While censorship touched upon the careers of every German writer in the nineteenth century, a few cases stood out to contemporaries, defining their era. If the Demagogenverfolgung stamped the early 1820s and the prohibition of Young Germany the 1830s, the assault on left-wing or “Young” Hegelianism in 1842–43 was the major censorship case of the decade. Banning the Deutsche Jahrbücher, Rheinische Zeitung, and Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung was part of a significant, coordinated effort to undermine a small but influential faction of radical social critics. This wave of intellectual persecution radicalized the left, sowing the seeds for Marx's thoroughgoing assault on the foundations of European state and society. Understanding these cases in the context of a broader process of the transformation of censorship practices in modern Germany, however, remains an incomplete project for historians.
Consequently, this essay analyzes the most significant event of the crackdown on left-wing Hegelianism in the early 1840s, the prohibition of the Deutsche Jahrbücher, as a result of pressure from Prussian and Saxon authorities. Edited by Arnold Ruge, the Hallische Jahrbücher (after 1841, Deutsche Jahrbücher) provided a forum for philosophical and religious critique, reportage on German universities, and even new literary works.Footnote 1 With his collaborator Theodor Echtermeyer, Ruge promoted the journal both as a leading organ of progressive opinion and as a kind of general-purpose scholarly journal. The relationship of the journal's creators and its censors offered opportunities for cooperation as well as occasions for conflict. Where all too often studies of censorship have portrayed censors as a monolithic bloc of reactionaries, investigating the history of the Hallische Jahrbücher reveals complicity between censors and editors as well.
The decision over censoring this politically and intellectually avant-garde publication prompted a larger effort to define and police the boundaries of Wissenschaft. The journal's censors, in accordance with Saxon law, sought to accord the Jahrbücher wide latitude to express heterodox religious and philosophical viewpoints. The journal's status as a “scholarly” publication freed it from many, though not all, of the burdens it would have faced as a “purely political” publication. These designations were no mere genre conventions or disciplinary boundaries, but legal categories that entailed different procedures on the part of Saxon authorities. Therefore, increasing displeasure in the highest reaches of government in Saxony and its powerful northern neighbor Prussia manifested itself as an effort to refute the Jahrbücher's claim to scholarly status and expose its radicalism to harsher censorship standards. As a result, the Saxon state could only maintain its professed commitment to academic and scholarly freedom by a significant narrowing of the definition of legitimate scholarship that served to polarize the intellectual community and further erode the tacit alliance of reform-oriented intellectuals and the state first apparent in the German Enlightenment.
The struggle over censoring the Jahrbücher represented more than a battle over political liberalism, religious critique, or social revolution. In crucial respects, it also represented a contest over the nature and limits of Wissenschaft. Censors advanced their own visions of scholarship, formed not only through experience as censors but also frequently through experience as intellectuals: authors, editors, and teachers. Meanwhile, officials in the Saxon Interior Ministry came to challenge the Jahrbücher's claim to scholarly status so they could overcome legal and practical objections to suppressing it. Thus the relationship of state authorities, censors, and publishers often depended upon negotiations over the nature of scholarship and of the forms of educated publics presumed to be the audience for written works.
Analyzing the censorship and eventual prohibition of the Jahrbücher, I argue, illuminates the priorities and values of the state at a moment of profound social and cultural conflict. Censoring the Jahrbücher forced the Saxon state to confront a contradiction in its own official values between commitment to scholarly freedom and censorial oversight of political speech. It ultimately resolved this conflict in the case of the Jahrbücher by defining Wissenschaft as a politically innocuous form of abstract and objective knowledge formation that eschews concern for effecting change in the world. Any work that, by tone or content, seeks not only to interpret the world, but also to change it loses its scholarly character in this view. Drawing such boundaries around acceptable scholarship aimed to exclude much of the expanding reading public, to diminish the disruptive potential of Wissenschaft to challenge the social order, and, crucially, to exclude perceived dangers so as to make possible the autonomy of university-affiliated scholars.
Censorship also militated against the universalist claims of more independent intellectuals such as Ruge by stressing narrowly bounded disciplinary specialties and a division between politics and scholarship. German states thus promoted the progress of Wissenschaft, while hoping that its effects would remain narrowly contained within the academy.
Because Vormärz censorship was legally based around categories of the “political,” the “scholarly,” and the “popular,” contemporary understandings of these categories influenced the behavior of censorship authorities. Conversely, censors' employment of these categories to guide their choices in what to permit, alter, or cut helped to transform the categories employed. As the censorship of the Jahrbücher makes apparent, scholarly objectivity was given a particularly apolitical, quietist meaning by authorities who hoped to exclude radical ideas from the protected realm of scholarship. German censorship entailed thus not only, as historians have long recognized, a repression of liberal, nationalist, and eventually socialist political movements, but also a redefinition of the state's relationship to scholarship that had begun in the Enlightenment.
Examining the censorship of the Jahrbücher also helps to shed light on a lingering scholarly debate about the significance of Young Hegelian critique. In Harold Mah's view, left-wing Hegelianism was the unhappy consequence of the disparity between Hegel's progressive vision of the state and the reality of Prussian repression. Mah argues that a more or less apolitical movement of theological critique became politicized through the experiences of frustration with political reality. In his view, then, censorship shaped the development of radical Hegelianism by disappointing the Hegelian faith in the state; in its place grew a cynical, self-defeating vision of the impotence of philosophy, conceived as materially determined ideology, in the philosophies of Ruge and Marx.Footnote 2 Warren Breckman, however, has challenged Mah's representation of Young Hegelian radicalism, arguing instead that its religious critique was from the outset an attack upon the underpinnings of Christian civil society, and thus deeply political.Footnote 3 Breckman overturns the standard narrative whereby the Young Hegelians migrated from religious to political concerns, although he affirms the traditional interpretation of progressive radicalization posited by Mah and most other commentators. The investigation of the journal's censorship to follow, however, suggests that the censor's collaboration and negotiation with the journal played some role in its early moderation. Moreover, the increasing intervention of higher state authorities in the journal's censorship ironically contributed to its later radicalization by promoting an all-or-nothing logic for article submissions.
Censorship and Wissenschaft
Had Ruge lived and published the Jahrbücher one hundred years earlier, he would have faced censorship institutions ostensibly similar to those of the Vormärz. In the eighteenth century, the Holy Roman Empire, like Metternich's German Confederation, claimed supreme authority over censorship within the German states, yet in practice relied upon the cooperation of a fractious group of subordinate states for actual implementation. Under both censorship regimes, decentralization and political diversity frustrated efforts to secure uniform implementation of any specific ideological program, while offering by contrast the kind of flexible implementation that blunted the potentially sharp edges of censorial repression.Footnote 4 Likewise, both regimes combined an unwieldy and often unsystematic mixture of prepublication censorship, through appointed censors in each constituent state, and post-publication prohibition and confiscation, requiring the coordination across the myriad political units of central Europe.
