‘Trash,’ Censorship, and National Identity in Early Twentieth-Century Germany

Abstract

In recent years, censorship in nineteenth and twentieth-century Europe has increasingly attracted scholarly interest. Historians like Gary D. Stark or Robert J. Goldstein highlighted the crucial role censorship played in modern society. Drawing on such recent work in European culture, Kara L. Ritzheimer proposes a new approach to the history of censorship in early twentieth-century Germany. Having already explored censorship agencies in a regional case study of Baden, Ritzheimer’s new book revises and broadens her dissertation project to a national study of censorship. By focusing on the so-called anti-‘trash’ activists’ rhetoric from the early 1900s to the 1930s, the study aims at explaining ‘how and why lawmakers [in Weimar Germany, C.T.] voted in favor of censorship’ and ‘how these laws became possible over the course of two regimes and one war’ (p. 2). As the study makes clear, censorship turned out to be a form of youth protection as mass culture ‘trash’, that is serialized books, dime novels, pamphlet fiction and film dramas, was accused of ruining the youth intellectually, morally and physically.