Poisoned Hearts, Diseased Minds, and American Pimps: The Language of Censorship in the Schund und Schmutz Debates

Abstract

imposing sanctions on religious, ideological, or aesthetic grounds; and members and advisers of the Priifstelle have often spoken in defense of freedom of expression. Whether the censorship is weak or powerful is less important than the symbolic force of the board's activities: it provides a central forum for expressing moral indignation and collective anxieties of conservative, middleclass Germany (Stieg 56). Since the law's original conception in the early twentieth century, advocates of this uniquely German censoring agency have feared the loss ofnational identity, social decay, the decline of the family, crime, the rising lower classes, and commercialism. Thus, in 1953 the Gesetz iiber die Verbreitungjugendgefidhrdender Schriften served the larger political goal ofcoordinating the apprehensions and frustrations of heterogeneous conservative groups, much as had its Weimar predecessor in 1926, the Gesetz zur Bewahrung der Jugend vor Schundund Schmutzschriften. Historically, the initiatives to censor Schund literature appeared when Germany was striving to secure its national integrity: the debate arose during the nationalistic fervor of pre-World War I canon building in literature, echoed German fears of losing cultural purity during the Weimar Republic, and contributed to the denial of the National Socialist past and Cold War anxiety during reconstruction in the 1950s. The problems of German youth, whom the laws were to protect, cast an image of the nation's wholeness and security at risk. The Weimar debate provided a thoroughly structured sentimental archetype of youth threatened by decadent society. In Weimar and under Adenauer, the same perceived threat that young people's morals were eroding contributed to the consolidation of conservative power. The present study examines how arguments and concepts supporting the 1926 and 1953 censorship laws exemplify antidemocratic principles which go back to the Wilhelminian Reich. Conservatives in both