Warnings about the pernicious effects of new media on young people are as old as media history itself and are a common theme throughout the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. Looking back at previous struggles can put outrage about the media consumption of today’s youth into a proper perspective.

We associate the culture of the Weimar Republic with glitter and glamour, the Golden 20s and the avant-garde. Mass culture is often overlooked, despite the fact that it met with fierce resistance in its day. Ever since the days of the German Empire, concerned citizens had been taking action against the pleasures of the “common people” under the slogan “Schmutz und Schund” (“filth and trash”).

On 3 December 1926, they celebrated the enactment of the law protecting young people from smutty and trashy literature. It replaced the old paragraph on decency, according to which obscene texts could still be prohibited by court order.

The legislators opened new censorship offices in Munich and Berlin and established a governing censorship authority in Leipzig. They made decisions at the request of the state youth welfare offices or Ministries of the Interior. The censorship offices placed offensive literature that did not meet an undefined standard of quality on a list. The works listed could not be advertised or put on display. Sales to people aged under 18 were forbidden.

The showcase exhibition at the German National Library’s German Museum of Books and Writing will use numerous case studies to shed new light on this little-known chapter of the cultural history of the Weimar Republic. The items displayed will include popular pulp magazines, weekly novels, cheap periodicals, the first tabloid sheets and – last but not least – elaborately designed picture books. Besides providing insights into the index of banned literature, they will also contextualise the explosive social force and political message of certain provocative materials.

The exalted words of those in favour of the law concealed a struggle for cultural supremacy: the bourgeois elite wanted to retain control of who was permitted to read what. On the other side of the coin, the cheap paperbacks did actually contain emancipatory messages. The censorship offices did not approve of the portrayal of strong women, while many adventure heroes seemed to them to be un-German, criminals who recounted their activities without remorse and had an inflammatory effect on the population.

The law was to be short-lived. The Nazis repealed it in 1935. From then on, they banned “harmful and undesirable literature” directly by placing such works on blacklists. However, they were more tolerant of erotica and mass literature – provided it did not step out of line with Nazi ideology. Not until 1953 did the Federal Republic of Germany again bring in a law on “smutty” literature, while in the GDR, the fight against filth continued solely on an informal basis.

The exhibition “Filth and Trash” was developed by students taking part in a Master's degree seminar at the Institute of Communication and Media Studies of the University of Leipzig under the direction of Jun.-Prof. Patrick Merziger in cooperation with the German Museum of Books and Writing.

More about censorship in the permanent exhibition at the German Museum of Books and Writing.