Kara Ritzheimer's carefully researched book is a refreshing contribution to the body of historical research that stresses the continuities between the Kaiserreich, the Weimar Republic, and the Third Reich. The author examines the campaign against “trashy” and “filthy” publications (Schund- und Schmutzschriften) and against early cinema to show how legislators reconciled censorship with freedom of expression and the press. If censorship had been possible within the Kaiserreich's Rechtsstaat, in which individual and liberal rights were supposed to be protected, it became central to Weimar's Sozialstaat. The Weimar constitution's stated commitment to social welfare meant that contemporaries believed that individual rights and freedoms could be curtailed if this served a larger purpose, namely, the protection of youth. Ritzheimer argues that the rhetoric that anti-trash campaigners developed before and during World War I encouraged public and political support for censorship precisely because it focused on youth protection and the maintenance of traditional gender norms. The work of these activists (teachers, morality campaigners, social reformers, and pastors, as well as local and state politicians) made censorship “respectable.” Over two decades, Ritzheimer argues, Germans grew accustomed to censorship, which made the Nazi attack on liberal rights seem like a natural consequence of these previous campaigns.

The anti-trash movement grew in the context of an explosion of mass culture and popular entertainments fostered by technological innovation and the commercialization of culture at the turn of the twentieth century. Mass culture took the form of spectacles, such as Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows, which brought the American frontier experience to Germans; of imported and homegrown detective stories and westerns; and of films that celebrated crime and sex. The author's close examination of the publications and films included in the vague categories of trash and filth renders these terms concrete and prepares the reader for understanding better the target of these campaigns.

Germans became acquainted with mass culture not in large urban centers, but in the small towns and villages where most of them lived at the time. That this encounter happened in the “heartland” is important because the anti-trash campaign started there. Censorship was implemented first at the municipal and state levels, where legislators relied on creative solutions, using the commercial code or the 1874 Press Law, to regulate the distribution, sale, and consumption of supposedly harmful publications. Campaigners disliked the fact that, in their view, these stories and films did not represent German “culture,” but were instead cheap commodities with no aesthetic or pedagogical value. This argument did not suffice to justify censorship at the national level, though. The campaign became effective on the national stage only once these products began to be described not only as worthless but also as dangerous for young people.

The activists’ message was “standardized” around the rhetoric of youth endangerment in the years before World War I. Young people were the fastest growing demographic group and were thought to be negatively influenced by mass culture. The war justified tighter control of the media and paved the way for the laws that followed during the Weimar Republic. Cheap and salacious stories depicting life on both the war and home fronts undermined the “gravitas of the war” (132), critics claimed, and brutalized audiences. Youth, ever more vulnerable, occupied a symbolic place and came to represent the possibility of survival and regeneration, as well as the possibility of Germany's demise. After the war, protection of youth justified the need for censorship in a democratic and constitutional state that guaranteed liberal rights. Censorship was reframed “as a fulfillment of the federal government's expanded and gendered social welfare obligations” (190), which, in addition to protecting youth, included securing traditional gender norms.

The author focuses on two key pieces of Weimar legislation: the 1920 National Film Motion Picture Law and the 1926 Publications Law. Ritzheimer examines the legislative debates surrounding these laws, as well as the difficulties and failures of their enforcement. She makes a compelling claim about the significance of censorship for the tensions between federalism and regionalism: the regulation of culture had traditionally been the domain of local and regional authorities that tailored laws to their particular religious, cultural, and political dynamics. These differences highlight Germany's “multiple and centrifugal moralities” (221). By contrast, these two federal laws undermined regional identity by imposing a national standard on what counted as an acceptable, and hence moral, cultural product. The rhetoric surrounding youth protection against trash, Ritzheimer contends, may have fostered a shared national identity beyond political, regional, religious, and class differences. Nevertheless, sharing a standardized language about youth's vulnerability did not lead to “a nationally unifying morality” (221). This division, the author stresses, undermined the republic's stability, and to make this case, Ritzheimer examines rich archival material from Baden. People in this state may have had a lower level of tolerance for mass culture than people in Berlin did, but German national identity was not as fragmented as she implies.

Scholars argue that celebrations and symbols encouraged a sense of national belonging during this period. But the lack of a “unifying morality” did not lead to Weimar's downfall. Democracies are not made of a unifying morality but of competing moralities, diverse identities, and an ability to find common ground despite such differences. Ritzheimer states that the republic's “adoption of a constitution that legalized censorship immediately placed into question its valid claims to being a liberal democracy” (272). Despite Ritzheimer's pessimism, the law's moderate reach shows that the democratic process worked to some degree.

The book ends with an epilogue that draws lines of continuity into the Third Reich and the Federal Republic. Ritzheimer stresses that the two pre-1933 laws mentioned earlier “paved a rhetorical path for Nazi laws” and “made censorship both respectable and familiar” (284). The fact that similar laws continue to exist today, also outside of Germany, demonstrates that concerns about youth protection remain effective in justifying illiberal measures and that such rhetoric is common to all liberal democracies. The book provides a new perspective on the issues of censorship and historical continuities, and is a superb contribution to the historiography of the intersections between popular culture, the law, and politics during this period.