Reprints and translations had to be submitted for censorship like manuscripts, and the same applied to catalogs of books offered for sale or auction. The Book Review Office decided which censor a manuscript was assigned to, and contact between censor and author respectively publisher was to be avoided. In the case of manuscripts, a censor could require deletions (the final decision would then be “admittitur omissis deletis”) or the specification of a printing location abroad (“admittitur absque loco impressionis”). Two copies of every manuscript had to be submitted so that one of them, which remained with the Book Review Office after having been read by the censor, could be compared to the printed version after its production. 8 Manuscripts could not be printed, nor books produced abroad be sold, without prior approval. 7Ī General Censorship Ordinance subsuming the previous partial enactments was issued on 22 February 1795. In 1792-by order of Leopold II-Hoffmann had founded the Wiener Zeitschrift, which existed until 1793 and pursued the goal of uncovering conspiracies and all forms of subversion. 6 A conservative publishing movement headed by Leopold Alois Hoffmann developed simultaneously. The police force was upgraded under the leadership of Count Pergen, who viewed science in general as a threat to peace and order in the state. 4 Gazettes like the Straßburger Courier and the Jenaische Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung were likewise prohibited for transporting undesirable political contents. French newspapers like Moniteur and Journal de Paris could only be read with special permission from the court censorial authorities.
A further court decree issued in February 1793 reminded the censors that books painting the French Revolution in a positive light were to be allowed neither for printing nor for import. Books written by revolutionary French and Italian emigrants became the subject of more intensive inspection. This meant the end of collegiate treatment of censorship questions censors now submitted their individually compiled reports, based on which an official at the Court Chancellery made the final decision regarding permission or prohibition. There followed a comparatively uniform phase with consolidated and strict censorship from 1821 to 1848, with an increasing loss of control occurring during the 1840s as a result of the rapid growth of the book market-as will be demonstrated at the end of this chapter.ġ.1 The Establishment of the System of Police Censorshipįollowing a court decree issued on February 10, 1792, the Bohemian-Austrian Court Chancellery inherited the censorship agendas from the discontinued Studien- und Zensurhofkommission. 3 The phase from 1805 to 1815, meaning the period of the Napoleonic Wars with temporary French occupation and government of parts of the Habsburg Monarchy until the Congress of Vienna, is highly inhomogeneous and complex in terms of its censorship history. Johann Ludwig von Deinhardstein, a head ideologist of the Metternich era who was also active as a censor during the 1840s, added that the task of censorship was to prevent the publication of material that was “detrimental to the state” and thus disturbed “the peace of the majority” for the benefit of an individual. 1 While the focus of censorship during the previous decades had been placed on enlightening the citizens and promoting their happiness, it now explicitly served to maintain the “peace of the state” and suppress any ideas that “confound its interests and its good order,” as Metternich explained. The Enlightenment from above had bred an authoritarian state, and the unity between the sovereign’s decisions and the will and interests of his subjects, which had formed the basis for the Habsburg Monarchy under Joseph II, turned out to be an illusion. By 1795, this system was largely established and chartered by way of a new censorship directive, and the number of book prohibitions was climbing to new record heights. The first five years of the period discussed in this section form the transition phase between the instructionally oriented and Enlightenment-focused censorship regime to the strictly prohibitive system instituted by Emperor Francis II in the post-revolutionary era.
0 kommentar(er)
