Fragile Minds and Vulnerable Souls: The Matter of Obscenity in Nineteenth-Century Germany by Sarah Leonard (review)

Fragile Minds and Vulnerable Souls is an ambitious book that explores the history of obscenity in nineteenth-century Germany. The volume walks the reader through the intricacies of thinking about obscenity in the patchwork of German states from the eighteenth century until after the unification of Germany in 1871. This book is important for changing our understanding of obscenity’s relationship to sexuality. As Leonard shows, in the late 1870s obscenity began to hinge on sexual honor, sexual acts, and sexual knowledge due to the development of conservative moral reform, the expansion of commercial culture, and the medicalization of mind and body. Though obscenity has become almost synonymous with sexuality over the past century and a half, in Germany this conflation was very much a product of changing definitions and shifting controls, as detailed in Leonard’s book.

Sarah Leonard combines three very separate methods for considering obscenity: the history of reading, geographies of the book trade, and legal history. The strength of her approach is also its weakness. She refuses to simplify matters and instead shows the enormous variability in understandings of obscenity. However, in doing so, Leonard also details the range of texts and the ways that they could be read; the changing laws and where they came from; the variety of interpretations and how they emerged from law, philosophy, medicine, and psychiatry; and the changing regimes subject to multiple structures of politics, only to demonstrate that obscenity laws remained ineffective. While the book well represents the wide variety of factors affecting definitions of obscenity, it becomes hard to keep track of its overarching chronology, geography, and themes.

One of Leonard’s central propositions is that German obscenity codes rested upon ideas about the inner life. When legal theorists argued about the definition of obscenity, ideas of the inner life and its realization came to bear upon the matter. Vulnerable individuals, including elite young men, needed protection from their own failings. Legal theorists believed that as surely as great books might help a person develop a rich personality, so too might untrue books wreck one’s inner self. Because of this model, books about fortune telling and the future could be obscene because they would lead to superstition and folly, polluting the inner life rather than refining it. The development of an inner life had real consequences beyond the individual, according to this model, because elite men affected the rest of the world and because the individual provided the link between texts and civil society. The idea of the inner life goes far in explaining the importance of late nineteenth-century developments in medicine and psychology, which allowed for the scientific linking of mind and body and therefore spoke directly to the inner life. According to this model, those professions needed to contribute to thinking about obscenity because they provided a clear method for understanding its impact. Even after World War II, the idea of the inner life “guaranteed citizens ‘the right to the free development of the personality,’” a right not guaranteed in other liberal regimes (211).

A second central proposition in Leonard’s work is that historians should differentiate laws from practices, a welcome intervention in the study of obscenity. Her discussion of lending libraries, colporteurs, and the circulation of texts stands as a demonstration of the value of this claim. Her discussion of colporteurs in particular connects issues of social class, ethnicity, and the geography of distribution across state lines as Jewish porters took on the work of meeting consumer demand despite regulations that hindered the passage of goods. That sort of social history would remain obscured if historians assume that laws equal practice. The separation of law and practice allows Leonard to go further and see the failure of law. As she states in her conclusion, if the passage of obscenity laws sought to limit the production and circulation of certain...