he terms “speculative booksellers” who changed the nature of the book trade in the 1830s and 1840s.54 At the most basic level these booksellers worked to create new ways to sell more books to more people. Keeping costs low was one way to do this, which meant using inexpensive materials, avoiding honoraria whenever possible (a practice that favored foreign titles and certain states without strict policies on piracy), and publishing in larger quantities. Prinz, who experienced these transformations firsthand, used the term speculative to describe their practice of offering books without a firm order from bookstores. 55 Other strategies included using innkeepers and book binders as sellers, thus bypassing traditional bookstores, and selling overstock books to used-book dealers.56 Booksellers also began to market texts in new ways: selling subscriptions or small books through colporteurs, marketing books in installments, and offering collections of books in a series. In 1836, for example, Scheible offered a series entitled Nouveautés de la littérature française, a collection of fifteen French works distributed in eighty-four installments.57 In 1840 he offered another series, Collection portative d’oeuvres choisies de la littérature française, delivered in 151 installments.58 One catalogue advertised that the books would arrive “brochiert” (bound in paper) and would be delivered in a “clean cover.” If these strategies flourished in the 1830s, they seem to have originated earlier in the nineteenth century, with publishers like F. A. Brockhaus and Barron Cotta. Brockhaus used the subscription system to publish his successful encyclopedia, and Cotta found a way to publish an 1818 edition of a popular volume of Schiller for a third of the cost of his competitor’s edition. 59 By the mid-1830s innovative publishers in Stuttgart were turning out popular, inexpensive, and often illegal books. In the process they managed to frustrate the efforts of authorities in Prussia, who

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tried to control the importation of books and other forms of print from southwestern states with more liberal press laws. This problem became particularly pressing following the revolutions in 1830. In 1835 a detailed report on censorship commissioned by the Prussian interior minister complained, “Certainly the states of Bavaria, Baden and Württemberg might have spared [us] the irksomeness of their periodical press and (even worse) its consequences, had they chosen to expand censorship to cover the whole of literary production.” The consequences were serious: “Pernicious endeavors rush in where they find an opening; once there they acquire strength, and in the end they breach the boundaries of the forbidden with such violence that they can no longer be controlled.”60 In the eyes of the government’s council, liberal states in the southwest were breeding grounds for radical ideas and for publishers more interested in profit than respectability. Once they had found a foothold it was difficult to control the circulation of these texts and ideas. In the summer of 1833 Police Headquarters in Berlin decided to address the problem directly with a measure aimed at Stuttgart’s offending booksellers. According to the measure, all texts sent into Prussia from liberal southwestern states would receive special treatment. Books and periodicals not clearly marked with the name of a known publisher would be stamped “Forbidden” and returned to the sender. Two more categories of texts, those in the German language printed outside the German states and those under a “special ban of literary commerce,” had to be deposited with the Prussian police commissioner within twenty-four hours of their arrival in Prussia or face being stamped by the commissioner. Forbidden works would be sent back via post within eight days.61 A month after the censorship measure was announced, a letter from booksellers in Stuttgart announced a counterstrategy: any books sent to them via post bearing the stamp of the Prussian police would simply be refused and returned to sender, and the bookseller in question would refuse to pay any of the costs incurred by sending texts through the post.62 Stuttgart’s booksellers appealed to their Prussian counterparts with a defense of what they identified as the “principles” of the German book trade: “support for business and knowledge.” According to Prinz, Berlin’s police abandoned their plan once they realized how expensive it would be to enforce.63 Prinz, who could never resist the opportunity to editorialize, used his defense of Stuttgart’s booksellers as an opportunity to make a principled argument against censorship. “Confiscations,” he wrote,

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“are in fact nothing other than theft perpetrated by the privileged and by rulers against the owners. No one has a right to take away my property, simply because it displeases someone else. What an uproar there would be in the world if the government was allowed to confiscate boots because they are pegged rather than sewn, or because the soles are made of rubber rather than leather. Is it a different matter with books?” Twice exiled, sentenced to short prison sentences no fewer than four times, involved his whole professional life in battles with the police, Prinz took this line of thought even further: “If the government does not care for the contents [of a book], the most they can do is deny access to that book; but this in itself is quite a lot, because by God and Law no one has the right to tell his fellow man what to read. Indeed in this stilted, unnatural state we are not in possession of natural rights.”64 In Prinz’s anger, and in the protests of Stuttgart’s booksellers, we hear different strands of liberal thought. For the booksellers, censorship interfered with the development of business and the free exchange of knowledge; this was a standard argument, compatible with collective aspirations. Prinz’s brash evocation of natural law and individual rights called on different strains of liberal thought that were less often heard but certainly not absent in the 1830s and 1840s. It is difficult to know if anything beyond profit motivated publishers and booksellers to involve themselves in the illicit book trade. In the 1830s and 1840s critics of this new breed of publishers and booksellers were quick to reduce their motives to unscrupulous profit seeking. As a contemporary chronicler and colleague, Prinz also stressed profit motives, while pointing to a broader context of expectations for political change. Yet it is difficult to ignore the possibility of links between political convictions (or expectations) and the willingness to transgress the limits put on the circulation of print by beleaguered governments and the “respectable” conventions of the book trade. This question is particularly intriguing in the face of publishers like Johann and Friedrich Franckh of Stuttgart. The Brothers Franckh appear to have been involved in democratic politics at the same time that they were making a fortune sending inexpensive French novels and erotische Schriften to various corners of the German states. An official history of the Franckh publishing house tied the political aspirations of the brothers to their efforts to provide books “for the masses.” Describing the climate of the 1820s, when the press was founded, the history explains, “This period witnessed the lively development of printing and publishing.

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The intellectual interests of the people [Volk] growing vehemently in the wake of the war of independence, and the imperative to produce inexpensive peoples’ editions of good literature encouraged the inventive and skillful publisher.” The pioneering idea of the press, the author states, was to produce “universally intelligible books for all the people” and to “raise the education level of broad segments of the people over a broad territory.”65 Such statements might be dismissed as window dressing (or nostalgia—the history was written in 1957), yet other elements of the story make it difficult to ignore the possibility that politics and publishing may have intersected. In 1831 Friedrich Franckh participated in a conspiracy against Württemberg’s monarchy and spent nine years in prison as a result. Offered a royal pardon in 1841, he chose to stay in prison. At the urging of friends he eventually made his way back to Stuttgart and resumed his work as a publisher. Prinz provides another example of a publisher involved in both democratic politics and illicit publishing. In his case it is difficult to see a direct link between political discontent and smuggling illegal erotic literature across state borders, just as it feels like a stretch to link Friedrich Franckh’s publishing activities to his repudiation of the monarchy. Profit and politics are not mutually exclusive, and motives need not be pure to be potent. Yet individual motives matter less than the broader point that the activities of these men both in politics and in publishing point to a world in which the convictions that had held power in place were beginning to erode. New forms of prestige and new visions of “the public” were emerging. In the book trade the “respectable” bookseller who catered to the needs of the educated elite began to face the competition of bookmen who were unconcerned with matters of taste and reputation. One result of this, as Fullerton argues, was the emergence of a second, alternative market for books, a kind of second “public” as yet unbounded by the conventions that regulated an older and more established public sphere. This second public was not new, of course, as can be easily seen in eighteenth-century efforts to regulate marketplaces as spaces filled with gaming, tumult, and unscrupulous song and picture salesmen. What was new in the 1830s was the fact that this other public that emerged was linked to print in ways it had not been before. At the same time, the ability of absolutist governments to control the texts and images that circulated in their territories was challenged, both by logistics (censorship ceased to work well) and by ideas (it had become more difficult to craft a legitimate argument for censorship).

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In the Vormärz liberalism was expressed in ideas and embodied in practices. Legal reformers’ heady efforts to re-create the basis for criminal law seem far from the armies of colporteurs hired by speculative publishers to send inexpensive print to a growing number of readers in the German states. Sober work to expand intellectual autonomy and freedom of conscience seem (again) far from the Brothers Franckh’s steady supply of books with titles like Tales from the Life and Memoirs of a Female Casanova and Scandalous Chronicles from the Court of Louis XVI.66 Perhaps these phenomena seem so disparate because we assume that the intentions behind them are different, the first term in both sets based on high-minded principles, the second allegedly built on crude profit seeking. Viewed in terms of effects, both developments opened (or worked to open) a broader space for public expression and deliberation—one through openings for individual conscience, the other by providing ready access to print. Yet there is still another way to view the relationships between these developments: not as a confluence of impulses and ideas leading to enhanced freedom but instead as a series of developments leading to deep tensions. The breakdown of traditional forms can be seen in both cases. In the case of obscenity law and legal reform, jurists had to articulate the basis for the social order in new secular terms in order to explain how obscene texts, images, or acts might undermine that order. Entrepreneurial booksellers invented new forms of production and distribution in order to create an audience for their wares. In each case the old ideas and forms were not supplanted but continued to exist alongside the new, and this itself created tensions. It also seems likely that those who fought on principle for freedom of conscience might have been disturbed by the spread of popular fiction, producing important profits for inventive booksellers; there was no guarantee that their vision of intellectual freedom would coincide with the explosion of the popular book trade, and yet both profoundly impacted the history of unzüchtige Schriften in the 1830s. Profit and principle are not always as beautifully in step as some theorists of liberalism would have them, a point not lost on German liberals in the Vormärz.

New Attitudes about Censorship and Reading In the 1830s and 1840s attitudes toward reading and moral development were expressed in multiple contexts. Journals like the

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Allgemeiner Anzeiger und Nationalzeitung der Deutschen included regular articles on reading and cultivation of character. The journal was published in Gotha by Friedrich Gottlieb Becker, who in 1848 would go on to serve as a liberal delegate in the Frankfurt National Assembly. His father and the founder of the journal was Rudolf Zacharias Becker, the author of important and popular works on pedagogy. Perhaps it is for this reason that, beginning in the 1820s, the journal included regular articles from a variety of perspectives on popular reading habits and their effects. Questions of popular reading habits and moral cultivation also continued to animate the files of the Prussian Interior Ministry. This was particularly true of their files on lending libraries, as these venues enjoyed a status of their own, marked by assumptions about the social interactions and reading practices engendered by these spaces. Among the subtle shifts in attitudes that marked these sources was a reevaluation of the role of fantasy in the life of readers of popular fiction. Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century sources denounced fantasy on grounds that it led to mental disorder and fanaticism, but these attitudes had shifted by the early 1840s. In 1841 the anonymous author of an article entitled “Novel Reading” argued that fantasy had an important role to play in the life of the reader. The imagination was not dangerous, but useful: “The ideal world must elevate the real world. . . . We therefore do not want to condemn novel reading or any thought that allows us to understand the development of human knowledge or that uncovers any fold of the human heart, or that occupies our fantasy and gives us an hour free from this world.” Practical reading was not more valuable than fiction, as the latter worked to “refresh” and to render the reader more lively and energetic. In a world in which people were occupied with business and profit making, who would deny the hardworking man or woman a moment of relief and mental escape? “Evil will not result if a clerk, servant, soldier or even a professor seeks to restore his heart with a chivalrous romance; what harm if a coffee-bean enthusiast or a chambermaid and her lady weep now and then over a fabricated misery?” The author argued that the great age of German novel reading had coincided with the growth of ingenuity and practical improvements— evidence that pleasurable reading did nothing to discourage useful activity. The role of fantasy remained instrumental, subordinated to the need for productive activity in the world, but its ability to refresh the tired worker marked an important shift in attitudes.67

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Few contemporary authors expressed equal zeal for the healing power of fantasy. But other sources pointed in similar directions, arguing that reading should not be simply “mechanical,” that selfdevelopment through reading should be made available to nonelites, and that reading was a useful way to gain strength after a difficult day. In 1842 a supplemental article from the Frankfurter Journal pasted into the files of the Prussian Interior Ministry articulated anxieties about the expansion of print to newly literate members of society: “Mere mechanical reading and more susceptibility to a wider circle of ideas and knowledge has been achieved—more so than was the case a few decades ago.”68 Borrowing language from the article, the Prussian interior minister fretted about the effects of “mechanical reading” in a land in which (or so he thought) even the farmer was beginning to spend his free hours with a book or newspaper. He insisted that greater efforts should be made to guide these less experienced readers toward books that would elevate the “spirit of the people” (Volksgeist). Yet the trouble was twofold, for the expansion of reading was accompanied by the recognition that more censorship would not solve the problem, as it was both ineffective and unpopular.69 Faced with readers of uncertain talents, an innovative and rapidly expanding book trade, and the recognition that censorship was neither effective nor politically viable, the Prussian government was unsure how to proceed. While the liberal author of “Novel Reading” thought books protected against spiritual depletion, others worried that reading the wrong books might actually cause dullness and depletion. (Here we see a shift from the concerns earlier in the century that novel reading would cause excitement, stimulation, and unruly behavior.) An 1844 letter from the provincial government of Frankfurt am Oder described the effects of lending libraries in detail: “There is no doubt that the spread of common lending libraries in rural areas, and especially the introduction of trivial novellas and novels, produce overstraining and dullness of the natural feelings, and give rise to an undesirable tendency toward diversion and similar spirit-deadening products of the lowest literary activities.” The overstimulation of fantasy might lead to a loss of interest in one’s activities and work and therefore lead to the blunting of one’s “original and lively interest.”70 An 1845 article in a Berlin newspaper entitled “An Appeal” expressed concerns about the mental and moral development of the lower classes: “In cities we are rushing toward total demoralization; in rural areas there

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is a tendency toward mental flatness and indifference toward intellectual life, which disdains efforts toward improvement.”71 In this new formulation fantasy was a problem not because it caused readers to overstep the bounds of reason but because it ruined one’s ambition and threatened to render one useless in one’s job and in one’s mental development. Articles in the Allgemeiner Anzeiger in the 1830s and 1840s point to concerns about masculinity and its relationship to reading for pleasure. During this period the idea of leisure emerged as an important theme in discussions of reading. Reading for leisure and pleasure was seen as a source of relaxation—an especially important accompaniment to the rigors of a profession. “He who has a proper profession or is busy preparing for one, requires mental recuperation,” an article from 1830 asserted in a formulation that would become typical.72 A decade and a half later another article extolled the benefits of reading—the development of knowledge, honor, humanity, and enthusiasm—but warned of attendant dangers: “Even when [books] only offer relaxation and light, fantasy-engaging entertainment—still they encourage a good mood, and thus provide renewed vigor in one’s work. Total distraction, actual lack of thought is simply out of the question. In this case, or if books produce low spirits, dull brooding, or exaggerated pleasure seeking, then they must absolutely be discarded.” Still, the author was unconcerned about a light read every now and then: “No, the people are still good and energetic, and they do not have a lot of time to be reading novels; a grisly novel of knights or robbers will not corrupt and enfeeble their conscience.”73 Even the Prussian interior minister believed that in rural areas farmers spent their few spare hours reading books from lending libraries and that this was an important means of affecting the people’s spirit.74 Reading for entertainment was fine, then, insofar as it reinforced productive activity. The notion of leisure carried with it assumptions about a division between private time (which could and perhaps should be spent in relaxation and renewal) and public time (which was productive and energetic). This division between relaxation and work often seemed to exclude women readers. The assertion that those with solid, bourgeois, professional endeavors (or simply hard work) were entitled to entertainment, which would increase vitality and engagement in worldly matters, assumed a male reader whose life was divided between work and nonwork. An exception to this was the lady’s maid, whose work was thought to be stressful enough that

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she merited a few moments to herself. But she was a liminal figure who transgressed public and private and thus might pass unsavory literature on to elite women and youths. (Male Gymnasium students were similarly identified with transmission of immoral texts from the street to the home.) Discussions of reading earlier in the century had not expressed this positive attitude toward leisure and solitary reading; then leisure had been a source of worry. Sources from the earlier period had also been far more suspicious of privacy and solitude, states that led men and women to misanthropy and Schwärmerei. By the 1840s, however, privacy and retreat were seen as necessities for those with professions. The more important goal was practical engagement in the world, but reading was conceived as both a privilege of work and the crucial tool to achieve worldly engagement. An anonymous author wrote in the Allgemeiner Anzeiger, “We are not concerned with people who turn to reading because they are bored and world-weary. One’s profession, the work that secures one’s livelihood [and] earns one a place in civil society should not suffer because of books. But this does not have to be the case. The books that we have in mind . . . encourage knowledge of one’s craft, expertise, enthusiasm for one’s work, honor and respect for one’s fellow man. They affect the whole of human mental stimulation and moral disposition.”75 This suggests a related conviction that reading was essential preparation for engaging in public life, which required knowledge of the world beyond the narrow expertise requires of one’s profession. One was required to communicate, and even to understand, those in different walks of life, with different lifestyles and interests. Stressing these points, the anonymous liberal author with whom I began this section continued to press for the broader benefits of novel reading, fantasy, and emotion. Reading promoted self-cultivation and Bürgerlichkeit and prepared the Bürger, or citizen, to enter the public world and to engage in sociability beyond the limited concerns of business. An 1847 article entitled “What Should the Citizen Read?” stressed the importance of sociability: “The character of these times demands that we no longer retreat from the world with a bottle of wine and a few friends. On the contrary, we must come to know as many people as possible—young and old, wise men and fools. Books and print make this exchange of ideas easier.”76 There were serious requirements for admission to this public world of extended engagement; a good job was not sufficient

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(though it was necessary), for one also had to be properly educated on a range of subjects and know the intricacies of the human heart. Choices about reading should be left to the Bürger, who must make his way through the panoply of human experiences without danger of being corrupted by a sentimental novel or a thrilling crime story. What remained unclear was who exactly had the leisure and opportunity to engage in public life. Who had the fortitude to withstand and not be distracted or distorted by the crime story, the romantic novel, or the piquant erotic text? What was the status of women readers, whose alleged moral vulnerabilities had helped fuel arguments for censorship and the strict regulation of lending libraries in the 1810s and 1820s? Were they included in this new attitude toward reading that stressed its importance as essential to public life, while subordinating it to “practical activities in the world”? The sources examined here provide limited and generally negative answers to these questions, but they do not tell the whole story. We know that women of all kinds were reading in the Vormärz, among them Claire von Glümer, an activist and writer who translated George Sand’s novels into German and engaged in a regular exchange with French women activists and authors. The few articles in the Allgemeiner Anzeiger that directly addressed female readers argued that women and girls were far too susceptible to the lure of leisure, fashion, and trends from France. These were old themes, dating to the eighteenth century or perhaps even earlier, but they were deeply gendered in light of a more general support for reading as a source of relaxation, renewal, and cultivation of self.77 An 1841 article decried the faulty education of women, which promoted pleasure in reading and writing, thereby ruining women for their work as housewives. The author praised “German women of old,” who would have nothing to do with the “emancipation of the flesh” and “assaults on virtue” that marked the present. “In those days,” the article continued, “German women were unrefined creatures who existed far from Parisian elegance, who had no lending libraries accumulating the works of a George Sand or a Paul de Kock . . . in countless translations (most the work of women), or other similar texts.” Fascination with these and similar novels produced women who were unprepared for their work as housewives and, more seriously, had ceased to believe in traditional feminine ideals and religions truths. “What can a girl do, who follows the trends and turns to models offered by women who would corrupt the soul, who ingests an overly sweet poison and then becomes a housewife?”

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The goal of women’s education should be to train women for the work they would do in the house, not to produce women who would then gravitate to reading and writing and thus find mundane activities intolerable.78 Here again the theme of work and productivity and its relationship with reading and leisure animated articles on women readers in the Allgemeiner Anzeiger. While reading was seen as a potential source of relaxation and renewal for those with demanding jobs (presumably men), women were portrayed as too likely to succumb to the temptations of leisure. Implicit too was the idea that the education of women beyond their practical duties might lead them to frustration and dissatisfaction. While citizenship and self-cultivation required learning beyond the narrow confines of one’s profession, it seems that this requirement (and the concomitant promise of sociability and participation in civil society) was not always extended to women. The perquisites of leisure and engagement in public life were extended to and expected of men. Women’s relationship to these new developments remains opaque in these sources, though there is ample evidence to suggest that 1840s visions of masculinity were compatible with reading, leisure, and self-development. Prussian authorities were meanwhile preoccupied with the moral cultivation of “the people” and their participation in the expanded world of print. In the early 1840s Prussian authorities introduced new vocabulary into their discussions of lending libraries. They began to refer to a new group, variously called “the broad public” or “the lower classes,” whose reading practices played a key role in constituting the Volksgeist, or “spirit of the people.” Volksgeist was an elevated term, used to describe something valuable and in need of stewardship. The trouble, as an 1842 report on lending libraries explained, was that this process of mental development was proceeding spontaneously as a “half-educated people” flocked to lending libraries in search of education and entertainment: “Reading has unquestionably become a public need. This lively drive toward education is a welcome development, as the power of the state is based above all on mental elevation. Yet it also appears urgently necessary to protect this drive from the absence of direction and to provide careful supervision and guidance, for that same drive, when left to itself to choose the source of its own satisfaction, can just as easily lead to degeneration as to the good and the useful, to intellectual development and moral improvement.” Lending libraries were also a special case because “not only forbidden

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publications, but rather all books whose content could have a damaging effect on the half-educated, should not be allowed in lending libraries.” The solution, according to the report, was not censorship but the active promotion of alternative lending libraries that would offer “good” publications and successfully compete with their less responsible counterparts.79 Documents such as this (and there were many others in the early 1840s that reiterated these themes) stressed the role of the state in promoting the development of certain qualities necessary to a healthy Volksgeist. The state was increasingly convinced that prohibiting people from reading was neither effective nor desirable; facilitating access to the proper kinds of texts was a better (or at least more practical) strategy. The idea of the Volksbibliothek was therefore born of this era, though it would take a decade or two before people would begin in earnest to build such institutions. When freedom of the press was declared in March 1848, Prussian authorities wondered if lending libraries should (or could) receive special treatment; in the end the Prussian Interior Ministry ended censorship of lending libraries. In the early 1850s regulation would be reinstituted in a new form, and the 1851 Prussian Criminal Code (completed after decades of work) would criminalize the production and distribution of obscene texts and images.

Summary This chapter began with a broad question: Why was the language of secular obscenity law forged in an era marked by the growing influence and prestige of liberalism? Was there a relationship between liberal ideas and practices and the development of new language to identify and describe the effects of obscenity? The question requires a nuanced answer, as liberals were not the only Germans in the Vormärz preoccupied with questions of reading, self-development, and the tone and texture of public life, maters deemed relevant to the meaning of obscenity. Yet liberalism affected the development of obscenity in key ways. The efforts of legal reformers to remove obscenity from the jurisdiction of the police and to make it a criminal offense subject to the rulings of a court constituted an important step away from the paternalism of the absolutist state. Formal separation of obscenity from other crimes of the press and legal proximity to Sittlichkeitsdelikte shifted the meaning of the unzüchtige Schrift from a general source of mental disequilibrium to a sexual offense. Proximity in the

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legal code to the torture of animals suggested that what was at stake in both laws was the danger that public exposure to certain acts or representations could lead to a “roughening” or depletion of important impulses and feelings. If liberals in the Vormärz were preoccupied with the moral integrity or the public sphere (facilitated by the growth of civil society), one’s identity as citizen depended upon the cultivation of inner life. Obscenity laws of the 1830s and 1840s suggest how cultivation of inner life was intimately linked to expectations of comportment and participation in public life. This chapter suggests a second way of framing the links between liberalism and the codification of obscenity in the Vormärz. It is possible to argue that liberalism engendered the very developments obscenity laws sought to address. Expanded access to print, the promotion of primary education, and the inclusion of publishers, printers, and colporteurs without imprimatur changed the nature of the book trade. Structures that had provided informal regulation of the book market—among them questions of honor and reputation, guild membership, the importance of maintaining concessions—began to fall away as men and women unconcerned with the politics of reputation entered the market for print. If liberals were concerned with the politics of reputation and the dangers of publicity, the new market for print challenged their ability to exercise effective control in these areas. Finally, it is important to say something about the strains of “derepression” that ran through the sources on obscenity in the Vormärz. In this period we hear a few voices advocating for greater expansiveness in what people were allowed to read on the grounds that merely utilitarian or “mechanical” reading would lead to dullness, apathy, and a lack of vitality and sociability. Such arguments posited a broad and expansive engagement with reading as a source of renewal following strenuous work. Repression, even Prussian authorities agreed in the 1840s, was not what was needed; rather people needed to be encouraged to expand the scope of their engagement with the world and with books (and the two were seen as linked). In her book The Frail Social Body historian Carolyn Dean traces a process of de-repression in interwar France. Dean argues that anxieties surrounding masculinity were associated with a shift in the boundaries between “literature” and “pornography.” Texts that before the war had been categorized as pornography and associated with the depletion of vital masculinity were now categorized as literature; in

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this postwar context consumption of vitalist, naturalist, and even pornographic texts was thought to promote masculinity. The broader implications of Dean’s argument are that de-repression is often associated with liberalism, but it is not necessarily only about “freeing” a constrained subject through liberation of natural instincts. She suggests that de-repression too is a strategy bound up with liberal forms of power that work to promote and produce certain subjectivities, bodies, and practices. It would be a stretch that anything on the order of the crisis of masculinity experienced in interwar France was taking place in the liberal Vormärz. Yet the impulse to open access to texts of all kinds runs through these sources, and it also seems clear that such access was thought to be salutary for some (those with demanding jobs who needed to engage in public life) and dangerous for others. What people read meant a great deal to liberals, as individual and collective identity (their “ability to recognize one another”) was bound up with the ideals of Bildung and Bürgerlichkeit. So while liberals in the Vormärz demanded freedom of the press, liberal identity required engagement with books and with the public in particular ways. Derepression was recommended for the hardworking Bürger, who merited both relaxation and intellectual expansion. Yet liberalism also required that other values—shame, modesty, empathy, and morality—be preserved and protected. Separating the crime of obscenity from other press crimes and associating unzüchtige Schriften with sexual assaults provided a way to grant the liberal demand for freedom of the press while still maintaining control over immoral texts and images. It provided a way of allowing for maximum expansiveness for some, while still maintaining control over the reading habits of others.

