Since 1991 the Siebenpfeiffer Foundation has published first-rate anthologies on significant themes in social, legal, and political history of the Vormärz period. This volume is no exception: the reappraisal of censorship is a pressing question. Although older paradigms of repressive government and political retardation continue to emphasize the “Macht der Zensur” to frame master narratives of post-Napoleonic Germany, newer work on the public sphere has qualified and repositioned state censorship when surveying the terrain of political culture. The essay collections of Robert J. Goldstein (1989, 2009), John A. McCarthy and Werner von der Ohe (1995), R. C. Post (1995), Beate Müller (2004), and, more recently, the two anthologies edited by Bernd Kortländer and Enno Stahl (2011) and Christine Haug et al. (2011) mark advances in recalibrating the impact of censorship and self-censorship on modern Germany. But the collection under review is particularly significant, for its pan-European framework is designed to reframe German practices. In this regard, the volume bristles with programmatic energy and illuminates the pressing need for future work.

The anthology has the dual purpose of surveying censorship regimes in continental Europe while drilling down and investigating German procedures in the Napoleonic, Restoration, and Vormärz periods. Discussions of state censorship in France, Spain, Italy, Russia, and Luxemburg-Holland set broad parameters to reassess the control of information in Bavaria, Saxony, Prussia, Austria, Westphalia, and the Hanseatic cities. Although most of the authors refrain from explicit comparative perspective, Gabriele Clemens's indispensable introduction cogently unifies the essays' findings, establishing the ubiquity of censorship among European governments and calling attention to their similarities. Her expansive historiographical review is well worth consulting.

The chapters on censorship outside of Germany present a wide range of regulatory operations. Werner Daum's chapter on Restoration Italy and Neapolitan censorship and Pierre Horn's study of France underscore the willingness of liberal constitutional monarchies to impose censorship. During the brief constitutional revolution in southern Italy in 1820–1821, which deposed the restored Bourbon monarchy of 1815 and provoked Austrian intervention in 1821, the moderate liberal government retained a censorship system in spite of proclaimed laws that stated otherwise. Daum particularly emphasizes the offensive press politics of the Neapolitan regime, which strove to manage public discussion, a monopolistic tendency that the populace contested. In addition, the essay's survey of censorship in Italy underscores the enduring presence of the ancien régime—an apt observation with broader application. Horn's discussion of French censorship is similarly instructive. After brief periods of press freedom in the French Revolution, subsequent governments routinely censored the press. The Serre Laws of 1819 and the September laws of 1835 imposed high start-up costs, steep deposits, and stiff prison sentences for recalcitrant publishers, all of which deterred voices outside the establishment. The July Monarchy reintroduced precensorship procedures, and mere criticism of monarchy was interpreted as treason. Regardless of the enormous demand for political print and the spirited partisan style for which French journalism is known, the September laws muzzled the oppositional press: “editors and newspapers encountered a high rate of prison sentences and monetary fines until the outbreak of the February Revolution in 1848” (35). In another instance of censorship serving a western constitutional monarchy, Norbert Franz and Josiane Weber's essay notes the alacrity with which William I of the United Netherlands confiscated liberal-radical print matter in his Luxembourg territories after 1830. Although censorship in Luxembourg and the German Confederation ran on parallel tracks, the initiative in Luxembourg was Dutch, not German. Jens Späth's essay on Spanish censorship renders intelligible a particularly complex story fraught with extreme political divisions. After promulgating the Cadiz constitution of 1812, a document that inspired liberal-democratic activity in two hemispheres, Spanish liberals would fall in 1814, rise again in 1820–1823, yet lose their hold on the monarchy for another decade. In the same period, King Ferdinand VII reinstituted the Inquisition (1814–1834), thus setting into motion subsequent pendulum swings of liberalism and conservatism. Whereas most constitutional states worked progressively toward greater press freedoms, Späth notes, Spain achieved its apogee in 1812, thereafter negotiating compromises, none of which questioned the dominance of Catholicism. Finally, Jan Kusber's astute essay on the Russian Empire both confirms and modifies received knowledge. It acknowledges the rollback following the Decembrist uprising in 1825 as well as Nicholas I's extreme measures between 1848 and 1855, yet the essay argues that characterizing Russian censorship as a “totalitarian system,” as was the wont of contemporary critics and subsequent historians, is inaccurate. Whether deliberately exempted, as with Pushkin, or because of rampant oversight, the government censored haphazardly. Consequently, Kusber argues, “the public sphere transformed society in the first half of the nineteenth century” (124).