Despite these similarities, however, historians of censorship largely agree that the eighteenth century was a period of profound transformation for censorship. Developments in the age of Enlightenment therefore shaped the institutional context as well as the expectations and behaviors of Ruge, Wachsmuth, and his superiors in the Interior Ministry throughout the Jahrbücher affair. Most significantly, during the eighteenth century secular political authorities increasingly assumed responsibility for censorship from ecclesiastical authorities.Footnote 5 Seventeenth-century appeals for relaxation of censorship from Bayle, Locke, and others primarily appealed to principles of religious toleration, for which the state appeared as the ultimate guarantor.Footnote 6 Religious pluralism in the Holy Roman Empire further promoted secular control of censorship, as Protestants resisted being subjected to Catholic censorship for theological works and vice versa. Eighteenth-century states such as Prussia under Frederick the Great or Joseph II's Austria could count on the support and allegiance of Enlightenment intellectuals in their campaigns to wrest control of the instruments of intellectual control from the church, although they were also prodded to exercise censorship with greater restraint and charity as well.
Moreover, the change in censors naturally produced a change in censorship; its purpose changed from defending theological orthodoxy to suppressing political criticism and challenges to the state and public order. Neither in the eighteenth nor the nineteenth century did this focus on politics entail an abandonment of theology and ecclesiology as objects of concern, of course. Instead, the major shift occurred in the purpose and scope of censorship of religiously heterodox texts: secular authorities increasingly responded to Enlightenment calls for religious toleration by broadening the range of acceptable opinion and permitting heterodox religious views provided that they posed no challenge to the state. Paul Spalding argues that the last case of traditional censorship aimed at enforcing religious orthodoxy was the 1736 suppression of Johann Lorenz Schmidt's Wertheim Bible, a rationalist translation of the Pentateuch that united Pietists, Catholics, and orthodox Lutherans against the author's Wolffian interpretation of the Bible that sought to make rational sense of the miraculous and supernatural aspects of the Bible. After this case, Spalding demonstrates, the machinery of the imperial censorship system began to break down, especially given the concurrent crises of the uncertain Austrian succession and the accession of the religiously indifferent Frederick II to the Prussian throne in 1740. Frederick was no opponent of censorship, but instead focused upon making its exercise more efficient and less onerous by restricting its exercise to those instances in which political writers threatened state power and dignity.Footnote 7
The cooperation between reforming absolute monarchs and Enlightenment intellectuals extended as well to censorship. Thanks to the work of Robert Darnton and others, the picture of this relationship is much clearer for France than it is for the case of Prussia and other German states. Malesherbes's role as a midwife for the Encyclopédie during his tenure as the chief of Parisian censorship in the mid-eighteenth century is perhaps the clearest example of how censorship and Enlightened reform could coexist and even thrive at times in the eighteenth century.Footnote 8 As Sophia Rosenfeld argues, eighteenth-century French censors often viewed their task in much the same intellectually “dirigiste” terms as elite literary critics: defenders of standards of public taste and morals from bad literature.Footnote 9 A similar relationship between Aufklärer and censorship existed in Germany as well. From the 1740s until at least the 1780s, the Prussian state set the tone for German intellectual life through an alliance between the state and its reformist bureaucrats and academically trained intellectuals.Footnote 10 As Reinhard Aulich argues, German writers and censors just as often fought together in the eighteenth century as against one another.Footnote 11 Secular, university-trained men in state service worked as censors and generally pursued their goals of religious toleration and educational reform not by challenging the institutions of censorship but by occupying them. Again, this censorship was different in kind from that which preceded it: less focused on doctrinal purity, more tolerant of disagreement carried out among enlightened elites, and more focused, again, on safeguarding a limited domain of public freedom by ruling out of bounds truly threatening ideas. Aulich argues, however, that this relationship had ended by the Vormärz. Examining the censorship history of the Jahrbücher challenges the notion that this was a completed process even as late as the early 1840s.
The Young Hegelian Challenge to Traditional Scholarship
Once regarded as philosophically insignificant critics of orthodox religion, the Young Hegelian movement has enjoyed a renewed interest in recent historiography. For most of the twentieth century, intellectual historians tended to downplay the philosophical significance of the Young Hegelians, either because of their failure to anticipate Marxism or their guilt for having done so. John Toews's Hegelianism represented a correction to this tendency and once again made the movement into a significant object of study in its own right, and not a mere footnote in the intellectual prehistory of Karl Marx.Footnote 12 Warren Breckman's work represents the culmination of this scholarly reconsideration. His Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory understands Young Hegelianism as a radical project whose religious critique of Christian Personalism cannot be severed from its political import.Footnote 13 Moreover, thanks to the work of Andre Spies on the men who made up the movement and the publication of the correspondence of editors of the Jahrbücher edited by Martin Hundt, we now know a great deal about the social background of Young Hegelianism.Footnote 14 Yet intellectual historians, with the exception of Toews, have tended to focus on the book-length works of the Young Hegelians, while relatively neglecting the Jahrbücher. The Hallische, later Deutsche Jahrbücher, however, was in many ways the public face of the intellectual movement. The Jahrbücher was dedicated to providing a forum for what its editors saw as progressive philosophy, literary criticism, and journalism. Ruge was under no delusion that such material would not prove challenging, although he hoped that the journal's designation as scholarly and its challenging written style would persuade authorities that it posed no immediate threat to public order.
Although in time Ruge and his collaborators would come into conflict with the Saxon censorship authorities, the early days of the publication experienced little such conflict. In fact, the censors and the editors saw themselves as potential collaborators, and the scholarly reputation of the publication, based upon its illustrious contributors, lent it credibility in the eyes of authorities. The principal censor of the Jahrbücher for the majority of its print run was a Leipzig history professor, Wilhelm Wachsmuth. Forgotten today, Wachsmuth published prolifically in his lifetime, writing on history, contemporary politics and culture, and classics. Far from being extraordinary, Wachsmuth's intellectual pursuits were not uncommon within the ranks of censors in the German Confederation. Frederik Ohles's work on Jakob Grimm brought to light Grimm's experiences as a censor in 1820s Kassel, yet Grimm represents only the most illustrious intellectual in the ranks of Vormärz censors.Footnote 15 Baden's censors boasted a notable liberal economist and translator of Jean-Baptiste Say, Karl Fahnenberg, while Württemberg's censors included the noteworthy dialect poet Johann Friedrich Hebbel, for instance. After a decade in Halle and Kiel, Wachsmuth accepted a professorship at the university in Leipzig in 1826, where he taught for the next four decades. The history position in Leipzig completed his transition from philology; his publications also show increasing interest in nineteenth-century history at the expense of works on medieval and classical history. Thus the censor's academic interests coincided almost exactly with those of the journal's contributors as a whole.
