Banned in Berlin. Gary D. Stark

Reichstag petitions signed by nearly all the nation's leading writers, artists, musicians, scholars, publishers, book dealers, and a few industrialists; they published numerous appeals and declarations in the liberal press; and they met with Chancellor von Hohenlohe, the imperial minister of justice, and other government representatives and party leaders to lobby their case.⁶¹

      The imperial government had never liked the bill: Chancellor Hohenlohe, a moderately liberal Bavarian Catholic once described as “an artist in the avoidance of catastrophe,”⁶² found the theater paragraph too extreme and favored passage of a more moderate bill. So too did the Bavarian government's delegate to the Bundesrat, the parliament's upper house that represented the individual state governments and that had to confirm any bill passed by the Reichstag. He and other members of the Bundesrat were suspicious of the bill because it shifted power from the states to the central imperial authorities. Some prominent leaders in Bavaria were also concerned that a rigid national law would stifle Munich's rich artistic and intellectual life, undermining its reputation as a lively cultural center that equaled Berlin and in some areas (such as its innovative, modernist theatrical life) even surpassed the nation's capital. The Center and the bill's other supporters on the Right slowly realized that to retain the imperial government's lukewarm support, to overcome the Social Democrats' obstructionist tactics and win Reichstag approval for other provisions of the bill, and to assure its approval by the Bundesrat, the controversial theater paragraph would have to be sacrificed. In April, therefore, they reached a compromise with the government and the Lex Heinze's liberal opponents under which the theater paragraph and other repressive clauses were dropped. The remainder of the bill was then approved by the Reichstag in late May and became law in June 1900.

      The battle over the Lex Heinze and its defeat in 1900 marked an important turning point in imperial Germany's polices of literary censorship. As subsequent chapters will show, since approximately 1890 a loose but influential coalition of politically and culturally conservative forces had been profoundly disturbed about the direction being taken by modern art, and by the theater in particular. Largely in response to their pressure and complaints, state and local authorities had been exercising—or attempting to exercise—an increasingly stringent censorship over German literary life, especially over the theater, and the 1890s witnessed the empire's most dramatic and controversial confrontations between writers and the state. The fight over the Lex Heinze that ended in 1900 was a showdown between antimodern cultural conservatives and an unusually diverse and broad-based coalition of forces united in opposition to the designs of the cultural Right, albeit for different reasons. That coalition included artists and intellectuals who enthusiastically supported artistic modernism, but also more moderate members of the educated middle class as well as Social Democrats who, while perhaps unsympathetic toward artistic modernism, nevertheless feared a victory for the Right would also endanger more traditional, classic art and literature. These groups, in turn, were joined by some conservative authorities in states like Bavaria who wanted to preserve states' rights against further centralization. The unprecedented political cooperation over this issue between middle-class liberals and the hitherto isolated Social Democrats—a partnership in which the Socialists often played a leading role and were accepted on more-or-less equal terms—also opened up new political possibilities for the future and helped further integrate Social Democrats into the imperial political system. Finally, the dramatic mobilization and politicization of the German artistic and intellectual community over the Lex Heinze was itself a significant new development and signaled a shift in the balance of cultural power. Whereas the political power of the cultural Right and state intervention against modernist literature had been in the ascendant before 1900, after that date both began to recede. To be sure, liberals failed to abolish theater censorship and state intervention into literary life continued after 1900, but censors now intervened in fewer areas, on a more modest scale, and with less effectiveness than in the 1890s. This softening of state opposition to modernist culture corresponded to what some have argued was a general “civilizing of power relationships” throughout the empire after 1900: the authorities, more concerned about avoiding criticism and scandal, used their powers more cautiously and relations between the police and citizenry became less tense.⁶³

      Their successful campaign to defeat the Right's efforts to bring dramatic art under tighter censorship again emboldened the Left, which immediately launched a counter campaign to free theaters completely from the burdens of the law. Having failed in their earlier judicial challenges to local theater censorship ordinances, after 1900 the coalition of liberal intellectuals, the Progressive Party, and Social Democrats that emerged during the Lex Heinze controversy adopted a new strategy to eliminate theater censorship and licensing by means of nationwide legislation.

      Rather than disbanding after defeating the Lex Heinze in the spring of 1900, the Goethe Leagues redoubled their efforts to defend the nation against what one prominent league spokesman called any “muzzling or subjugation of spiritual and intellectual life.” Another leader compared the movement to a national guard that takes up its weapons whenever needed to defend the borders of free artistic creativity.⁶⁴ Having beaten back the most immediate threat to freedom of art and learning, leaders of the Goethe Leagues pledged themselves to keep watch against any new attacks on intellectual freedom: “Our task is also to exercise a sharp, eternal, ever-ready vigilance against the silent and not-so-silent work of the Reaction, to train the German nation to exercise this vigilance for itself, and to educate the nation about the meaning and incalculable importance of a free national culture, of an independent scholarship and art.”⁶⁵ When representatives of local Goethe Leagues met in November at a national conference in Weimar, they approved a resolution condemning censorship of theatrical performances by local authorities and demanding its abolition everywhere in Germany. German dramatic art, they declared, was an expression and manifestation of the German national spirit and it was time to treat it as a national, not local matter. The existing uneven patchwork system of local theater censorship contravened a truly national German culture, the resolution continued: it placed in the hands of local authorities, whose decisions frequently contradicted each other, important dramatic and artistic questions that should really be decided on a nationwide basis by the German people itself. The Union of German Goethe Leagues, condemning theater censorship as an antiquated and “unworthy tutelage [for] the German nation,” announced it would petition the Reichstag to abolish censorship by means of a national law and called upon “all friends of a free German art” for support.⁶⁶

      In November 1900 the Progressive Party presented the Goethe League petition to the Reichstag and two months later introduced a motion to abolish all local theater censorship by amending the Commercial Code. To the paragraphs of the code that required the licensing of all theater and music hall operators, Progressives proposed adding a clause clearly stating that no prior approval is necessary to stage an individual dramatic work in a legitimate theater or to hold declamatory, musical, pantomimic, or plastic performances on the popular stage.⁶⁷

      In Reichstag debates early the next February, Progressives condemned the confusing, haphazard hodgepodge of local censorship ordinances that were both unconstitutional (in Prussia) and violated the spirit of the nation's Commercial Code, which established freedom of occupation. They cited numerous instances where local police censors had recently issued irrational, arbitrary, and contradictory decisions (works banned in one locale but not others, important works by respected authors that should not have been forbidden at all but were, etc.), and argued if Germany were to have a truly national, rather than a local, particularistic literature, then the issue of prior theater censorship must be settled on a uniform, national basis. “Are we not one people, with one language and one literature?” a Progressive speaker asked. Yet from the illogical system of local censorship “one would almost conclude that we don't even have a local state literature, but rather simply a city literature! This is an abomination!” Theater censorship, Progressives maintained, was an area where the Reichstag and federal government must—and legally did—have ultimate jurisdiction. They called upon the Reichstag to undertake the difficult but necessary task of “finally looking into the Augean stables of particularistic police law—to examine it closely in regard to its legal compatibility vis-à-vis the provisions of the imperial constitution and the Imperial Commercial Code.” If one wanted a true state of law (Rechtsstaat) rather than an arbitrary police state, the Reichstag had