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

By Sarah L. Leonard

Fragile Minds and Vulnerable Souls investigates the creation of "obscene writings and images" as a category of print in nineteenth-century Germany. Sarah L. Leonard charts the process through which texts of many kinds—from popular medical works to stereoscope cards—were deemed dangerous to the intellectual and emotional lives of vulnerable consumers. She shows that these definitions often hinged as much on the content of texts as on their perceived capacity to distort the intellect and inflame the imagination.

Leonard tracks the legal and mercantile channels through which sexually explicit material traveled as Prussian expansion opened new routes for the movement of culture and ideas. Official conceptions of obscenity were forged through a heterogeneous body of laws, police ordinances, and expert commentary. Many texts acquired the stigma of immorality because they served nonelite readers and passed through suspect spaces; books and pamphlets sold by peddlers or borrowed from fly-by-night lending libraries were deemed particularly dangerous. Early on, teachers and theologians warned against the effects of these materials on the mind and soul; in the latter half of the century, as the study of inner life was increasingly medicalized, physicians became the leading experts on the detrimental side effects of the obscene. In Fragile Minds and Vulnerable Souls, Leonard shows how distinctly German legal and medical traditions of theorizing obscenity gave rise to a new understanding about the mind and soul that endured into the next century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Dec 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9780812291780

Book preview

Introduction

The Cultivation of Inner Life

and the Dangers of Reading

What kind of society sends its citizens to prison for their fantasies?

—LAURA KIPNIS, 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 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 mental makeup of the individual continues to animate discussion of obscenity and pornography. So too does the related concern that such exposure may render the individual incapable of engaging in forms of intimacy—such as conjugal and parental love, as well as the emotions necessary to engage in civil society and citizenship—that undergird certain expressions of political culture.⁴ Societies cultivate certain forms of intimacy and discourage others, and they depend upon individuals to learn and to enact these forms of intimacy in particular ways. Practicing desirable forms of intimacy is not simply a matter of private choices; these practices also have bearing on multiple forms of public life.

Space matters as well in definitions of obscenity; representations welcome in one geographical or social location may be threatening or arousing (or both) in another space. In a modern Western context such spatial concerns are often expressed in terms of public and private; actions and expressions considered valuable in private (sexuality is one example, but there are many others) are sometimes deemed obscene when practiced in public. Boundaries between public and private are historically specific, and shifting definitions of obscenity often accompany such changes. In broad strokes historians of Europe have suggested that a shift from early modern to modern culture entailed a privatization of the body. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth century the ability to regulate the boundaries of the body became symbolic of the ability to self-govern. In such contexts the representation of bodies once deemed fecund now became obscene, out of place in public.⁵ Space is important in other ways as well. The movement of texts and images from one national or geographical space to another may render obscene or pornographic what is acceptable in the original context. For example, in 1970s America an issue of Playboy was arguably mainstream fare, whereas in the Soviet Union the same magazine was considered deeply subversive and (at least in some circles) intensely desired, having both the allure and the perceived excesses of American freedoms and consumer culture.⁶ As texts move across borders, they often carry associations with their place of origin; their movement can render them matter out of place.

At stake in definitions of obscenity and pornography, then, are a series of historically specific investments in the cultivation of certain kinds of people capable of interacting with other human beings—and, more broadly, with their world—in particular ways. At stake too are important disputes about legitimate and illegitimate knowledge, appropriate modes of cultural expression and consumption, and spatial boundaries and their attendant meanings. While such general observations do not map neatly onto the history of obscenity in nineteenth-century Germany, they do begin to suggest why such a study promises to shed light on multiple aspects of this society.

In this volume I investigate a category of print, immoral and obscene texts, as it was made and remade in the German states during the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, attempting to understand three interconnected histories. First, I examine the legal history, tracing the concept of obscene and immoral texts as it was created by censors and police in the early part of the century, codified in the politically dynamic decades of the 1830s and 1840s, and reframed surrounding unification in the 1860s and 1870s. Second, I seek to understand the underlying social, cultural, and political preoccupations that animated definitions of obscene and immoral print. Among these were a set of evolving ideas about the tone and texture of inner life—the soul, the mind, and (eventually) the nerves. Nineteenth-century Germans imagined this interior world as deeply marked by print, accessible only indirectly, and vulnerable to distortion. Discussions of obscenity often rested on particular visions of inner life and perceived links between interiority and actions in the world. Thus a history of obscene and immoral texts also tells a story about changing concepts of the mind and soul. Third, I take a careful look at the body of books condemned as obscene by contemporaries, tracing their production and circulation, the routes they traveled, the hands through which they passed, and the human needs they were designed to serve. Understanding this last point requires attention to the content of publications dismissed as trivial and filthy, a heterogeneous body of works that included gallant tales, popular medical works, memoirs, racy novels, books of prophesy, and a broad assortment of other texts that came in and out of view over the course of the century. These three related histories shed new light on important topics: on conceptions of the self as they were invented and reinvented over the course of the nineteenth century, on the geographical routes and social spaces through which obscene print (however lowbrow) passed, and on the evolution of print culture and civil society.

The history of German obscene and immoral books, their readers, producers, and detractors, has been hazy at best. This is perhaps fitting, as most of the books discussed here were designed to be inconspicuous and disposable; they did not often make it into the literary canon or onto the shelves of research libraries.⁷ They were also ignored or found wanting by generations of scholars. Even the folklorist and philologist Jacob Grimm, a figure we would expect to be sympathetic to such expressions of popular print culture, dismissed them. Serving as a censor for the principality of Hesse in the 1820s, he wrote that the frightening and seductive tales circulated in fly-by-night lending libraries and aimed at a popular audience were so poor that they did not even merit the attention of censors.⁸ The German sexologist Paul Englisch agreed. Working on his comprehensive history of erotic literature in the 1930s, Englisch divided these works into two categories: those of high quality and creativity and those that catered to the lowest desires of readers.⁹ The quality of editions mattered a great deal to Englisch. He even condemned the great nineteenth-century German publisher of illicit books, Johann Scheible, because he published poor, inexpensive editions of erotic works, sold at prices that many readers could afford. (Here Scheible will receive some of the attention he deserves.)

Even Rudolf Schenda’s ambitious study of trivial literature, published in West Germany in the late 1960s (a moment of scholarly sympathy for popular and illicit literature), bemoaned the paucity of good books available to popular audiences in the nineteenth century. Schenda blamed this on German elites, who produced a powerful cautionary rhetoric around the reading practices of women, the poor, and the less educated. This rhetoric conflated moral instability with vulnerability to dangerous political views and translated into ongoing efforts by elites to control the reading practices of ordinary people. As a result, he argued, poor and uneducated Germans were rendered a people without a book, lacking a literary culture because of censorship, limited distribution networks, and the vocal disapproval of people in positions of authority.¹⁰ Thus even scholars positively inclined toward low texts of various kinds experienced disappointment in the face of cheaply produced, derivative, poorly written, and politically uninspiring books and pamphlets.

Why unearth such allegedly degraded material? Why scrutinize handwritten police files trying to trace the routes these books traveled and comb through library catalogues for rare extant copies? These were, after all, texts condemned by contemporaries and scholars alike as filthy, frivolous, morally poisonous, or mind- and heart-destroying. They exist as a category only because of their alleged ability to distort readers’ 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, 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 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 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 nineteenth-century 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 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 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 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 nineteenth-century 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 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