Balancing the duties of censor and scholar proved a significant challenge for Wachsmuth. Censoring offered him only an unpleasant distraction from his main interests at best; at worst it jeopardized his entire scholarly career. He had left a secure position to come to Leipzig believing the new position would afford him more time to participate in “literary life.”Footnote 16 This belief, however, proved unfounded. Instead, he found his duties as censor a major drain on his time. Worse, censoring impaired his standing among scholarly and literary circles, as he wrote in 1832 to the Saxon Education Ministry:
My professional activity and my status as a scholar and teacher as well as my blamelessness as a man and citizen are endagered in the utmost by the unnatural connection of what is primarily a purely police business with a professorial office directed toward scholarly research. My peace of mind and health have been most severely assaulted by it.Footnote 17
Wachsmuth argued that if professors must act as censors, they should only censor works within their fields. Purely political works, in his view, needed non-scholars as censors, since dealing with these works impaired the scholar's neutrality and impartiality required for legitimate scholarship. Furthermore, Wachsmuth's description of political censorship as “purely police business” unfitting for a scholar carries with it an unmistakable note of derision; he seems, in fact, to concede the point that acting as a censor of political works—an “unnatural” act for a scholar—ought to cast doubt upon his professional good name.
Wachsmuth's superiors in the Education Ministry responded favorably to his request, and because of their intercession, the Interior Ministry formally limited his responsibilities as a censor to historical and philological writings in accordance with his wishes.Footnote 18 Wachsmuth was undoubtedly pleased to be relieved of the burden of censoring political publications, which brought him more work, greater government scrutiny, and heightened risk. The Saxon government did not, however, change its policy of assigning Leipzig University professors to censor political writings, even though the logic of Wachsmuth's argument tended to imply such an action. Instead, Wachsmuth's responsibility for censoring political works now fell to his Vaterland coeditor Bülau.Footnote 19 As a result of this reassignment, Wachsmuth had every reason to believe that the publication he was to oversee had a scholarly, nonpolitical character, as he had fought earlier to free himself from the unseemly business of censoring political speech. As a published author, journal editor, and professor, Wachsmuth understood the Jahrbücher as a scholarly work subject to relaxed censorship standards and behaved in the first years of the Jahrbücher's publication as if his principle responsibility was to shepherd the editors through the process of compliance with the censorship laws.
Like most German states at the time, Saxony placed its central censorship organs under the control of the Interior Ministry. The Carlsbad Decrees of 1819 had stipulated that each member state of the Confederation must form a central Censorship Commission and such subordinate bodies necessary to examine all printed works under twenty printers' pages (about 320 pages in normal octavo) before publication.Footnote 20 While the Carlsbad Decrees prompted many states to sharpen censorship, Saxony had already developed stringent censorship standards because of its alliance with Napoleon. While French influence in the early 1790s often led to a relaxation of absolutist censorship practice, by the waning years of the Napoleonic regime, French influences pointed toward ever more restrictive censorship of political matter.Footnote 21 Saxony, to its great detriment, remained an ally of France long after Napoleon's other German allies switched sides to join the victorious Sixth Coalition. Before 1831, Saxony had a traditional Privy Council (Geheimer Rat), where ministers did not have dedicated portfolios, but instead deliberated collegially. Saxon censorship was thus the responsibility of the Privy Council as a whole; it delegated day-to-day authority to the individual districts. The Saxon constitution of September 1831 dramatically reorganized administration, creating specialized ministries with a clear division of bureaucratic competencies. A State Ministry (Gesamtministerium) replaced the Privy Council as the highest political body in the kingdom. The State Ministry comprised the ministers of the major ministries (Interior, Foreign Affairs, and Justice, among others) and only involved itself in the most significant and long-lasting censorship controversies. The Jahrbücher case was one of them. In most cases, however, censorship took place at the district level for periodicals. Saxony was divided into four administrative districts (Kreise) named for the major cities of the kingdom: Leipzig, Dresden, Bautzen, and Zwickau. Each had a censorship commission (Censurcollegium) charged with preventive censorship of publications that appeared within its borders, and the Dresden Censorship Commission functioned as the central Censorship Commission (Obercensurcollegium). Actual analysis of prepublication texts was also further contracted out to local censors, whose backgrounds varied even more. Local censors ranged from police officials to private scholars (Privatgelehrten) to family doctors (Hausarzt).Footnote 22
While structures such as these had become standard in almost all of the states of the German Confederation by the late 1830s, Saxony's censorship institutions did diverge somewhat from the arrangement common to its peers in places such as Bavaria, Baden, and Hesse-Kassel. In those states, a central Censorship Commission, located in the capital city, held central authority, especially over the book trade. In turn, this commission delegated censorship duties to local, district censorship authorities primarily for local or regional newspapers assumed to pose less risk. This arrangement was unsuitable for Saxony, though: Leipzig, not Dresden, was Saxony's publishing center. Indeed, Leipzig was in many ways the capital of the German publishing industry as seat of the Booksellers Association of the German Book Trade (Börsenvereins des deutschen Buchhandels) starting in 1825 and home of the Leipzig book fair. As far back as the early eighteenth century, Leipzig represented the commercial heart of publishing: Germany's closest approximation to Grub Street in its relative absence of patronage and dependence on a market economy.Footnote 23 Consequently, the Leipzig censorship commission was no mere subordinate, local commission as most district-level censorship commissions in Germany were. Instead, it was responsible for a great deal of the censorship responsibilities for the kingdom as a whole. Books and periodicals that appeared in the Leipzig administrative district outnumbered those in the capital, even as the Dresden Censorship Commission was formally superior.Footnote 24 The intervention of the Interior Ministry or the State Ministry signaled a breakdown in the normal procedures of censorship, a recognition of the failure of prevention.
Despite the auspicious beginning of the Jahrbücher, though, Wachsmuth recognized the potential for difficulties with the higher authorities that stemmed from the challenges the journal posed to communicative norms of scholarship. The Jahrbücher struck a delicate balance between prevailing modes of scholarship and the belief that a new philosophy required new ways of thinking and writing. The prospectus presented to the Leipzig district government, responsible for administering censorship of periodicals, introduced the journal as a scholarly publication that drew upon Germany's leading minds. It would primarily focus on historical scholarship, national literature, and classical philology. The prospectus did not much address the religious criticism that became the journal's hallmark. On the sensitive question of how the journal would address a broader public, though, the editors stressed the quality of its expected readership:
The Hallische Jahrbücher are to be written by academic specialists, but not exclusively for academic specialists, but instead for the educated world as a whole, which today engages with the real progress and general significance of every branch of science. Thus [the journal] would elevate itself out of the particularity of isolated journalism to become a true instrument of the general spirit and its self-consciousness.Footnote 25
Thus the publishers stressed the journal's place within an educated public sphere, outside but connected with the academy. Focusing upon the role of specialists (Fachgelehrten) to relate their disciplines to an overarching philosophical whole, the prospectus offered a classic representation of the social role of the intellectual in his relation to his public and to his society as a whole.Footnote 26
The district government agreed that the journal was scholarly and informed the Interior Ministry that per §56 of the Press Police Ordinance of October 13, 1836, the journal required no special concession or revocable permit to publish.Footnote 27 The purpose of this exception was to streamline censorship for publications thought to possess social value and to avoid additional censorship for works deemed unlikely to reach the uneducated masses.
