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Fragile Minds and Vulnerable Souls: The Matter of Obscenity in Nineteenth-Century Germany . By Sarah L. Leonard. Material Texts. Edited by Roger Chartier et al.Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Pp. viii+258. $55.00 (cloth); $55.00 (e-book).

2017; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 89; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/690176

1537-5358

Michael Hau,

European history and politics

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewsFragile Minds and Vulnerable Souls: The Matter of Obscenity in Nineteenth-Century Germany. By Sarah L. Leonard. Material Texts. Edited by Roger Chartier et al.Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Pp. viii+258. $55.00 (cloth); $55.00 (e-book).Michael HauMichael HauMonash University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn the nineteenth century, censors, the police, and courts scrutinized the reading materials and habits of Germans. The expansion of print culture and book markets was of great concern to political authorities, who worried about the political and social consequences if people were exposed to the wrong kinds of readings. In her fine cultural history, Sarah Leonard analyzes shifting discourses about what made texts and visual materials obscene in different social contexts. As she explains, the perception of the obscene was embedded in contemporary notions about the governance of reason, emotions, and the sexual. In liberal thought such understandings were tied to the bourgeois concept of Bildung, a term that referred to ideas of moral development and aesthetic cultivation of the self as well as formal education. Even though liberals called for an end to government censorship and defended the freedom of the press, they were still worried about what people, or rather certain kinds of people, read. They believed that women and lower-class people were more vulnerable to obscene texts than the mature male bourgeois who had cultivated his reason and judgment. While reading was recommended as a wholesome leisure activity for bourgeois males because it helped restore their energy and productivity, women were suspected to succumb more easily to the temptations of leisure.The same obscene text could have different effects on different readers. In the hands of the respectable bourgeois, an expensive edition of Goethe’s memoirs, for example, was not judged as indecent, despite all obscenities, because the central goal of the book was not sexual arousal. But a cheap edition of the same work made available to lower-class readers through lending libraries was a different matter altogether, as the jurist Karl Binding explained in 1882: “There is little doubt that Goethe’s Memoirs … in a cheap popular edition, must be seen as the distribution of obscene texts” (201).Distinctions between the obscene and nonobscene depended on the historical context. They were not always based on a work’s sexual content. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, commentators like the Catholic theologian Ignatz von Wessenberg were concerned about superstitious fantasies and imaginations as a source of people’s mental derangement. Wessenberg did not denounce frank representations of sex, which in his view could even restore mental health and vigor. He worried about the subjectivity and exploration of human emotions that characterized the Romantic cult of sensibility. Both romanticism and pietist religious enthusiasm (Schwärmerei) were suspected to unbalance people’s souls. Wessenberg denounced Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther because it turned love into an “an enraptured madness” (51) fostering mental disorder and suicide. What made such a text obszön was thus not sexual content or the depiction of moral transgressions but the danger it posed to excitable and gullible souls. Such judgments were shaped by the experience of the political emotionalism fostered by the French Revolution and the religious fanaticism of pietism. Both overwhelmed people with their enthusiasm and emotions and separated them from reason and authority. Pietists who believed in direct revelations of the words of God bypassed the authority of ministers and detached themselves from reason and reality.In the second half of the nineteenth century, the discourse on the obscene shifted toward the sexual. Liberals who advocated the freedom of the press still worried about the wrong texts in the wrong hands. But during this period, “obscene” publications were separated from other press crimes and became increasingly associated with sexual transgressions. This made it possible “to open the liberal public sphere to political expression while maintaining tight restrictions on morally dangerous texts, images, and acts” (132).Leonard’s book has many innovative aspects. She analyzes the changing dynamics of the book trade, the emergence of less respectable publishers and lending libraries as cheap and effective avenues for the circulation of obscene materials. While the main focus of the book is on the state of Prussia, she also looks at other states that played a key role in the production and distribution of obscene texts. The porous borders between German states could not be effectively policed. This facilitated the entrepreneurial success of new publishers in Saxony and the liberal states of Baden and Württemberg. The city of Stuttgart, for example, which these days is not exactly known as a mecca for the transgressive, became a conduit for the translation and distribution of morally suspect French texts that caused alarm among Prussian authorities.The one regret I have about this book is that the author does not extend her story to the cultural mass market of the Wilhelmine period. It would have been quite fruitful to include an analysis of discourses on visual materials that became more readily available around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Some of the concerns, which she has so aptly analyzed for the earlier period, were probably rearticulated in interesting ways after 1900. After all, it certainly made a difference whether erotic photography was found in expensive and lavishly illustrated hardback editions aimed at the art connoisseur and Bildungsbürger or whether the same or similar images were sold as single photographs or postcards to a mass audience. To be sure, she briefly discusses the afterlife of the obscene as it was expressed in the “Schund und Schmutz” controversy during the Weimar period and in similar debates after 1945. But a more sustained analysis of the final decades before World War I would have given the reader a more rounded picture of these issues as they played out in the long nineteenth century. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 89, Number 1March 2017 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/690176 Views: 258Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.