The work on German-speaking Central Europe is no less illuminating. Helge Buttkereit's essay on Leipzig during the Rhenish Confederation and Claudie Paye's work on the Kingdom of Westphalia offer complementary portraits of Napoleonic censorship. Focusing on Germany's leading print center, Buttkereit portrays the tolerance of such liberal censors as August Wilhelm Wench, a history professor who bent the rules, as well as the Kantian editor Johann Adam Bergk, who achieved a fair degree of latitude for his Europäischer Aufseher. Bergk negotiated the system with savvy, which included knowing the art of self-censorship. “Much can only be half said,” he wrote, “some only darkly hinted at, and still other material entirely passed over in silence” (53). Paye's essay centers on the politics of bilingualism, a neglected issue for this subject and period. Many French officials were not up to the task of vetting German print, which led to both arbitrary strictness and egregious lapses. By illustrating the differences in the French and German versions of the Moniteur, Paye explores a telling moment in cultural transfer. For readers versed in both languages, she argues, the practice of reading through and around this official newspaper contributed to the further politicization of German society (70). Censorship, she notes further, also promoted the adaptation of deceptive media forms; pamphlets posed as newsprint, denunciations as private letters, and proclamations as Russian flysheets (74). Notwithstanding the success of such ruses, the essays confirm the harshness of Napoleonic censorship.

If conventional interpretations of Vormärz censorship stress the suppression of political information, the collection's five essays on the German Vormärz all modify this viewpoint in some way. Reiner Marx's essay on Heinrich Heine reviews a classic case of censorship, arguing that Heine was less a victim than a brilliant mind who deployed an “aesthetics of censorship” to his decisive advantage. The essay thus poses the question whether repressive measures can ever restrain the critical idiom of irony. Marx's essay further questions whether the Karlsbad Decrees and the ban on Young Germany achieved its intended effect of tamping down political discussion and immoral ideas; on the contrary, the laws accelerated the politicization of all print culture. Hannelore Putz's essay on Bavaria nicely illustrates how press politics affected mid-sized German states and their interest in asserting their sovereignty against Confederal fiats; consequently, they did not obediently line up behind Austria and Prussia's censorship policies. The Bavarian state strove to retain complete control of its press laws and successfully loosened the reins on political reportage in the 1820s. In 1831, led by Palatinate delegates, the parliament outran the government and defeated a censorship ordinance, which Putz cites as a signal moment in spurring constitutional politics in Bavaria. Although Bavaria acquiesced in the Six Articles of 1832, Putz's analysis of Bavaria's internal political dynamics throws light on how and why so many Zensurlücken arose in Confederal Germany. In this same vein, Michael Hundt's excellent essay on the relationship of Hamburg and Bremen (and, nominally, Lübeck) to Confederal censorship policy clarifies well the contradictory positions of the Hanseatic republics. On the one hand, patrician senators censored local criticism that challenged their elite oligarchies in an age of expanding political rights. Yet, on the other, the cities exhibited a “decisive liberalism” when permitting their newspapers to express a wide range of critical opinion against German and European states. Not afraid to criticize Confederal powers, Hamburg and Bremen's conduits of transnational political communication undermined the political status quo.

Finally, Bärbel Holtz and Thomas Olechowski respectively examine censorship in Prussia and Austria. Olechowski's essay confirms and revises standard viewpoints on Austria. The Habsburg state between 1795 and 1810, he avers, introduced one of the strictest censorship regimes in Europe, thus eclipsing any significance of the Karlsbad Decrees in Austria. He nonetheless softens this position by portraying Austrian statesmen as divided and censors as frequently enlightened and moderate. Further, as Clemens notes in the introduction, Austrian censorship provided so many exemptions that the educated classes gained access to virtually all reading material (13). Austria's hegemony depended on Prussian cooperation, which reached a brittle fragility in 1842, when Prussia exempted works over 320 pages (twenty signatures) from prepublication scrutiny. Ultimately, Olechowski leaves the reader more with tantalizing impressions than with firm conclusions, although he tellingly points to a growing state leniency toward opinion formation in the 1840s.

