Zensur im 19. Jahrhundert. Das literarische Leben aus Sicht seiner Überwacher (review)

In recent years there has been a revived attention to literary censorship in nineteenth- century Germany that goes beyond chronicles of banned books and persecuted authors. There have been a number of English-language contributions, not often registered in German-language scholarship, such as Daniel Moran’s Toward the Century of Words (1990), which describes how the Cottas leveraged the interests of the king of Bavaria against the Austrian censorship; Mary Lee Townsend’s Forbidden Laughter (1992) about the resistance of caricature with particular attention to Adolph Glassbrenner; Katy Heady’s Literature and Censorship in Restoration Germany (2009) [editor’s note: see review in Monatshefte 103:2, Summer 2011, 309–311], analyzing how Grabbe, Heine, and Grillparzer attempted to work around what they supposed the censorship principles to be; Gary D. Stark’s Banned in Berlin (2009), dealing with the Wilhelmin-ian censorship that motivated the first phase of intense research into the topic; and the studies of the University of Delaware historian James M. Brophy, whose essay in the volume at hand on the struggles of the radical publisher Heinrich Hoff complements one in English on the same topic that appeared in 2010 in the Leipziger Jahrbuch zur Buchgeschichte. The volume under review contains the papers of a colloquium sponsored in 2009 by the Rhenish Literature Archive, part of the Heinrich Heine Institute in Düsseldorf. Since much of the research is drawn from archives of the Rhine Province, there is an emphasis on Prussian policy and practice, but not exclusively.

As an introduction Bernd Kortländer provides a summary of Heine’s experiences with the censorship that will be familiar to the informed reader. A first section on the functions of the censorship begins with Kaspar Maase’s account of the books banned by the military authorities during World War I, not for political reasons, but as agents of the bourgeois campaign against popular books harmful to youth, less easily purged under civil law. Bodo Plachta provides illustrations of the way the absence of censored passages was made visible by blank spaces or typographical devices, even when nothing had been excised, of which Heine’s chapter in Das Buch Le Grand consisting of dashes and the words “Die deutschen Zensoren . . . Dummköpfe” is only the most notorious example. The stratagem extends to the post-war period, when Brecht visibly blocked out Lindbergh’s name when republishing a radio script from 1930, Siemens forced F.C. Delius to black out pages about its complicity with Auschwitz, and Maxim Biller attempted to rescue with such devices his novel Esra, which was eventually banned in 2007 upon a lawsuit by a mother and daughter who thought themselves negatively portrayed in the fiction.

In a second section, Christian Liedtke illustrates the daily life of censorship from materials in the Heine archive; especially interesting among them are records of the fees publishers had to pay the censors for the privilege of being mutilated. Bernd Füllner relates the origin and persecution of Hermann Püttmann’s album of political verse of 1846, which included the final version of Heine’s “Die schlesischen Weber.” In a third section, Enno Stahl describes the bureaucracy and procedures of the censorship in the Rhine Province and shows how, after its alleged abolishment in 1848, it became a matter of criminal procedure that could be invoked at any time against authors, publishers, and distributors. The confusion and recurrent inefficiency of the superintending authorities in Berlin is given a deadpan treatment by Bärbel Holtz.

A fourth section, dealing with publishers and book dealers, contains, along with Brophy’s essay on Heinrich Hoff mentioned above, Christine Haug’s exposition of the constant complaints from the book trade about the tolls and tariffs at the many state borders, even within Prussia itself, and the difficulties of managing the varieties of currencies. These initiatives constituted, of course, a practical argument for German...