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Redefining Obscenity in an Era of “Progress,” 1848–1880 Around this time, the tales of Lafontaine were passed to me under the hand; they aroused my imagination, and I fell once again into the grievous habit—the one I gave up three years ago. The following year was 1815, and I had the misfortune of finding, in the corner of my father’s library, Baccaccio [sic] and similar works. I read—or rather, devoured—these books in secret. . . . My nervous system was brought to such a state of stimulation, that I could no longer look upon a woman without succumbing to violent heartbeats and shaky limbs. —d r . r . r i c h a r d , Die Regeneration des geschwächten Nervensystems

Our allegedly “dry” laws concern themselves in multiple ways with protecting the affective life of humans. —k a r l b i n d i n g , quoted in Villnow, “Die Verbrechen und Vergehen wider die Sittlichkeit”

Historians often characterize Germany in the years between 1850 and 1880 as a society on the move. These were, after all, decades marked by the revolutionary uprisings of 1848–49, by the beginning of Germany’s rapid industrialization, by three wars and national unification in 1871. During this period German definitions of unzüchtige und obszöne Schriften underwent a series of important changes. Transformations in the geography of the book trade meant that the movement of print via shippers, colporteurs, and post carved fresh routes into the German landscape. The expansion of cities and railroads created new pockets of commercial activity and opportunities for anonymity, and both were conducive to an expanding trade for books and images. The confidence of the German bourgeoisie found expression in the growing (though not uncontested) authority of social science, law, and medicine, bodies of knowledge that would inform ongoing 162

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efforts to understand what was at stake in the circulation and consumption of obscene texts.1 Bourgeois values of hard work and civic improvement would inform efforts to study and improve the city, bringing consumers of print, images, and other forms of urban entertainment into view in new ways. 2 Definitions of obscenity were also marked by a sharper emphasis on sexual conduct and honor. Contemporaries continued to ask questions about encounters between readers and texts, viewers and images (and, in a new addition, between viewers and acts). They still wanted to understand how obscene texts acted on those who consumed them. As in other periods, such changes were thought to have broader consequences for individuals, families, and society at large. To these ongoing questions, contemporaries added new ones: What was the relationship between obscene texts and obscene acts? What attributes and values were “injured” by obscenity, and what particular kinds of “injury” fell under the jurisdiction of the law? As an important response to changes in the physical and mental landscape, contemporaries also tried to understand the effects of the city and its growing array of commercial “stimulations” on the individual and society. As theories of the mind developed with the expansion of physiology and laboratory science, people used new vocabulary to consider the effects of such changes. Before this era of expansion would open new discussions, however, unzüchtige Schriften and their readers, producers, and detractors would pass through the decade following the revolutions of 1848– 49, a period marked by retrenchment and confusion on the part of authorities and by expanded opportunities for producers and distributors. Prussian officials initially responded to the revolutions’ challenge to their authority by charging the police with stepped-up efforts to monitor and control the circulation of texts. For Prussian ministers and police, the vision of peddlers hawking street literature to unruly and suggestible masses was among the potent memories of the 1848 uprisings. After the failure of the revolution the police were charged with zealously pursuing “subversive” (including morally questionable) texts. Those on the other side—publishers and booksellers, as well as their clients—remembered their recent history in different terms: censorship had been abolished in May 1848, and freedom of expression was not immediately foreclosed when the revolutions failed to yield a national constitution and democratic political institutions. In this chapter I examine the substantial transformations in official definitions of obscenity in the years between 1850 and 1880. My focus

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is on Prussia, first because the files kept by the Prussian Interior Ministry (after 1871 the Reich Ministry) on immoral and obscene texts were wide-ranging and extensive; second because transformations in Prussian law would directly inform national laws after unification. I will begin with the period of political reaction and regrouping that followed the revolutions in 1848–49. Despite efforts by a reactionary king and state to assert public order, the abolition of censorship shook up the existing system of book regulation. The definitions of obscenity articulated in the 1851 Prussian Criminal Code were in many ways only vague beginnings; their meanings still had to be worked out as part of a process involving vocal members of the public, a police force that aligned itself with the authority of the absolutist state, and a more liberal (or at least more procedurally correct) judiciary intent on following the rule of law. Their task was made even more complex by the mobility of their target, for texts and images referred to an ever-broadening array of expressions in print, ranging from advertisements and sexually suggestive product labels to popular medical books cloaked in the authority of science. New perceptions of the human mind and body, always important to definitions of obscenity, informed these efforts, as did contemporary reactions to the dramatic social and economic transformations of the period.

Postrevolutionary Realignments: The Reappearance of Casanova Before we consider how the developments of the 1860s and 1870s produced new definitions of obscene texts, we first need to examine the period that preceded it. In Prussia one of the first postrevolutionary battles involved the reappearance of an early nineteenth-century erotic classic. In October 1850 the police in Berlin reported that they had confiscated a new edition of Casanova’s Memoirs from bookstores in Berlin. It is likely that Gustav Hempel, the publisher of the new edition, had seized upon the abolition of censorship to publish the notorious Memoirs.3 After the battle between Prussian authorities and F. A. Brockhaus in the 1820s, Casanova’s Memoirs had disappeared from circulation. Decades later it now reappeared, serving as a reminder that the revolution had in fact ushered in important changes. The editor of the new edition, Ludwig Buhl, framed the Memoirs in language designed to provoke the police and to draw readers’

Figure 8.  A report from the Prussian Interior Ministry in 1856, noting the reappearance and circulation of a new edition of Casanova’s Memoirs. This was one of a flurry of reports from the 1850s tracing the circulation of new editions of Casanova’s Memoirs in lending libraries and bookstores throughout the Prussian territories. Geheimes Staatsarchiv PK, I. HA Rep. 77, Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Nr. 1, Bd. 1, 48.

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attention. Historian Gerd Forsch writes that this new translation focused on the author’s erotic life, emphasizing the sexual aspects of the story in ways the 1820s Brockhaus edition had not.4 On page 1 of his preface to the new edition, the editor addressed the reader: “The public, who have heard talk of Casanova but do not actually know him is very large in Prussia.” Until 1848, Buhl wrote, the book had been consigned to the index librorum prohibitorum: “The moral delicacy of the Christian State, which hides the refined intemperance of hypocrisy under the cloak of love, cannot tolerate Casanova’s healthy pursuit of pleasure, and they forbid a work that in the eyes of all people of good taste has always been seen as a classic.” Buhl also chose to emphasize the political dimensions of the Memoirs, evoking the 1848 revolutions on the first page and highlighting Casanova’s critique of class relations: “Who has done a better job than he representing the reverie and corruption of so-called elevated society—the thoughtless imprudence, the arrogance of the privileged classes and their provocative and defiant denial of the inalienable riches of mankind?”5 In the 1820s the editor of the original edition of the Memoirs, Wilhelm von Schütz, had argued that the book would aid in the cultivation of selfunderstanding and knowledge of the world. By contrast, the 1850s editor argued that the Memoirs contained valuable historical knowledge and political critique; in the postrevolutionary period even the Prussian authorities agreed that legitimate knowledge could not be censored. For those readers, Buhl played up the Memoirs’ critique of authority. For many patrons of bookstores and lending libraries, the reappearance of the Memoirs probably signaled that a long period of censorship had come to an end. The police, by contrast, failed to recognize the new limits on their authority. In 1850 they seized the book, sent out word to regional governments to find and confiscate copies, and reported that no legal process was necessary to condemn the work. “Because of the reputation of the book,” they wrote, “closer scrutiny is unnecessary. It is known that in his description of a life removed from all civil order, the author supplies a description of his amorous adventures, dissecting almost every manner of sensual gratification and laying it before the eyes of the reader.” They also rejected the editor’s insistence on the intellectual value of the book: “Casanova’s interesting depiction of the historical social and political situation of various countries is completely negated by the immoral content, which would be damaging to the young reader. The elegant, lightly

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veiled style . . . makes the work more attractive and as a result more dangerous.” Countering Buhl’s claim that the work’s “moral and political realism” constituted valuable knowledge, the police evoked a vulnerable and excitable audience: “In this case . . . the question of whether the work constitutes a worthy contribution to memoir literature is different from the question of whether it is suitable for the public.” The work not only injured youths; it also endangered the morals of the “broad masses.”6 The police predicted that the Memoirs would enjoy broad distribution, and they were correct; new editions and knockoffs of the book spread quickly. Between 1850 and 1857 German publishers produced three new editions. Using fast production and distribution, booksellers and the proprietors of lending libraries managed to stay one step ahead of the police and local authorities.7 Copies were confiscated from booksellers and lending libraries in Coblenz, Aachen, Trier, Halle, Hamburg, and Saarlouis. A Hamburg publisher even issued a spinoff of the classic text entitled The Hamburg Casanova: Memoirs of a Libertine. If the police in Berlin did not initially stop to think about the basis of their authority to confiscate and ban the Memoirs, the reappearance of the book did prompt authorities to begin asking questions about the legal changes ushered in by the revolution. As the interior minister and the chief of police began to explore their authority to regulate bookstores and lending libraries in the wake of 1848, they realized that they stood on shaky ground. Members of the Interior Ministry reasoned that because the supervision of lending libraries had been originally conceived as an extension of censorship, the abolition of censorship signaled the end of such supervision. Though they maintained the authority to review and approve applications for lending library concessions, all censorship-related provisions were suspended—at least insofar as they proceeded from prerevolutionary laws and ordinances.8 Therefore in 1850 the police found themselves with limited legal control over the content of lending libraries and bookstores but also responsible for documenting and suppressing threats to the state. Following the revolution the Prussian police were charged with the maintenance of public order. Elaine Glovka Spencer’s study of the police in Prussia’s Düsseldorf district documents some of the changes made to the role of the police in this period. During the revolution policemen had often been targeted as representatives of unpopular

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governments. In response to this hostility the state experimented with the creation of a less militarized police force, or Schutzmannschaft, consisting of men with fewer years of military service and dressed in civilian attire. In the period of political reaction and the expansion of the police force immediately following 1850, the Schutzmannschaft was dissolved and members of the police who might have democratic loyalties were systematically rooted out. Efforts were made to reanimate the leadership of the police. One of the key figures involved in this reorganization was Carl von Hinckeldey, who would serve as the head of Berlin’s police following the revolution and occupy the newly created post of general director of the police in the Interior Ministry in 1854–56. “In the post-revolutionary era,” Spencer writes, “the state intended the police to play a highly visible role in forestalling or monitoring all activities that could conceivably lead to renewed political opposition or disorder of any kind.” Two developments attempted to cement the role of the Prussian police as agents of postrevolutionary repression: the 1850 Prussian Police Law, which authorized the police to invent their own ordinances directed at public safety and security, and the Prussian Press Law of May 12, 1851, which required newspapers and other publications under twenty pages to submit copies of every issue to the police for their inspection; the same law gave police the authority to issue permits for the distribution of handbills and pamphlets and to monitor the book trade. The result, Spencer writes, was a police force intent on rooting out subversive publications and tightly focused on supervising the movements of “wanderers” and “outsiders.”9 Faced with the wholesale abolition of censorship, the police in Berlin struggled to find language to justify their regulation of lending libraries. In a flurry of correspondence in the early 1850s, Chief of Police Hinckeldey, the interior minister, and government advisors considered this question. Writing in January 1850, Hinckeldey complained that texts, “the content of which grossly injure morals, are offered in a rich assortment in lending libraries.” He bridled at the lack of control over this circulation, claiming that in “an orderly state, such a state of affairs should not be tolerated,” and he mined existing laws and trade ordinances for some source of authority to regulate this arm of the book trade.10 In his argument for expanded power over lending libraries, Hinckeldey stressed the importance of regulation on moral grounds. Yet outcry over “moral dangers” easily slipped into discussions of

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political dangers. In 1852, for example, Hinckeldey wrote that the police had confiscated several copy books from a “salesmen of gallantries” in Berlin’s Charlottenberg district. The covers of these copy books were decorated with images of the revolutionary uprisings in 1848 and 1849 (hardly “gallantries”), and the chief of police warned of the dire consequences of such images “upon the still quite inexperienced and not-yet-autonomous youths, when [the books] promote a spirit hostile to the government.” Here the logic of protecting youths from immoral texts was used to confiscate political images.11 A similar conflation of things moral and things political in an effort to justify renewed censorship was voiced by a state advisor from Magdeburg, who complained vociferously about “shallow,” “heart- and fantasy-[distorting]” novels. These novels often conveyed messages of (religious) unbelief, which in turn made readers more susceptible to communism. In the “dissembling form” of a story, he wrote, communism “penetrates into the soul, easily takes hold, and works such a truly destructive moral influence, that people become enemies of the church, of the state, and of enduring social values.”12 Here again the “frivolous” novel was accused of serious damage because of its ability to penetrate the soul. In answer to Hinckeldey’s desire to justify stricter supervision of lending libraries, the interior minister explained that the language of the 1845 trade regulations (unchanged by the revolution) allowed the police to strip the proprietor of a lending library of his concession if he or she traded in texts destructive to “the foundation of the state and of society.” This unguarded correspondence between like-minded figures suggests that while lip service was paid to a postrevolutionary orthodoxy of free expression and the circulation of knowledge, there appeared to be sufficient openings for arguments aimed at regulating “immoral” texts. As it became clear that the postrevolutionary legal framework left the police with limited control over books that circulated in bookstores, on the street, and in lending libraries, the interior minister and the chief of police began to strategize how best to use the tools at their disposal to achieve their desired goals. Recognizing the new limits on their authority, Berlin’s police headquarters endorsed an indirect strategy. This involved continuous searches of bookstores and peddlers’ boxes, threats to suspend lending library concessions and peddlers’ permits if proprietors did not comply, and regular confiscations of suspicious books, even if these books could not be successfully prosecuted. In the decades that followed, while the Interior Ministry

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battled with a newly empowered judiciary over the legal status of immoral and obscene texts, the police continued to make ample use of surveillance and confiscations.13

New Laws, New Language To understand these limits on police authority, we need to know something about changes in the legal landscape. Though the new Press Law of 1851 articulated the mechanisms for the regulation of printed texts and images, in its final version it said nothing specific about what constituted illegal content; this conceptual work was left to the Criminal Code.14 The Press Law stated clearly that any public display or sale of printed texts in “public ways, streets, places or other public spaces” could not proceed without the approval of the local police and a permit.15 It also laid out the process involved in the confiscation, evaluation, and prosecution of a text, including a strict schedule that promised timely processing of cases. The 1851 Prussian Criminal Code took up the work of defining obscene and immoral texts, images, and acts. Paragraph 150, describing obscene acts, read, “He who causes public offense through an injury to modesty [Schamhaftigkeit] will be sentenced to jail for three months to three years.” Paragraph 151 treated texts and images: “He who sells, dispenses, or otherwise distributes obscene writings, illustrations, or representations, or exhibits or posts such texts in areas accessible to the public will be sentenced to a fine of ten to one hundred Taler or to a jail sentence of 14 days to six months.”16 Together the two laws cast a broad net in their definitions of the objects causing the offense (even speech could be obscene) but provided more specific language about the nature of the infraction. Though paragraph 151 did not use the language of injured “feelings of shame” and “feelings of morality” to describe the meaning of the term unzüchtige Schriften, this more specific language was repeated regularly in police reports and legal discussions. The reasons for this are unclear; perhaps this was because the original language of paragraph 151, later amended, condemned “texts that injure the feelings of morality.”17 One might expect that having these definitions articulated in the criminal code would have the effect of rendering prosecution easier. Yet the opposite was true, and for decades Prussia’s police and Interior Ministry would be involved in a protracted and complex process of working through the implications of these new laws. A more

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specific legal definition of obscenity would be hammered out by the 1880s (in time for a new series of debates to erupt at the end of the century), but the period between 1850 and 1880 witnessed struggles between the police, a newly empowered Justice Ministry, and professional experts; they were joined by the less articulate (but nonetheless important) array of hawkers, peddlers, colporteurs, bookstore owners, picture salesmen, and advertisers who continued to offer the materials that would provide test cases for the evolution of legal opinions. Though the Prussian Criminal Code was issued in the period of reaction following the revolutions of 1848–49, revisions to the code had been originally conceived in the spirit of liberal legal reform following the promulgation of the French Code Pénal and Feuerbach’s 1813 Bavarian Code.18 The process of producing a new code began in the 1820s as part of a liberal effort to eliminate and clarify the overlapping web of laws, police ordinances, and edicts that had characterized criminal law in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Prussia. In the 1830s the original outline passed into conservative hands, and police ordinances were reintroduced into the code. The final version, promulgated in 1851, was marked by years of revisions and reflected the countervailing impulses of revolution and reaction. The result, historian Richard Evans writes, was a compromise between conservatives, intent on reestablishing monarchical order, and liberals, whose demands included formal equality before the law, trial in open court, the prohibition of corporal punishment, and the use of juries or their equivalent in criminal cases.19 We can see these tensions reflected in the new legal provisions surrounding obscenity. Changes in criminal procedure regularized the legal process and promised equal treatment. The police possessed the authority to investigate and to confiscate potentially obscene texts, but their authority ended there. Confiscated texts were then delivered to state’s attorneys, who evaluated the work in light of the existing legal framework and reported back to the Interior Ministry, which then notified police chiefs and provincial authorities about the decision. 20 If the state’s attorneys were prepared to prosecute the case, the defendants—booksellers, newspaper editors, colporteurs, among others—would usually appear before a Schoffengericht, a court composed of a judge and lay assessors. Defendants had the right to appeal convictions, and based on the obscenity cases documented in the files of the Prussian Interior Ministry, it appears that they often did. 21

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While liberals supported these procedural guarantees, they shared conservative fears of social disorder. Evans argues that liberal reformers aimed at the constitution and supervision of a bourgeois public sphere. Here their fears of disorder and insistence on propriety were in tension with their commitment to individual freedoms: “What these reforms were principally concerned with was the construction and regulation of the bourgeois public sphere; a sphere in which equality before the law had to be practiced, decorum maintained, and civil rights and freedoms—freedom of speech, mobility of labor, redress of grievances and so on—established.” The trouble with these freedoms, Evans argues, was that they assumed self-governing, rational subjects, capable of simultaneously maintaining freedom and decorum. Despite claims to universality, the public sphere imagined by liberals did not include everyone. Evans explains, “The bourgeois public sphere was created on the basis of certain crucial exclusions: of women and children, for example, of deviants, criminals, and people consigned by law to institutions such as prisons, workhouses, and schools.”22 New legal definitions of obscenity, now expanded to include obscene acts and focused on maintaining the order and propriety of public spaces, expressed some of these tensions. The new legal language was vague enough that it could be adapted to cover multiple varieties of public disorder. In the 1850s memoirs of the revolutionary uprisings were still fresh. As the century went on, concerns about disorder would increasingly focus on changes in the urban environment linked to the growth of cities. These were spaces offering many different kinds of urban entertainment, among them books and pictures, but also cafés chantants, stereoscope cards, and anonymous shopping districts. These forms of urban excitement (or, from another perspective, potential disorder) were navigated in many ways; obscenity law was one of them. At the same time, as legal experts, state’s attorneys, judges, the police, and the interior minister forged new legal definitions of obscenity, other values were expressed. These included an insistence on the free circulation of knowledge of all kinds (particularly scientific knowledge), the formulation of sexual knowledge as something distinct and socially relevant, and a fundamental ambivalence about imposing limits on the reading and viewing practices of men and women.

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The Legal Status of Injured Feelings At the heart of these new legal definitions of obscenity was the concept of injured feelings. Texts and images were obscene if they were deemed capable of injuring a particular set of emotional impulses in the reader or viewer. At the time and subsequently legal theorists agreed that this concept required explanation, particularly the idea that feelings of shame, morality, and modesty constituted Rechtsgüter, that is, valuable objects worthy of legal protection. An important concept in German law in the 1870s and 1880s, the language of the Rechtsgut identified the object meriting legal protection and provided an explanation of the value of this object to the individual and to society. The insights of legal scholars help us understand more about the theory of injured feelings and its contexts and implications. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century German law professionals— professors, doctoral students, state’s attorneys—took up the question of the legal protection of feelings in articles, books, and dissertations. They attempted to trace the history of the state’s legal protection of feelings, and they posed a set of broader questions about feelings and the law. 23 Were there other examples in which law sought to protect feelings? Did the law protect all varieties of shame, or was the shame it referenced more specific? What was meant by injury; that is, what were the imagined consequences of damaged feelings of shame and modesty? Was shame conceived as an object possessed by an individual or by a community? (And, by extension, who or what warranted protection?) Two early discussions of these questions are particularly useful: an 1877 article by a Dr. Villnow, a state’s attorney from Bromberg, and one published in 1882 by the law professor Karl Binding and his colleagues at the University of Leipzig. 24 Both articles were published in respected law journals, and both were cited repeatedly in a subsequent flurry of scholarship on the legal status of injured feelings published in the early twentieth century. Neither article appears to have been ideologically driven; Binding and Villnow sought to understand the origins and meanings of these efforts to legislate feelings. To begin, both authors attempted to clarify the specific legal understanding of shame and moral feelings at work in the relevant laws. While they acknowledged that Sitten, meaning collective norms of behavior, named a broad category, they insisted that the law understood

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the term Sittengefühle (feelings of morality) as sexual morality and sexual honor. The impulse of shame (inborn and learned) was important because it promoted honorable sexual conduct. Because of this, Villnow reasoned, shame was an inborn mechanism and provided the tools necessary to regulate one’s own sexual behavior in accordance with social norms. He explained, “A particular modesty in sexual matters is desirable in everyone—particularly in one’s conduct towards others, regardless of one’s relationship to that other person.”25 Binding, concerned with identifying the “object of legal protection” that justified legal regulation of obscene texts and acts, settled on the concept of “sexual honor.”26 Because the state and society (these authors spoke little of the individual) had much at stake in the maintenance of sexual morality, Binding wrote, the regulation of books and images was justified, though only in particular cases. “If [the text or image] is aimed at the sexual arousal of the reader or viewer,” he wrote, “only then is the text or image immoral—otherwise it is not.”27 Both authors stated explicitly that it was heterosexual desire that had to be pruned and cultivated (but not discouraged) to conform to social conventions. Sex between men was strictly condemned, not only as an infraction of social norms but also as a transgression against nature. For Villnow, sexual transgressions fell into three categories: those like adultery that were “natural” but still immoral according to the conventions of human law, those like masturbation and sex between women that were “against nature” (widernatürlich) but not legally punishable, and those like sex between men, which he deemed genuinely “unnatural” (unnatürlich) and therefore categorized unequivocally as obscene. Binding and Villnow both insisted that society had a lot resting on the impulses that governed sexual behavior, both spontaneous and learned, and it was for this reason that they could make a case for the value of obscenity in secular terms that also did not foreground the interests of the state. Drawing on the insights of Michel Foucault, scholars have argued that the mechanisms of power shifted considerably in Europe over the course of the nineteenth century. Power initially rooted in religious institutions and absolutist states became more broadly dispersed, operating via institutions, the production of knowledge, and disciplinary power through which individuals began to police their own impulses and behavior. According to this argument, it was not simply that power held initially by a few was spread broadly to include

