Literary censorship in Austria was the Habsburgs’ attempt to prevent the exposure of their subjects to corrupting or degrading ideas produced by literati at home or abroad. Originally set up under Empress Maria Theresa, there was a council of seven official censors, mostly tenured university faculty members with abilities in multiple languages and expertise in a variety of subject fields. They were empowered to recommend whether the handwritten prepublication manuscripts of books and plays submitted to them should be approved with changes, made available only to certain high officials, nobles, or the highly educated, or prohibited from publication. Copies of books and plays imported from abroad also were held up until they were approved by the censors. Norbert Bachleitner's book is not about censorship of letters, pamphlets, or public speech—all the domain of the Austrian police—but about domestic and foreign literature that was perceived as able to corrupt literate Habsburg subjects. The topic is specialized and will attract those interested in the supposed and/or real impact of belle lettres on a continually expanding reading public between 1750 and 1848.

Norbert Bachleitner, the author of this volume, is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Vienna and his background, interests, and professional connections make for both the strengths and weaknesses of the book. Its greatest contribution is to introduce a wider scholarly audience to a digital source, “Verdängt, verpönt—vergessen? Eine Datenbank zur Erfassssung der in Österreich zwischen 1750 und 1848 verbotenen Bücher” (http://univie.ac.at/zensur), that Bachleitner, Daniel Syrovy, and their colleagues at the University of Vienna created. Bachleitner has used this digital source as the basis for a “literary-sociological” portrait of Austrian censorship, its historical background, and its impacts (13). The result, another strength of the book, is that Bachleitner has the opportunity to present and analyze the detailed plots of major literary works in German, French, and English that appeared on the lists of censored works.

To understand both the richness and the complexity of Bachleitner's volume one must understand its structure. That structure is didactic, complex, and a bit repetitive. He first introduces his readers to considerations of theories regarding censorship: “old” and “new” (official and self-imposed). Then he describes the taxing tasks of the censors and lists the censored works of what he considers two contrasting periods, 1751–91 and 1792–1848. Bachleitner then pauses to lead the reader on a side tour into censorship in Bohemia and the Italian-speaking parts of the Habsburg monarchy. This section of the volume contains essays by his colleagues, Daniel Syrovy, Michael Wögenabuer, and Petr Píša. The geographical detour into the provinces helps us to remember that the plans and hopes of central administrators are rarely realized at a distance.

Bachleitner follows this section with his own highly insightful and entertaining section concerning the nature and difficulty of censorship of productions for the Viennese theater. With audiences highly attentive to nuance and innuendo, not only the words of the playwrights but also the stage presence and facial expressions of the individual actors required attention and supervision. The largest part of the volume is entitled “Fallstudien.” In this section, Bachleitner impressively analyzes specifically censored literary works. Unfortunately, he is unable to cite censors’ specific comments. Making up in part for this lack of evidence, however, he does the next best thing: he uses the appendices of the volume to present examples of censorship protocols, decrees, and advice to censors. Sadly the documents presented represent official attitudes between about 1760 and 1810, leaving the 1815–48 without examples.

The result is that Bachleitner's characterization of the censorship periods between 1751 and 1791 as “Im Dienst der Aufklärung” and between 1792 and 1848 as “Die Zensur als Instrument der Repression” is more persuasive for the earlier period than for the later one. Certainly, in neither period were literary assaults tolerated directly or indirectly upon royalty, nobility, or the Catholic Church. But as the author admits, the number of publications proliferated during the post-Napoleonic period to feed the interests of an increasingly educated and politically aware public. This alone necessitated quantifiably higher censorship initiatives, though the percentage of approved works—both foreign and domestic—rose. Bachleitner tries to explain this by suggesting the success of Austrian government–induced self-censorship by Austrian authors and the sheer overwhelming avalanche of publications from abroad (160–63). His reasoning here is more intuitive than document based. Bachleitner does admit that the nineteenth-century opinion spread by Liberals regarding the Austrian government's alleged blind-reactionary obscuranticism has been undermined recently by Wolfram Siemann's work (Metternich. Stratege und Visionär. Eine Biographie [Munich, 2016]) that asserts that the literary and political rhetoric of the era led to real acts of violence that were not only imagined (127). Bachleitner notes also that Siemann portrays Prince Clemens von Metternich, author of the so-called Metternich System, not as a narrow-minded reactionary but as a reformer (128). Ouch! Bachleitner is still convinced by the nineteenth-century Liberal perspective of Metternichian obscuranticism but gives a nod to recent historical scholarship that runs counter to his interpretation.

Whatever the readers’ historiographical views, they will be mightily impressed by the painstaking collection and presentation of censorship data by the author and his colleagues. Likewise, their careful research into numerous archives and booksellers’ catalogs makes this volume a notable contribution to scholarship. One telling insight that a reader can carry from the book comes from Bachleitner's introduction: he notes that censorship is founded upon the belief that literary communication functions perfectly; the reader is presumed to understand the texts as the authors intended. But if that is really true, Bachleitner notes, censors must always be left with the feeling that they have missed hidden meanings and illusions (40). What an empathetic eye for the sad world of censors and their employers!