Ironically, the first traces of a relationship between the journal's editors and its censors are not to be found in rejections, but rather in submissions to the journal. In the prospectus, Bülau appeared as a contributor. Friedrich von Bülau was a professor at Leipzig University from 1829 until 1859 in the philosophical faculty, where he taught courses on politics and diplomacy. Like Wachsmuth, Bülau was also a prolific author, whose works focused primarily on Staatswissenschaft and contemporary diplomatic relations between the European states. Although he discussed multiple possible contributions with Ruge, only two of Bülau's pieces actually appeared: an 1838 biographical sketch of Friedrich Dahlmann and an 1840 review of Nikolaus Julius's Nordamerikas sittliche Zustände, a work on prison reform. While Wachsmuth did not contribute to the journal, he did submit copies of his published works to Ruge with enthusiastic requests that they be reviewed in the Jahrbücher.Footnote 28
It is worth taking a moment to look into Bülau's sketch of Dahlmann because it reveals the attitude toward scholarship that characterized the censors of the Jahrbücher, and indeed many censors. At the time, Dahlmann was best known as one of the Göttingen Seven—tenured professors fired in 1837 for protesting Duke Ernst August's abrogation of the Hanoverian Constitution. In addressing this topic, the censor-intellectual faced a dilemma. As a censor, Bülau had to respect official policy regarding political discussion. Yet as a professor of history, he was a colleague of Dahlmann; moreover, Bülau's article was to appear in a journal explicitly dedicated to promoting academic freedom. He had to strike a balance between supporting a colleague, objectively assessing a scholar, and condemning political resistance to authorities through the printed word.
These tensions permeated Bülau's work. He praised Dahlmann not for his political courage or scholarly significance, but instead for his impartiality and independence. Bülau castigated partisanship as an impediment to seeking the truth and as a source of needless dogmatism and rigidity. Dahlmann, though, resisted the negative effects associated with academic partisanship: bending the historical truth to justify preconceived conclusions. In Bülau's view, this independent drive for the truth did not lead to an unbending zealotry, either. Instead, he depicted Dahlmann as a meliorative pragmatist: “His ideal is the good that is possible under the existing circumstances.”Footnote 29 What is plainly apparent is that Bülau's description of Dahlmann also functioned as an idealized self-conception and apology for the intellectual employed by the state: “[Dahlmann] stood upon the side of the state because he was convinced that only with it could his work be accomplished.”Footnote 30 Scholars who acted as state servants could thus have intellectual independence and integrity while working on behalf of the state; in fact, the desire to work for the state arose from an understandable aspiration to work through the state and not simply for it.
The most difficult subject for an admirer of Dahlmann such as Bülau to address is Dahlmann's public protest against Ernst August in 1837. Bülau's treatment of Dahlmann's actions revealed the tension and difficulty faced by the censor-intellectual; at no point in the article did the words “Hannover,” “Göttingen,” “dismissal,” “Ernst August,” or “academic freedom” appear. As a censor, Bülau understood how to discuss controversial events. He also knew his audience would be familiar with the case and left out specifics that could provoke hostility from Hannover. Bülau's readers without prior knowledge of the occurrence would come away mystified, while cognoscenti could discuss the incident without fear of censorship. Although he tried to dismiss “the well-known, consequential events of recent days” cryptically, he could not easily brush such a subject aside.Footnote 31 Instead, he sought ways to temper the meaning of Dahlmann's insubordination, stressing Dahlmann's loyalty to principle and not party, for instance.
Seeds of Confrontation
Although the journal's censors were partially invested in its success and its quality, they nonetheless vigilantly guarded against perceived excesses. Those excesses often came in the form of polemics against the movement's philosophical critics on the Right, and Wachsmuth's first major intervention as a censor came in an effort to end such a dispute. In late 1838, Heinrich Leo, the conservative Hegelian, published an attack on the circle of the main contributors to the Jahrbücher. In “Die Hegelingen,” Leo attacked Strauss and Ruge for religious heterodoxy and ultimately all but called for the Young Hegelians to be thrown into prison.Footnote 32 Leo, like many Hegelians otherwise unsympathetic to Strauss, had actually published in the Jahrbücher in 1838. Leo was one of the Right Hegelians who abandoned the journal after its first year because of distaste with its radicalism.Footnote 33 His attack on the Young Hegelians was part of his self-appointed mission to defend the pillars of Christian society. Leo's acquaintanceship with members of Frederick William IV's camarilla also augured the difficulties Left Hegelians would face from the conservative Romantic when he became Prussian king in 1840.
The young philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, at that time fast eclipsing David Friedrich Strauss as the most prominent Young Hegelian critic of orthodox Christianity, wrote “Der Wahre Gesichtpunkt” as a rejoinder to Leo. In the piece, Feuerbach sought to defend the practice of philosophy from religious intolerance, in Feuerbach's view a central problem for philosophy throughout its history. Wachsmuth informed Ruge on March 4, 1839, that the Leipzig Censorship Commission had ordered the article cut before its halfway point.Footnote 34 Where the Kreisdirection was focused on the administrative aspects of censorship, the Censorship Commission in Saxony was the deliberative authority to which the censors reported. Its decision to cut the remainder of the article represented the first documented instance in which Ruge and Wachsmuth alone could not reach accommodations on articles.
Ruge appealed to the Privy Councilor and head of the Gesamtministerium Bernhard von Lindenau, a supporter of the journal, to try to overrule the Censorship Commission.Footnote 35 Lindenau, himself an astronomer and supporter of the arts and sciences, had entered state service in Saxony after a career in Altenburg, the small liberal enclave in Thuringia just southwest of Saxony, in which he collaborated on the drafting of a liberal constitution in 1818. Lindenau's support for the journal as a forum for the advancement of Wissenschaft is thus wholly in accordance with his public actions, and Ruge had good reason to see him as a sympathetic and influential defender of the Jahrbücher. In his entreaty to Lindenau, Ruge argued that this kind of censorship as enshrining one view, Orthodox Lutheranism, was the only permitted view. Legally, theological heterodoxy was tolerated; an attack on Christianity in itself was not. Wachsmuth stated that the article was truncated because it went beyond critiquing a particular part of Christianity to attack the whole; Ruge's response was to assert Feuerbach's critique as an expression of Christianity that, while heterodox, was within the bounds of an accepted cultural tradition. Yet the more telling argument he offered was about the nature of scholarship. Repeatedly, Ruge contrasted the spirit of scholarship with hypocrisy and argued that permission to explore and examine religious heterodoxy was a prerequisite for arriving at any kind of true belief.