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more people; it is also that the techniques of power changed. Part of Foucault’s point is that sexuality played an important role in the new techniques of power that grew toward the end of the century. As the mechanisms of power transformed with the growth of institutions (compulsory schooling, for example) and knowledge (the production of reports and statistics), the state cast its goals in new terms, pursuing public health and productivity as a means of promoting certain behaviors and discouraging others. It is possible to see the promotion of the goal of creating healthy and hygienic minds and bodies occupying disciplined public spaces as part of a new operation of power. 28 Such techniques, aimed at health, thrift, and discipline, were not unique to the last third of the nineteenth century; we have seen, for example, that similar impulses existed in the late eighteenth century. It is nonetheless true that the language of obscenity and immoral texts became associated far more explicitly and exclusively with sexuality in the 1870s and 1880s, and it is likely that this shift in the language of obscenity was part of a broader transformation of the operations of power. Shame was important in this context because it provided a mechanism through which people regulated their own sexuality and (indirectly) the sexuality of others. Liberal legal theorists like Binding could therefore insist on a strict definition of immoral texts and images, one that placed strict limits on the ability of the state to regulate what people read and viewed, while also arguing decisively that something as subjective as the feeling of shame constituted an irreplaceable value to society. As H. Josef Haubach wrote in his 1917 study of the laws regulating morality and shame, “sexual morality should be understood as an object of collective value. It is for this reason that sexual infractions are prosecuted as attacks on the state in the interest of the state.”29 Haubach conceived the interests of the state as synonymous with those of the collective, and the role of the state as the defender of collective good. Writing in the 1870s Villnow agreed: “The modern state, which sees its duty in the maintenance of social order, must assure that public morality remains uninjured.”30 In his recent study of German criminal law, the historian Richard Wetzel explains that a new school of German legal reform in the 1880s shifted the focus of punishment away from retributive justice; punishing criminals became instead an effort to protect society against crime. The leader of this new generation of legal reformers, Franz von Liszt, cast the purpose of criminal law in new terms: “If

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the earlier generation of reformers had sought to protect the individual from the state by limiting the state’s penal powers, Liszt was concerned with better protecting society against crime by extending the state’s punitive powers.”31 It seems clear that in the last third of the nineteenth century the relationship between the law, the state, and social interests was configured in new ways. The need of the state to protect the interests and well-being of “society” became the justification for legal interventions in the lives of individuals. In their efforts to contextualize German obscenity laws, legal scholars searched for other cases in which feelings were defined as objects in need of legal protection. Looking for more precise legal precedents concerning books and images, Haubach found nothing in classical law. He identified the 1810 French law condemning texts that were “contraires aux bonnes moeurs” as one of the first legal references to the affective states of readers and viewers.32 Binding concluded that there were multiple instances in which German law sought to protect the affective life of individuals and society; these included the protection of people’s sense of piety through blasphemy laws, their feelings of honor for the dead, and their subjective sense of safety and peace. Another example seemed even closer in sprit to definitions of obscenity. German law, they explained, condemned the torture of animals— not to protect animals but to shield the feelings of the human witness. According to the logic of the law, repeated exposure to cruelty could affect the ability of the witness to feel empathy, first for the animal and later for fellow human beings. Viewing the torture of animals might result in a “roughening” of the individual’s feelings and a deadening of essential social impulses. What of the substance of these laws—how did they articulate this theoretical injury? In the 1840s and 1850s the idea that exposure to offensive texts and acts might cause permanent damage to the sensitivity of moral responses began to animate discussions of obscenity. The dangers of obscene texts and acts were imagined in two ways. In the first formulation, the wrong book or image might inflame the senses and result in violations of sexual morality and honor. More often, however, the notion of injury was bound up with a loss of affective sensitivity or desire. In theory—or at least in the explanations of legal theorists—obscene texts and images could damage readers and viewers, rendering them less sensitive and emotionally inert. “Injury,” Haubach wrote, “refers to any change for the worse caused by an event. Injury to the feelings

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[Gefühlsverletzung] is therefore always expressed in a slackening or dullness of feeling, which has supplanted a previously existing sensation of pleasure.” In legal terms damage referred to an actual change of condition of inner life—a mental transformation. “Whether religious, aesthetic, or moral, feelings are the object of assault, [and] the outcome is the same, for the corresponding substance in the state of one’s feelings has been destroyed.” According to the law, Haubach wrote, “feelings are also damaged . . . if dullness has been aroused in our consciousness.”33 Pfeifer articulated damage in similar terms: “We understand feelings of shame as the fantasies and feelings that are aroused in a morally pure, normal human being, in regards to sexual life. We say that feelings of shame are injured when an assault takes place on those fantasies and feelings, which evoke feelings of aversion [Unlustempfinden] in relation to sexuality.”34 The deadening of sexual desire and potency was perceived as one of the more egregious outcomes of overstimulation via books and images, and these theorists were convinced that feelings of shame were necessary for the proper functioning of sexual morality. Obscenity law, they concluded, aimed at protecting the “natural” impulses of both shame and desire, promoting individuals capable of both self-discipline and (in appropriate contexts) sexual ardor. Shame and modesty had an important role to play in the maintenance of this balance. Villnow argued that nature provided a potent source of morality in the distinctly human sense of shame. Shame was a valuable attribute, providing humans with a natural source of morality in keeping with the cultural constraints of human morality.35 Shame and modesty were imagined as valuable human attributes; to take them away constituted injury and loss. Exposing the individual to obscene acts, texts, or images threatened to rob him or her of the impulses that harmonized natural impulses with human conventions. Such, then, was one sophisticated secular formulation of what was at stake in these laws. Villnow’s justification of obscenity law in terms of the maintenance of the central human impulse of shame was striking because it stressed the authority of nature and community. The legal justification for pursuing sexual crimes and misdemeanors came not from the authority of state or from God but from nature and collective norms. This was a different argument for the regulation of obscene texts and images. Even if the interests of the state were furthered by

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the regulation of sexual behavior, those interests did not justify moral regulation. The rhetorical efficacy of the state’s authority as a means of justifying intervention in moral matters receded, at least temporarily. It was replaced by a vision of collective social interests. Aside from the legal scholarship, the literature on shame and modesty (Schamgefühl and Schamhaftigkeit) written during this period was not extensive. However, one work sheds a bit of light on contemporary understandings of these feelings. Psychiatrist Jakob Santlus’s 1864 book, On the Psychology of Human Instincts, presented a detailed discussion of feelings of modesty as one of several important human instincts.36 Santlus attempted to describe the development of conscious and unconscious impulses in the human brain and body. The brain served as the primary organ of consciousness; the nervous system, rooted in the spinal cord, was also deemed an important “organ of the soul” and made responsible for unconscious functions. Like many German psychiatrists working in this period, Santlus attempted to integrate physiology, in particular a discussion of nerves, into his model of human mental and emotional life. Santlus began by identifying several impulses: instincts toward inner and outer freedom, religion, power, society, imitation, and love. He described a complex of “functional instincts” surrounding family, sexual love, and affection for children. This complex also was the basis for inclination, which in turn shaped emotional instincts, among then the “instinct for honor” and, as a subset of honor, the instinct toward modesty in the female sex. For women, he wrote, modesty “manifests itself in an aversion to that which is directed at injury of chastity and virginal honor. Within the realm of modesty we find the primary advantages and virtues of woman; where they are absent, there is moral ruin—itself inevitable—because woman is outstripped by feeling and abandoned by reflection, in which case honor must stand in as the only Talisman of her virtue.” Modestly therefore played a crucial role in the maintenance of women’s virtue; abandoned by this instinct, women were lost: “Modesty exists in the worry and fear that one might suffer a dishonor, which in extreme cases devolves into despair and fear.”37 In a section of his book devoted to “anomalies of the functional instincts,” Santlus suggested that the education of instincts began during adolescence; young people were susceptible to mental and emotional extremes, particularly to worldly or religious fanaticism. He condemned titillating French books (among them the popular

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novels of Eugène Sue) on grounds that they had a negative influence on the development of the mind and body and on the awakening of sexual life: “Here we come to the arousal of the fantasies through seductive novels, the sight of ballet and theater scenes and of nudity, and lusty and voluptuous conversations; these are generally the first conditions for the eruption of this vice. The imagination is led astray, which means that the senses and fantasies are awakened and aroused in a sexual direction.”38 Santlus blamed luxury in food, drink, clothing, and amusement, religious fanaticism, and contemporary educational mores, which aroused the nervous system and sexual instincts. This psychology evoked a world filled with sources of arousal: speech, entertainment, pictures, and books. In a world increasingly urban and commercial, one could hardly avoid hearing or seeing something that might affect the nerves and arouse the instincts. Shame and modesty served as spontaneous checks on the behavior generated not from without but from within. Some shame provided protection against dishonor in the face of emotions and impulses; too much shame, Santlus wrote, led to asceticism, melancholia, and a loss of contact with reality. These two previous points are worth developing, as they were important to Santlus’s view of human psychology. He was interested in the inner world and in the interior impulses of the subject; he believed these arose not simply in reaction to stimuli in the external world (in strict materialist fashion) but also through a series of inner processes unique to human beings. The development of the nervous system played an essential role in the emergence of the conscious and the unconscious mind: “It would occur to no one to believe that the development of the human creature is brought about and set in motion by the external world and not by its own inner energy. The cells out of which this creature develops are hidden from the influence of the external world, and they develop according to the same laws of existence as those that apply to all creatures—each according to their own laws.” Yet the spontaneous inner development of the human did not mean that it was not also susceptible to external influence. And Santlus was particularly preoccupied with the “functional instincts,” those governing sexual attraction, love, family, and friendship. The development of human character, he wrote, began with adolescence and puberty. It was at this age that the developing individual might become the “unwitting victim of unnatural and sinful passions, which cloud the happiness of one’s whole life and lead

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to the degeneration of one’s mental freshness.” The impulse among friends to repeat tales of love (Liebesmärchen) meant that an “instinct was awakened and a demon had taken position of one’s heart.”39 The individual’s development—through cells and nervous system—happened spontaneously and provided important counterweights (a sense of shame, of honor) to moral corruption. Yet the individual was still endangered by the influences of peers and especially vulnerable in matters of sexuality and religion. Some of Santlus’s ideas were mirrored in the language of Berlin’s police, as they fretted in the 1860s and 1870s over the growing number of objects that might stir the nerves of the unwitting victim, from stereoscope cards and advertisements to the racy novels and cafés chantants increasingly available in urban spaces during the last third of the century. At the same time, Santlus insisted on the spontaneous, self-generating development of human creatures, complete with instincts that led them away from moral dangers, among them modesty and honor.

Obscenity in the 1860s and 1870s: New Geographies, New Language By the early 1860s much had already changed in the regulation of immoral and obscene texts and images in Prussia. New legal language and procedures meant that confiscated texts and images were evaluated by different parties and according to new standards. Furthermore the questions of self-development and miseducation that had animated concepts of immoral and obscene books in the first half of the century gave way to greater focus on the moral tenor of public spaces and the sexual honor of readers and viewers. In 1861 Wilhelm I ascended the Prussian throne, replacing his reactionary predecessor and ushering in a regime that, although still conservative, nonetheless left more room for liberal principles and middle-class aspirations. In the 1860s and 1870s these liberal principles would be used to narrow and refine the scope of obscenity law; liberals would also turn a sharper eye on sexual acts and sexual honor. Several developments transformed the circulation, production, and regulation of immoral and obscene books and images in the 1860s and 1870s. New spaces of production, distribution, and regulation transformed the geographies of these texts. Contemporaries began to employ novel vocabulary to describe their dangers and effects; much

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of this language borrowed from psychiatry and medicine, both of which enjoyed growing prestige enhanced by skilled popularizers and a curious public. This prestige had the effect of bringing popular medical works, long a staple of the book trade, into sharper focus. Officials tried to sort useful knowledge from knowledge whose only goal (however carefully cloaked) was to incite lust. There were novelties to navigate in this world, and armed with vocabulary gleaned from law and medicine, contemporaries set out to uncover, investigate, and measure the effects of texts of all kinds. To understand these changes it helps to begin with transformations in space. During the second half of the nineteenth century the intricate topography of the illicit book trade, etched into the German states between 1830 and 1848–49 and marked by the political and social upheavals of that era, gave way to new centers and spaces of book production and exchange. During the revolutionary decades of the 1830s and 1840s the production of all kinds of illicit texts had shifted to liberal states in the southwest. By the 1850s publishers in states like Baden and Württemberg no longer enjoyed the particular advantages that had led to their previous success. As the trade in erotic books stopped being closely associated with forbidden books of other kinds, proximity to France and freedom from prepublication censorship no longer gave publishers in the southwest a significant advantage. Thus by the 1850s Hamburg and the neighboring city of Altona were already two points in a node that would become one of the most important centers for the production and distribution of racy, explicitly sexual books. In the 1860s, for example, the Hamburg bookseller J. D. Polack offered editions of Casanova’s Memoirs, the notorious erotic classic Thérèse Philosophe, and an array of books with titles like The Secret Museum, Hamburg Brochures (probably one of several contemporary texts offering detailed information about prostitution in Hamburg), and The Mirror of Marriage.40 By the 1860s August Prinz was the proprietor of a flourishing business publishing erotic books in Altona.41 Prinz had moved to Hamburg in 1842 after completing a traditional bookseller’s apprenticeship in Berlin and a Wanderjahr that took him from Leipzig to Berlin.42 Less than a year after moving to Hamburg he had already run into trouble with the censors over a book he published anonymously and under a false imprint. Forced to leave Hamburg as a result, he established his business in the neighboring city of Altona. Prinz was back in Hamburg again in 1848,

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editing a political journal, Der Republikaner.43 Thrown out of that city a second time, in 1849, Prinz reestablished himself in Altona, where he would continue his work as a publisher and bookseller until his death in 1883.44 Earlier in the century the publisher E. M. Heilbutt had established Altona as an important center of erotic book production, and in 1866 Prinz bought Heilbutt’s firm. In addition to his primary imprint, Verlagsbureau Altona, Prinz published potentially illegal books under cover firms, including J. J. Wagener, Neustadt; Reginald Chesterfield, Boston; and George Brown, Cincinnati. Among these titles were a variety of erotic (“gallant”) memoirs attributed to women with titles like Memoirs and Gallant Adventures of a Young Woman from the Demi-Monde, Memoirs and Gallant Adventures of Ida Jones, and The Modern Decameron. In 1861 or 1862 Prinz would publish the first volume of The Memoirs of a Singer, one of the great erotic classics of the nineteenth century. He published a second volume in the early 1870s. The Memoirs of a Singer was notorious, popular, and sexually explicit; nonetheless the book attracted surprisingly little attention from the police in Berlin. In the 1860s and 1870s the Prussian authorities busied themselves examining books that rode a fine line between legitimate and dangerous knowledge; perhaps they were less interested because The Memoirs of a Singer was unambiguously obscene. By contrast authorities in Altona were concerned with Prinz’s activities, banning many books from his printing house, including The Memoirs of a Singer, and in some cases condemning the entire output of a particular imprint.45 With liberal political institutions, a growing prostitution trade, and ready access to transportation networks, it is not surprising that Hamburg-Altona became a central hub for the trade in erotic books during the second half of the nineteenth century, sending books via mail order and colportage and capitalizing on its ideal location in a transportation network that only continued to develop over the second half of the century. Other important centers of erotic book production developed as well during the last decades of the century. Historian Gary Stark writes that by 1900 Germany boasted several important pornographic publishers, including Adolf Estinger in Munich, Curt Ronniger’s House in Leipzig, and Dresdner Romanverlag in Dresden.46 There were other important material transformations in the erotic book trade, among them changes to the spaces in which books and

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texts were displayed and sold, sought out by readers and sniffed out by the police. During the second half of the nineteenth century German cities expanded rapidly; between 1850 and 1910, for example, Berlin’s population grew from 172,000 to over 2 million.47 These transformations in the physical spaces of cities were reflected in the reports on immoral and obscene books and images gathered by the Interior Ministry. As early as the late 1850s the police began to be less concerned with uncovering secret caches of erotic books in lending libraries and focused their attention instead on shop windows and advertisements.48 They became especially attentive to the morality of public spaces. With the help of private parties, who often wrote to the police urging them to confiscate offending texts, the police began to chart a new view of the city. This included areas seemingly thick with offensive images and book titles, especially the Friedrichstraße, a major commercial venue even before the train station was built there in the 1870s. The police also worried about areas of the city where popular entertainments—the ballet, the comic opera—comingled with “countless picture stores selling . . . photographic prints that must tickle the senses infinitely more than the suggestive title of a book.”49 Advertisements for such works were another source of concern, as were advertisements for contraceptives. The colporteurs who occupied train stations also drew the attention of the police. In October 1878 a private party wrote to alert the police to the circulation of three unwholesome texts: The Memoirs, Romantic and Gallant Adventures of Ida Jones (probably the work of Prinz); Berlin Ball Ladies from the Berlin Demi-Monde; and Interesting Divorce Cases. In the letter to the interior minister the author fretted that such books were regularly sold in train stations and other public venues. 50 This new view of the city generated by police surveillance was aided by the growth of moral reform groups that sprang up in the late 1870s and 1880s.51 Often associated with conservative Protestant ministers, these groups decried the immoralities of the city and sent outraged letters to police headquarters, pointing to pockets of the city where sexually suggestive or explicit books were openly displayed. Often these denunciations were sent anonymously. In 1878, for example, an anonymous letter was sent to the justice minister in Berlin informing him that the “most scandalous novels of the Marquis de Sade” were displayed in store windows and sold by itinerant booksellers alongside “texts of all kinds about prostitution” and books that included pictures of human genitalia. 52 The police often acted on there reports,

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making use of the information they contained and perhaps seeing in them a justification for their efforts to expand the scope of government control over bookstores, kiosks, and peddlers. Writing reports and charting this new moral topography of the city, officials also had the chance to practice the new vocabulary of obscenity, bringing it into speech and practice. In the 1850s they applied the language of injured feelings and began to speak of books and images “that, through their obscenity, offend public decency.” The police also articulated the dangers they saw arising from public advertisements for contraception. Exposure to such texts, they reasoned, affected people’s behavior and “called forth sexual offenses.”53 In the 1860s and 1870s police and legal experts began to borrow from medical science to describe encounters with obscene texts and images. 54 As human physiology developed as a field and professional psychiatrists turned to laboratory science to investigate mental phenomena, a more mechanical language of “nerves” and “mental impulses” would provide a new vocabulary of the mind and soul. 55 Historian Robert Nye describes this transformation in France: “The encroachment of an essentially medical outlook on the traditional legal, philosophical, and moral domains was well underway by 1870; doctors had succeeded in making their technical knowledge indispensable to public health courts, and the medical avant-garde had made excellent progress toward the goal of situating medicine in the mainstream of modern scientific materialism.”56 A similar process was taking place in the German states. The language of science and medicine would inform discussions of unzüchtige Schriften, though such language would also intersect and overlap with other ways of making sense of the vulnerabilities of the mind and the soul.

The Status of Popular Medical Texts While the trade in erotic texts transformed and flourished in the 1860s and 1870s, the police, state’s attorneys, and courts focused first on the legal status of popular medical works, and later on the status of advertisements for contraceptives (usually sold as a means for preventing the spread of sexually transmitted diseases). Private parties—most associated with moral reform groups—remained focused on sexually explicit books, collecting examples as evidence and delivering them to the police. Despite these efforts, the Interior Ministry, Police Headquarters, and state’s attorneys focused their energies on

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determining the status of texts that walked a fine line between popular medical science and sexual titillation, among them books and pamphlets, as well as printed advertisements. This was in part a testament to the authority of medical science. It was also a matter of establishing a hierarchy of values, and, theoretically at least, genuine knowledge trumped moral concerns. Any genuinely useful knowledge could not be condemned as obscene. As Binding and his colleagues made clear in their important article on obscenity law, sexuality was an important topic, and knowledge about it was both legitimate and valuable.57 It was therefore essential to distinguish between legitimate knowledge and titillating works that masqueraded as such. Despite steady reports that the circulation of erotic books and images was expanding in the 1860s and 1870s, the police generally avoided these works and focused instead on delivering popular scientific works and advertisements for such books to state’s attorneys. The attorneys would then evaluate the works in light of existing legal precedents; when they thought prosecution was possible, they would pass them on to the courts. In exchanges and deliberations over such texts, the police and state’s attorneys made different assumptions about these texts. While the police and Interior Ministry evoked the language of vulnerable subjects and the decency of public spaces, members of the Justice Ministry stressed the autonomy of individuals and the legitimacy of knowledge. These tensions can be seen in a case concerning an advertisement for a popular medical text, The Regeneration of a Weakened Nervous System, or the Best Cures for Onanism and Pollution, attributed to Dr. R. Richard. 58 Richard’s book took up the popular topic of masturbation and impotence among boys and men, presenting the book as a case study given to a physician, couched in the language of science. In 1857 members of the Justice Ministry in Berlin assessed the advertisement and the book itself. Two state’s attorneys evaluated Regeneration of a Weakened Nervous System in light of existing legal frameworks. Their exchange also suggests that there were important points of disagreement between the police and the judiciary about the status of such texts, the vulnerabilities of readers, and the limits of admissible knowledge. 59 Regeneration of a Weakened Nervous System was first brought to the attention of Police Headquarters in Berlin in 1852; the provincial court in Breslau had condemned an advertisement for the book

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on the grounds that it offended against public decency. Two people were accused of public offense and causing injury to feelings of shame: the editor of the newspaper that advertised Regeneration and a bookseller by the name of Geelhaar. Four years passed before the case resurfaced in a report from the Justice Ministry. In Berlin state’s attorneys by the name of Korner and Schwartz rejected the decision of Breslau’s courts. Korner argued that the advertisement itself did not meet the legal criteria of paragraph 150, aimed at eliminating “public offenses” and “injuries to modesty” from public spaces. The author of Regeneration, Korner explained, was careful to use scientific, anatomical language to describe the maladies that formed the subject of the book, thus making an attempt to veil the potentially “indecent” nature of the content. Furthermore the book in question served a legitimate purpose, providing important information about the healing of sexual illnesses. “In the conflict between modesty on the one hand, and healing on the other,” he wrote, “the former recedes in the face of the irrefutable and higher importance of the latter.” The distribution of knowledge, particularly knowledge leading to health and therefore to greater well-being, was of primary importance; protecting modesty was secondary. The content and title of the book, Korner argued, stayed within the boundaries of its subject matter, the healing of illness. As to the question of whether it was appropriate to publicly advertise a book with a title mentioning masturbation and nocturnal emissions (albeit in veiled language), Korner answered in the affirmative: the title itself was less likely than the book to injure modesty. Furthermore, he explained, nowhere was it written that a work offering scientific or practical knowledge could be advertised only in scientific periodicals. The chief state’s attorney, Schwartz, agreed. He began his defense of text and advertisement by imagining the likely reader of Regeneration. The book, he wrote, was directed “not especially at the physician, but instead more or less at the father of a house and family, [for whom the text in question is] important and useful knowledge.” A father was capable of evaluating evidence and maintaining his equilibrium in the face of potentially stimulating information. He would put the book to use as a means of healing illness rather than as a source of titillation. Schwartz likened Regeneration to books on “midwifery and chronic constipation and the like, which might offend prudery, but in no case really injured feelings of shame or aroused public offense.” While Korner and Schwartz acknowledged the danger that the work might fall into the wrong hands—those of

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a woman or child or a member of the lower classes—they were willing to grant the paterfamilias responsibility for managing such risks.60 Different conceptions of the reader thus produced different interpretations of the text. Summing up his thoughts on Regeneration, the interior minister worried about “the indecent wildness that [the book] obviously must give to the younger members of the reading public.”61 Korner and Schwartz, by contrast, imagined a mature reader who occupied a position of authority and required knowledge in order to guide the members of his household, in this case his sons. They assumed that a father in possession of an informative and medically grounded book about the dangers of masturbation would be in a position to regulate the members of his household. By assuring the circulation of practical knowledge, such texts extended and confirmed moral authority. A symbiosis between two authorities—physician and father, both in possession of knowledge—should be promoted. The question of the advertisement itself, and thus the nature of the public offense, did not concern the state’s attorneys. For the interior minister, worried about the public circulation of such frank language about the body and sexuality, the advertisement itself constituted a potential source of moral injury. He concluded that greater pressure must be put on the editors of newspapers to discourage them from publishing such advertisements. A closer look at the book itself helps us understand the controversy it generated. In a lengthy subtitle the 1856 edition of Regeneration promised the reader three things: an anatomical representation of male sexual organs, patients’ authentic testimonials of illness, and insights into the newest discoveries in the physiology of the nervous system. True to his word, Richard offered all three, crafting a book balanced between accounts of onanism and “pollution” allegedly written by suffering patients and authoritative commentary provided by the physician; all of this was punctuated by a large anatomical representation of the lower half of the male torso, complete with an image of the reproductive organs and genitals. As the title itself promised, the book focused on the fragility of the human nervous system. Richard suggested that men (women were not mentioned except as objects of potential stimulation) had fragile physiologies, which must be carefully guarded against overstimulation lest too much desire should lead tragically to impotence and the absence of desire. In his introduction Richard addressed his imagined audience, described as youths who had weakened their body and ruined their

