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Universities in many liberal democracies, such as the US, the UK, or Germany, grapple with a pivotal question: how much room should be given to controversial utterances? On the one side, there are those who advocate for limiting permissible speech on campus to create a safe environment for a diverse student body and counter the mainstreaming of extremist views, particularly by right-wing populists. On the other side, concerns arise about stifling the free exchange of ideas and creating an atmosphere of fear and censorship. The debate is further complicated by participants' occasional uncertainties about the legal norms relevant in the given context, such as when freedom of speech is an issue and when it is not. This paper addresses the question of whether universities should allow actors with primarily political (as opposed to scholarly) agendas to speak on campus. Focusing on German universities, we begin by discussing some of the potentially relevant legal norms. We then propose shifting emphasis from "whether" we should make room for public political discussions on campus to "how" such events must be organized so that they deliver the goods that their advocates emphasize while avoiding the dangers of which critics warn. Drawing on conflict management literature concerned with process design, we make several practical suggestions on how to organize an event that brings political discourse to the university campus without causing harm.

In the past years, there has been an intensive discussion on the topic of academic freedom in the university. More precisely, it has been criticized that the university is confronted with a growing intolerance and the request to limit free speech. This contribution takes a case at a German university as point of departure. It shows how the current discussions draw on central figures of the philosophy of Enlightenment. In the first part of the paper, the ideas of free speech following Kant, Mill, and Popper are presented. The second part of the article shows how these positions can also lead to an inversion or instrumentalization of Enlightenment thought. This is illustrated using exemplary statements from the case presented in the beginning of the article. In the third part of the article, the concept of higher education or "Bildung" will be discussed in relation to academic freedom. The guiding principle is an openness toward a pluralistic discourse that is to be framed by societal analysis, civility, and critique.

While the spectacle of book burnings in Nazi Germany was something that most Americans recoiled from in the 1930s, by the end of the decade, on the eve of America's entry into the Second World War, the symbolic power of destroying books by fire was unfortunately something that certain Americans were not above seizing upon. In the 1930s and 1940s, audio-visual technologies became the major conduits through which the state communicated its aspirations to its public. If there is a fine line between the banning of books and the burning of books, then exploring a specific American instance of the former may help spare future generations of the latter. National Education Association (NEA) head J. W. Crabtree had been lobbying U.S. Secretary of War George H. Dern to see things his way on the urgent matter at hand, even invoking the office of President of the United States in the process. What motivated the leader of the nation's largest teachers union was his hope that the Secretary of War might lean heavily upon Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) director Robert Fechner to rescind his recent banning of the instructional booklet "You and Machines." Fechner had effectively suppressed the booklet from distribution to the CCC camps, and Crabtree hoped that the Secretary of War would convince Fechner to back down and allow distribution of the booklet. As head of the NEA, Crabtree deemed Fechner's censorship a "flagrant insult" to the federal Office of Education, which had been tasked with advisement on all educational matters within the CCC. Crabtree went as far as threatening to initiate Congressional hearings into what he perceived to be a heinous violation of academic freedom. He felt that such hearings might be feared enough within the administration that Fechner would be advised to back down. Perhaps already knowing that Franklin Delano Roosevelt would support him, Fechner responded politely, but in no uncertain terms, that his decision to ban the instructional booklet would stand. Thus began one of the most fascinating instances of censorship during the New Deal era. This article explores what this incident suggests about the competing discourses regarding the role of technology in society, and highlights an instance where this conflict reached the highest levels of government. (Contains 4 figures.)

