Robert Darnton: Censors at Work. How States Shaped Literature. NY: Norton, 2014. 316 pp. Ill.
Darnton opens his study by showing how censors in pre-revolutionary France were responsible more for endorsing a text submitted for their approval than for purging or forbidding it, as one might imagine. He even claims that the reports they submitted were so detailed and well-written that they form their own genre of literature. Having little expertise, however, when it comes to censorship in the Bourbon monarchy (and even less regarding the British in India), I will confine myself in this review to the third part of the book, which focuses on the German Democratic Republic.
Instead of describing how censorship was structured in East Germany from the top down, Darnton takes the sensible alternative of recounting his path of discovery about how things really worked. Thus the opening parts have some of the excitement of a story from the literary-detective-in-the-library genre, as we see him set forth with high expectations, grow frustrated at being trapped in an information maze, until finally he is shown the way forward by a sympathetic insider.
As it happens, I was working in the same building at about the same time, researching W.E.B. du Bois in the GDR, and Darnton’s words bring it all back. The archives of the SED “had been left undisturbed in a building at the heart of East Berlin, at 1 Torstrasse – formerly named Wilhelm-Pieck-Strasse….” (pg. 165) I can still see the desks in the reading room covered with documents that had so recently been secret, still remember leaving the archive one day and seeing the empty binders that had been tossed in the garbage bin outside, with hand-written labels on them announcing their former contents, such as “Orders and Medals Presented to Wilhelm Pieck.”
The bin stood right outside the main entrance, seen here in a later picture after the building had undergone a facelift. (Credit: Picture Alliance)
Darnton soon found that without a guide, an archive can turn into a labyrinth. “After several days of combing through bureaucratic flotsam and jetsam, I began to despair of finding anything important.” Then, just as he was starting to lose heart, he found a helpful guide, an archivist who assisted him in navigation. Having found the thread, he moves on to a series of case studies, focusing on selected texts from authors including Wolfgang Hilbig, Erich Loest, and Volker Braun, among others.
Darnton discovered that, as in France before the Revolution, the process of censorship in the GDR was not a simple one of an author writing a book and getting it accepted or rejected. Instead, the whole procedure could go through elaborate stages, with some authors submitting their work in bits and pieces, and receiving feedback from their editors while the work was still in progress. Moreover, even when the work was finally accepted for publication and had already appeared in print, that by no means meant the censors laid down their red pens. “The process of censoring could continue even after the book had been published, because if it provoked a scandal, it could be withdrawn from bookshops and pulped. Certain passages might be excised from later editions, but they also might be added,” for example in a version published in West Germany. In a very literal sense, texts published in the GDR were unstable.
A detail Darnton does not mention is that certain favored customers were often in a position to obtain so-called “under the counter” volumes, held for them by their contacts in the book industry. These hard-to-get copies would then be passed around and discussed among a narrow circle. So it could be said that in the GDR the last link in the censorship chain was the bookseller. (In the USSR, the final link was the individual customer, who could be told to paste over offending pages in their copy of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, for example.)
The chain’s first link was to be found in the mind of the writer, who might have a more or less accurate notion of what was permitted. Darnton calls this “the most important part of the process…, because it happened in the author’s head. Self-censorship left few traces in the archives, but East Germans often mentioned it, especially when they felt free to talk after the fall of the Wall.” (pg. 184)
Another variant of this could be termed self-incrimination. The way this worked was, the author would deliberately include certain passages that were sure to arouse the objections of the censors. When they – as expected – voiced their complaints, the author would protest vehemently but at last cooperate and give way. This process would be dragged out enough to exhaust the censors, making them more flexible when it came to other, less-inflammatory passages that might now slip through. Such techniques were practiced by Hollywood screenwriters when they faced censorship, and it comes as little surprise to learn they were also employed in the GDR. Ultimately, though, it was not a winning strategy: “By playing that game… they accepted its rules and became complicit with the system.” (pg. 184)
On the whole, the censors Darnton interviewed were likely not as courageous in their dissent as they wished to appear in the years just after 1989, but neither were they as slavishly conformist as they tried to appear to their superiors before then. Their position was encapsulated by the title of the memoirs of Jürgen Kuczynski (not quoted here), in which this well-connected GDR economic historian termed himself “a dissident who toed the line.”
Darnton resists the temptation to demonize the censors, refusing to reduce them to the function of ideological gatekeepers. “They devoted a great deal of attention to the aesthetic qualities of manuscripts, working closely with authors to improve phrasing and strengthen narratives. As far as one can tell from reading their reports, they were intelligent and well-educated critics who had much in common with editors in West Berlin and New York. They sought out talent, worked hard over drafts and shepherded texts through a complex production schedule.” (pg. 186)
Moreover, the system did not work exclusively top-down, from the party to the publisher to the individual censor. There were in fact multiple layers, and room for negotiation among all the participants. Sometimes an individual on a lower position on the flow chart could win a concession from the higher-ups; “the censors in Berlin did not treat the editors in the publishing houses as if they were underlings in a chain of command.” One should not imagine the GDR as having been more dictatorial than it really was; “there was room at every point for some degree of negotiation.” (pg. 191)
Wolfgang Hilbig’s case shows how one could criticize an author in such a way as to CYA but still permit publication. A volume of his poetry, Stimme Stimme, was subjected to certain restrictions: “Hilbig would have to eliminate certain poems and tone down others; his editors at Reclam would have to vet the final text with great care; the printing would have to be restricted to a small number of copies, and they would have to control its reception by preparing reviews to expose the inadequacy of its ‘worldview and ideological position.’ ” (pg. 177) But in the end, publication was permitted, and the author was even allowed to travel to West Germany, albeit with his publisher as a minder. To an outsider, this incident just looks like censorship, whereas to an insider it might look like navigation of a tricky situation.