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health with “youthful sins,” and the parents and teachers in a position to protect them from the “dangerous enemy” of self-abuse, pollution, and the resulting weakening of body and mind. Employing medical vocabulary to describe the functioning of the human mind and body, the author waded through multiple causes and manifestations of masturbation and impotence. The scientific information was illustrated by narrative accounts of “self-abuse,” sexual indulgence, and tortured attempts by suffering men to control their mind and body in pursuit of “health” and sexual moderation. The stated goal of the book—and of sexual and physiological knowledge—was to ensure that men would be able to “enjoy the pleasures of life” without succumbing to dissipation. Speculating on the etiology of pathological masturbation, Regeneration hovered between mental and physiological origins. Arousal generated from within, through sexual maturation of the body, for example, stimulated the nerves, but the individual was also deeply susceptible to external stimuli. The disastrous consequences of an overabundant imagination were described as physical rather than mental: “There are men who possess strong, passionate imaginations, who view everything through the colorful lens of poetry, who have a strong inclination toward frolicsome ideas, who infuse their memories with the most beautiful forms; this produces appetites whose satisfaction cannot be endured by the organs.” Imagination promoted sensuality and thus easily led the inexperienced young man into habits that might injure his physical organism. Fathers were exhorted to keep adolescent males away from wet nurses and governesses, to make sure that they did not witness animals mating, and to keep them from sleeping in the same beds as other children. Youths should avoid contact with servants, whose “indecent talk” could arouse the senses, and they should be kept away from “dirty pictures,” which might “produce wildness in the most precious of feelings.” Other dangers included bed sheets, blankets, and night shirts, which could arouse sensuality through “rubbing against the male organ.”62 For the author of Regeneration, the world of the affluent young man was marked by multiple routes to the self-destruction of masturbation, arising spontaneously in the mind or creeping in through multiple cracks in the fortress of the affluent home. In his discussion of nocturnal emissions, Richard stressed the physical (rather than mental) distortion of the subject. Fathers were told to look for signs of masturbation and pollution. The first signs included

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general weakness, an inability to sit still, and regular sighing. Signs of more advanced disturbance included changes in eating, poor complexion, premature signs of age, nervous heartbeat, convulsions, and epilepsy. The result was a man incapable of playing a productive role in society. The overactive imagination and dissipation of the crippled onanist deprived the state and society of potential energy. Richard encouraged the poor onanist, “crippled in body and in soul,” to “go out into the world, to take hold of a career, to learn something.”63 Thus bourgeois values of hard work and self-discipline made their way into this frank treatment of bodies and desires. Stress on such values differentiated popular medical books from “gallant” memoirs (also a source of sexual knowledge), which offered narratives that were often at odds with these bourgeois values. While Richard’s analysis used clinical vocabulary, the narrative accounts of individual suffering he included evoked the excess, repetition, and confessional tone employed in classic texts of gallantry. The longest and most remarkable of these narratives, occupying fourteen pages of a ninety-page text, provided readers with a case history, a narrative of dissipation written in the first person, embedded in a larger study. This case history began with the discovery of masturbation by a young man at the age of eleven, followed by years of struggle against temptation, dissipation, and ultimately collapse. Erotic books played a role in the patient’s dissipation, as did early seduction by an older woman. Eventually his private sufferings resulted in isolation and depression. After years of struggle against the dissipations of self-abuse, a medical solution was found; the young man was subsequently cured and returned to good health. As attorneys Korner and Schwartz read the book in light of existing laws, they took the author of Regeneration at his word. They concluded that the text offered legitimate medical knowledge, directed at responsible heads of household intent upon protecting the moral health of their family. Perhaps they also recognized that Regeneration could help to discipline male sexuality by providing a compelling account of the dangers of erotic books, older women, and masturbation. The attorneys overlooked the fact that the patient’s account of his illness included frank discussions of his body and desires. Regeneration presented a story that was ultimately cautionary; perhaps it was this that influenced the state’s attorneys’ decision not to bring the case to court. Members of the Interior Ministry saw things differently, worrying that such texts encouraged “moral wildness.” They ignored the book’s

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cautionary logic and focused instead on how such a book might be approached by readers interested in the graphic, titillating details of the story and the image of the male reproductive organs. Regeneration was a text that could be used in several ways by resourceful readers. One thinks, for instance, of the longing for authoritative knowledge about sexuality and the body that might have plagued young men and women in the 1850s and 1860s. While Regeneration offered a model for disciplining the mind and body and thus harnessing the productive power of sexuality, it did so in secular, even mechanical terms. The text articulated a materialist vision of the body, acted upon by internal and external stimuli, which set off a chain of physical responses. It argued that sexual dissipation was bad, but the problem was not one of moral order or religion but instead was a matter of the organic functioning of the body. Furthermore, tucked in between elucidations of the nervous system, Regeneration offered the reader the narrative pleasures of firsthand testimonials. These were tales of insatiable lust, sexual dissolution, and aroused bodies, couched in the (increasingly unimpeachable) language of medical science. The interior minister was probably correct to assume that in this case science served to authorize a text that could have been put to other uses. At stake was not the question of whether it was permissible to discuss sexuality; it was a matter of how one could discuss sexuality: where, to whom, and evoking what brand of authority. Such questions were deemed pressing and relevant. Texts of this kind regularly attracted the attention of the police between 1850 and 1880. Among them were books such as No More Overpopulation (found in a bookstore in Berlin in 1854) and Novelties for Those Engaged to Be Married (confiscated in Cologne in 1875). The authorities also regularly concerned themselves with advertisements for contraception. In 1873, for example, the Interior Ministry in Berlin worried that a local newspaper was offering prophylactics, “for women!,” to be sent discreetly.64 Another case involving the confiscation of popular medical books confirms the importance of this genre as a test case at the limits of legal definitions of obscenity. The case involved the activities of a bookseller from Münster by the name of Wundermann, who wrote to the Prussian interior minister in May 1868 complaining that popular medical books had been confiscated from his store without adequate legal justification. The case focused on several texts, described by Berlin’s Police Headquarters as “popular scientific instructions and

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warnings.” In the report only one title was mentioned: Gifts for the Newly Engaged, attributed to a Dr. Brandt. Wundermann initiated contact with the authorities in Berlin, complaining that he had been mistreated by Münster’s “ultramontane” Catholic authorities. He explained that those who confiscated his texts had never given him a motive for that confiscation, nor had they given him a written statement, to which he was entitled. He speculated that this mistreatment was motivated by religious intolerance and appealed to the Prussian authorities, evoking “the intelligent state” and the equality of subjects before the law. Wundermann believed the legal process and rights should override narrow-minded provincial prejudices.65 Responding to queries from Berlin, the authorities in Münster explained their position. They were less concerned with the content of Wundermann’s popular medical books than with their public display in a store window. While such texts might not bother people on the street in a big city like Berlin, in a smaller city like Münster such texts served as a means of “arousing the senses” (Sinnen-Reizmittel) of those walking by the store window. They argued that the books served no legitimate medical purpose and were likely to attract the attention of youths, who were easily injured by such displays. Berlin’s chief of police offered a different perspective. To begin, he distinguished between questions of display and those of content. While the titles of such texts, he argued, “stimulated the senses,” this was not necessarily true of the content. Though he agreed with the authorities in Münster that those who bought such books were seeking arousal rather than medical knowledge, he believed they might be disappointed by what they found. The chief of police further explained that the criminal code was strict: “Not everything bawdy falls under the legal definition of obscene.” He explained that his own efforts to prosecute such works had been unsuccessful. Finally, he suggested that Wundermann’s titles were relatively innocuous given the broader context of urban entertainments; the population was regularly exposed to ballet, comic opera, theater, and countless picture stores that “titillate the senses far more than the double entendre offered in the title of a book.”66 Based on the three-way exchange between Wundermann himself, the police in Berlin, and the authorities in Münster, it appears that the court in Münster found the bookseller guilty of displaying obscene writings. Wundermann won the case on appeal but found himself convicted of another infraction: harassing government officials while engaged in their work.67

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Wundermann’s case reveals that by the end of the 1860s a new vocabulary had crept into official discussions of obscene texts. Wundermann himself clung to the idea of a rational and legitimate state. After a decade and a half struggling to test the limits of new definitions of obscenity (with little success in the case of popular medical works), Berlin’s chief of police adopted a pragmatic stance. While he agreed that Wundermann’s texts were “unclean,” they were not “bordello writings” and would not make it past the legal definitions that guided state’s attorneys and judges. At the same time, authorities began to use new language to describe the effects of such texts, explaining that they were “a method of arousing the senses.” Even when the encounter with the wrong kind of text took place in public, the damage was imagined as interior, contained at the level of physical and mental impulses. Finally, the authorities in Münster clung to a vision of law centered on the maintenance of local order. The relevant parties understood their relationship to the law in very different terms: Wundermann as the beneficiary of liberal concepts; Berlin’s chief of police as a pragmatic practitioner; and the authorities in Münster clinging to the importance of public order. Thus a wholly secular, even at times materialist view of individuals with vulnerable nerves inhabiting a newly complex social world provided a renewed justification for protecting the reader or viewer of the obscene text or act. Lines of historical continuity linked the protection of religious feelings to the protection of shame. Yet there are important discontinuities as well, particularly in imagining a human subject consisting of drives and nerves and acted upon by an increasing array of visual, mental, and physical stimuli. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the loss of shame, even when imagined as the loss of an individual attribute, expressed a deep-seated concern about the vulnerability of individuals in a world in which authority (even of the most interiorized form, as with shame) was attenuated by physical and economic mobility, the anonymity of urban spaces, and the temptations of leisure pursuits.

Refining Definitions of Obscenity in the 1870s and 1880s The 1860s and 1870s marked an important period of development in the legal concept of obscene texts and images. Germany’s first national criminal code (the 1872 Reichsstrafgesetzbuch) modeled its

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obscenity laws on the 1851 Prussian Code. Two paragraphs established the meaning of obscenity: paragraph 183 condemned “public arousal of offense through obscene acts”; paragraph 184 condemned “the distribution of obscene writings, images, or representations.”68 While national unification and the promulgation of the Reich Criminal Code did not immediately translate into convictions in obscenity cases, a series of court rulings in the 1870s would result in more specific language and a wider scope for interpretation and application. Many important cases involved newspaper advertisements for contraception. Officials feared that the public display of such texts might offend the public or might lead people to engage in illicit sex. The refinements to legal language answered relevant questions about the nature and varieties of “injured feelings” and the relationship between texts and acts. In 1872, for example, a court decision established that “obscene acts” were those that “rudely injured feelings of morality and shame in a sexual manner.”69 To the language of morality and shame, the modifiers “rudely injured” and “sexual manner” were added. This language was initially put to the test in cases involving advertisements for contraception. An 1877 case in Berlin involving advertisements for contraceptives was rejected (as many were) by the court on the grounds that the “content of the text [the advertisement] was not seen as injurious to feelings of shame or moral feelings in a sexual sense, nor could they be seen as stimulating forbidden sexual relations.”70 That same year a report from Police Headquarters in Berlin explained, “Immoral is any satisfaction of the sexual instincts that takes place outside of marriage and the natural intermixing of men and women.”71 Regulating the quality and effects of sexual arousal and protecting sexual honor and modesty became the central principles at stake in these laws. In legal theory protecting sexual honor extended in three directions: to regulate sexual relationships, to protect people from becoming the object of a stranger’s sexual desire, and to make sure that someone was not injured by the sexual expressions or activities of another. The courts ruled that texts were obscene if they might lead to immoral acts—in the language of the law, if they could have an immoral “terminus.”72 A case in 1879 involving advertisements for a manufacturer of contraceptives marked another important change in the law. According to the circular sent to state governments by the interior minister, the case involved two men accused of advertising contraceptives. The accused argued that their advertisements

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for contraceptives did not fall under the definition of paragraph 184 “because immoral writings are only those that rudely injure modesty and moral feelings in a sexual sense.” They also took up the link between texts and acts and claimed that nothing in the advertisement prompted readers to engage in extramarital sex.73 In a case involving such a text, the appellate court argued that advertisements for contraceptives providing protection from syphilis aroused readers to engage in extramarital sex and injured the feelings of shame and the moral feelings of readers. The court argued that the law did not stipulate that injury of feelings of modesty and morality had to reach a certain level. It was also not necessary that the advertisement allude in text to extramarital sex; rather the problem was that acts might follow from the reading. Binding and his colleagues explained the 1879 decision, writing that the court “assumed that an invitation to buy plastic copies of male and female genitals in rubber and [contraceptives] would stimulate and promote the acting out of obscene acts.”74 The decision thus confirmed that immoral acts associated with reading a text did not have to be depicted in the text but could simply be the consequences of reading the text. A text need not be narrative; an advertisement or image constituted a text, particularly if it opened the way for lewd acts. The central term unzüchtig was defined in somewhat narrow terms as sexual relations taking place outside the confines of marriage. In this respect the imagination of the courts was limited to a narrow set of sexual dangers, centered on the propriety of public spaces and preoccupied with the threats of extramarital sex, venereal disease, and “rude injury in sexual terms to feelings of shame and morality.” These more specific definitions of obscene texts seem to have led to more successful prosecutions; by 1880 state’s attorneys once again began to successfully prosecute works of erotic fiction. In late 1879 the authorities in Altona wrote to the Prussian interior minister to recount the details of a trial of two booksellers, August and Carl Vaternahm, accused of selling three pamphlets: The Memoirs of the Marquise of Pompadour; The Memoirs of Catherine II, Queen of Russia; and The Memoirs of Jerome Bonaparte, a Love Story of the Westfalian Court in Capel.75 The three pamphlets were all published in Berlin by C. I. Leo, but they had made their way north to Altona. Pamphlets of this kind were commonly found in peddlers’ boxes and bookstores. In May that same year Louis and His Court, or the Marquise of Pompadour was confiscated from the coffers of a

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colporteur from Bremen and a bookseller in Hamburg; both were successfully prosecuted and fined.76 The Vaternahm case is interesting for two reasons: first, because it marked a return, after a long period, to prosecuting “gallant” memoirs; second, because of the detailed commentary on the texts offered by the courts and recorded in the files. Confirming an earlier decision by the district court in Altona, which had condemned the works, the appellate court in Kiel explained the reasons for the conviction. In his discussion of the first work in question, The Memoirs of the Marquise of Pompadour, the judge rejected the claim that the work had historical value: “Following page 120, [the work] gives an exhaustive description of a scene, in which the Marquise, who is shown to be nearly insane with lust, is interrupted just as she is at the point of sexual abandon with the king. She finds herself in the same situation with [another man] on the same day, and is again disrupted. The segment ends with the observation that the poor little Marquise was interrupted twice in the same day with unfinished business—a bad break.” The judge’s description was indirect and measured; nonetheless it revealed more than the usual brief, legalistic evaluation of confiscated works. The commentary explained that the memoir contained graphic descriptions of sex and, in particular, of a woman engaged in promiscuous sex (two lovers in one day) out of wedlock: “No further argument is required to show that this work deals not with historical realities, but with the most indecent possible scenarios. These are more or less a product of the author’s fantasy. Furthermore, in their content and form they are intended, and evidently calculated to arouse the sensuality of the reader.”77 According to the judgment, the work in question was explicitly intended to arouse the reader in a sexual manner—an important detail in the prosecution of a text. The judge did not mention the tendency of the text to inspire immoral acts; this would become key to the interpretation of obscenity law that same year. Yet the causal connection between texts and acts might easily have been applied to this case, as the lusty extramarital exploits of the young marquise might have inspired lust in the reader as well as actions designed to address that lust. The second pamphlet in the case, The Memoirs of Catherine II, was described in terms that emphasized the explicit nature of the text: “On page 68, a caricature is described in an obscene manner, which refers to the sexual intemperance of the Empress Catherine II.” Like Marquise de Pompadour, the court explained, this work documented

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the empress’s search for sexual satisfaction with several parties, including a nun. Historical accuracy is contrasted with the invention of the author for purposes of titillation: “Here too it is obvious that the work deals not with a faithful account of historical facts, but instead with an account assured to sexually excite the reader.” The third pamphlet was also condemned, as it contained several descriptions of the king’s sexual conquests, including a “filthy” description of a love scene between Jerome Bonaparte and an actress, which took place in a theater. The court’s commentary ends with a refutation of the previous court decision: “The opinion of the previous judge, who ruled that the works in question were not immoral, appears unjustified. At stake here is a work of objectionable kind. The work rudely offends the feelings of shame and morality through the arousal of sensuality through representations of sexual pleasure. Accordingly, it should be considered justified, that the work in question is immoral in the sense of paragraph 184 of the Criminal Code.”78 By 1879 notions of obscenity had been further refined and fleshed out. Historical characters and setting did not automatically grant a text the status of “legitimate knowledge” and render it immune from prosecution. The theory of injured feelings central to concepts of obscenity had become considerably more refined, referencing sexual injury and articulating a causal process that led from immoral texts to immoral acts. By the late 1870s, then, questions of sexual knowledge and sexual behavior were at the center of debates about obscene texts. A variety of genres, from popular medical works and gallant memoirs to novels, none of them new, offered readers information about sexuality. While the interest of readers and the genres that satisfied those interests were not new, the explicit focus of obscenity law on the link between immoral texts and sexual acts was new. It was also impermanent, for broader concerns about the socialization of youth (particularly young men) would reanimate these discussions after the turn of the century. What accounts for the fact that discussions of obscenity turned sharply in the direction of sexual honor, sexual knowledge, and sexual acts in the 1870s and 1880s? Certainly the increased role of conservative moral reform groups, whose members were preoccupied with a perceived moral degeneration associated with urbanization, played a role. So too did the expansion of commercial culture, evidenced by new urban spaces dedicated to leisure and consumption

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and by the proliferation of advertisements for popular medical books, contraceptives, photographs, and stereoscope cards. Though the pleasures of consumer society were for many a welcome sign of economic development, such pleasures also sparked concerns about the moral effects of industrialization. The focus on sexuality was also furthered by new, mechanical models of the mind and body that stressed the vulnerability of the nerves to external stimuli. In the 1860s and 1870s German psychiatrists advanced models of the mind derived from anatomical studies, and for many practitioners, the physical body became the seat of the soul.79 Such studies were furthered by the use of the microscope as a tool of observation and diagnosis, and many psychiatrists used laboratory science as a means of understanding mental processes. As a result, historian Eric Engstrom writes, “the medicalization of madness [was] a defining characteristic of nineteenth-century psychiatry. What in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century had commonly fallen within the purview of priests, jailors, philosophers and officers of correction, lay by 1900 largely within the jurisdiction of the medical profession.”80 While the mental distortion associated with exposure to obscenity, sometimes imagined as a form of madness, was in the 1870s still the purview of a variety of experts, medical science provided important vocabulary for making sense of the effects of mental and visual stimuli and therefore of texts and images. In 1872, for example, following the Franco-Prussian War, anonymous articles from the evangelical journal Die Deutsche Wacht grafted the medical language of injured nerves and vulnerable bodies onto the new realties of foreign wars. One article, pasted into the interior minister’s files on obscene and immoral texts, complained about the effects of immoral advertisements on the nerves of returning soldiers and worried about the sexual and medical dangers of foreign wars: Ah, but these sexual offenses have various uses: First 1) that their terrible consequences, insofar as they consist of terrible infectious diseases, can be quickly cured; 2) that unnerved [entnervte], blood-poor bodies can be once again rendered capable of pleasure through material means, through all varieties of physical and mental stimuli: shining ballrooms filled with voluptuous and shamefully dressed girls, where dirty pictures, books, and works of art along with particular medications are strongly encouraged; 3) that the consequences, insofar as they result in illegitimate births and therefore threaten one party with abuse and scandal and the other with awkwardness, vice, and worry, can be solved with the shameful use of certain substances.81

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In August 1876 a letter from a private party addressed to the interior minister warned that the French anxiety about the declining birthrate might spread as German soldiers were offered contraceptives in French sleeping quarters.82 Yet in this case it was not French books that threatened the German mind but the contamination and weakening of the bodies of German soldiers through contact with French soldiers and French ways. This weakness was potentially contagious, insofar as returning soldiers might spread it to the rest of the population. Contemporary discussions of unzüchtige Schriften made selective use of the medical language of fragile nerves and dangerous stimuli. Yet is not entirely clear why such language so often sounded the alarm of sexual distortion; all forms of mental distortion might have been described with reference to nerves and physical stimuli. Nonetheless broader psychological concerns about mental development, citizenship, and social comportment that had animated discussions of unzüchtige Schriften in the 1840s were temporarily eclipsed, replaced by commentary focused on the physical body and the stimulation of impulses, especially inappropriate or unwanted sexual desire. Influential medical models that placed the seat of the soul in the operations of the physical body may have directed the commentary toward sexual impulses; more likely this medical language provided a vocabulary to describe concerns about sexual desire and behavior that filled late nineteenth-century German discussions of immoral texts.

