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Fragile Minds and Vulnerable Souls. Sarah L. Leonard
Читать онлайн.Название Fragile Minds and Vulnerable Souls
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780812291780
Автор произведения Sarah L. Leonard
Жанр Философия
Серия Material Texts
Издательство Ingram
The police and censors also worked with an unarticulated hierarchy of offenses. This hierarchy moved in an ascending scale from the lowest level but still serious category “highly frivolous,” through (worse) “morally damaging,” and finally (worst of all) “dangerous publications that ruin heart and mind.”38 The “mindless novel” was bad enough to merit scrutiny and prohibit from circulation in lending libraries, which were thought to be filled with “useless and self-damaging readings.” Other infractions, such as “mockery of religion,” “obscene content,” or “promotion of superstition,” merited confiscation. Colporteurs and lending libraries were particularly suspicious, as they carried books aimed at the “common man.” The Memoirs of Casanova, confiscated from a lending library in Bromberg in 1824, was labeled “destructive of good morals” by the censors. In 1835 Amours secrètes des Bourbons, in the original French, was confiscated in Cologne from a box of books that had been sent from Brussels to a local bookseller named Schlesinger. Another French title, La Religion St. Simonienne, was confiscated from the same box. The censors decided that both works should be banned from lending libraries, Amours secrètes because of its “highly immoral” content and La Religion St. Simonienne because it “spread antisocial and anti-Christian lessons.”39 Authentic Memoirs of Midwife was judged only “slightly damaging to the morals” and was therefore allowed in bookstores, but it was banned from lending libraries.40 Gallantries, Adventures and Loves of a Young Woman of Standing, sold in four volumes and reviewed by the Prussian censors in 1834, received similar treatment. The censors decided that the title promised a work that was more titillating than it actually was; yet because the work was “highly frivolous” it was banned from lending libraries and lending circles, but bookstores were free to sell it.41 An implicit class bias informed this hierarchy of offenses and defined the bookseller’s crime as playing on the inherent vulnerability of an uneducated, lower-class reader. This reader was believed to possess an overactive fantasy life and to be subject to “folly and fanaticism” and worry. Colporteurs, who possessed none of the status granted to professional booksellers and who catered to readers at the lowest end of the book trade, were subject to regular searches.
A closer look at three specific texts introduces us to the kinds of texts authorities identified as morally dangerous in the first decades of the nineteenth century. In 1817 the police in the city of Halle reported the confiscation of a pamphlet entitled A True Terrifying Horrifying Story of a Mother, Eva Rosina Riedelin from Marienberg, who on February 25 of this year Roasted her own small Child, and with it Managed to assuage the Hunger of her other Five Children. Paying a visit to the local song and picture salesman, the police discovered that the source of the pamphlet was a man named Weimann.42 Under interrogation Weimann gave up two more names: he had obtained the original text from a man named Nicolai and then gave it to a printer named Bantsch. Weimann must have kept the production costs low, as the pamphlet (luckily pasted into the report itself) was bound in plain paper and sold for six pfennig.
Composed of six pages in a large font, the story itself is simple to recount. A True Terrifying Horrifying Story tells the tale of Johann and Eva Riedelin and their six hungry children. Johann is a tenant farmer who cannot make an adequate living farming and is therefore forced to take on other jobs to feed his family. He works hard, taking on extra jobs and missing sleep in an attempt to earn money. In spite of his hardship, he never gives up faith in God:
Figure 1. Title page of Wahre schauderhaft-schreckliche Geschichte einer Mutter (1817). This copy was confiscated and pasted into the Prussian Justice Ministry’s files on printed songs, pamphlets, and stories of wonder carried by colporteurs. Geheimes Staatsarchiv PK, I. HA Rep. 77, Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 243, Nr. 50, Bd. 1: 57.
In Boden, a sizable village close to Marienberg, lived a poor tenant farmer by the name of Johann David Riedelin with his wife and 6 small children, the eldest around 8 years old and the youngest seven weeks old, who relied on him to work. Even if he denied himself sleep to earn extra in addition to his daily labor, he was still not in the position to earn enough money to feed his family. Nonetheless, untiring and constant in his trust in God, he never lost courage.
Not so his wife.
Though Eva Riedelin is presented as a woman who has lost her faith, she is also resourceful. In an effort to feed her family she adopts the habit of borrowing bread on credit from the local baker, who takes pity on her and never presses her to settle her bill. In this way she is able to keep her family from starving. One day, prompted by six children crying for food, Eva resolves once again to ask the baker for bread on credit. Arriving in town, she discovers that the baker is away on business, leaving his wife to take care of the store. When Eva asks timidly if she may borrow some bread, the baker’s wife urges her to return when her husband comes back, for she herself is not authorized to give bread on credit. Despairing, Eva returns home, where she is accosted by hungry children crying “Mommy doesn’t love us anymore” and clawing at her skirts. Pushed over the edge by the cries of her children, Eva kills the smallest child, roasts him, feeds him to his siblings, and hangs herself. Returning home from his trip, the baker hears of Eva’s visit. He urges his wife to carry two loaves—one as a gift, the other on credit—to the Riedelin home. When the wife arrives, anticipating the happy cries of the hungry children, she discovers “the arms and legs of a small child scattered on the floor” and the other children “gnawing on a human hand.”
A police investigation into the text revealed that in 1814 a manuscript of the story had been presented to and approved by a censor, Dr. Pfaff, a member of the philosophy faculty at the University of Halle. Questioned by the police in 1817, Pfaff explained that he had approved the manuscript because the story appeared to be based on a true incident. He declared that whereas immoral fiction merited censorship, the truthful depiction of immoral acts did not. (Here we see the censor’s evocation of truth as a value to be protected.)43 The police and interior minister disagreed, reading the story according to the vocabulary and ideas that ran through their own file on colportage, condemning “published songs and pamphlets of thoroughly filthy and indecent content, which destroy the morality of the average man,” and “so-called spiritual wares, which exhale the most tasteless superstitions and thereby destroy the good morals of the average man.”44 While Pfaff’s judgment focused on the pamphlet’s content, the police were preoccupied with audience and effects. According to the police, the danger of the story hinged on its tale of a woman who lost her mental equilibrium and, as a result, was capable of unimaginable acts. By provoking strong emotions, the text might lead to the loss of the reader’s moral compass and mental stability. Both Pfaff and the police called upon legal principles articulated in 1788: Pfaff stressed the importance of truth; the police sought to protect readers from “indecent images and enticing depictions of vice.” With no courts to weigh in, the police usually won out in such disagreements.
Tom Cheesman has studied the “true crime narratives” that were ubiquitous in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German street literature. These narratives were often performed orally with the aid of poster boards (anyone who has seen the prelude to Threepenny Opera will be familiar with Moritätslieder); during the first half of the nineteenth century it was not uncommon for these oral stories to be published in inexpensive editions. It is likely that the Eva Riedelin pamphlet was such a story, and the narrative is typical of the genre. Cheesman explains, “The shocking ballad tradition is one of dramatic elaborations of this basic legend, the central motif being refusal of a request for food—i.e. ‘hard-heartedness.’” The basic outlines of this story sound familiar: a poor family, often headed by a women, is threatened with starvation. A request is made for charity from someone who is better off, and this request is refused. In the published versions of the story the woman usually kills all the children and herself. Cheesman interprets the “hard-heartedness story” as a reflection of emerging bourgeois norms, particularly ideas of the “self-enclosed” and “self-sustaining family,” newly separated into a public sphere in which the man worked, and a private sphere dedicated to privacy and consumption.45