What is the difference between freedom of opinion and artistic freedom? And what happens when the two are brought into conflict? This is the subject of a philosophically intriguing and rigorously argued book by Peter Jelavich. Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, the author brings a wealth of historical knowledge to this area (his book on radio and film during the Weimar Republic casts a vivid light on the burgeoning media age. See Jelavich, Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film and the Death of the Weimar Republic: University of California Press, 2006) and direct experience, in recent years, of the delicate instruments of censorship. The result is a confident command of his historical material and an articulate handle on complex legal and moral debates that would leave a more timorous historian tongue-tied.

The introduction provides important background on how the distinction became embedded in German law. In a revision of sorts to the famous Historikerstreit over the nation’s historically problematic relationship to democracy, Jelavich can assert that there is indeed a Sonderweg [special path] in respect to cultural censorship (On the intense intellectual debates of the 1980s, see for instance, Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, “The Pre-history of the Holocaust? The Sonderweg and Historikerstreit Debates and the Abject Colonial Past,” Central European History, 2008). This goes back to the late eighteenth century and Friedrich Schiller’s treatise of 1795, “On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters,” in which art was required to stand in for the political freedoms that were denied the citizens of a patchwork of disparate states still living under semi-feudal laws. What the author describes as an “ideology” was born of an implicit pact between citizen and ruler—where the Kantian idea of a “disinterested” art was kept firmly apart from politics. Officially inscribed in the Weimar Constitution of 1919, that pact was effectively bulldozed by the propaganda machine of Nazi ideology, before being reinstated at the founding of the Bundesrepublik. As Jelavich guides us through a series of historical flashpoints, he observes numerous conflicts of interest and ever-growing loopholes, until the point, around the time of German reunification after 1989, where the landscape of what constitutes art has no borders to speak of, and laws based on antiquated ideas of personal and public morality are plainly no longer fit for purpose. However, it does not end there, as his closing case studies reveal. Throughout, we are reminded of art historian Hans Belting’s critical enquiry into Germany's “troublesome relationship” with art (see Belting, The Germans and Their Art: a Troublesome Relationship, 1998).

The legal debates raised in this book turn on the conflict between rights to freedom of expression—with the special provision for art—and elements of the criminal code and its protection of the individual and society. In the Wilhelmine era (1871–1918), the relevant sections concerned blasphemy, indecency, insult to the crown and the incitement of class conflict. Among test cases in the 1890s, Jelavich probes the moral and social arguments with clear-sighted analysis of the forces for conservatism and for change (and an ironic eye on the ability of judges to sniff out instances of indecency and quote them with indecent alacrity). Technological advances played their part: photographic reproductions of academic nudes, which caused no issue in the hallowed spaces of the museum, gave rise in 1900 to heated parliamentary debates over the borders between art and “smut.” If such debates highlighted the inevitable clash of eras, they also provided—equally inevitably—an outing for anti-Semitic diatribes against the power of a “Jewish-liberal” press.

A year after the twelve-year ban on the Social Democratic party was lifted in 1890, the authorities weighed in on the famous case of Gerhart Hauptmann’s play The Weavers. Based on the Silesian revolt of 1844, the rousing action and the vernacular language of the play were viewed by the Berlin theatre censor not in terms of dramatic art but as “propaganda” for the working classes. After Hauptmann toned down both content and language, the persistent fear of social disruption led to a thoroughly skewed solution, whereby the play was permitted for bourgeois audiences (first performed in September 1894 at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, where ticket prices were high and there were no performances on a Sunday, the one day most workers had free) but banned for theatres catering to the proletariat.

The founding of the Weimar Republic saw both an explosion of artistic expression in increasingly provocative directions and the enshrinement of artistic freedom in the new constitution of July 1919. But was society ready for such freedom? Film makes a central case in point. Ostensibly, there was no pre-censorship until the first gay film, Anders als die Anderen, in which the prominent campaigner Magnus Hirschfeld took a key role. The furor upon its release in May 1919 led to a hastily assembled law which subjected all future films to approval by a central committee. A specious logic in claims regarding the corruption of youth led to the film being banned not only for under-eighteens but across the board (after a manufactured assertion by “medical experts” that sexual maturity begins at age 20!) And, as Jelavich underlines, political positioning in view of upcoming elections meant that left-wing parties, while openly regretting the restrictions on public freedom, nonetheless had to concede to a conservative lobby.