Reading Casanova in the 1880s If medical language provided a useful tool to describe the effects of obscenity, so too did the sophisticated body of legal language that developed in the 1870s. In 1882 Binding and his colleagues on the law faculty at the University of Leipzig decided to offer an “expert opinion” (Gutachten) on obscenity law. In addition to providing a cogent discussion of developments in the legal understanding of obscenity over the second half of the nineteenth century, they applied these new frameworks to three books, including Casanova’s Memoirs. The way they read these texts tells us a great deal about changing definitions of obscenity. Before offering their own readings of these books, Binding and his colleagues engaged in a critical discussion of paragraphs 183 and 184 of the Criminal Code. They were uncertain about the status of the

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injured party in cases involving alleged assaults on feelings. Whose feelings were imagined as injured, and according to what criteria? Was it necessary to prove that feelings had in fact been injured, or was the theoretical possibility of injury enough to condemn an act or work? They found the reigning legal answers to these questions less than satisfying. They took issue, for example, with the fact that it was not necessary to establish that affective injury (to shame, modesty, or morality) had actually taken place; according to the law, it was enough to show that such injury was theoretically possible. As rigorous instructions were not provided to aid courts in determining who was injured and how, the judge typically drew on his own sensibilities to gauge the affective dangers of a text. According to Binding and his colleagues, this meant that judgments on this point of law were both too subjective (drawing on the judge’s feelings) and too abstract (injury only had to be possible, not actual). The Leipzig legal faculty also worked to understand the meaning of the central legal terms Unzucht and unzüchtig individually and in relation to one another. The older term, Unzucht, referred in law to sexual infractions like prostitution, adultery, and sex between men. The adjective unzüchtig, by contrast, was used to describe things that were lewd, immoral, or obscene. To the category Unzucht, they explained, “belong all acts aimed at the satisfaction of sexual instincts that take place outside normal married sex life.” This term evoked an older body of religiously inflected laws, namely “crimes of the flesh,” or Fleichesverbrechen. Understanding the historical resonance of the noun Unzucht shed light on the legally imprecise adjective unzüchtig, used to describe the offenses of acts, texts, and images. If obscenity laws referenced this older term, and with it the legal tradition of crimes of the flesh, it was then easier to understand what obscenity laws were trying to protect: sexual honor and socially sanctioned sexual relations. Using the term unzüchtig linked obscenity laws to a second legal tradition as well, this one associated with the liberal jurisprudence influenced by Kant and intent upon securing individual autonomy. This autonomy included freedom from assault on one’s intellectual and affective life. According to this branch of legal theory, the goal of obscenity law was to protect the mental and physical integrity of the individual so that he or she did not become an object or a “mere vehicle” for another person’s will or desire. This implied that one must also respect the sexual autonomy of others and in this way not

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“injure” the integrity of their body and mind. Though Binding and his colleagues would offer a pointed critique of the laws concerning obscene texts and images later in their article, they nonetheless argued that important legal traditions legitimated the regulation of sexual behavior and rendered sexual honor a matter of social (and legal) value. They were less certain, as we will see, about banning books and other texts. Finally, the authors explored the relationship between paragraph 183 and paragraph 184. They concluded that the two hinged on entirely different conceptions of the injured party. Paragraph 183 was applied when an act could be shown to cause public offense. Paragraph 184 posited a different set of dangers, for it was not simply that a text or image might offend but that the outcome could be a loss of sensitivity in the reader or viewer, a blunting of feeling that might result in a fundamental change to inner life: “Paragraph 183 assumes the occurrence of a normal reaction against public sexual offense; paragraph 184 is concerned in equal parts that such a reaction against the distribution of obscene texts will be aroused, and that the ability to have such a reaction might be lost.”83 This important distinction pointed to a fundamental (and now familiar) concern that the effects of the written text or visual image might not simply offend but might produce a “roughening” of people’s sensitivities and an inability to feel empathy. Having finished their analysis of the law, the authors moved on to their readings of three texts: they discussed the reading of Casanova by the Leipzig courts in 1880 and ended with their own legal evaluation of Casanova, Boccaccio’s twelfth-century Decameron, and Louvet de Couvray’s eighteenth-century Life and Adventures of Chevalier Faublas. Reading these texts required that they first set some legal distinctions. First, they noted that the obscenity of a text was determined by the whole, not by isolated passages. Second, no suitable object of scientific contemplation or teaching could be legitimately withheld. Legitimate discussions of sexual knowledge could never be deemed unzüchtig in the sense of the law, even if the “sensuality of the weak reader is ignited” by such a text. Yet they were careful to say that not all works claiming to be “science” or “legitimate knowledge” in fact were; books aimed at sexual arousal masquerading as sexual knowledge were not exempt from prosecution. Third, they asserted that the purpose of a book mattered a great deal. They also noted that The Memoirs of Casanova, subjected again to legal scrutiny by a Leipzig court in November 1880, had earned a

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different response by the court. Though the Memoirs contained individual passages that, seen in isolation, were obscene, the court concluded that the overall tendency of the work moved in a different direction. Casanova’s intention in writing the text “was not to injure the moral feelings of the reader, not to excite sexual lustiness.”84 Thus a text might contain passages that aroused readers, but this response was secondary to the values of knowledge, the overall goals of the text, and (in this case) the author’s intentions. As they contemplated the notorious works of Casanova, Boccaccio, and Couvray, Binding and his colleagues gravitated to questions about books and readers that had largely disappeared from official discussions of obscenity: questions about the reader’s soul, about how to evaluate inexpensive editions aimed at a popular audience. They also brought up the status of poetry, a genre they associated with the arousal of the reader’s senses. What about the memoirs of a respected author like Goethe, they asked, which were both unveiled and aimed at stirring the affective life of the reader? How should one make sense of such classic texts in light of a legal definition that equated obscenity with the “arousal of the senses”? “Like the painter and the sculptor, the poet wants his feelings to linger in the heart of the listener or viewer. They address themselves not to the intellect or to judgment; they want to move minds receptive to beauty as deeply as possible toward pleasure or empathy. Herein lies the danger—that the work of art conceived in noble sensuality can quickly arouse both noble and ignoble sensuality. This danger is as enduring as it is inevitable. No measures taken by the morals police or by legislators can change this.”85 Books like Goethe’s memoirs, they concluded, might contain obscenities without being obscene, for isolated passages did not render a text obscene, especially when the central goal of the book was not sexual arousal. The authors introduced a final category, that of “relative obscenity,” which focused on the nature of the audience. Some readers, they wrote, were more capable than others of digesting texts that moved the mind and body. Cheap editions were more suspect than those directed at an elite audience: “There is little doubt that Goethe’s Memoirs, offered in isolation in a cheap popular edition, must be seen as the distribution of obscene texts.”86 Thus great literature in one set of hands was obscenity in another. In the article by Binding and his colleagues, we see the surprising endurance of early nineteenth-century attitudes: texts were morally

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dangerous if they appealed not to the intellect but to emotional life and to the body; the real dangers of texts and images lay in the depths of the reader’s subjectivity, in his or her inner life. Coupled with this, the Leipzig law faculty expressed concerns about inexpensive novels and inexperienced readers; the integrity of the mind, hardened by education, could be undermined if the reader lacked the requisite knowledge. In keeping with these notions, the authors decided that in the case of Boccaccio’s Decameron the edition made all the difference. While a cheap popular edition was condemned as obscene, a more expensive edition offering an adequate context met with their approval. Couvray’s Life and Adventures of Chevalier Faublas was simply condemned, deemed “absolutely” (rather than relatively or partially) obscene. “The author,” they wrote, “drags the reader from one lewd scene to the next; extramarital sex is a permanent feature.”87 Even the classic eighteenth-century contrast between virtuous love and dissipated desire struck them as insincere; while they may have tolerated such stories if they served the purpose of sexual and affective instruction, Couvray’s text simply did not deliver. For once, Casanova’s Memoirs merited a positive review. “Sexual life,” Binding and his coauthors asserted, “plays such an important role in the life of a people and in the development of the individual, that to ignore it would be to advance a false picture. When someone like Casanova, who has led a colorful and adventurous life, faithfully depicts this life . . . it would be highly absurd to condemn this extraordinarily important historical source as an obscene text.”88 Thus the law faculty at Leipzig, like so many of their contemporaries, concluded that sexual knowledge was valuable, both for the individual and the collective, and even difficult and unlovely truths provided useful lessons that could be processed and translated into thoughtful behavior on the part of individuals. Frank discussions, like those offered by Casanova, were especially valued for their honesty and candor; sexual truths did not need to be veiled, and dishonesty was unnecessary and misleading. Ultimately, they wrote, the aim of the work mattered a great deal, and Casanova’s aim was not to titillate but to tell his story.

Summary Legal concepts of obscenity changed significantly between 1850 and 1880. In the period immediately following the revolution assaults on structures of authority and public order—political, moral, or

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both—were often conflated. One symptom of this tendency was the condemnation of Casanova’s Memoirs by the police because the protagonist lived a life “far removed from civil order.” Yet by 1880 new laws, a newly powerful Justice Ministry, and a long series of court decisions had carved out a more tightly circumscribed logic of obscenity focused more explicitly on questions of sexual conduct, honor, and autonomy. What accounts for this unmistakable (albeit temporary) alignment between obscenity and sexual morality in this period? To begin, it seems that both liberals (like Binding and his colleagues) and conservatives (among them the police and members of moral reform groups) could agree that there was much at stake in sexual morality and measures to support it. Consider, for example, the importance attributed to “feelings of morality” and “feelings of shame.” For liberals, the idea that a person’s mental world should be protected from unwanted incursions was part of a long and distinguished line of thought and liberal jurisprudence associated with Kant. So too were fears that one might lose one’s natural impulses if they were subjected too often to strain or offense. Liberals also supported the disciplined self-regulation expressed in the proper performance of sexual behavior. But if liberals insisted on the free circulation of knowledge and on a balanced judicial process, they also supported the reasoned regulation of public spaces. Conservative attitudes, evident in the files of the Prussian police and Interior Ministry and the steady pressure exerted on them by moral reform groups, expressed deep concerns about the new social realities of the city. Proceeding more often from a religious creed, conservatives seem to have found it easy to support efforts to root out immoral and obscene texts and images. The fact that liberals and conservatives might converge (if not agree) when it came to matters of sexual honor is not itself an adequate explanation for the increasingly sharp focus of obscenity law on sexuality in the 1870s and 1880s. To account for this change we must return to some of the broader themes of this chapter. The new metaphors supplied by psychiatry and medicine often, though certainly not always, offered more mechanical visions of the mind and body reacting somewhat automatically to external stimuli. Thus books were regularly described as “instruments for arousing the senses.” Impulses of shame and modesty central to the emerging language of obscene acts, texts, and images, were imagined as natural impulses— reflexes rather than carefully cultivated attributes. Here again the encounter between book or act and the vulnerable person was almost

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mechanical. Such a vision of the mind and body facilitated the conservative suspicion of the expanding city; it became possible to imagine a highly reactive soul responding reflexively to the wonders and dangers of the city. And what of the blurred boundaries between “moral” and “political” concerns that had characterized these discussions in earlier periods? Were they severed, delivering up obscenity law purged of political import? Lest we conclude prematurely that this is true, it is necessary to return to my previous discussion of the changing techniques of political power that characterized the last third of the nineteenth century and beyond. It is not that associating obscenity with sex and sexuality severed it from politics; rather this seeming separation was an indication that politics itself had changed. Contemporaries agreed that sexual honor and sexual comportment were matters of deep social, public importance; they were, in fact, political matters. It is also important to recognize that despite the considerable efforts by multiple parties to conceive, refine, and apply obscenity laws in the 1860s and 1870s, these laws were largely ineffective, if we judge their efficacy by their ability to stop the circulation of obscene texts. In fact racy and sexually explicit books of all kinds circulated in this period. They were offered in a variety of venues, old and new, from colporteurs and urban peddlers to train station kiosks and mail order. One thing made clear by the files of the Interior Ministry is the extent to which the police in fact had little control over the circulation of images and all matter of print. Here, though, it is helpful to return to the idea that the goals and techniques of power had begun to operate in new ways during this period. Pounding out sharper legal definitions of obscenity helped prosecute a few more texts but left hundreds of others circulating. If these protracted processes of creating definitions did not effectively control the circulation of print, they did facilitate the creation of a body of “official” knowledge about the physical and mental responses of readers and viewers complete with the details and mechanisms of these responses. Similarly the frustrated efforts of the police to control the steady stream of sexually explicit and suggestive texts make more sense if we understand that they had ample success when it came to gathering information about the circulation of texts and images. By the 1880s they were in a position to begin compiling statistics on the trade in unzüchtige Schriften. By the early twentieth century Police Headquarters in Berlin would be home to a huge archive of obscene texts, images, and objects. Obscenity law, in

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other words, worked as a tool for promoting knowledge—knowledge of readers and the processes they went through as they encountered texts, and knowledge of the streets, the byways, and the people who inhabited and populated them. It also served, as it had since the early decades of the century, as a means of negotiating and categorizing knowledge, of defining the outer edges of acceptable expression and authoritative representation. This too was a matter of politics.

Conclusion Everyone has the right to the free development of the personality, as long as this does not injure the rights of others and does not violate the constitutional order or the moral law. —Article 2, The Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany

This book began with the assertion that we had much to learn from studying printed texts that were condemned, cast off, read furtively, and smuggled across borders in nineteenth-century Germany. Understanding the making and remaking the category unzüchtige und obszöne Schriften, I suggested, would reveal new geographies, changing concepts of the mind and soul articulated at the level of everyday life, and novel connections between politics, psychology, sexuality, and reading. Having completed this investigation of obscene texts and their producers, detractors, and defenders in the short nineteenth century, we are now in a position to return to some of the questions posed at the outset of this study. I began by asking what contemporaries believed was at stake in ongoing controversies over the moral effects of reading and print. Their answers were numerous; nonetheless it is worthwhile to propose some broad conclusions. Controversies over immoral and obscene books expressed as much about cultural aspirations of nineteenthcentury Germans as they did about moral fears. The potential misuse of books generated deep concerns precisely because reading was accorded such weight. Books were imagined as facilitating knowledge and promoting empathy; they would provide the tools necessary to conduct oneself in society and to serve as a good citizen. Later, reading was imagined as a source of rest and revitalization after a hard day’s work and as a means of broadening the scope of one’s knowledge in an increasingly specialized world. It is not surprising that such aspirations coexisted with commensurate fears that reading would 206

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lead to superstition and fanaticism, to a disorganized inner life, to exhaustion and dissipation. I also suggested that concepts of obscenity would reveal a history of the self and shed new light on questions of “German inwardness.” The evidence I presented does not support the Germans’ reputation for being “rich in thought and meager in action.” Yet it is clear that there were traditions of thinking about inner life that, if not exclusively German, were nonetheless distinct and enduring. These traditions informed conceptions of obscenity—and not simply at the level of high theory. The idea that the intellectual and emotional life of the individual held intrinsic value, that it must be protected from coercion or intrusion, informed many discussions of inner life. This was true even as reigning concepts of the self changed over time. Paradoxically, defining this space of the mind as sacrosanct also suggested that it was important enough to merit concern, detailed study, and even attempts at regulation. German concepts of obscenity articulated in legal codes and on the street embodied this tension between insisting on the autonomy of inner life and subjecting it to scrutiny and intervention. I also made it clear that the regulation of obscene books and images was not (or not often) a story of success, if success is defined as preventing the production and consumption of condemned texts. People invariably found ways around censorship, even carving new production centers and distribution routes into the German countryside in an effort to provide access to forbidden books of all kinds. But if efforts to define, confiscate, and evaluate immoral and obscene texts did not successfully control their circulation, what was their purpose? The existence of these obscenity laws provided a space to articulate concerns about the education and cultivation of the individual in a century profoundly preoccupied with the process of human development. In addition, debates about obscenity allowed contemporaries to explore the boundaries of complex cultural questions. In the 1820s, for example, the language of unzüchtige Schriften was used as a way to distinguish legitimate knowledge from superstition and religious piety from fanatic Schwärmerei. In the 1870s obscenity laws focused attention on the growing status of medical science and sought to determine where legitimate medical advice ended and titillation began. Historian Detlev Peukert has used the phrase “social politics of the soul” to describe the Schmutz und Schund (Filth and Trash) laws of the Weimar Republic aimed at regulating the reading

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habits of adolescents.1 This phrase is useful here as well; if obscenity laws did not stop the circulation of “obscene texts,” they provided an important space in which to articulate and debate the social politics of the soul. Geography played an essential role in these politics, as things foreign were often fascinating to readers and profitable for producers. They were also worrisome for those who saw foreign influence, particularly on women, as a threat to the moral and political tone of society. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century popular French novels were weighted with cultural significance. As they moved across the porous borders of the decentralized German states in the Vormärz, they carried with them the scent (or the stench, depending on your point of view) of revolution, frivolity, and even early socialism. France was not alone, however, in its role as a source of textual excitement and anxiety. The thoroughly German state of Württemberg served its time as the prime offender in the 1830s and 1840s, a legacy that would continue into the twentieth century. German liberalism did not pave the way for the loosening of restrictions on obscene texts. Over the course of the nineteenth century obscenity laws were articulated in increasingly specific language, and police power was reined in by a more active judiciary, but the rise of liberalism did not signal an end to debates over obscenity. Liberals, like conservatives, had their own complex investments in monitoring fragile minds, vulnerable souls, and potentially unruly bodies. While some of these investments were principled and enduring—insistence on intellectual and emotional autonomy, for example—others were temporal and strategic. The liberal Weimar Republic took measures to control the availability of English detective fiction and American Wild West stories. In the wake of World War I officials worried that these popular books would promote moral callousness and violent tendencies in vulnerable male youths. Following World War II the German Federal Republic, at pains to establish its liberal credentials and to distinguish between public and private spheres, nonetheless renewed the Weimar-era “Filth and Trash” laws and made it clear that expressions of racial violence and hatred were dangerous and forbidden; these were expressions to be kept, in a much older understanding of obscenity, “out of the scene” and away from public discourse. In light of these conclusions it is possible to venture a broader point: debates about obscenity—and more recently pornography—are often situated at the center of some of the most important concerns of a

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given period. In contemporary America, for example, representations are often condemned as obscene or pornographic because they render human beings “objects,” exploited for the prurient pleasure of other people. Related debates rage about the “objectification” of women in pornography; critics take this further and argue that there is a causal connection between these representations and women’s subordinate status. Yet it seems there are multiple contexts in which people are rendered objects and made to serve the interests of those who subordinate them. In current discussions of business and economics, for example, such objectification is acceptable, even naturalized. Perhaps debates over pornography serve as a place in which to express concerns over processes that are both ubiquitous and deeply disturbing. Here we venture into speculative territory; still this contemporary example is helpful to understand the status of obscenity in nineteenth-century Germany. I have argued that debates about obscenity expressed concerns that were central to a given society, even when the texts and figures involved were relegated to the margins. In the 1820s the condemnation of immoral books expressed the anxieties generated by the intellectual and emotional independence promised by revolution and the religious autonomy central to pietism. In the Vormärz political and geographical dangers informed discussions of obscenity, as did political maturity and citizenship. Later in the century, as sexual honor and heterosexual intimacy became central to the bourgeois self, debates about obscenity laws identified the outer limits of sexual expression and broadcast the dangers of moving beyond those limits. The body of obscene and immoral texts treated here does not often speak directly to these major transformations in German cultural history. These texts were not the stunning works of eighteenth-century philosophical erotic fiction translated and analyzed by the historian Robert Darnton in his efforts to uncover the “forbidden best-sellers” of eighteenth-century France. The gallant memoirs, popular medical books, and novels that dominated German lists of forbidden books over the course of the nineteenth century did not have the weight of a masterpiece like the eighteenth-century French book Thérèse Philosophe. Nonetheless these less dazzling examples of forbidden literature were important for the stories they told, the information they conveyed, the routes they traveled, and the readers they engaged. Some texts—the story of Eva Riedelin, books treating seduction, pregnancy, and even abortion—told stories and conveyed knowledge of material interest to readers. In the 1830s and 1840s hastily printed

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and forbidden French novels, memoirs, and reports brought valued and accessible news from across the Rhine. Gallant tales, a mainstay of popular print, continued to depict the topsy-turvy, genderbending, caste-shifting, and exotic adventures of their protagonists, in many cases doubling as travel guides and informal encyclopedias. These tales flouted middle-class respectability and presented a world in which actions were free of consequences—or at least consequences that were difficult to escape. In these tales it was always possible to move on to the next town, conquest, or identity. It is no wonder that such books sparked both interest and concern.

Afterlives Laws designed to regulate the moral and developmental effects of reading existed well into the twentieth century. World War I revived the focus on vulnerable readers, but in this case the readers were young male adolescents. The books in question included “trashy” French novels but also hard-boiled detective fiction and Wild West stories translated from English and American originals and sold in inexpensive paperback copies. The Weimar Republic’s Schund und Schmutz law of 1926 codified these concerns with a law regulating “youthendangering texts.” Scholar Luke Springman links the creation of this law to the appearance of a new category of vulnerable reader: the adolescent. Springman argues that the concept of adolescence was itself an invention of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, produced by a body of experts (psychologists, biologists, anthropologists, and physicians among them) who identified and sought positive intervention in the lives of allegedly vulnerable youths. The experts who identified the potential pathologies of puberty also imagined themselves as part of a cure. 2 Springman writes, “This therapeutic reasoning, formed out of a sentimental projection of Jugend [youths or adolescents], carried over from the 1920s to the 1950s the belief that an ‘education to human compassion’ would heal the emotional injuries that children suffered from the two world wars, such as familial disruption, poverty, and distrust of authority.”3 As they had in the nineteenth century, Germans living in the Weimar Republic assumed the right kind of reading promoted the development of empathy; conversely the wrong books might lead to misanthropy and violence. The Nazi regime famously continued this preoccupation with the cultural effects of books. The public book burnings of the era were

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designed to demonstrate many elements of Nazi ideology (including its penchant for violent destruction), but the burnings also expressed a desire to cleanse the German soul of foreign and immoral elements. The postwar era was also not immune to the “social politics of the soul.” In 1953 the Federal Republic of Germany renewed the Weimar-era Law on the Dissemination of Youth-Endangering Texts.4 The state did so in spite of the presumably deep tensions surrounding interventions in the mental and emotional lives of citizens—interventions that, by then, would have been associated with totalitarianism. Obscenity laws were in effect in the Federal Republic of Germany into the 1970s and in the German Democratic Republic for its entire existence. Historian Josie McLellan explains that the East German government took a strong stand against (particularly Western) pornography and erotic works, which they officially rejected as the products of decadent, Americanized capitalism. 5 In the 1980s the government endorsed the production of erotic “classics” in high-quality limited editions, deemed important for their historical value. Yet these editions were priced beyond the means of the general population and therefore perceived as less of a threat. There was no attempt in East Germany to make erotic classics in inexpensive copies available to the average reader. Scheible’s achievement of the Vormärz—making flimsy copies of works like the great eighteenth-century classic Thérèse Philosophe available at prices that many could afford—was not imitated by the socialist state in the name of the working class. If the category unzüchtige und obszöne Schriften had twentiethcentury afterlives, so too did the importance attributed to inner life. Article 2 of the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany’s constitution) guaranteed citizens “the right to the free development of the personality, as long as this does not injure the rights of others and does not violate the constitutional order of the moral law.” Legal scholars have since puzzled over this concept, singling it out as particular to a German legal tradition. As the law professor James Whitman recently wrote in an article in the Yale Law Review, “The protection of privacy in the German tradition is regarded as an aspect of one of the most baffling of German juristic creations: ‘personality’ . . . the Law of Inner Space, in which humans develop feeling and self-responsibility in their personalities. . . . Clearly, ‘personality’ is somehow central to German legal culture. But the concept is likely to seem elusive to most readers. What is this ‘Inner Space’?”6 Whitman contrasts a German notion of privacy as protection of inner

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space and personality to Anglo-Saxon legal traditions, which envision privacy not in terms of individual dignity but in terms of liberty. According to Whitman, contemporary German laws on sexual harassment continue to link privacy to the protection of individual dignity. Today the value and vulnerabilities of inner life still hold sway, even as concepts of interiority and the self go through radical change. As in the nineteenth century, it is not today a specific vision of inner life that is at stake. Rather this long-standing preoccupation with the space of inner life acknowledges and negotiates a distinctly modern vision of the self. This self is marked by developmental processes and susceptibility to external stimuli but is also accorded autonomy and individuality. Abiding interest in these processes was not a sign of German “inwardness”; it was part of multiple efforts to understand the complex interaction between inner life and actions in the world. Obscenity provided a fertile field for such investigations.

notes

abbreviations BSB DBSM GStA PK SStAL StAL

Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Archives Deutsches Buch- und Schriftmuseum, Leipzig Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz Sächsisches Staatsarchiv Leipzig Staatsarchiv Ludwigsburg

introduction 1. On the history of pornography as a category, see Kendrick, The Secret Museum; Hunt, The Invention of Pornography. 2. For a thoughtful discussion of pornography and the way it encourages the tendency to reduce humans to objects, see Langton, Sexual Solipsism. 3. On historical links between the cultivation of humanitarian values and viewing the pain of others, see Halttunen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain.” 4. For a discussion of the relationship between emotions and political culture, see Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling. 5. On the relationship between Western ideas of self-governance and individual sovereignty, see Dean, The Frail Social Body. On this argument about the privatization of the body described in broad strokes, see Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World. 6. Eliot Borenstein, “Stripping the Nation Bare: Russian Pornography and the Insistence on Meaning,” in Sigel, International Exposure, 232–54. 7. One important exception is the Bavarian State Library, which has an extensive collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century books treating sex and eroticism. The basis for these holdings was the private collection of erotic books given to the library in the early nineteenth century by the prominent Bavarian minister Franz von Krenner. On this collection, see Kellner, Der “Giftschrank.” 8. Ohles, Germany’s Rude Awakening, 73. 9. Englisch, Irrgarten der Erotik.

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10. Schenda, Volk ohne Buch. 11. Hull, Sexuality, State and Civil Society; McNeely, The Emancipation of Writing. 12. Brockhaus Real-Encyclopaedie oder Conversations-Lexicon, s.v. “Introduction.” 13. Ward, Book Production, Fiction and the German Reading Public. 14. Wessenberg, Über den sittlichen Einfluß der Romane. 15. Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self; Kaufmann, Aufklärung; Seigel, The Idea of the Self; Helmut Walser Smith, “The Mirror Turn Lamp: Senses of the Nation Before Nationalism,” in The Continuities of German History, 39–73. 16. Germaine de Staël quoted in Frevert, “Tatenarm and Gedankenvoll?” For a detailed discussion of Germaine de Staël’s summation of German culture and politics, see Kaufmann, Aufklärung. 17. Seigel, The Idea of the Self, 297; Smith, “The Mirror Turn Lamp,” 55. 18. Hunt, The Invention of Pornography, introduction. 19. The most important of these recent works are Jelavich, “Paradoxes of Censorship in Modern Germany”; Heineman, Before Porn Was Legal; McLellan, “‘Even under Socialism’”; Springman, “Poisoned Hearts”; Stark, Banned in Berlin; Wiggin, Novel Translations.

chapter 1 1. Wessenberg, Über den sittlichen Einfluß der Romane, 41–42. 2. In this respect Wessenberg’s vision of the self shares commonalities with the sensational psychology of thinkers like Condorcet and Locke, who saw the self generated by experience and external stimuli. For an excellent discussion, see Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self, chap. 1. On the sensational psychology in an Anglo-American context, see Halttunen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain.” 3. Wessenberg, Über den sittlichen Einfluß der Romane, 11. 4. Wessenberg, Über den sittlichen Einfluβ der Romane, 34. 5. Wessenberg, Über Schwärmerei. On the use of this term in late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century Germany, see Kaufmann, Aufklärung, 55; Goldberg, Sex, Religion, and the Making of Modern Madness. Goldberg writes that the term was often applied to the poorer patients in asylums who were less educated than the liberal doctors who treated them. In this context, she explains, the religious terms with which educated patients described their mental disturbances contrasted with the “scientific” language of their doctors; the understanding of the former might be referred to derisively as Schwärmerei. 6. Lapowski, Baiern’s Kirchen- und Sitten-Polizey unter seinen Herzogen und Churfürsten, section 8; Döllinger, Sammlungen der im Gebiete der inneren Staats-Verwaltung des Königreichs Bayern bestehenden Verordnungen, division 2, section 9: “Sitten-Polizei.” 7. For an analysis of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century visions of the self in France and western Europe, see Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self.