After arguing that the object of Feuerbach's critical analysis ought to be fair game, Ruge pivoted to examine the nature of Feuerbach's essay as a written product:
Feuerbach's essay is purely scholarly, with many citations from the Catholic Church fathers and from Lutheran Orthodoxy. The Hallische Jahrbücher are read only by the most highly educated men and such young men for whom all the sources of heterodoxy in Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, and Herder, which Feuerbach names, are already available and well known.Footnote 36
Here, Ruge employed a number of tropes to demonstrate the scholarly nature of both the article in question and the journal as a whole: the quality of its readership, including its younger readers, of whom authorities might be particularly suspicious; the appeal to cultural icons of preceding generations; and the stress upon Feuerbach's adherence to scholarly protocol. Ruge concluded with the cryptic remark,
Your Excellency knows the course of history and will without a doubt find it preferable that the battle between genuine and hypocritical belief be settled in the domain of science than of life, better with ink than blood and fire, and better with the pen than with the sword.Footnote 37
Ultimately, Ruge's protestations fell upon deaf ears; as often proved the case under the German Confederation's censorship system, however, a piece eviscerated in one state was published more or less as is in another jurisdiction. Feuerbach's essay appeared in full in Baden shortly after the failure of Ruge's appeal.
In fact, reading Feuerbach's article in light of this censorship process makes it clear that the censors' proposed cuts sought to prune those elements deemed less scholarly—especially humor. Since the censors cut the article completely after a certain point, examining the directly following paragraphs, which contained the most withering sarcasm in the piece, proves instructive. Up to that point, Feuerbach argued that the conflict between religious orthodoxy and philosophy was nothing new; instead, it was merely the continuation of the progressive displacement of religion's claims to explain the natural world begun even before Descartes. Religion, Feuerbach argued, trespassed on the domain of philosophy as the rational approach to the world when it made positive claims about nature and humanity without evidence or argumentation. Human beings made these claims, and thus created “positive” religions, out of the self-serving, immature desire to make the world conform to their own fantasies, rather than accept reality. The censor let a good number of provocations pass: Feuerbach saw religion originating in the feminine, philosophy in the masculine; religion was old and decaying, philosophy young and vibrant; paradoxically, religion was childish and immature, while philosophy was mature and sober.
After the censor's cut, however, Feuerbach commenced a sarcastic critique of the notion that philosophy must conform to Christian principles in its methods or conclusions. Perhaps belaboring the joke, he elaborated further on how astronomy, geology, mathematics, botany, and mineralogy would become absurd if they were constrained to biblical principles, and used actual eighteenth-century Christian texts to punctuate the farce.Footnote 38 Tellingly, these passages are merely comical hyperbole designed to illustrate principles already established by argumentation. Censorship thus addressed the tone and presentation more than the substantive critique here.
Upon learning of the article's rejection as is, Feuerbach requested that Ruge return it to him. He also noted archly what he thought was Ruge's own editorial concession to censorship: “I do not take ill the minor change of ‘Christian’ to ‘ostensibly Christian,’ although ultimately it is necessary also to unmask the hypocrisy of Christianity as well.”Footnote 39 Ruge, clearly concerned about being seen as complicit with censorship, vehemently blamed all changes on the censor. Wachsmuth's “minor change,” though, was in fact precisely calculated to navigate the challenges of censorship. As long as it appealed to a higher, “real” Christianity, Young Hegelian religious critique could claim to exist within the permitted framework of religious criticism. The points of open contention were therefore whether the content of the journal in fact supported such a reading and whether the form of the journal was appropriate to such a goal.
Later in 1839, the Jahrbücher were once again the subject of a censorship imbroglio, this time over Ruge's article “Karl Streckfuß und das Preußenthum.” This time the publisher, Otto Wigand, also fought for the Streckfuß article, bemoaning with exasperation the laborious efforts of pleading with the authorities to Ruge.Footnote 40 In fact, Wigand and Ruge both trusted they could call upon support in the Saxon government when they felt Wachsmuth was the principal obstacle. As the controversy over Feuerbach's article showed, Wigand and Ruge believed their benefactor von Lindenau could overrule local censorship. Ultimately, Ruge and Echtermeyer's article ran in the Jahrbücher from November 1–4, 1839, and became one of its most significant articles of the early years. The article, ostensibly a review of Karl Streckfuß's Ueber die Garantien der preußischen Zustände, presented the objections of a “Württemberger” (in reality the Prussian subject Ruge) to the Prussian patriotism of the conservative Streckfuß. The thrust of Ruge's argument was that constitutional Germany was no enemy to Prussia's greater interests, but instead a source of alliance and strength should Prussia take the lead in forging a constitutional, national state. Ruge suggested that the censorship of the article was more focused upon his criticism of the religious politics of the Prussian conservatives than the constitutional issues and “foreign relations” of Prussia, suggesting that the Saxon censorship authorities alone probably opposed the tone of the article's religious critique.Footnote 41
From late 1839 until the end of 1841, however, only isolated incidents of strife over censorship occurred.Footnote 42 Given most historians' tendency to view this period of the journal's history as a phase of ever-increasing radicalization, that ought to surprise us. Unfortunately for the historian, calm and relatively uncontentious relations between author and censor leave little trace. The discussion of the Hanoverian Constitutional Conflict in the review of Bülau's book is one example of a minor censorship case.Footnote 43 Discussion of the issue in a journal published by men of “questionable” political beliefs only made Saxon authorities suspicious, even when the discussion took place in the context of a review of a work by one of their very own censors. Ruge also wrote to Wachsmuth to thank him for his prudence in dealing with the article series “Der Protestantismus und die Romantik.” For Ruge, “Romanticism” was always a loaded term—and a target. This piece, ostensibly art criticism, was in fact a political manifesto for Ruge and Echtermeyer.Footnote 44 Ruge associated Protestantism with academic freedom, in that Protestantism was progressive and evolutionary, not reactionary and inward like Romanticism. For Ruge, this Protestantism in theory had been degraded in practice by the embrace of Romanticism—a quintessential Catholic attitude—on the part of nominal Protestants. The critique of dead orthodoxy and authoritarian repression thus represented a renewal of the core essence of Protestantism, and not an affront to it. Despite his disappointment in the censorship, however, at this stage Ruge could appreciate that Wachsmuth's exercise of discretion and judgment early on could help avoid a complete prohibition.Footnote 45
Ministerial Intervention and Prussian Pressure
The turning point in censorship of the Jahrbücher came in 1841. The sharpening of censorship began when Prussia demanded that Ruge submit his journal to Prussian, rather than Saxon, censorship. Prussian demands reflected the contradictory effects of Frederick William IV's accession to the throne, which brought both a liberalization of some forms of censorship and a sharpening of others, about which more will be said later. Ruge interpreted Prussia's demand as the opening salvo of a Prussian campaign to suppress the Jahrbücher. He moved to Dresden and changed the journal's name to the Deutsche Jahrbücher. In November 1841, the Saxon Ministry of the Interior began to intervene. In an instruction to the Leipzig Censorship Commission, the Interior Minister Eduard von Nostitz-Jänckendorf stressed that the Jahrbücher had reached an increasingly broad public more vulnerable to abuses of the press.Footnote 46 As the head of the Interior Ministry from 1836 to 1844, Nostitz-Jänckendorf had succeeded Lindenau and shifted the ministry in a conservative direction. Nostitz-Jänckendorf shared the fear with local authorities in Leipzig that the Jahrbücher was reaching popular audiences. As the Leipzig Censorship Commission would make clear, however, this was not only through the journal's own, rather small circulation, but through its articles reprinted in other publications.Footnote 47
Moreover, there is another way to interpret the Ministry's concerns about the Jahrbücher's changing public. Rather than seeing the “broad” public as a comment about the actual quantity and/or quality of the Jahrbücher's readers, the statement pertains to the style and perceived intent of the editors and authors in itself, without regard to actual reception. Specifically, censorship authorities time and again argued that departures from a certain written style of academic scholarship represented dangerous attempts to extend the boundaries of scholarship. These dangerous “excesses” included the use of mockery, sarcasm, and hyperbole, as well as the engaged and partisan tone found in parts (and only parts) of the Jahrbücher. Deviations from the studious impartiality of the responsible scholar were ipso facto an effort to reach a nonacademic, undereducated, and dangerous public.