One would expect artists associated with Berlin Dada to come into the line of fire. Examining obscenity charges brought against Otto Dix and two others in 1922, Jelavich singles out two points of particular interest. The first of these is the question of offence caused to the “normal citizen.” Who, in the face of such rapid change of moral and aesthetic standards, could say what “normal” meant? The second concerns the manner in which Dix overturned the morality question not with the claim of artistic freedom but in fact by using the very instrument with which he had been accused: namely, with the claim that his painting (a virulently satirical work entitled Girl Before the Mirror, 1921, destroyed) was in fact designed to expose the corrupt conditions of society. As the author tells us, this “gross irony” did not go unnoticed in the avant-garde press, poised to defend precisely the artistic freedom which Dix neatly sidestepped. Meanwhile, George Grosz was charged with blasphemy for his lithograph Christ with a Gas Mask (in an anti-war portfolio of 1928). Here, further accusations on behalf of the “normal” sensibilities of a Christian majority raised a question which is debated keenly today: whether to limit the right of an individual to take offence? As politics became more divisive, so censorship cases became more contentious. Following the assassination of Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau in 1922, the Reichstag brought in a new law to protect the rights of the Republic. Originally designed to limit right-wing extremism, all too soon it became co-opted against the forces of democracy. This is the background, firstly, to cases against writers with communist sympathies, and again to the censorship of films such as Battleship Potemkin (1926) and All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). In relation to the increasing polarization of art and literature, Jelavich cites the intriguing example of a revolt by left-wing author Alfred Döblin against the very sanctity of art. In short, Döblin insisted, artists and authors who downplayed the political tendency of their work in front of censors were committing acts of “self-castration”; art itself should exercise a right to prosecution alongside all other cases of censorship.

The chapter on the Third Reich is understandably the shortest in this book. Where tyranny rules, the ideology that kept art and politics apart is reversed in favor of the only ideology. In addition to the notorious spectacles of book burning of 1933 and the famous Degenerate Art exhibition first instated in 1937, we are reminded of the manipulative policy (in part to appease international observers) that allowed Jewish musical and theatre organizations to exist separately, yet banned these from performing any of the iconic classical repertoire of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, etc. The Jewish Cultural Organisation [Kulturbund] survived in Berlin until 1941: “now it was no longer a question of censorship. It was the beginning of genocide.” (93)

The reinstatement of laws that came with the founding of the Bundesrepublik brought with it a further redrawing of lines between art and politics. A well-known factor in the visual arts at this juncture is the view of abstract painting as the (unpolitical) domain of the West as opposed to socialist realism as the (political) dogma of the East. Jelavich documents, amongst other examples, the boycott in 1951 of a new film by Nazi collaborator Veit Harlan seeking a clean certificate of conscience [Persilschein] in a new era; and extensive debates on sexual and criminal content across popular and high culture—from lewd comics to Jean Genet and Georg Baselitz—which led to a sea change in accepted norms of public decency and the effective obsolescence of any notion of the “average” citizen. Astonishingly, objections by moralists, church and youth organizations even resulted in renewed book burnings (the last in 1965). The campaign for and against the publication of Klaus Mann’s novel Mephisto exposes further difficulties in coming to terms with the immediate past. First published in Amsterdam in 1936, Mann’s tale of the once left-wing actor who became a darling of the National Socialist stage painted a thinly veiled portrait of Gustaf Gründgens, famous for his role as Mephistopheles in a production of Goethe’s Faust in 1932 and from 1936, General Director of the Prussian State Theatre. When the postwar publishing world would not risk a re-issue of the novel, the author’s artistic rights conflicted with libel claims by the well-known public figure. Mann, who vehemently denied any deliberate parallels, took his own life in 1945. But the process ran on until 1965, by which time the book had long been available in an edition published in the GDR.

Foremost on the radar of German cultural censorship since 1945, the topic of anti-Semitism is the focus of two closing case studies. The first concerns a play by Rainer Werner Fassbinder on property speculation in 1980s Frankfurt. The second recounts Jelavich’s own experience with public sponsorship decisions and political platforms in connection with dokumenta fifteen in Kassel in 2022, curated by an Indonesian collective with artists from across the Global South. Numerous manifestations of anti-Israeli protest, which displayed classic instances of anti-Semitism, led to deep divisions among audiences and a curatorial defense that opened yet another new chapter on questions of censorship. To read of this contemporary example, still being debated in the German parliament (and with implications for all polarizing statements, whether of racial hatred, gender-critical views, or misogyny), is to understand the serious starting point for Jelavich’s historical enquiry. As he underlines the problematic legacy of that Sonderweg that sets artistic freedom over other forms of expression, the author stands up for activist art, but makes a plea for “a scenario in which art can forge communities rather than to destroy them” (166).

The premise for and detail of this book are concentrated in a specifically German sphere; however, there is no question of the global relevance of the moral debates under scrutiny. The uninitiated reader will need to brace themselves for the unavoidable legalese; however, anyone familiar with the cultural politics of the Weimar Republic will be well versed in article numbers, clauses and symbols thereof. Cultural historians, while perhaps regretting a lack of illustrations, will find many prominent figures in the spotlight, if also disappointed by the absence of women (by no means surprising, given that during the period of study their art simply was not deemed important enough to cause public scandal). Should an English translation be forthcoming, it would meet with much interest from anyone engaged, whether directly or indirectly, in issues of censorship and the borders between a universal freedom of speech and the specific domain of art—however that is to be defined.