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8. My thinking here is indebted to several important points Doris Kaufmann makes in the introduction to her book Aufklärung. First, she argues that the German middle classes were, contrary to de Staël’s formulation, exceptionally oriented toward action in the world, though not necessarily toward the kind of action that culminated in revolution. Notions of industry and productive activity were essential to an emerging German bürgerlich identity. Second, she argues that new middle-class forms of selfunderstanding were, in themselves, a generative activity. In both respects, then, the “culture” of the emerging German Bürgertum produced the working components of a new understanding of the self in the world. 9. GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 101 Oberzensurkollegium und Oberzensurgericht, D. Nr. 13, Betr. die Ankündigung und der Debit obszöner Schriften und ungeprüfter Heilmittel, 1820–1841. 10. Verordnungen von 1788, No. 95, Erneuertes Censur-Edict für die Preussischen Staaten: Nebst Begleitungs-Rescript an das Cammer-Gericht, von 25. December, Berlin, December 19, 1788. 11. Sven Hanuschek, “Die hiesige ganz und gar närrische Censur zwischen Laissez-faire und Schikane: Zensur in Bayern um 1800,” in Kellner, Der “Giftschrank.” 12. Gewerbe-Polizeiliche Edikt von 1811, § 127. 13. It appears as thought the regulation concerning lending libraries was issued in June 1819 as an edict of the Prussian king. What is clear from the files is that the edict was sent to the regional governments of the Prussian territories in the summer of 1819 explaining what the procedure should be for the granting of concessions for lending libraries and for the maintenance of those concessions. This set of regulations appears to govern only the territories under Prussian control. GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Nr. 1, Bd. 1, Betreffend die Anlegung und Unaufsichtigung von Leihbibliotheken getreff neue polizeiliche Anordnungen. 14. Verordnung, wie die Zensur der Druckschriften nach dem Beschluß des deutschen Bundes vom 20sten September d. J. auf fünf Jahre einzurichten ist, October 18, 1819. 15. On the regulatory activities of the guild vis-à-vis their members, see SStAL, Börsenverein der deutschen Buchhändler zu Leipzig, (I) 465: Akte des Börsenvereins der deutschen Buchhändler zu Leipzig Jahre 1842: Untersuchungen von Uebertretungen des §12 des Statuts. Also see August Prinz, Der Buchhandel vom Jahre 1815–1843, 45–56. 16. Describing the police code in early nineteenth-century Bavaria, Isabel Hull writes, “Police law consisted of the mass of ordinances, rescripts, edicts, instructions, and so on, that poured from the organs of government regulating everything from correct bread weights, to bathing in rivers, to assault, to various sexual acts.” This appears to have also been the case in early nineteenth-century Prussia. See Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society, 359–69. 17. Benke und Holzleithner, “Zucht durch Recht,” 75. 18. On the history of Gefährliche Bilder in Austrian law, see Benke und Holzleithner, “Zucht durch Recht.” 19. Hull, Sexuality, State and Civil Society, 365.

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20. Benke and Holzleithner, “Zucht durch Recht,” 47. 21. For more on cameralism, see Hull, Sexuality, State and Civil Society; Mack Walter, German Home Towns: Community, State and General Estate, 1645–1817 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971). 22. Schauer, Zum Begriff der unzüchtigen Schrift. 23. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Nr. 1, Bd. 1, 31. Copy of the circular sent by the regional government of Aachen to the police in its jurisdiction providing guidelines for the regulation of lending libraries. 24. Hull, Sexuality, State and Civil Society. 25. Verordnungen von 1788, No. 95, Erneuertes Censur-Edict für die Preussischen Staaten: Nebst Begleitungs-Rescript an das Cammer-Gericht, von 25. December, Berlin, December 19, 1788. 26. For more on this topic, see my discussion of cameralist theory in the sections that follow. 27. Verordnungen von 1788, No. 95, Erneuertes Cenzur-Edict. 28. GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77, Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Nr. 1, Bd. 1, 20–22. Report to Berlin from Stralsund. 29. It is difficult to know what relationship existed between these new rules concerning lending libraries and Metternich’s Karlsbad Decrees, issued the same year; though it is likely that the decrees inspired this tightening down on print by the state, no mention of the decrees are made in the documents. 30. GStA PK, I. HA, Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Nr. 1, Bd. 1, 15, Trier, October 27, 1819, Betreffend die Anlegung und Unaufsichtigung von Leihbibliotheken getreff neue polizeiliche Anordnungen v. 29 April 1809 bis 27 August 1938. 31. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Nr. 1, Bd. 1, 34. 32. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Nr. 1, Bd. 1, 24. 33. GStA PK I. HA Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Nr. 1, Bd. 1, 72, Coblenz, August 1824, Betr. Die Aufsicht der Leih-bibiliotheken. 34. GStA PK, I. HA, Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Nr. 1, Bd. 1, 79–81, Merseburg, December 12, 1824, Betr. Die Beaufsichtigung der Leihbibliotheken. 35. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 101 Oberzensurkollegium und Oberzensurgericht, D. Nr. 13, Betreffend die Ankündigung und den Debit obscöner Schriften und ungeprüfter Heilmittel. Between 1819 and 1821, for example, the interior minister called for serious punishment of Privy Councilor Grano on the grounds that Grano granted an imprimatur to the “obscene publication” Der deutsche Don Juan. It appears that Grano had in fact asked for major revisions of the original manuscript as a condition of legal publication and that these revisions had been ignored by the publisher. Nonetheless this case makes it clear that the interior minister could call censors to task in exceptional cases.

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36. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 101 Oberzensurkollegium und Oberzensurgericht, E. Lit. C, Nr. 16, Die Zensur über die Cholera-Krankheiten erschienenen Schriften, Zeitungen, und Flugblätter, 1831–1838. 37. For a discussion of the popular press inciting anti-Semitic uprisings later in the century, see Smith, The Butcher’s Tale. 38. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Nr. 1, Bd. 1. 39. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 101 Oberzensurkollegium und Oberzensurgericht, D. Nr. 13. Report from the Provincial government in Cologne, February 26, 1835. 40. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 101 Oberzensurkollegium und Oberzensurgericht, D. Nr. 13. Report from the Censorship Board, 1836. 41. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 101 Oberzensurkollegium und Oberzensurgericht, D. Nr. 13. Reports from the Prussian censors in Berlin, October and November 1834. 42. GStA PK. I. HA, Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 243, Nr. 50, Bd. 1, Bet. die von Colporteurs ausgetragenen gedruckten Lieder, Pamphlets, Wundergeschichten, sowie der Debit derselben, 1810–1844. Report from Halle, May 23, 1817. 43. GStA PK, I. HA, Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 243, Nr. 50, Bd. 1. Report from Pfaff, June 12, 1817. 44. GStA PK, I. HA, Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 243, Nr. 50, Bd. 1, 23, 8. 45. Cheesman, The Shocking Ballad Picture Show, 50, 79. 46. GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 101 Oberzensurkollegium und Oberzensurgericht D. Nr. 13. Report from Magdeburg, April 8, 1824. The pamphlet in question is Das Buch der Geheimnisse. 47. GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 101 Oberzensurkollegium und Oberzensurgericht D. Nr. 13. Reports on the same work from Düsseldorf (April 12, 1824), Weimar (May 4, 1824), and the president of the Censorship Board in Berlin (December 29, 1824). 48. “Vorbericht,” in Das Buch der Geheimnisse. I am grateful to the archivists of the Shadeck-Fackenthal Library at Franklin & Marshall College who provided me with a copy of this very rare pamphlet. 49. Das Buch der Geheimnisse, 11. 50. Fischer [?], Magnetismus und Immoralität. 51. Sonnenfels, Grundsätze der Staatspolicey, §63. 52. Excellent work has been done on the transformation of policing in Germany. Among these works are Lüdke, Police and State in Prussia; Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State. Lüdke argues that there were two central problems of concern for the Prussian state in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century: the processes of commercialization and capitalism and the concern that the French Revolution might “infect” Germany. At the local level, he explains, the police were charged with the maintenance of public order and the identification and control of “dangerous persons” who might disrupt that order. Writing about the early modern period, Raeff reiterates Lüdke’s point that the police were concerned with identifying and regulating

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those persons and elements whom they deemed “unruly,” “superfluous,” or damaging to the peace and order of the communities in question. 53. Justi, Grundsätze, 4–10, 10–14. It is worth noting that the primary goals of the state, as articulated by Justi, were with the promotion of economic health through attention to commerce, the circulation of money, the creation of a uniform system of weights and measures, and promoting the progress of food production. 54. Justi, Grundsätze, 14. 55. Justi, Grundsätze, § 276. 56. Justi, Grundsätze, § 276. 57. Justi, Grundsätze, 246–47. Justi linked the imperfection of man’s nature to the need for statecraft and law. Here again we see that cameralist theory is distinct from enlightened liberalism. 58. Sonnenfels, Grundsätze der Staatspolicey, § 62. 59. The edict also established an institutional basis for censorship, organizing a body of medical, legal, religious, and literary experts to review all publications before they were made available in bookstores, peddlers’ boxes, or lending libraries. Books without the imprimatur of the censorship commission were subject to confiscation and prosecution. 60. Justi, Grundsätze, §276. 61. Wessenberg, Über Schwärmerei. 62. Wessenberg, Über den sittlichen Einfluß der Romane, 11. 63. On parallel developments in early psychiatry, see Kaufmann, Aufklärung. Kaufmann explains that during this period important questions surrounded the content, functioning, and meaning of this inner life. During the same period anthropology was emerging as a discipline that sought to produce scientific knowledge about humans. On these developments, see Honegger, Die Ordnung der Geschlechter. Honegger investigates the development of what she calls the “science of man” during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Part of the impulse of this movement was to investigate (and establish) differences between the sexes, which could be naturalized. On the materialist approach to the mind expressed in the work of the German anatomist Thomas Soemmerring, see Krauss, “Das Organ der Seele.” 64. Another early nineteenth-century theory of the mind was articulated by Franz Joseph Gall, founder of phrenology. Gall’s phrenology was based on the idea that the impulses and sentiments of human life arise from specific organs inside the physical brain. His ideas were first published in the late eighteenth century, but they were spread by a well-attended lecture tour in 1805. Gall argued that the physical shape of the brain determined character and that character could be discerned and “seen” by a careful look at the shape of the skull, which determined the shape and therefore the nature of the brain and therefore the mind. De Giustino writes that the basic idea was this: “The interior mass of the brain, with all its strengths and weaknesses, caused a corresponding relief on the outside of the head, where, according to Dr. Gall, ‘the most fundamental qualities and faculties’ were highly visible to all” (Conquest of the Mind, 13). On the controversy surrounding Gall’s theories, see Blanckenburg, “Seelengespenster.”

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65. Wessenberg, Über den sittlichen Einfluß der Romane, 18, 28, 29–30. 66. GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Nr. 1, Bd. 1, 72. 67. Wessenberg, Über den sittlichen Einfluβ der Romane, 94–95, 120. 68. Wessenberg, Über den sittlichen Einfluβ der Romane, 82. 69. Wessenberg, Über den sittlichen Einfluβ der Romane, 87–88. 70. Wessenberg, Über den sittlichen Einfluβ der Romane, 126–27. 71. Wessenberg, Über Schwärmerei, 59. 72. Wessenberg, Über Schwärmerei, 34. 73. Wessenberg, Über den sittlichen Einfluβ der Romane, 62–63. 74. Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self, 31.

chapter 2 1. Soltyk’s Polen und seine Helden im Letzten Freiheitskampfe was published by Scheible in 1834. 2. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 10 1 Oberzensurkollegium und Oberzensurgericht, J. Nr. 2, Kabinet Ordre von 19. Februar, 1834. 3. Quoted in Chandler et al., “Arts of Transmission,” 1. 4. Hagemann, Mannlicher Muth und Teutsche Ehre, 113–28. For more on education, see Sheehan, German History, 513–17. 5. Louise Otto quoted in McNicholl, “Women in Revolution,” 225. 6. Anderson, Imagined Communities. 7. Sheehan, German History, 251. 8. Herzog, Intimacy and Exclusion. 9. Prinz, Der Buchhandel vom Jahre 1815–1843, 27. 10. For more on this story, see Prinz, Der Buchhandel vom Jahre 1843– 1853, 45–56. Prinz himself would have been seventeen in 1827, so it is possible but unlikely that he was present at the book fair. Nonetheless he quotes dialogue from the involved parties in detail. This story is also related in Englisch, Irrgarten der Erotik, and in the Archiv für Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels 8 (1883): 214. 11. According to the files of the Prussian interior minister, Brockhaus’s edition of The Memoirs of Casanova was banned from circulation in Prussian lending libraries as early as 1824. 12. Prinz, Der Buchhandel vom Jahre 1843–1853, 54. 13. Prinz, Der Buchhandel vom Jahre 1843–1853, 46. 14. Englisch, Irrgarten der Erotik, 56. The files of the Prussian interior minister indicate that Brockhaus was also “unloved” by the police, who kept a special file on the publications from his publishing house. Brockhaus resisted this censorship, sending letters to the Prussian authorities debating the terms of censorship laws. 15. Englisch, Irrgarten der Erotik, 56. Prinz worked with Heilbutt in Altona, one of the best-known publishers of erotic literature in early nineteenth-century Germany. 16. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 380, Nr 7, Bd. 1, 59–60, Die verbotenen Schrift Denkwürdigkeiten von Casanova betreffend.

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17. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Bd. 1, 211, Merseburg, May 15, 1835, Betreffend den Betrieb des Gewerbes als Buchodern Kunsthaendler. 18. Englisch, Irrgarten der Erotik, 75. 19. Copy of a letter from Arndt to the king of Prussia, Berlin, December 31, 1836 (it appears that the copy was made in January or February of 1837), GStA PK, I. HA Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 243, Nr. 50, Bd. I, Betr. Die von Colporteurs ausgetragenen gedruckten Lieder, Pamphlets, Wundergeschichten pp., sowie den Debit derselben 1810–1844, 126–33. 20. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 243, Nr. 50, Bd. I, 126–33. 21. Blackbourn, The Long Nineteenth Century, 99. 22. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 101 Oberzensurkollegium und Oberzensurgericht D. Nr. 13, Report from Cologne dated February–March 1835. 23. Sperber, “Echoes of the French Revolution” and Rhineland Radicals. 24. GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Bd. 1, 12–14, Berlin, October 1, 1819, Betr. Die Polizeiliche Aufsicht auf die Leihbibliotheken. 25. GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Bd. 1, 15, Trier, October 27, 1819, Inquiry from the Provincial Governor of Trier to the Prussian Interior Minister. 26. GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Bd. 1, 34, Münster, November 23, 1819, Betr. Polizei der Leihbibliotheken. 27. It is also worth noting that the same report differentiated between the authorities on the left side of the Rhine (closest to France), who were not well-versed in the art of policing, and the police on the right side of the Rhine, who were more “competent in police affairs.” 28. Englisch, Irrgarten der Erotik, 66–68. 29. According to the tax records housed in the Stadtarchiv Stuttgart, Scheible applied for a license to trade in Stuttgart as early as 1823. The same records note that 1835 was an exceptionally good year for Scheible, based both on his tax assessment and the number of assistants he employed. It was also the year his first wife died; he remarried in 1844. He had eight children in all, though it is not clear if some of the children were from his first marriage. 30. An extensive collection of censorship records dating from the early nineteenth century is housed at the Staatsarchiv Ludwigsburg (StAL), the former seat of Württemberg’s monarchy and government. 31. “Gesetz über die Preßfreiheit vom 30, Januar 1817,” StAL, E173I, Büschel 483–84. 32. Scheible published a translation under the German title Memorien in begleitung vertrauter briefe Sr. Majestät des Königs Ludwig von Bayern und der Lola Montez in 1849. The original French edition was published in Nyons in 1849. 33. Englisch, Irrgarten der Erotik, 68; Druckenmüller, Der Buchhandel in Stuttgart. 34. On authorship and copyright in the German states, see Woodmansee, “The Genius and the Copyright”; Bosse, Authorship ist Werkherrschaft. On

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the invention of the modern notion of authorship, see Hesse, “Enlightenment Epistemology.” For an excellent discussion of piracy and the creation of modern knowledge, see Johns, The Nature of the Book. 35. SStAL, Börsenverein der Deutschen Buchhändler zu Leipzig (I) Nr. 562, Akte des Börsen-vereins der deutschen Buchhändler zu Leipzig Jahre 1842, Unterzuchung von Uebertretungen des §12 des Statutes. Klagen gegen Scheible, Johann. 36. J. Scheible, Verlagsbericht von 1832. Original copies of Scheible’s catalogues are held in the Ehemalige Bibliothek der Deutschen Buchhändler, DBSM, Leipzig. 37. J. Scheible, Verlagsbericht von 1834. 38. The cover page of Scheible’s catalogue is reproduced and commented upon in Bayer and Leonhardt, Selten und Gesucht, 307. The German titles of the books mentioned here are Neue Wunder-Schauplatz, der Kunste und Interessantesten Erscheinungen im Gebiet der Magie, Alchymie, Chemie, Physik, Geheimisse und Kräfte der Natur, Magnetismus, Sympathie, und verwandte Wissenschaften, and Bibliothek der Zauber-Geheimniss-und Offenbarungs-Bücher. 39. Ironically Scheible’s series of books on magic and the occult appear to have survived and can be found in rare book collections in Germany and the United States. Harvard University’s rare book library, for example, has collected several of Scheible’s publications from this particular series. 40. Englisch, Irrgarten der Erotik, 67. 41. Ashbee’s Index quoted in Bayer and Leonhardt, Selten und Gesucht, 307. It appears that Scheible’s widow, Theresa, took over the business after her husband’s death in 1866. There is also some evidence that she continued the practice of publishing illicit books. These suggestions about Theresa Scheible and her work come from Englisch and from the records of the Stadtarchiv Stuttgart, but the evidence is not decisive; it may be that one of Scheible’s sons continued his business. 42. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 101 Oberzensurkollegium und Oberzensurgericht, D. Nr. 13, Clipping from the Mainzer Zeitung, Nr. 13 (January 30, 1821). 43. Sarkowski, “Buchvertreib von Tür zu Tür,” 22. Sarkowski explains that the term Kolporteur was borrowed from the French colporteur in the seventeenth century to describe ambulant sellers of popular reading material. 44. Fullerton, “The Development of the German Book Markets,” 203. 45. Sarkowski, “Buchvertreib von Tür zu Tür.” 46. Prinz, Der Buchhandel vom Jahre 1815–1843. 47. Fullerton, “The Development of the German Book Markets,” 25. 48. GStA PK I. HA Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 243, Nr. 50, Bd. I, Betr. Die von Colporteurs ausgetragenen gedruckten Lieder, Pamphlets, Wundergeschichten sowie den Debit derselben 1810–1844, 5. 49. GStA PK I. HA Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 243, Nr. 50, Bd. 1, Betr. Die von Colporteurs ausgetragenen gedruckten Lieder, Pamphlets, Wundergeschichten sowie den Debit derselben 1810–1844. 50. GStA PK, I. HA I. Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 243, Nr. 50, Bd. 1, Betr. Die von Colporteurs ausgetragenen gedruckten Lieder,

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Pamphlets, Wundergeschichten, sowie den Debit derselben 1810–1844, 49–50; Betr. den Verkauf der Geschichte des neuen Propheten J. A. Mueller. 51. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 243, Nr. 50, Bd. 2, 1–2. 52. Chandler et al., “Arts of Transmission.” 53. GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Nr. 1, Bd. 1, 166. In a petition from M. Morgenstern seeking a concession for a lending library in Magdeburg in 1824, the applicant explains that he has “purchased a lending library consisting of 5,500 volumes.” He does not describe (nor does he seem to feel it is necessary to mention in his application) a dedicated space devoted to loaning the volumes. 54. There are at least two references to the use of couriers to deliver illegal publications to clients across state borders, so we know that there was some precedent for using couriers to deliver borrowed texts to readers. 55. It is unclear if women could apply for lending library concessions themselves, or if they could only inherit concessions from their husbands. In the late 1850s and early 1860s the files of the Prussian Interior Ministry note that women have begun to apply for lending library concessions; these later records indicate that by the 1860s there were no official rules standing in the way of granting a concession to a woman if she was qualified. 56. GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Nr. 1, Bd. 1, 166, 37–45, 77: related reports from Magdeburg, Cologne, and Coblenz, respectively. 57. GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Nr. 1, Bd. 1, 24–25, Koblenz, October 27, 1819, Report on the supervision of lending libraries. 58. The source of this table is Morgenstern’s appeal to the authorities in Berlin. See GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Nr. 1, Bd. 1, 166–69. According to a system of currency adopted in 1821, 12 Pfennig = 1 Silbergroschen, and 30 Silbergroschen = 1 Taler. 59. The least expensive books in Adolph Wolff’s bookstore were priced at 1 Taler, and they usually cost more. See 7ten Folge zum Verzeichniß der Leih-Bibliothek von deutschn und engl. Büchern, Berlin, 1825, GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Nr. 1, Bd. 1, 119–27. 60. GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Nr. 1, Bd. 1, 95, Berlin, April 30, 1825. Complaint from the bookseller and lending library proprietor Vieweg concerning several books confiscated from his lending library. 61. GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Nr. 1, Bd. 1, 12–14, Betr. die polizeiliche Aufsicht auf die Leihbibliotheken. 62. GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Nr. 1, Bd. 1, 119–27, 7ten Folge zum Verzeichniß der Leih-Bibliothek von deutschen und engl. Büchern, Berlin, 1825. 63. For a lively firsthand account of this process of professional training, see Prinz, Stand Bildung und Wesen des Buchhandels. 64. Morgenstern’s own narrative of his life story, which included a stint as a trader, the failure of that business, and his speculative purchase of a

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5,500-volume library without a concession attached, is included in the files of the Prussian Interior Ministry. See GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Nr. 1, Bd. 1, 166–69. 65. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 101 Oberzensurkollegium und Oberzensurgericht, E. Lit. C. Nr. 16, Die Zensur über die Cholera-Krankheiten erscheinen Schriften, Zeitungen und Flugblättern, 1831–1838. 66. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 101 Oberzensurkollegium und Oberzensurgericht, E. Lit. C. Nr. 16, Cholera-Zeitung von den Aerzten Königsbergs Nr. 14, September 21, 1831. 67. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 243, Nr. 50, Bd. 1, 103. 68. GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Bd. 1, 136– 37, Minden, February 2, 1826, Report concerning the application for a lending library concession. 69. GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Bd. 1, 178–83. 70. This narrative is pieced together from a three-way exchange between Pitschpatsch, the regional government in Posen, and the Interior Ministry in Berlin. See GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Bd. 1, 178–83. 71. GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Bd. 1, 182, Letter from the director of the Gymnasium in Lissa, February 17, 1827.

chapter 3 1. It is difficult to estimate the number of erotic texts published during this period, but a rough (and unscientific) estimate would be something on the order of 150 to 300. Publishers of erotic texts like the Brothers Franckh in Stuttgart advertised five or six titles at a time; the same was probably true of other publishers of erotic works, such as Heinrich Gerlach in Dresden and Heinrich Gräff in Leipzig. If we add to this the texts considered unzüchtig by censors and police, the number begins to grow. Of course the category discussed here is an invention of the historian; contemporaries (as I said earlier) had different ways of categorizing these texts, and the categories would of course affect the number of texts. 2. Huerkamp and Meyer-Thurow, “Die Einsamkeit, die Natur und meine Feder,” 180. The authors of this first-rate biography of Fischer explain that the Althing works inspired countless imitations. An early nineteenth-century critic, they report, wrote, “Diese Gattung Schriften sind eine Art Pest die im Finstern schleicht, und durch die, überall zu findenden Leihbibliotheken, durch ganze Deutschland verbreitet wird.” 3. More recently Jean-Marie Goulemot has evoked a similar distinction to differentiate what he calls “libertine fiction” from “pornographic novels.” The distinction, he writes, depends less on the content of each and more on the type of reading each inspires. “Pornographic” novels, according to his criterion, encourage “the obsessive, intentional pursuit of readers’ desire for erotic sensation.” A piece of writing is “pornographic if it triggers in its

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reader certain physiological reactions” (“Toward a Definition of Libertine Fiction and Pornographic Novels,” 135, 134). 4. Schütz, “Vorrede des deutschen Herausgebers,” xx. 5. GStA PK I. HA, Rep 101 Oberzensurkollegium und Oberzensurgericht E. Lit B. Nr. 48, Das Verbot der anstößigen u. unsittlichen Schriften von Fried. Wil. Bruckbräu. 6. Doris [?], Napoleon Bonapartes geheime Liebschaften. The work is of course attributed to Napoleon himself, but the librarians at the University of California (or a previous librarian or owner) added Charles Doris as the author. 7. Althing, Die Geliebte von Elftausend Mädchen. Fischer’s biographers insist that this book was falsely attributed to Fischer/Althing. 8. According to Fischer’s biography, Dosenstücke was published in 1800 in Leipzig by Gräff and published again fingiert with the (presumably false) imprint Zofingen: Joseph Kreutzenach, 1802. 9. Wiggin, “Fiction, France, and Other Vices,” 207. 10. On these earlier “gallant” women characters, see Wiggin, “Gallant Woman Students.” Cross-dressing women, Wiggin explains, was a staple of the literature of gallantry in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century, and it seems likely that the conventions of gallant texts continued to inform erotische Schriften in our period. 11. See Linda Williams’s classic analysis of the plots of hard-core pornographic films, Hard Core. 12. This in contrast to an Enlightenment-era book like Thérèse Philosophe, which thematized the dangers sexuality posed to women (pregnancy, loss of marriage prospects, social condemnation) and applied reason in pursuit of a solution. 13. Huerkamp and Meyer-Thurow, “Die Einsamkeit, die Natur und meine Feder.” 14. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 101 Oberzensurkollegium und Oberzensurgericht, E. Lit F. Nr. 10, Die Zensur und der Debit der von dem ehemaligen Universitätsprofessor zu Würzburg Dr. Christian August Fischer herausgegebenen Schriften und Bücher, 1830–1842 (Berlin, September 24, 1824). 15. Heine quoted in Huerkamp and Meyer-Thurow, “Die Einsamkeit, die Natur und meine Feder,” 367. 16. Huerkamp and Meyer-Thurow, “Die Einsamkeit, die Natur und meine Feder,” 367. 17. For the details on the Bavarian State Library’s Remote-Bestände, or restricted collections, see BSB, Remota-Bestände der BSB: Alte Remote Prohibita (I) and Remota I (neu). For more on this collection, see Kellner, “Bibliotheca erotica Krenneriana.” 18. Huerkamp and Meyer-Thurow, “Die Einsamkeit, die Natur und meine Feder,” introduction. 19. According to Huerkamp and Meyer-Thurow’s bibliography, Hannchen’s Hin- und Her-Züge was published at least twice, first by H. Gerlach in Dresden in 1800 (with the second volume probably published in 1801) and second by Heinrich Gräff in an “improved” edition (most likely in Leipzig, though the place of publication is not included on the imprint).

