The Censorship of Literary Naturalism, 1890–1895: Bavaria

Abstract

WHEREAS Gary Stark suggests that there has been a ten? dency to overrate the deleterious effect of censorship upon the naturalist movement in Prussia and Saxony, this essay will argue that the opposite holds true for Bavaria. Far from being a secure haven for cultural opposition to Wilhelmine Germany, as is sometimes contended, the Bavaria ofthe Prinzregentenzeit (1886-1912) saw an upsurge of political Catholicism which placed significant con? straints upon the development of modern tendencies in the arts. Al? though the increasingly conservative tone of Bavarian politics could not prevent modernism from flourishing in Munich after 1896, it did succeed in dividing and weakening the local naturalist movement in the early 1890s. The political constellation that surrounded the naturalist movement in Bavaria was significantly different from that in Prussia or Saxony. For most of the nineteenth century, Bavarian politics was marked by a struggle between a centralizing, secularizing, and often liberal state and the Catholic Church, which had lost its lands and most of its worldly influence during the Napoleonic era. This on-again, off-again struggle was intensified after 1867, when the royal cabinet, staffed by liberal (and often Protestant) ministers, sought to allow nondenominational educa? tion and marriage, equal rights for members of all faiths, and free trade in the economic sphere. To counter these developments, as well as to ward off Bavaria's acquiescence in the creation of a Kleindeutschland under Prussian hegemony, Bavarian Catholics founded the Patriotenpartei in 1868 (renamed the Bavarian Zentrum in 1887). The Patriots quickly mobilized the peasantry and lower middle classes in Bavaria's