The Leipzig Censorship Commission's response to Ruge stressed its concern over the direction the journal had taken since its name change. The Commission hoped that preventive censorship would suffice, provided the censor exercise greater scrutiny; any harsher measures might threaten the integrity and progress of Wissenschaft.Footnote 48 Censoring the Jahrbücher, however, severely tried the censor's ability to moderate political speech, because, in the Commission's view, the journal as a whole was destructive and dangerous, but it was difficult in every case to specify precisely which individual parts were at fault. Yet after a perceptive analysis of the difficulties of dealing with a genre-defying publication such as the Jahrbücher, the Commission fell back on the promise to refer the censor once more to the guidelines. Such vague instructions were issued periodically in every state in the German Confederation and usually held little value in practice in difficult cases. It is therefore unsurprising that this measure seems to have accomplished little.
The Saxon Ministry of the Interior sent Ruge an official decree on December 10, 1841, to inform him of its increased scrutiny of the journal. In the decree, the Ministry declared that it could no longer tolerate the “spirit” with which the journal was edited and censored. That is, the ministry's first criticism fell equally on Ruge and Wachsmuth, both of whom bore responsibility for the dangers posed by the journal. The problems stemmed not only from the content and tone of the journal but also from its increasing publicity, and here the context of Prussian pressure becomes apparent. While the Jahrbücher's print run never exceeded 800 for a single issue, as Ruge would later point out in his ironic defense against the charge of popular appeal, many more people read portions of the journal excerpted in other publications, a common journalistic practice of the day.Footnote 49 The heart of the matter of how the journal was to be censored remained the question of its scholarly character. To the Interior Ministry, the Jahrbücher forfeited its purely scholarly character because of this growing public appeal.Footnote 50
Furthermore, the Ministry argued that the Jahrbücher had abandoned the appropriate methods of scholarship to engage in a form of advocacy, which meant that different censorship standards were to apply henceforth. Scholarship was built up slowly and constructively, through accretion of knowledge and corrections through disinterested examination of principles. In contrast, the editors of the Deutsche Jahrbücher were engaged in a political and religious “revolutionary path of negation.”Footnote 51 The “intellectual means” of the editors and contributors, which the Ministry could not deny, were nevertheless in the service of a nonscholarly program aimed at the destruction of pillars of the existing order. Therefore, the Ministry argued that continuation of the journal required that the talents and abilities of its creators be turned toward pure scholarship, and specifically away from writing that aimed to appeal to a broad audience. The letter ended with a note that the censor had been admonished to follow the dictates of the censorship instruction more closely.
The first manifestation of this increased censorship came only several days later when Wachsmuth informed Ruge he could not publish an announcement for Hoffmann von Fallersleben's Unpolitische Lieder. Wachsmuth also told Ruge that future articles about Prussia would be censored with less indulgence than before.Footnote 52 Ruge assured Wachsmuth of his compliance to the Saxon authorities, stressing his complete support for the constitution of Saxony in a clever allusion to the fact that he was aware Prussia, a state without a constitution, was behind the decision. He also let Wachsmuth know that he planned to focus more on religious and philosophical questions in the journal and avoid direct discussions of Prussian politics.
Yet Ruge was mistaken in his belief that avoiding commentary on current politics would mollify the authorities. In late January 1842, the Leipzig Censorship Commission informed the Interior Ministry that the Jahrbücher remained dedicated to the “dissolution of all religious and social relations.”Footnote 53 Yet beyond this charge, it also tellingly described scholarly vices as well, namely its one-sided partisanship and lack of voices of dissent from its editorial line. Needless to say, such a criticism—that a publication needed to be censored because of its intolerance for dissent—reveals the contradiction at the heart of censorship carried out on behalf of Wissenschaft. The Interior Ministry expressed growing skepticism that the normal practices of censorship would suffice. The Jahrbücher were “impermissible in tendency and tone,” and the Ministry was unconvinced Wachsmuth could trim it in such a way that it would be acceptable. The use of “tendency” (Tendenz) as a criteria of censorship was especially challenging to authors, because it referred to the combination of overall tone, form of presentation, and bias. Censorship of Tendenz implied a holistic approach to judging the effects of a work through criteria that were, to contemporaries, especially subjective.
Wachsmuth's position became tenuous: the Ministry urged the Censorship Commission either to ensure he fulfilled his duty or suspend him completely, a step he felt might endanger his academic career.Footnote 54 After this correspondence, the Interior Ministry felt it had satisfied Prussian demands for the moment.Footnote 55 On February 12 the Saxon Privy Councilor and member of the Censorship Commission Johann Paul von Falkenstein warned Ruge that the Jahrbücher had not turned away from its tendency to promote the dissolution of religious and social relations.Footnote 56 Falkenstein, who would go on to succeed Nostitz-Jänckendorf as Interior Minster the following year, was also a former lecturer (Privatdozent) at the University of Leipzig and supporter of the university within the government. Falkenstein served Ruge with a formal notice that prohibition of the journal was on the table, while the previous response had stressed how undesirable this step remained.