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20. Althing, Erotische Schriften, 2: 128, 188. 21. Althing, Erotische Schriften, 1: 17–18, 171–74. 22. Althing, Dosenstücke, vol. 1. 23. Walther, Die deutschsprachige Verlagsproduktion von Pierre Marteau/Peter Hammer, Köln. 24. Bussy-Rabutin [?], Geheime Liebschaften von Pariser Hofdamen. 25. Doris [?], “Vorwort des Herausgebers,” in Napoleon Bonapartes geheime Liebschaften. 26. As we saw in chapter 1, the story of a manuscript found in an abandoned castle during the revolutionary wars introduced Das Buch der Geheimnisse. 27. GStA PK I. HA, Rep 101 Oberzensurkollegium und Oberzensurgericht, D, Nr. 13, n.p., Betr. die Ankündigung und der Debit obszöner Schriften und ungeprüfter Heilmittel, 1820-141. Clipping from the Mainzer Zeitung, January 30, 1821, pasted into the file. 28. GStA PK, I. HA, Rep 101 Oberzensurkollegium und Oberzensurgericht, D. Nr. 13, Note from Beckendorff to the Minister of the Interior and the Police, March 30, 1821. 29. Whatever punishment he received, we know that Grano did not lose his position as a censor, as he appears as an active censor in records concerning F. A. Brockhaus between 1820 and 1823. 30. Schaden [?], Der deutsche Don Juan, 114, 128. 31. Schaden [?], Der deutsche Don Juan, 159, 137. 32. Doris [?], Napoleon Bonapartes geheime Liebschaften, 57–58. 33. Schaden [?], Der deutsche Don Juan, 403–4. 34. Aus den Memoiren einer Sängerin quoted in Englisch, Irrgarten der Erotik, 234–35. 35. I would like to thank my former graduate students Anna Cook and Ame Wren for their convincing arguments in favor of reading Thérèse Philosophe as a feminist text precisely because it treated the practical and material concerns of women readers. 36. Childs, “Publication of C’s Original Text of the Memoirs.” In this short article Childs tells the twentieth-century history of the manuscript. He writes that during World War II the manuscript was preserved in twelve cartons in an underground bunker below the publishing firm’s Leipzig headquarters. Though Brockhaus’s collection of books and articles about Casanova was destroyed by bombing raids, the manuscript was preserved. At the end of the war it was transferred via bicycle to the vault of one of the remaining banks in Leipzig. In June 1945 the U.S. Army supplied a truck to remove the manuscript to the company’s firm in Wiesbaden. 37. For more on this first German edition and following editions, see Gerd Forsch’s excellent reception history, Casanova und seine Leser, chap. 1. 38. GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 380, Bd. 1. 39. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Bd. 1, 82–83. We know the first volume (and perhaps the second) had made it to Berlin bookstores by July 1822 because the Nicolaische Buchhandling sent a copy of Brockhaus’s catalogue to the Interior Ministry and noted which

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books they had received in their store. On this, see GStA PK, I. HA Rep 101 Oberzensurkollegium und Oberzensurgericht, E. Lit B. Nr. 3, 99. 40. GStA PK, I. HA I. Rep 101 Oberzensurkollegium und Oberzensurgericht, D. Nr. 13 (no page numbers), Report from the President of the Censorship Board about Casanova’s Memoirs, Berlin, December 19, 1824. 41. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 101 Oberzensurkollegium und Oberzensurgericht, D. Nr. 13, Response to the President of the Censorship Board, February 2, 1825. 42. GStA PK, I. Rep 101 Oberzensurkollegium und Oberzensurgericht, E. Lit B. Nr. 3, Die Strengen Censur der im Verlag des Buchhändlers Brockhaus zu Leipzig und Altenburg erscheinenden Schriften und Bücher, v. Sept 1820. 43. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 101 Oberzensurkollegium und Oberzensurgericht, E. Lit B. Nr. 3, 80. In May 1822 Friedrich Wilhelm wrote of Brockhaus and his offending publications to the Ober-Censur-Collegium, “Besonders empfehle Ich der strengen Aufsicht des Ober-Censur-Collegia das bei Brockhaus erscheinende Conversationsblatt. Dasselbe hatte früher die augenscheinliche Tendenz, die in Portugal und Spanien herrschende, im Italien unterdrückte, in Frankreich aber noch immer gegen die rechtmäßige monarchische Gewalt in offenen Kampfe sogennante liberale [Factionen?] zu begünstigen und alle Vertheidiger des monarchischen Princips gehässig und verdächtig zu machen.” 44. Forsch, Casanova und seine Leser, 16. 45. Achim von Arnim quoted in Spies, “Achim von Arnim als Rezensent der Memoiren Casanovas,” 308. 46. Spies explains that von Arnim bought at least one more volume after buying the first two in 1822. The price of volume 1 of The Memoirs comes from Brockhaus’s 1821 Verlags-Catalog, which advertises volume 1 of the Memoirs on page 10. This information was found in the file kept by the Prussian Interior Ministry on Brockhaus: GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 101 Oberzensurkollegium und Oberzensurgericht, E. Lit. B. Nr. 3. 47. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Vol. 1, 82–83, Bromberg, December 15, 1824, Betr. Die Beaufsichtigung und Revision der Leihbibliotheken. 48. Allgemeiner Anzeiger der Deutschen, no. 118 (1828): column 1292. 49. Allgemeiner Anzeiger der Deutschen, no. 69 (1828): column 715. 50. Schütz, “Vorrede des deutschen Herausgebers,” Vol. I, xx, xix. 51. Schütz, “Vorrede des deutschen Herausgebers,” Vol. I, xxii–xxiii. 52. Schütz, “Vorrede des deutchen Herausgebers zum zweiten Theile,” vii-viii. 53. Schütz, “Vorrede des deutchen Herausgebers zum zweiten Theile,” viii–ix. 54. Schütz, “Vorrede des deutchen Herausgebers zum zweiten Theile,” viii, xiv, xv. 55. The story of Lucrezia is told in chapter 10 of volume 1; the description of their lovemaking (probably the raciest passage in all of Volume 1) is on 463: “Es war das Einzig, was sie sprach. Kuss und Umarmung verscheuchten

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die Worte. Ausbruch innerer Fulle und inner Lebens war das Feuer, das uns entflammte. Der Vesuch es beherrschen zu Wollen hätte uns verzehrt.” 56. Schütz, “Vorrede des deutchen Herausgebers zum zweiten Theile,” xiii. 57. Schütz, “Vorrede des deutschen Herausgebers zum dritten Theile,” xxii. 58. Brockhaus, Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus. 59. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 101 Oberzensurkollegium und Oberzensurgericht, E. Lit B. Nr. 3, 1. 60. On Karl Sand and the German nationalist movement, see Sheehan, German History, 406–8. 61. GStA PK, III. HA Ministerium des auswärtigen Angelegenheiten, I Nr. 9274, Betr. Maßnahmen gegen die Verlagstätigkeit des Buchhändlers Brockhaus zu Leipzig, Mai 1822–Juni 1823. 62. It seems appropriate here to once again evoke the term civil society to describe this alternative source of authority to whom Brockhaus felt he could appeal in print. 63. In my work with these sources, this is the only case involving direct intervention by the king himself. 64. GStA PK, I. HA, Rep 101 Oberzensurkollegium und Oberzensurgericht, E. Lit B. Nr. 3, 80, Letter from Friedrich Wilhelm to the Censorship Board, Berlin, May 9, 1822. 65. GStA, HA I, Rep 101 E. Lit B. Nr. 3, 20–21, Exchange between Brockhaus and the Prussian Interior Ministry. 66. GStA, HA I, Rep 101 E. Lit B. Nr. 3, document begins on page 125, Letter from Brockhaus to the Ober-Censur-Collegium in Berlin, Leipzig, July 21, 1822. 67. Literarisches Conversations-Blatt, no. 241 (October 18, 1821).

chapter 4 1. James Sheehan writes that Hesse emerged from the 1830 uprisings with a new constitution; the king of Saxony, under considerable political pressure, issued a new constitution in 1831; the ruler of Baden, Duke Leopold, himself supported liberal ideas. In the early 1830s Baden issued a reformed press law that guaranteed freedom to express political opinions. On this and the details of the 1830 uprisings, see Sheehan, German History, chap. 10. 2. Harvard University’s law library has a large collection of nineteenthcentury legal codes from the German states; often the text of these codes is accompanied by commentary. For the text of Hessen’s code, I drew from Strafgesetzbuch für das Großherzogthum Hessen. On Baden’s 1845 Criminal Code, see Thilo, Strafgesetzbuch für das Großherzogthum Baden; Strafgesetzbuch für das Großherzogthum Baden nebst Einführungs-Edict. 3. On Feuerbach’s code and sexual offenses, see Hull, Sexuality State and Civil Society, chap. 9. For a broader discussion of Feuerbach and his influence on German legal theory, see Schmidt, Einführung in die Geschichte der deutschen Strafrechtspflege, 250–56.

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4. Hull, Sexuality, State and Civil Society, 365. 5. Haubach, Der Strafrechtliche Schutz des Schamgefühls, 37, 19. 6. For a fascinating discussion of the connection between the inviolable body and human rights theory, see Dean, The Frail Social Body, introduction. 7. Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness; Marcus, The Other Victorians; Nead, Victorian Babylon. 8. See Heath, “Obscenity, Empire and Global Networks.” Heath draws on Victor Tadros’s article, “Between Governance and Discipline.” 9. In Governing Pleasures historian Lisa Sigel argues that the shift from sovereign power to discipline affected a related shift in the focus of obscenity law. As long as the government functioned through sovereign power, the state sought to regulate the sale of obscene materials, which threatened the monopoly of state power. As power began to operate through discipline rather than coercion, consumption rather than sales became the focus of concern: what mattered was not protecting the power of the sovereign but rather the ability of the state to shape the lives of subjects and citizens. 10. Schauer, Zum Begriff der unzüchtigen Schrift, 9. 11. Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, xiv, xv. 12. Sheehan, German Liberalism, 5. 13. “Was soll der Bürger Lesen?,” column 4065. The editor of the journal, Friedrich Gottlieb Becker, would in 1848 serve in the National Assembly in Frankfurt. 14. McNeely, The Emancipation of Writing, 62–66. 15. “Das Romanlesen.” 16. GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Nr. 1, Bd. 2, 23, Report from the Minister of Interior and Police, Berlin, March 19, 1842. 17. On Bildung and its relationship to liberalism, see Sheehan, German Liberalism, 8–18. 18. Gray, “Men as Citizens and Women as Wives.” 19. Sheehan, German History, 492. 20. Herzog, Intimacy and Exclusion, 37; Hull, Sexuality, State and Civil Society, especially chaps. 9 and 10. 21. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 84a Justizministerium, Nr. 46716, 33, Acta des Königlichen Justiz-Ministeriums betreffend den Gesetz-Entwurf über die Pressen, Mai 1848. The document is part of the material generated in advance of revisions to the press law. The exact date of this document is not clear, but it was almost certainly produced between 1840 and 1845. 22. Some German legal scholars trace the origins of this category of crimes to “crimes of the flesh” and therefore emphasize its roots in canon law; others emphasize the category’s modern origins. 23. Hull, Sexuality, State and Civil Society, 350. An early draft of the Bavarian Police Code, designed to accompany the legal code, was among the first laws to single out sexual content in texts as a reason for censorship, but this law was not ultimately adopted (365). 24. Hull, Sexuality, State and Civil Society, chap. 9. For a detailed discussion of Feuerbach’s code and its influence, see Schmidt, Einführung in

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die Geschichte der deutschen Strafrechtspflege, 250–56. Schmidt includes a detailed discussion of Kant’s influence on the development of modern German legal theory. 25. Feuerbach’s Lehrbuch quoted in Schmidt, Einführung in die Geschichte der deutschen Strafrechtspfege, 254. 26. The text of the French codes is reproduced in Schauer, Zum Begriff der unzüchtigen Schrift, 9–10. 27. Strafgesetzbuch für das Großherzogthum Hessen. 28. Das neue Criminal-Gesetzbuch Sachsens. 29. Hartitzsch, Das Criminalgesetzbuch für das Königreich Sachsen, 456–57. 30. Weiss, Criminalgesetzbuch für das Königreich Sachsen. See the commentary on chapter 16 of the Code on Die Verletzungen der Sittlichkeit. 31. Weiss, Criminalgesetzbuch für das Königreich Sachsen, commentary accompanying §309. 32. Weiss, Criminalgesetzbuch für das Königreich Sachsen, commentary accompanying §310. 33. Thilo, Strafgesetzbuch für das Großherzogthum Baden mit Motiven der Regierung der Ständeverhandlungen im Zusammenhange dargestellt, 301–19. 34. Feuerbach quoted in Thilo, Strafgesetzbuch für das Großherzogthum Baden mit Motiven der Regierung und den Resultaten der Ständeverhandlungen im Zusammenhange dargestellt. See his discussion of Feuerbach in his commentary on §371, “Widernatürliche Unzucht.” 35. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 84a Justizministerium, Nr. 46716, 1832, Gesetz über die Polizei der Presse und über die Bestrafung der Pressvergehen. Information on Baden’s 1832 Press Code was reviewed by Prussian officials in the 1840s when they were in the process of reforming their own Press Law. The text reproduced here follows the Prussian document. 36. Staatsarchiv Ludwigsburg, Staats- und Regierungsblatt von 1817. 37. Schmidt, Einführung in die Geschichte der deutschen Strafrechtspfege, 310–13. 38. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 84a Justizministerium, Nr. 46716. 39. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 84a Justizministerium, Nr. 46716, 65, Commentary on Savigny’s draft. 40. GStA PK, I. HA, Rep 101 Oberzensurkollegium und Oberzensurgericht, A Nr. 1, Bd. 3, 5–90, Die Errichtung des Koenigl. Ober-Censur Collegiums durch das Edict v. 18 Oct. 1819 und dessen Umorganisation in Gefolge der Allerhöchsten Kabinets-Ordre v. 16 Dezbr. 1835. The report is from a government advisor on the state of existing censorship practices with recommendations for reorganization. 41. GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 84a Justizministerium, Nr. 46716, 315–32, Draft of the new Press Law, which is not dated but from the context was likely written between July and November 1847. 42. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 84a Justizministerium, Nr. 46717, 1–28, Acta des Königlichen Justiz-Ministeriums betreffend den Gesetz-Entwurf über die Presse, 1850.

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43. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 84a Justizministerium, Nr. 46717, 254–77, Compilation of suggestions concerning the draft of the Press Law. 44. On Belgium’s involvement in piracy in the 1830s, see Haynes, Lost Illusions. 45. Sheehan, German History, chap. 10. 46. Prinz, Der Buchhandel vom Jahre 1815 bis zum Jahre 1856, 5–6. 47. On the expansion of the German book trade in the southwestern states, see Fullerton, “The Development of the German Book Markets”; Schenda, Volk ohne Buch. Both authors offer detailed accounts of the growth of the popular book trade in the southwestern German states. 48. Gesetz über die Preß-Freyheit, 30 Jan. 1817, StAL, “Staats- und Regierungsblatt von 1817.” Württemberg’s Press Law of 1817 authorized the government to confiscate publications that challenged “religion, church and morality, the safety of the state, the honor of government officials, foreign officials, and private parties.” Paragraph 5 declared, “For the preservation of morality, every form of published work treating moral matters, which betrays malicious intent on the part of the author to instigate other crimes and vices recognized as such by state and church, is a prohibited act. The public display of obscene texts and images is also forbidden.” 49. StAL, E 173 I, Bücher- und Pressezensur; E 173 III, Buchdruckereien und Buchhandel, Nachdrucke, Antiquariatsbuchhandel, und Leihbibliotheken. 50. StAL, E 173I, Büschel 1018, Bücher- und Pressezensur. 51. StAL, E 173I, Büschel 1019, Bücher- und Pressezensur. 52. StAL, E 173I, Büschel 6839, Bücher- und Pressezensur. 53. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 101 Oberzensurkollegium und Oberzensurgericht, D. Nr. 13, Betreffend die Ankündigung und der Debit obszöner Schriften und ungeprüfter Heilmittel, 1820–1841. See the series of reports on this case, originating with correspondence from the government in Cologne between March and April 1835. 54. Fullerton, “Development of the German Book Markets,” 118. 55. Prinz, Der Buchhandel vom Jahre 1815–1843. 56. Fullerton, “The Development of the German Book Markets,” chaps. 1, 2, 3. Fullerton draws heavily on Prinz, Bausteine, in his discussion of speculative booksellers. 57. Verzeichniß der Verlags Bücher von J. Scheible’s Buchhandlung in Stuttgart, January 1836 (printer: J. Wachendorf). Scheible’s original catalogues are housed at the DBSM in Leipzig. 58. Verlags-Katalog von J. Scheible’s Buchhandlung in Stuttgart, 1840, DBSM, Leipzig. 59. Both Prinz and Fullerton stress the importance of Brockhaus’s early innovations; they both argue that his practices would be picked up and extended by publishers in the 1830s and 1840s. 60. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 101 Oberzensurkollegium und Oberzensurgericht, A. Nr. 1, Bd. 3, 5–90, Commissioned government report on the reorganization of censorship in Prussia.

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61. Berlin, June 15, 1833, Königl. Polizei-Präsidium, reproduced in Prinz, Der Buchhandel vom Jahre 1815 bis zum Jahre 1856, 6–8. 62. Circular-Schreiben an sämmtliche Buchhandlungen der königl. Preußischen Monarchie, Stuttgart, August 17, 1833, reproduced in Prinz, Der Buchhandel vom Jahre 1815 bis zum Jahre 1856, 7–9. 63. Prinz’s statement seems confirmed by the 1835 commissioned report on the reorganization of censorship: GStA PK, I. HA Rep 101 Oberzensurkollegium und Oberzensurgericht, A. Nr. 1, Bd. 3, 5–90. 64. Sarkowski, “Hinweise über August Prinz,” 111. 65. “Ein Verlagsschicksal,” in Franckh’sche Verlagshandlung Stuttgart, 11. 66. Aus dem Leben und den Memoiren einer weiblichen Casanova and Chronique Scandaleuse des Hofes Ludwig XVI, both written, or at least translated, by Friedrich Wilhelm Bruckbräu, were published by the Brothers Franckh and advertised as erotische Schriften from the same publisher in books like Bussy-Rabutin [?], Geheime Liebschaften Pariser Hofdamen. 67. “Das Romanlesen.” 68. GStA HA I. Rep. 77. Tit. 78, No. 1, Bd. 2, 16, Betreffend die Anlegung und Unaufsichtigung von Leihbibliotheken getreff neue polizeiliche Anordnungen v. 2 Mai 1840 bis 6 Decbr. 1847, Clipping from the Beilage zum Frankfurter Journal, January 24, 1842, pasted into the file of the Interior Ministry. 69. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Nr. 1, Bd. 2, 16–23. 70. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Nr. 1, Bd. 2, 70, Frankfurt a/O, April 5, 1844, Report concerning permission to establish lending libraries in rural areas. 71. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Nr. 1, Bd. 2, 79, Clipping in file: “Aufruf,” Erste Beilage zur Königl. privilegierten Berlinischen Zeitung, November 28, 1845. 72. “Ueber den sittlichen Einfluß der Romane.” 73. “Was soll der Bürger Lesen?” 74. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Nr. 1, Bd. 2, 23. 75. “Was soll der Bürger Lesen?” 76. “Was soll der Bürger Lesen?” 77. For a lively account of the links between women readers and and French influence in the eighteenth century, see Wiggin, “Fiction, France, and Other Vices.” 78. “Die Schreibseligkeit des weiblichen Geschlechts die Hauptursache des Mangels an Mädchen.” 79. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Nr. 1, Bd. 2, 23, Circular sent to the regional governments from the Prussian interior minister, Berlin, March 19, 1842.