In sum, the chapter “Communist East Germany: Planning and Persecution” is the result of remarkably thorough archival research. To quote from the final paragraph, “censorship never stopped, not even during the relatively tolerant last years of the GDR…. The process of negotiation, accommodation, resistance, and compromise went on at all levels, as it had done in earlier years, as if it could go on indefinitely. What, then, finally brought an end to censorship in East Germany? The fall of the Wall. Soon after the Wall was breached… nothing remained of the censorship system, except the censors themselves, who sat at their desks with nothing to do, trying to make sense of it all and to explain their experience to a naïve outsider, when I showed up in their office at 90 Clara-Zetkin-Strasse.” (pg. 227)
Translation Issues
Darnton is a self-described “outsider” when it comes to the GDR, and it shows. Some of his translations are less than idiomatic. “Self-feeling” is not the ideal rendering of “Selbstgefühl“ – “feeling of self-worth” would be better. The same goes for “Party-ness” for “Parteilichkeit” – “party-mindedness” is preferable, or “adherence to the party line.” (pp. 178, 212) East Germans themselves often called self-censorship “that little green man inside the ear” or the “scissors in the head.” (pg. 184) Here German uses the definite article where a possessive adjective would be normal in English: “inside your ear” and “in your head.”
Ulrich Plenzdorf’s name acquires a syllable to become “Plenzendorf.” (pg. 198); likewise the first name of poet Hanns Cibulka is misspelled, and the title of his volume of poetry “Seit ein Gespräch wir sind” is rendered as “Seid…” etc. (pg. 186) Admittedly, even the correct version (originally penned by Friedrich Hölderlin in his poem “Friedensfeier”) is odd and in fact deliberately “incorrect.” The problem is that where English uses the single word “since,” German calls for “seitdem” (if followed by a verb) or “seit” (if not). For reasons about which one can only speculate, Hölderlin selected the wrong form (to say nothing of the unorthodox word order). Darnton, however, introduces a new error, this one inadvertent, when he replaces the preposition “seit” with the imperative “seid” – as in for example “Seid ruhig!” (Be quiet!). In the end, he renders the title as “We are a discussion.” More accurate would be something like, “Since we are a conversation” (most likely meaning “Since we are talking and hearing from each other”).
Erich Loest’s novel Es geht seinen Gang is rendered too literally as “It goes its way” instead of It Takes Its Course or perhaps better Things Take Their Course. Darnton’s translation of Volker Braun’s Wir und nicht sie as “Us and not them” shows that he is not always a slave to literalism, but later on the same page he renders Braun’s Unvollendete Geschichte as “Incomplete story” instead of Unfinished Story – as if Schubert had composed an “Incomplete Symphony.” (pg. 204) And Braun’s Langsamer knirschender Morgen is called “Slow, grinding tomorrow” instead of Slow, Grinding Morning. (pg. 224)
To describe Sinn und Form as “the literary review of the GDR Academy of Arts” is formally correct but hardly gives an idea of this journal’s prominence in the literary landscape. The same goes for his description of Die Weltbühne as “a cultural weekly.” (pg. 215) It would be like describing Rolling Stone simply as “a musical publication.” To be fair, he does identify Neue Deutsche Literatur and Weimarer Beiträge as “influential journals.” (pg. 218)
These problems may seem trivial, but they do add up. It is unimaginable that Darnton would make them when writing on French and English literature. More serious is his translation of the phrase “real existierender Sozialismus,” which causes him some rather needless difficulty. “Real existing socialism” is obviously the closest equivalent, but is too inelegant to be considered. “Socialism as it really exists” strikes me as a satisfactory circumlocution, but Darnton opts for a variety of alternatives, often “real socialism” with explanatory phrases tacked on. For example, “real socialism – the actual existing order of the GDR.” (pg. 181)
The problem comes when he says that East German writers “accepted the reality of what they knew as ‘real socialism’ – a term they often used to describe the imperfect but superior character of East German society – and as far as one can tell, they retained their belief in its fundamental legitimacy.” And as an example he cites Christa Wolf, who “never deviated from her commitment to the socialist ideals of the GDR.” (pg. 199) Here Darnton essentially conflates acceptance of “real socialism” with support for socialist ideals, two very different things indeed. “Socialism as it really exists” was a slogan used mainly by the regime and its apologists, which did not reliably include Christa Wolf by any stretch of the imagination. Her acceptance of it was at best grudging, while her vocal support of socialist ideals was meant as a criticism of Honecker’s “real socialism.” When Darnton later calls “real socialism,” which of course was not a literary term at all, “a progressive kind of literature,” the confusion is complete. (pg. 210)
Probably these errors were corrected in the German edition: Die Zensoren: Wie staatliche Kontrolle die Literatur beeinflusst hat (2016), which I have not seen.
Further Reading
An intriguing revelation gets buried in a footnote: In 1992, a friend told him the Stasi had a file on Darnton himself, in which he is characterized as “a progressive young bourgeois.” (pg. 282, note 88) One wonders if Darnton ever followed up on this tip and asked to see his dossier. The result might be a book similar to Timothy Garton Ash’s excellent The File (reviewed elsewhere on this site). See also Darnton’s “Berlin Journal 1989-1990.”
Elsewhere at this site can be found my review of Herman Ermolaev: Censorship in Soviet Literature.
For results of my research on Du Bois and the GDR, see: “Censoring Your Ally: W.E.B. du Bois in the German Democratic Republic” in: Crosscurrents: African-Americans, Africa and Germany in the Modern World (1998) – not at this site. See also the second part of this essay, with greater focus on translation issues, published in Lebende Sprachen 64/1, spring 2019.
© Hamilton Beck
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