To examine Heidegger's pedagogy is to be invited into a particular era and cultural reality--starting in Weimar Germany and progressing into the rise and fall of the Third Reich. In his attempt to reform the German university in a strictly hierarchical, authoritarian and nationalistic mold, Heidegger addressed one group of students and professors and not another. The petit-bourgeois student and the future philosophers he invited with his "logic of recruitment" into the corps of instructors, would share his coded language with its built-in taboos and censorship. The result was a rhetoric of absolute self-reference and a semiotic of pure propaganda, based on the evocation of the ancient Greeks in which the philosopher meant to project all that was properly Germanic. Heidegger's rhetoric is exclusionary; its politics and its philosophy are interpenetrating. His lecture courses grew increasingly poeticized, and thus mired in ambiguity, evasion, elision, avoidance, grandiloquence. Parallels are drawn in this essay between Heidegger and our time. Is Heidegger's insistence on autocratic controls within the German university comparable to the corporate positions taken today by some educators? How does the shifting relation between disciplines affect the role of the specialist? How might the sciences morales or humanities, along with the much maligned "humanism", be redefined morally and holistically?

Presents a case study in the praxis of "constructing childhood." Relates the history of a campaign in turn-of-the-century Germany against "filth and trash," the professed goal of which was to protect minors from the effects of penny magazines, movies, and popular songs. Presents theses on the motivation of adult campaigners. (DSK)

Service to young adults in German public libraries expanded under the Nazis because of their idealization of youth. The elaborate structure created to propagate Nazi views determined the types of books and services available. Progress resulted from the accommodation to a totalitarian creed that was essentially evil. (EM)

During the past five years the cultural world in Germany has been shaken and divided by a series of controversies involving contemporary works of art charged with being anti-Semitic. Obviously, with the Holocaust continuing to occupy a major position in modern German consciousness and history, sensitivity to anti-Semitic expressions is particularly keen here. This sensitivity has been increased by a number of recent developments, including the growing visibility of far-right political groups, the rise of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS) protesting Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, and the official politicization of these tensions by a parliamentary ruling in 2015 restricting the activities of the BDS. The conflict between legitimate criticism of policies of the Israeli state and legitimate censorship of ethnically offensive material has recently become increasingly bitter in Germany. This article discusses the dynamics of three of the most significant recent examples: the conflict involving Germany's most prestigious arts festival, the Kassell documenta in 2020; the withdrawal in 2022 of the European Drama Award, the continent's largest award, from British dramatist Caryl Churchill; and the withdrawal from the Munich stage of the most recent play by Wajdi Mouawad, who has been widely heralded in Germany as the most significant contemporary dramatist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While science communication is increasingly being discussed as a third mission alongside research and teaching, there is little research on how universities and research organizations deal with issues regarding the quality of science communication. This article examines, from an organizational perspective, which new forms of quality assurance processes scientific organizations in Germany apply when addressing quality risks for science communication such as exaggeration in press releases or in the online communication of individual faculty members. Six focus group discussions were conducted with 22 participants (rectors or presidents of universities, heads of communication, ombudsmen, and high-impact researchers). Based on the results, proposals were developed to extend central as well as decentral organizational structures to assure good scientific communication practice. Their possible implementation was discussed in a workshop with representatives of all abovementioned groups. In conclusion, recommendations for future institutional policy are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to censorship and deplatforming policies on big social media platforms, far-right users have been forced to migrate to other online platforms that provide them with safer spaces for communication. One of these platforms is the Russian social networking site VK. This research investigates the German political environment on VK, which predominantly comprises online groups supporting far-right views. The analysis of users' activity in the online groups showed that VK functions as an alternative platform and is not used for outward-oriented goals. Looking at the activities on VK in terms of the theory of sustainability practices, we claim that one of the most critical functions of VK is archiving content. This practice ensures the preservation of accumulated narratives in the case of complete deplatforming on a mainstream platform. We found that people who use VK for communication form two different thematic clusters: The first focuses on German domestic issues, and the second focuses on transnational conspiracy theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Germans paid close attention to how Japan won not only on the battlefield but also in the arena of public opinion, having smoothly fused censorship and propaganda into their objectives. Germany did not fight in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. After the German censorship law of 1874, newspapers had a I Sitzredakteur i (sitting editor), a straw man who was legally responsible and would go to prison ( I sitzen i , to sit, means being in prison) when a paper violated censorship laws. For nearly 30 years, I have contemplated why wartime press-military relations have varied from war to war and country to country, starting with my first academic book, I Secrets of Victory: The Office of Censorship and the American Press and Radio in World War II i . [Extracted from the article]