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chapter 5 1. David Blackbourn describes the “buoyancy” and growing authority of middle-class professions after midcentury, among them doctors, lawyers, surveyors, and engineers (The Long Nineteenth Century, chapter 4). On the growing authority of medicine in the field of mental illness in the 1860s and 1870s, see Engstrom, Clinical Psychiatry in Imperial Germany. 2. Andrew Lees discusses one important statistical study: Alexander von Oettingen’s Moralstatistik, published in the late 1860s and twice again in the 1880s. See Lees, “Deviant Sexuality and Other ‘Sins.’” 3. Gerd J. Forsch writes that Gustav Hempel’s 1850–51 edition of the Memoirs was based on a pirated edition from Paulin-Besoni. On the details of this edition, see Forsch, Casanova und seine Leser, chap. 6. 4. See my discussion of the editor’s preface to this original edition of Casanova’s Memoirs in chapter 3. 5. Buhl, preface, 1. 6. GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 380, Nr. 7. Bd. 1, 1–3, Berlin, October 30, 1850, Report form the police in Berlin to Interior Minister von Manteuffel, concerning the translation of The Memoirs of Casanova. 7. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 380, Nr. 7, Bd. 1, 1–63. A second new edition, published by M. O. Henri in Hamburg, was advertised for sale by J. D. Polack’she Buchhandlung in Hamburg and confiscated from a bookseller in Trier in 1856. In October 1857 a bookseller named Behrendsohn in Hamburg was caught trying to sell installments of Der Hamburger Casanova “under the hand.” In 1856 the Memoirs were confiscated from a lending library in Saarlouis; the next year they were taken from the lending library of Kraus und Sohn in Halle, with reports that the same version had already been confiscated in Coblenz and Aachen. 8. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Nr. 1, Bd. 3, Betr. Die wegen Anlegung und Beaufsichtigung der Leihbibliotheken getroffenen polizeilichen Anordnungen vom 9. Mai 1848. 9. Spencer, Police and the Social Order, 39–40. 10. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Nr. 1, Bd. 3, 36, Correspondence from Police Chief Hinckeldey to the Imperial States Minister for Trade, Industry, and Public Work, Berlin, January 26, 1850. 11. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Nr. 1, Bd. 3, 92, Berlin, October 21, 1852, Report on the complaints of the salesman of “gallant wares,” Gade of Charlottenberg. 12. GStA PK, I. HA, Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 78, Nr. 1, Bd. 3, 85, Letter to the Prussian Interior Minister from the State Council of the Provincial Government in Magdeburg, March 26, 1852. 13. GStA PK, I. HA. Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 380, Nr. 7, Bd. 3, 32, Report from Police Headquarters to the Interior Minister, October 7, 1878. In 1878 a Berlin bookseller named Wortmann faced six raids over the course of a few months; the bookseller Löwensohn in the Kaisergallerie had been similarly unlucky, as one police raid turned up 50,000 Marks’ worth

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of “obscene books and pictures.” While the police often had little hope of getting these texts past state’s attorneys and were therefore forced to return them, surveillance and the threat of raids and confiscations were enough to make merchants wary. 14. “Gesetz über die Presse vom 12. Mai 1851,“ Gesetz-Sammlung für die Preußischen Staaten, Nr. 16. 15. Gesetz-Sammlung für die königlichen Preußischen Staaten Nr. 16, 276. 16. Strafgesetzbuch für die preußischen Staaten und Gesetz über die Einführung desselben von 14. April 1851. 17. Beseler, Kommentar über das Strafgesetzbuch für die Preußischen Staaten und das Einfuhrungsgesetz. 18. Schmidt, Einführung in die Geschichte der deutschen Strafrechtspflege, 303–13. 19. Evans, Tales from the German Underworld, 109–10. For another assessment of the 1851 criminal code, see Johnson, Urbanization and Crime in Germany. 20. “Gesetz über die Presse vom 12. Mai 1851.” 21. GStA PK, I. HA. Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 380, Nr. 7, Bd. 1-3. My summary of the justice system is based on my reading of these files, and on Johnson’s excellent discussion of the Prussian justice system in Urbanization and Crime in Germany. 22. Evans, Tales from the German Underworld, 114. 23. For late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writing on this topic, see Villnow, “Die Verbrechen und Vergehen wider die Sittlichkeit”; Karl Binding, “Unzüchtige Handlungen und unzüchtige Schriften: Gutachten des Leipziger Spruchkolleges, Entworfen von Professor Karl Binding in Leipzig” Zeitschrift für die gesamte Strafrechtswissenschaft 2 (1882); Misch, Der Straftrechtliche Schutz der Gefühle; Pfeifer, “Die Begriffe Sittlichkeit, unsittlich, Schamgefühl, Unzucht, unzüchtige Handlungen und unzüchtig”; Haubach, Der Strafrechtliche Schutz des Schamefühls. 24. I have been unable to find any reference to Villnow that gives his full name; he is referenced often in his capacity as state’s attorney in Bromberg but always referred to as “Dr. Villnow.” 25. Villnow, “Die Verbrechen und Vergehen wider die Sittlichkeit,” 108. 26. Binding, “Unzüchtige Handlungen und unzüchtige Schriften,” 458. 27. Binding, “Unzüchtige Handlungen und unzüchtige Schriften,” 466. 28. For an excellent discussion of these historical shifts in relation to obscenity, see Heath, “Obscenity, Empire and Global Networks.” On changes in the “techniques” of power, see Peukert, Grenzen der Sozialdisziplinierung. 29. Haubach, Der Strafrechtliche Schutz des Schamefühls, 42. 30. Villnow, “Die Verbrechen und Vergehen wider die Sittlichkeit,” 41. 31. Wetzell, Inventing the Criminal, 34, emphasis in the original. 32. On these historical precedents, see Haubach, section 2: “Das Schamgefühl in unserem Strafgesetz,” in Der Strafrechtliche Schutz des Schamgefühls, 33. Haubach, Der Strafrechtliche Schutz des Schamgefühls, 19. 34. Pfeifer, “Die Begriffe Sittlichkeit, unsittlich, Schamgefühl,” 6.

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35. Villnow, “Die Verbrechen und Vergehen wider die Sittlichkeit,” 114–15. 36. Santlus, Zur Psychologie der menschlichen Triebe, 55. 37. Santlus, Zur Psychologie der menschlichen Triebe, 72–73. 38. Santlus, Zur Psychologie der menschlichen Triebe, 89. 39. Santlus, Zur Psychologie der menschlichen Triebe, 14, 89. 40. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 380, Nr. 7, Bd. 1, 29. 41. Englisch, Irrgarten der Erotik, 54–66. 42. This sketch of Prinz’s life is drawn from historian Heinz Sarkowski’s, “Hinweis auf August Prinz,” published as a biographical sketch in the reprint of Prinz’s classic chronicle of the book trade, Stand Bildung und Wesen des Buchhandels. 43. Staatsarchiv Hamburg has police files related to Prinz’s activities in 1848, including a copy of Der Republikaner and the police report concerning Prinz’s editorial work that year. 44. For a discussion of the authorship of Aus den Memoiren einer Sängerin, attributed to the famous German opera singer Wilhelmine SchroederDevrient, see Sarkowski, “Hinweise auf August Prinz”; Englisch, Irrgarten der Erotik. 45. Englisch, Irrgarten der Erotik, 57. 46. Stark, “Pornography, Society and the Law,” 207. 47. Evans, “Prostitution, State and Society in Imperial Germany.” 48. GStA PK, I. HA, Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 380, Nr. 7, Bd. 1, 13. In 1852 Chief of Police Hinckeldey complained that Berlin’s booksellers were regularly displaying pictures that “offend public decency through their obscenity,” as well as books with titles that “injure morals and shame.” 49. GStA PK, I. HA, Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 380, Nr. 7, Bd. 1, 108, Report from Police Headquarters in Berlin to the Interior Minister, January 13, 1868. 50. GStA PK, I. HA, Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 380, Nr. 7, Bd. 2, 32, Report from Police Headquarters in Berlin to the Interior Minister, October 7, 1878. 51. For a full discussion of these groups, see Stark, Banned in Berlin; Lees, “Deviant Sexuality and Other ‘Sins.’” 52. GStA PK, I. HA, Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 380, Nr. 7, Bd. 1, 43, Anonymous letter addressed to Justice Minister Leonhardt, September 26, 1878. 53. GStA PK, I. HA, Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 380, Nr. 7, Bd. 1, 13, 166. 54. Historians have shown that during the second half of the nineteenth century emerging medical models of the body were applied to law, politics, and social theory. See Nye, Crime, Madness and Politics, 23. Richard Wetzell argues that a similar process was at work in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century, illustrated by the development of criminology. On the intersection between medical, social, and legal models of crime, see Wetzell, Inventing the Criminal.

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55. On these developments in German psychiatry, see Engstrom, Clinical Psychiatry in Imperial Germany, introduction and chap. 4. 56. Nye, The Medical Concept of National Decline, 23. 57. Binding, “Unzüchtige Handlungen und unzüchtige Schriften,” 462. 58. Richard, Die Regeneration des geschwächten Nervensystems. 59. Oddly enough, Richard’s book itself, focused on the delicate and easily damaged nerves of male adolescents and adults, provides detailed discussions of the effects of sexually explicit books on the physical and mental development of the individual. “Obscene” books, and even books of popular medical advice, result in overstimulation and illness. Thus Richard’s book, itself denounced as morally dangerous, seemed to provide the logic of its own condemnation. (This was not, of course, Richard’s intention, and the state’s attorneys did not hold Richard to the logic of his own book.) 60. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 380, Nr. 7, Bd. 1, 69–71, Berlin, October 21, 1857, Report from Police Headquarters concerning the success of the case against the editor of the Vossische Zeitung for injuries to modesty. 61. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 380, Nr. 7, Vol. 1, 79, Berlin, November 19, 1857. 62. Richard, Die Regeneration des geschwächten Nervensystems, 1. 63. Richard, Die Regeneration des geschwächten Nervensystems, 16. 64. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 380, Nr. 7, Bd. 1. 65. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 380, Nr. 7, Bd. 1, 98, Münster, May 27 (26?), 1868, Letter from Wundermann to the Interior Minister in Berlin. 66. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 380, Nr. 7, Bd. 1, 108, Berlin, June 13, 1868, Report from the Chief of Police concerning the complaints of the bookseller Wundermann from Münster. 67. GStA PK, I. HA Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 380, Nr. 7, Bd. 1, 135, Concerning the investigations of the bookseller Wundermann. 68. The text of the law is reproduced in Schauer, Zum Begriff der unzüchtigen Schrift, 13. 69. Binding, “Unzüchtige Handlungen und unzüchtige Schriften,” 453. 70. GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 380, Nr. 7, Bd. 2, 23, Report from Police Headquarters in Berlin to the Interior Minister. 71. GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 380, Nr. 7, Bd. 2, 212, Berlin, October 1878, Report from police headquarters in Berlin to the Minister of Interior. 72. Binding and his colleagues suggest that this language originated with a decision by the Reichsoberhandelsgericht in 1872. 73. GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 380, Nr. 7, Bd. 2, 267–68, Circular from Minister of the Interior, copy of the decision of the Reichsgericht from December 15, 1879. 74. Binding, “Unzüchtige Handlungen und unzüchtige Schriften,” 464. 75. GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 380, Nr. 7, Bd. 3, 23, Copy of the proceedings against Rudolf Franz Vaternahm from

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Zechnow bei Landesberg and August Vaternahm, bookseller from Altona. I could not make out what Carl Vaternahm’s profession was, though one is listed in the trial report. It seems likely that he was also a bookseller or a colporteur. 76. GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 380, Nr. 7, Bd. 2, 167, Betr. Das Feilhalten unzüchtiger Bilder und Schriften. 77. GStA PK, I HA, Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 380, Nr. 7, Bd. 3, 23, Betr. Die Unterdrückung unsittlicher und obscöner Druckschriften, 8. February–19. März 1892. In my translation I tried to stay true to the kind of language the judge used to describe this scene. There are, of course, many ways to discuss sexually explicit scenes, but it is clear that the judge chooses his words carefully. 78. GStA PK, I HA, Rep 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 380, Nr. 7, Bd. 3, 23. 79. Engstrom, Clinical Psychiatry in Imperial Germany, chap. 4. 80. Engstrom, Clinical Psychiatry in Imperial Germany, 23. 81. “Ein Streifblick auf die Tagespresse,” Die Deutsche Wacht, March 7, 1872, II Jahrgang, Nr. 10. The run of articles was clipped and pasted into the files of the Interior Ministry: GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 380, Nr. 7, Bd. 1, 140–59. 82. GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 380, Nr. 7, Bd. 1, 199. 83. Binding, “Unzüchtige Handlungen und unzüchtige Schriften,” 459, emphasis mine. 84. Binding, “Unzüchtige Handlungen und unzüchtige Schriften,” 463. 85. Binding, “Unzüchtige Handlungen und unzüchtige Schriften,” 465. 86. Binding, “Unzüchtige Handlungen und unzüchtige Schriften,” 469. 87. Binding, “Unzüchtige Handlungen und unzüchtige Schriften,” 471, 470. 88. Binding, “Unzüchtige Handlungen und unzüchtige Schriften,” 463–63.

conclusion 1. Peukert, “Der Schund- und Schmutzkampf.” 2. Springman, “Poisoned Hearts.” On these debates, see also Heineman, Before Porn Was Legal, and especially Peukert, “Der Schund- und Schmutzkampf.” 3. Springman, “Poisoned Hearts,” 411. 4. On the 1953 law, see Heineman, Before Porn Was Legal. 5. McLellan, “‘Even under Socialism.’” 6. Whitman, “The Two Western Cultures of Privacy,” 1153–221.

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index

Adolescents, 29, 91–92, 178, 188–89, 208, 210, 235n59 Althing, Christian, 60–63, 95–96, 98, 101–7, 223n2. See also Fischer, Christian August Altona, 59, 61, 147, 181–82, 194–95. See also Hamburg Appadurai, Arjun, 56–57 Anti-Semitism, 17, 31, 92. See also Jews Baden, 59, 67, 127, 129, 131, 140, 142, 181 Bavaria, 21, 102–3 Bildung (education, self-development), 7, 80, 95, 125, 128, 131–36, 144, 161 Binding, Karl, 162, 173–76, 185, 194, 198–203 The Book of Secrets, 37–38 Booksellers, 10, 94, 145–50 Booksellers’ guild, German, 22, 69–70, 86, 145 Brockhaus, Friedrich Arnold, 61, 63, 96, 112–14, 122–26, 148, 164, 219n14, 230n59 Brockhaus Konversations-Lexikon, 7, 122, 148 Brockhaus publishing house, 61, 63, 112–14 Bürgerlichkeit (citizenship, middle-class mentality), 122, 132–36, 156–57, 161, 215n8 Cameralism, 24, 42, 40–46, 218n53 Canon law, 137, 139, 228n22 Censors, 25–26, 34–35, 109–10, 216n35 Censorship, 21–26, 43, 163, 218n59 Circulation of print: in the German states, 1, 6, 56–57, 59–60, 63–73; across international borders, 6, 57, 59–60, 63–73

Civil society, 6–7, 44, 158, 227n62 Colporteurs, 22, 31–32, 63, 73–78, 148, 169, 183, 195, 221n43. See also Couriers; Peddlers Communism, 143, 169 Contraception, 183, 193–94 Couriers, 64, 222n54. See also Colporteurs; Peddlers Crime narratives, 35–36 Crimes of the flesh, 137, 139, 199, 228n22 Criminal codes: in Baden, 127; in Bavaria, 128, 171; in Hesse 127, 129; in Prussia, 12, 159, 164, 170–71, 192–93; in Saxony, 127, 129; in unified Germany, 192–93; in Württemberg, 142 De-repression, 51, 160–61 Drowsy Tales, 106–7 Editors, 94–96, 107–8, 164–66 Emotions, 30–31, 35–36, 39–40, 46 Empathy, 2, 7, 30, 118, 129, 144, 176, 210 Englisch, Paul, 5, 61–62, 70, 72, 111 Enlightenment, 19, 23, 137 Erotic books, 97–107, 117, 125, 223n1 Erotic Tales: Hanne’s Adventures Here and There, Alongside the Stories of Three Wedding Nights, 104–6 Federal Republic of Germany, 103, 206, 208, 211 Feelings, legal status of, 144, 173–80, 186–87, 193, 199 Feuerbach, Anselm von, 127–28, 137– 42, 171 Fischer, Christian August, 39, 60, 100 –107, 126, 223n2. See also Althing, Christian

254 Foucault, Michel, 174–75 Franckh, Friedrich Gottlob, 97, 131, 150–52 Franckh, Johann Friedrich, 97, 131, 150, 152 French books: influence of, 49, 83, 197–98; movement across borders, 6, 71–72, 145 French criminal code, 24–25, 138, 171, 209–10 French Revolution of 1789, 15, 19, 24, 52–53, 129 Friedrich Wilhelm III, King of Prussia, 122 Gallant literature, 6, 30, 99–100, 115, 182, 189, 209–10, 224n10 German Democratic Republic, 211 The German Don Juan, 96, 108–11 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 47, 51, 94, 117, 119, 201 Hamburg, 147, 181, 195. See also Altona Hesse, 127, 129, 138 Homosexuality, 174. See also Sodomy law Interiority, 4, 7, 14–20; German conceptions of, 8–9, 12, 19–20, 121–22, 179–80, 197–98, 207, 211–12; historical views of, 9, 55. See also Self Jews, 17, 31, 75–78, 86–92. See also Anti-Semitism Justi, Johann von, 42–46 Kant, Immanuel, 19–20, 23, 52, 129, 137, 199, 203 Legal reform processes: criminal law, 41–42, 170–72; press law, 142–45 Lending libraries, 6, 22, 28, 31, 65–68, 78–86, 89–91, 136, 147, 158–59, 168–69, 215n13 Liberalism: 12, 129–36, 159–61, 172, 203 Literacy, 58 Magnetism and Immorality: A Remarkable Contribution to the Secret History of the Medical Practice, 39 Masculinity, 53, 155, 158, 160–61 Medical books, popular, 18, 36–40, 85, 184–92, 209

Index Memoirs of Casanova von Seingalt: censorship of, 31, 61–62, 81, 114– 15, 164–67, 219n11; defenses of, 97, 116–25, 198, 200–203, 229n39; narrative elements, 84–85, 115–16; publication history, 96, 112–16, 164–67, 181, 225n36, 226n46, 232n7 The Memoirs of Lola Montez, 63, 70, 73 The Memoirs of a Singer, 111–12, 182 Mesmerism, 37, 39–40 Misanthropy, 44, 109, 159 Modesty, 138, 178–79, 186, 194, 203 Moral crimes and offenses, 136, 144. See also Sexual offenses Moral models, 23–24, 49 Moral reform groups, 183, 203 Napoleon Bonaparte, 22, 24, 67, 100 Napoleon Bonaparte’s Secret Love Affairs, 98–100, 108, 110 Napoleonic wars, 15, 27, 38, 59 Neurology, 46 Novel reading, 7, 15–17, 47–55, 153–57 Obscene acts, 139–40, 163, 193–94, 200 Obscenity, concepts of: in France, 129, 138; in the German states, 4–5, 17–30, 93, 127–32, 136–42, 171–78, 184, 190–92; in unified Germany, 192–96; in the west, 2–4, 129–30, 208–9. See also Pornography Peddlers, 6, 31, 64, 73–78, 86–89. See also Colporteurs; Couriers Phrenonology, 15, 46, 48, 218n64 Pietism, 7, 31, 46 Piracy, 70, 145–46 Police: history of, 23, 167–68, 217n52; laws and codes, 22, 139–40, 215n16, 228n22; regulation of morality, 18, 23, 28; role in censorship, 22–25, 166–70, 185, 204 Polish books, 72, 83, 88–89 Polish-speaking regions, 6, 71–72 Popular print: movement across borders, 6, 83–85, 145–52; scholarship on, 4–5, 147–48 Pornography, 2–4, 120–30, 160, 211, 223n3. See also Obscenity, conceptions of Press law: in Prussia, 21, 25–29, 43, 45, 142–45, 168, 170; in Württemberg, 69–70, 230n48

Index Prinz, August: activities as a publisher, 111–12, 126, 151, 181–82; historical reflections on the book trade, 60, 145, 148–50, 219n10 Private sphere, 3, 141. See also Public sphere Prussian territories, borders of, 6, 27–29, 59–64, 66–67 Psychiatry, 15, 46, 48, 197, 203, 218n63 Psychology, 8, 15–16, 46, 48 Public sphere, 3, 95, 141, 144, 156, 160, 168, 170–72. See also Private sphere Readers, 10, 14–17, 56, 95, 97, 99, 121, 125, 153–59, 187 The Regeneration of a Weakened Nervous System, or the Best Cures for Onanism and Pollution, 185–90 Revolution of 1848–1849, 128, 131, 144, 159, 163 Revolutionary uprisings of 1830, 57, 60, 63, 71, 145, 227n1 Romanticism, 15–16, 50–52, 121 Sadism, 2 Saxony, 64–66, 102–3, 122, 127, 129, 131, 138–40 Scheible, Johann, 5, 57, 62–63, 69–72, 131, 146–48, 211, 220n29, 220nn32, 221n41 Schütz, Wilhelm von, 96–97, 112–22, 125–26, 166 Schwärmerei (swooning enthusiasm), 16, 20, 29, 36, 45–48, 52–53, 207, 214n5. See also Superstition

255 Self, 8–9, 54–55, 212, 214n2, 214nn7. See also Interiority Sexual offenses, 12, 136–38, 159, 177–78. See also Moral crimes and offenses Shame, 12, 129, 138–39, 141, 144, 173–80, 194, 196, 203 Social class: and perceptions of readers, 32, 80–81, 136; representations of, 107 Social disorder, 44, 69, 143, 163 Socialism, 143, 208 Sodomy law, 141–42. See also Homosexuality Soltyk, Roman, 57, 71–72, 219n1 Sonnenfels, Joseph von, 41–46 Superstition, 17, 29–30, 37, 46, 207. See also Schwärmerei Thérèse Philosophe, 70, 112, 181, 209, 211, 224n12, 225n35 True Terrifying Horrifying Story of a Mother, Eva Rosina Riedelin from Marienberg, 32, 35–36, 78, 209 Urban entertainments, 163, 172, 180, 183 Weimar Republic, 207–8, 210–11 Wessenberg, Ignatz von, 7, 14–17, 19, 40, 47–55, 111–12, 120 Women: psychology of, 178; as readers, 5, 16, 58, 110–12, 117–19, 157–58; representations of, 112, 118–21 Württemberg, 62, 67, 69–72, 97, 120, 134, 142, 146, 149, 181, 208, 230n48

ack now l edgm e n ts

Having spent so many years working on this book, it is a relief to finally thank those who provided the intellectual, material, and personal support necessary to bring it to completion. Long ago Jonathan Beecher introduced me to the pleasures and challenges of historical analysis. Mary Gluck helped me formulate the earliest incarnation of this project; I am grateful for her prodigious intellect and sense of humor. Carolyn Dean provided inspiration and expressed excitement about my work at crucial moments. Volker Berghahn has been enormously generous at every stage in the process. Several institutions offered invaluable material support. Fellowships from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and Brown University allowed me to complete the initial research on this project. Faculty research grants from Western New England College and Simmons College provided funds for me to return to the archives to conduct more research. A Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Penn Humanities Forum brought me into daily contact with scholars outside my discipline and helped me expand the scope (and I hope the reach) of this project. A junior sabbatical from Simmons College allowed me to finish the penultimate draft of this book. I must also acknowledge the generosity and patience of numerous librarians and archivists, who responded to my queries, facilitated my visits, and helped me track down rare examples of obscure forbidden books. In particular I would like to thank the staff or the Staatsbibliothek Berlin (Haus I and Haus II) and the Geheimes Staatsarchiv in Berlin. Many people have helped me in the process of seeing this project through from start to finish. Tuska Benes, Trevor Coates, Lisa Gitelman, Mark Meyers, Jennifer Milligan, Sara Pritchard, and Seth Schulman all read and commented on portions of the manuscript.

258

Acknowledgments

Tom Green and Peter Jelavich read the whole manuscript and provided timely feedback and encouragement. Two anonymous readers for the University of Pennsylvania Press offered incisive critiques of the manuscript and helped me turn a series of linked chapters into a book. My editor at the University of Pennsylvania Press, Jerry Singerman, was enthusiastic about this project from the beginning and worked patiently to see it through to print, as did Caroline Hayes. Friends and colleagues have offered assistance of other kinds. Bruce Spear made it possible and pleasant for me to take regular research trips to Germany. He picked me up at the airport, fed me healthy food, talked through my research with me, and took me dancing. At the Penn Humanities Forum, Peter Stallybrass, Wendy Steiner, and Jennifer Conway welcomed me as a member of that vibrant intellectual community. I am deeply grateful to my colleagues and students at Simmons College; it is a privilege to work with smart and committed people. Laurie Crumpacker, Laura Prieto, and Steve Ortega deserve special recognition as generous colleagues and valued friends. I am thankful that friends and family have lured me out of the library and away from my desk. The Manning-Price family and the late, great Estrid Coates helped make the East Coast my home. Time spent with Burlin Barr, Juli Barron, Amy Cosentino, Amy Feinstein, Alyson Garvey, Kelly Hager, Colleen Kiely, Suzanne Leonard, Mark Meyers, Nancy Ortega, Anthony Robinson, and Courtney Williamson has made my life richer and more fun. Marie Nemir encouraged me to write and shared her own writing with me. I am grateful for the abiding support of my immediate family. My brother, Theo Halpert, inspires me with his talent, intelligence, and insight. My father, Pat Leonard, has consistently and enthusiastically supported my efforts to become a scholar and has taught me a lot through his own intellectual endeavors. My mother, Margaret Leonard, fostered my love of history; she deserves special thanks for encouraging me to think and explore and for organizing regular trips to libraries and bookstores. I thank my partner, Trevor Coates, for helping me at every single stage in the creation of this book and, more important, for sharing with me his life and his unfragile mind.