Both editor and censor believed a ban could come at any moment. “We have now arrived at the catastrophe,” wrote Wachsmuth. “I now see that, even in matters not actually political, censorship will have to be completely different than before.”Footnote 57 As a former editor himself, Wachsmuth was sensitive to the practical challenges of publication. He stressed to Wigand his goal of avoiding ruining issues that had already been printed. In Ruge's eyes, however, fulfilling Falkenstein's demands was impossible. Harsh censorship only encouraged Ruge to abandon efforts at moderation, and he submitted a series of articles that Wachsmuth rejected and/or severely cut, including a review of Feuerbach's epochal Das Wesen des Christenthums. Meanwhile, the Leipzig authorities used the pretext of the name change to demand that the journal apply for a permit concession, even though the publisher had been informed in 1837 that the Jahrbücher did not require one. Behind this pretense was the intimation to Wigand that, were he to apply for a concession, he might forestall a full prohibition as well as the new stipulation that the Kreisdirection in addition to the individual censor review each article. This policy was onerous to the publisher and clearly reflected the mistrust for the censor among the higher authorities. Wigand was not aware, however, that at this stage the Ministry was still uncertain of the possible public effects of such a ban and hoped that censorship under new conditions would suffice.Footnote 58
Thereafter, Ruge turned, without much hope for success, to a “highly placed statesman” with a defense of his work.Footnote 59 Ruge appealed to the Saxon state to resist Prussian pressure: “Saxony is forced to pronounce the anathema while Prussia avoids the odium of having the police shut down a purely philosophical journal.”Footnote 60 As for the charges of damaging religion, Ruge called them pure witch-hunting (Ketzermacherei), an infringement of the “Protestant” principle of freedom of conscience. To the extent that he hoped for any immediate relief from censorship, it was in the actions of a “free” statesman acting according to principles of honor and respect for scholarship. The censor, he tellingly argued, had already been cut out of exercising his own judgment.Footnote 61 Wachsmuth confirmed as much, urging Wigand simply to go over his head for any objections from that point on and assuring Ruge that he would prefer not to censor the journal any longer, but had no choice in the matter.Footnote 62
Yet while Ruge had more or less resigned himself to a slow and protracted death of the journal, Wachsmuth still held out hope that an actual prohibition could be averted. He sent Ruge a copy of the second volume of his Geschichte des Frankreichs in der Zeitalter der Revolution in April 1842, together with yet another notification of a rejected article. The hope for continuation rested, he asserted, on whether relations with Prussia changed, although the pressure on theological matters had an origin closer to home as well.Footnote 63 Wachsmuth hinted here at the difference between Prussia's problems with the Jahrbücher and Saxony's: most of the journal's political focus was on Prussia, not because it was particularly reactionary, but instead because it was the hope of German liberals and nationalists. Austria could be largely dismissed; Prussia's politics mattered. Furthermore, Ruge tended to praise Saxony, especially for its constitution, as a way of criticizing Prussia while ingratiating his new hosts. Yet Saxony had been the traditional heart of Lutheran orthodoxy, and the church, while certainly diminished in status since the eighteenth century, still retained the ability to register its complaints about the radical criticism of traditional biblical Christianity. After reiterating several months later the challenge Ruge would face in discussing Christianity, Wachsmuth described their current circumstance as a time of crisis, implying that the new standards, while severe, might be nonetheless temporary.
Taken together, Wachsmuth's behavior suggests he saw the sharpening of censorship as potentially temporary and wanted Ruge to weather a temporary spike in the authorities' attention. In fact, Wachsmuth's suggestion appeared wise, at least for the time being. Where the journal saw countless articles in March, April, and May cut completely (many of which would later appear in Ruge's Anekdota zur neuesten Philosophie, including Marx's critical examination of the turn in censorship), by June whole editions sailed through censorship. Thus the journal once again survived. In fact, Ruge in later testimony described the censorship of late 1842 as the laxest the journal faced. This resulted not, however, because of greater lassitude on the part of the authorities. Rather, it happened because the normal procedures of censorship had broken down and the multiple parties in Dresden and Leipzig concerned with silencing the critical tendencies of the Jahrbücher had not yet coalesced behind a plan.
That plan would wait until June, when the Saxon Censorship Commission, at the behest of the Interior Ministry, replaced Wachsmuth with Bülau, a contributor to the journal only a few years before.Footnote 64 Nonetheless, preventive censorship proved ineffectual to meet the Interior Ministry's goals. On December 17, 1842, Nostitz-Jänckendorf informed the cabinet of his belief that censorship had failed because of its excessive liberality, which only invited further provocation.Footnote 65 The cabinet met before the month ended and voted for the revocation of the journal's concession, granted only nine months prior. Nostitz-Jänckendorf summed up the government's difficulties with the Jahrbücher aptly:
The protection against abuse of the press offered by censorship appears insufficient, indeed almost futile, if, instead of individual transgressions, the entire tendency of a writer or editor is criminal and dangerous instead. When continually and in every expression, as is the case here, the writer defends his principles with particular adroitness and vehemence, the censor faces the dilemma of either permitting many unlawful expressions or striking everything. The current situation demonstrates the difficulty of an appropriate application of censorship in such circumstances, where one must repeatedly complain over the printing of impermissible essays despite the fact that both the former and the current censors are men whose wisdom and loyalty cannot be denied.Footnote 66
The important point to note from this passage is the acknowledgement of the difficulty a censor faced in simply striking the whole. Prior censorship, as exercised throughout the German Confederation, was designed to empower censors to make marginal changes where they could render works “safe” for the public and suppress only those works that they could not. Withdrawal of the concession, as well as the dubious proceedings that led the government to demand a prepublication concession four years into the Jahrbücher's print run, demonstrates that even with censors such as Wachsmuth and Bülau—“wise” and “loyal”—the prospect of decimating whole essays, rather than attempting the insufficient individual changes of censorship, was forbidding. This squares with what we know of Wachsmuth from his correspondence; he loathed cutting whole pieces and attempted to steer Ruge away from those things that would prompt prohibitive censorship. Naturally, this activity was still censorship, only a much more collaborative, productive form, more congenial to intellectuals who acted as censors than the prohibit-confiscate-punish model of police authorities, from which, as we have seen, censors such as Wachsmuth hoped to keep themselves distant.
Within the cabinet, only Lindenau dissented, largely on procedural grounds, arguing that the censor should simply strike every objectionable essay until entire series of issues were unprintable. Ruge protested the decision in a lengthy defense to the Interior Ministry, and, at this time assured of his petition's failure, he held nothing back. He opened by challenging the legality of the censorship laws as a whole, arguing that §35 of the Saxon Constitution contradicted the Press Police Ordnance of 1836, the law that regulated censorship in Saxony. §35 stated that “Matters of the press and the book trade will be regulated by a law that will affirm freedom [of the press] as a principle, in accordance with the prescriptions of federal law and of protection against abuse.”Footnote 67 This illegal action, Ruge argued, arose out of a blind opposition to novelty, not a reasoned judgment of the actual consequences of his publicistic work. Ruge recognized, however, that this challenge to the constitutionality of the law would be futile, and thus grudgingly based his primary defense on the disputed Press Police Ordinance. §56 of this decree stipulated that scholarly journals did not require concessions, and thus the requirement of a concession in March of the prior year had been in error. Ruge defended his journal's scholarly character against the protestations of the state that he had exceeded the boundaries of scholarship.
The problem of such a defense, as Ruge noted, was that the determination of the scholarly merit of a journal was arbitrary, left to the discretion of the Kreisdirection. The Jahrbücher, Ruge argued, had not changed in tone and content—instead the whims of the censorship authorities had changed: “The censors strike on one page what they permit on another, tolerate in one season what they reject in another.”Footnote 68 The reproach of arbitrariness was a well-developed attack on censorship by the early 1840s—Heine made it into an art form—yet it somehow rings false here. Wachsmuth had taken great pains to inform Ruge of the contours of official censorship policy. Where possible, he made cuts designed for the most part to satisfy the demands of Falkenstein to curtail anti-Christian religious critique, or of Nostitz-Jänckendorf, at the behest of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to avoid discussion of Prussian politics. When Wachsmuth lost effective control of censoring the Jahrbücher, censorship changed not because of the “censors'” arbitrary whims, but because a new set of actors much less committed to the survival of the journal intervened.