Holtz's essay on Prussia is a focused tour de force. She argues that Prussia in the Restoration and Vormärz periods remained severely limited in carrying out its claim to inspect all print before publication. In spite of its formidable reputation, Prussia's censorship administration remained understaffed, underfinanced, and chronically prone to Vollzugsdefizit: a patent inability to execute its duties. At the central level, the Ober-Censur-Collegium (1819–1843) lacked executive authority, its own office, its own budget, and even a job description (108). This commission convened infrequently in the 1820s, reviewing cases for bans and confiscations with growing inefficiency. This deplorable condition led to the creation of the Ober-Censur-Gericht in 1843, which accelerated decisions on bans and coordinated activity at local, regional, and central levels. Yet the system remained hampered by its preference for individual judgment over normative guidelines, resulting not only in widespread inconsistency among local censors to vet text but also temporizing while they often waited months for instructions from Berlin. In brief, the chronic “disorientation and helplessness” of censors was “pre-programmed” (114). Not surprisingly, many censors didn't like their job, and their resignations posed problems for district and county governors to find replacements. Seen from this perspective, the Prussian state's initiative to jettison prepublication censorship in 1845 is entirely logical. Holtz's extensive and persuasive evidence of Prussia's inability to censor consistently and carefully is of great consequence and awaits a fuller interpretive framework. To be sure, this portrayal of a ramshackle apparatus differs strikingly with conventional perceptions. Resolving this conundrum should prove productive both empirically and theoretically.

These thumbnail sketches obviously can't do justice to the essays' analytical depth and their specific historical contexts, but general themes and research desiderata emerge from these essays. For one, these juxtaposed analyses readjust our understanding of censorship in Central Europe, suggesting that the differences among Europe's various political zones are more in degree than in kind. Similarly, in view of the essays' chronological arc, the volume implicitly advocates a greater flexibility in tracing the continuities and ruptures of censorship regimes from the last decades of absolutism to the 1850s, an era of post-publication news management. The volume furthermore highlights the pressing need for more information about censors. Whether in Spain, Russia, Austria, Italy, or Germany, many censors emerge as intelligent and sympathetic to enlightened principles of liberalism. Aloys Blumauer is for Olechowski emblematic in his multiple roles as author, censor, and freemason (142). Jakob Grimm, Johann Peter Hebel, and a passel of professors served as censors in German states, too. Holtz informs us that Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff, the poet and novelist, also applied for the position in Prussia. To be sure, Wolfram Siemann and Ulrich Eisenhardt cautioned scholars long ago against embracing the satiric image of censors as dimwits and martinets, but this volume confirms the point on a pan-European level. Indeed, both the tensions and the satisfactions that arose from censors' dual roles as gatekeepers of state interests and as participants of bourgeois civil society warrant further inquiry. That bourgeois professors, pastors, doctors, and writers worked with governments to make censorship operable opens up a range of questions about the shades of complicity that reconciled a liberal social order with state control throughout Europe. Simply put, the state-society binary is too simplistic a schema to understand the intricate machinery of cultural production in the early nineteenth century. Adding to this complexity is the impact of market forces on mercantilist philosophies of censorship. Virtually all of the national experiences failed to stem the demand for information, and in this respect one wishes for a companion volume on the transnational economies, knowledge transfers, and forces of consumption that undermined the aims of censorship.

In sum, this fine collection of essays opens up much conceptual space for future research. By embedding German censorship regimes in a larger multifaceted European phenomenon, the volume challenges others scholars to conjoin the German Vormärz with the larger communicative networks of Western and Eastern Europe. Handsomely produced and carefully edited, this volume deserves an enduring resonance in the interdisciplinary fields of censorship and political communication.