Literary Censorship in Austria 1751-1848

Regarded from the point of view of censorship the years between 1751, when the first censorship comittee was inaugurated in Austria, and 1848, when the system of preventive censorship was finally abandoned, form a rather homogeneous epoch. Whereas former research concentrated on prominent protagonists such as Gerard van Swieten, Maria Theresia, Joseph II. or Metternich, this study is the first attempt to describe the development over the whole period. Moreover, former studies high- lighted the organisation and ideology of censorship but only rarely took heed of its impact on literature, the sciences and book history. For the first time a study of censorship is based on detailed and systematically collected data of the book bans. The recently established database Verdrängt, verpönt vergessen? Eine Datenbank zur Erfassung der in Österreich zwischen 1751 und 1848 verbotenen Bücher1contains all book and manuscript bans of the epoch mentioned above, it is used for statistics and for empirically founded statements about the total of bans in every single year, the languages of the banned works and the literatures and disciplines they adhered to, the authors and publishing houses that produced them. Ten case studies demonstrate the impact of censorship on certain genres (theatre, poetry, historical and social novels), literary movements (classicism, romanticism) and the treatment of certain motifs (the devil and suicide) in books and periodicals. The study proposes sociologically inspired research which tries to draw a comprehensive picture of censorship, its historical background and its impact. In order to provide material for further research it includes in the appendix sources such as the reviews of censors and the legal regulations. In the 18th century censorship served the spirit and goals of Enlightenment, it tried to encourage the useful and to forbid the useless, in the 19th century the focus was directed at the repression of writings deemed able to do damage to the political system of monarchy and the Catholic religion. From the paternalist system of censorship in the third quarter of the 18th century via a liberal intermezzo under emperor Joseph II. the organisation and practice of censorship ended up in a paternalist-authoritarian system in the Vormärz era. The obstacles erected by censorship to the exercise of literary, scientific and political communication are explained in their tendency as well as by many examples. It is hard to over-estimate the influence of censorship on authors, journalists, publishers, book-dealers, librarians, critics, theatre directors, actors, artists, composers, readers in short: on all members of the cultural `fields`, and especially of the field of literature. To say the least, until 1848 the autonomy of these fields remained restricted, it was impossible to even only think of an idea such as freedom of scientific research; the state and the church with the influence of the latter gradually diminishing dictated and watched the limits of the tolerable. 1 Siehe http://univie.ac.at/zensur. The data-base was established within the frame of two projects funded by FWF (P 13220 and P 22320).