Ruge then addressed the Ministry's case against his claims of being a purely scholarly publication, which the Ministry published in the Leipziger Zeitung on January 4, 1843. The operative word was “purely”—no one would deny that the Jahrbücher was largely a scholarly publication, but was it purely one? Here Ruge resorted to a bit of sophistry: philosophy was a pure science, not an applied science (such as medicine). Philosophy had no immediate practical application. Yet because thoughts must be embodied in actuality in some form, it was necessary for philosophical thought to grapple with concrete historical institutions and persons. Philosophy thus critiqued reality because it must do so to think:
What is “impure” in [the Jahrbücher]? Everything turns on this point. We have set thoughts in motion that strongly contradict those of the lords of the old world. This shall not be. And now they ban our journal as unscholarly, because it is clear from the [censorship] ordinances themselves that scholarly publications neither require revocable concessions nor may themselves be banned.Footnote 69
Although Ruge continued to defend his journal on the merits, refuting somewhat unpersuasively the allegations of criticism of Christianity and of the prevailing social conditions of Restoration Germany, this argument about the nature of philosophy and scholarship concluded his principal legal defense and revealed the stark divide over scholarship between Ruge and his opponents.
Conclusion
A little less than a year before the Jahrbücher was shuttered for good and a little more than a year before he would assist in its ill-fated “resurrection” in Paris as the Deutsche-Französiche Jahrbücher, a 24-year-old Karl Marx addressed censorship in his first piece of political journalism. Marx's article was one of many cut by the censor in the tense early months of 1842 that would later appear in Ruge's collection Anekdota zur neuesten Philosophie. Marx confronted the central quandary of censorship seen in the case of the Jahrbücher: the absence of clear, specified laws left responsibility to the censors, while the judgment of censors was constantly called into question by reference to these laws.
It is tempting to argue that ultimately the censors such as Wachsmuth and Bülau were simply lackeys of the real decision makers at the ministerial level. Yet the investigation of their decision making calls this view into question. Time and again, officials of the Interior Ministry felt themselves bound to the procedures and actions of the censors. Logistical constraints meant that ministers had to rely upon censors actually to carry out censorship. But these censors had to be drawn from somewhere, and when they were in fact drawn from the ranks of academic state employees, they were bound to bring in those experiences and interests. As James Moore argued, “If the regime had not insisted on cultivated officials, then it could have had officials who made no trouble. And if the regime had not believed in academic freedom, then the Hallische Jahrbücher would have been impossible.”Footnote 70 Precisely the academic and intellectual demands of censorship in this case undercut the censors' political reliability in the eyes of state officials.
The prompting for Marx's examination was Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm IV's new Censorship Instruction, published in early 1842. While many liberals entertained the hope that Prussia would finally move toward a new, less intrusive censorship law, Marx immediately fastened upon the problematic nature of the instruction's relation to the existing laws. While the instruction appeared at first to liberalize censorship, it urged the censors to return to the principles of existing law—of the Karlsbad press laws, that is. Marx seized upon this irony: “Thus until 1842 the law was present but not followed, because ‘now’ to free the press from illegal limitations not in accord with royal intentions, the law must be again called into memory.”Footnote 71 The instruction thus seemed to argue that the censorship system essentially all contemporaries traced back to the Karlsbad Decrees was actually a perversion of their principles. Liberalization meant returning to the spirit of 1819. Marx thus concluded that the instruction in fact represented a “pseudo-liberalism”; its rhetoric of broadening permissible speech masked its true intention of preserving the institution of censorship by attacking the censors for supposed deviations.
At this point, Marx had the Prussian authorities on the horns of a dilemma. Had the censors failed to follow the law? If so, how could the state idly tolerate such behavior for twenty-two years? If, on the other hand, the laws themselves were defective, then new laws, and not instructions to the censors to follow the defective laws more carefully, were needed. This dynamic, of course, was not confined to Prussia; the Saxon authorities repeatedly indicated their problems with Wachsmuth's censorship, only to refer him to the same laws for public expression that had clearly proven an inadequate guide.
Having indicated the problems with blaming the censors for the problems with state censorship, Marx turned to the positive ideal of scholarship laid out in the instruction. The Prussian state asserted the law in no way disadvantaged “serious and modest investigation of the truth.” Marx attacked this point directly: “Both designations refer not to the content of investigation, but instead to something lying outside it.”Footnote 72 Wissenschaft, as the single-minded pursuit of the truth, could not permit its definition from the outside, Marx argued. Modesty in the search for truth, he argued, was respect for falsehood and fear of the outcomes of the search for truth; conversely, indiscriminate “seriousness” demanded the scholars treat ridiculous things with respect and restraint.
In the censorship of the Jahrbücher, controversies over tone and bearing toward the subjects discussed predominated. In Feuerbach's article, for instance, substantive critiques of Christianity and religion as a whole passed, while mockery of eighteenth-century “biblically based” science were the first passages to fall. For Marx, this seemingly innocuous concession, to be “modest” and “serious,” was a means of subordinating scholarship to the whims of the state.Footnote 73 Setting external barriers to examining the truth was as unacceptable, therefore, as dictating its conclusions in advance. Marx identified the practical innovation in censorship behind the apparent liberalization: the censor was charged not with policing what was permissible to say, but how it was permissible to say it.
Thus, Marx turned once more to the censors. The task of mediating the contradiction between the apparent permissiveness of the new censorship and its practical limitations on all sorts of scholarly investigations fell to the censors. These censors had to weigh both scholarly merit and Tendenz to determine whether works might appear. Yet the scholarly merit of a work, Marx argued, could not be judged by external markers set up by authorities: it required the judgment of a scholar. The censors therefore had to be scholars and yet also politically reliable if they were to determine the appropriate Tendenz in the eyes of the state reliably. On this point, Marx was withering: “The general demand of scholarly capability, how liberal! the particular demand for political reliability, how illiberal! scholarly capability and political reliability together, how pseudo-liberal!”Footnote 74 In censoring the Jahrbücher, Wachsmuth attempted to balance precisely these tendencies, and it ended with his dismissal. Censorship required from the censors that they be like those they censored: enough to understand their language, to judge what was “well-intentioned” from “malicious,” and to know the appropriate limits of scholarship.
Finding men from the educated social milieu to censor their peers and colleagues was often difficult. When directed toward rowdy popular media, censors were much more willing to enforce the state's will to silence and control speech. But when confronted with plausible claims to scholarly or literary merit, censors frequently blanched at the implications of censorship. Marx was correct to argue that a focus on the individual censor's defects should not allow the structure of censorship itself to escape scrutiny. Yet Ruge was also correct to stress that these structures could only be examined productively when they were embodied in concrete relations and persons.Footnote 75
This investigation has sought to present some of the key structures of censorship in Germany—the struggle over defining legitimate scholarship, the multiple and competing actors associated with defining its course, and the centrality of subjective judgments of tone and tendency over objective policy prescriptions codified in law—in the form of tangible social interactions. Censorship is indeed, as Marx argued, official critique—but not simply critique of the conclusions reached by scholarship, but of its form of communication as well.