During the First World War (1914–1918), all belligerent governments realized that propaganda proficiency was critical to selling their causes and stirring up support for the war. Yet German propagandists in particular struggled to master mass media, manage their messages, and build audience trust during the Great War in their goal to control domestic and foreign public opinion. Although previous scholarship has agreed that the German propaganda machine failed, little has been said about how Germany recognized these failures early on and sought to remedy them through increasingly modern propaganda strategies—even if those strategies were ultimately no match for the public's growing distrust of official information. This monograph examines how it was that more institutions, more manpower, new publicity initiatives, copying tactics from enemies, crowdsourcing ideas, and eventually focusing on visuals and film did little to boost morale at home or improve Germany's reputation abroad. The findings rest on a historical analysis of military dispatches, federal policy documents, letters, news stories, propaganda materials, and memoirs located in German and U.S. archives. Although many of the methods and tactics these early propagandists used would fail, others would become part of the universal toolbox governments still rely on to influence people's views and spread information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"The Price of Truth: The Journalist Who Defied Military Censors to Report the Fall of Nazi Germany" by Richard Fine is a book that sheds light on the overlooked story of Edward Kennedy, a journalist who violated a news embargo to report Germany's unconditional surrender at the end of World War II. The book explores the tensions between the press and the military, as well as issues of freedom of the press and censorship. Fine's research is based on extensive archival sources and provides a compelling narrative that challenges the commonly held belief of a cooperative relationship between the military and the press during World War II. The book is suitable for both general interest readers and academic study. [Extracted from the article]

Physique photography played an important role in conditioning erotic subjectivity for gay male readers of West Germany's 1950s homophile magazines. To date, scholars of the period have focused on the content of these magazines and their role in the emergence of the postwar gay scene (Whisnant) but have yet to carefully consider the medium itself as a critical component in the creation of same-sex subjectivities. By focusing on layout techniques such as juxtaposition, this article examines the ways in which the magazine Der Weg zu Freundschaft und Toleranz created erotically suggestive narratives between photos that circumvented increasingly strict censorship laws in the early Federal Republic while at the same time conflating the gay male viewing subject with whiteness in alignment with dominant discourses of Heimat and national belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1930s and 1940s, the publishing sphere in Germany had to adapt to substantial ideological imperatives. It was subject to the control of various often rivaling institutions of censorship. These censoring institutions employed literary scholars to observe and influence the growing production of books and magazines. This paper reconstructs the practices these literary scholars employed for dealing with contemporary literature in an ideologically conditioned setting. It engages with the still largely unexplored relation between academic socialization, interpretative practices and politically motivated interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay re-reads two German low-budget horror movies, Jörg Buttgereit’s NekRomantik 2 (1991) and Olaf Ittenbach’s The Burning Moon (1992). I argue that both titles—amateurish and obscure as they may initially appear—explicitly comment on the difficult state of non-normative film-making (in particular with regard to horror cinema) in a country where, according to Germany’s Basic Law, “there shall be no censorship.” Largely overlooked in studies on German national cinema, Buttgereit and Ittenbach’s films reflect Germany’s complex relation to the practice of media control after 1945, including—but not limited to—the depiction of fictionalized violence. Not only have NekRomantik 2 and The Burning Moon been banned in their native country, they already anticipate the state’s intervention and inscribe the discourse into the texts themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Historische Zeitschrift is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

From its fin-de-siècle inception against the backdrop of Wilhelmine-era body culture and Lebensreform movements, the liberal German periodical Geschlecht und Gesellschaft consistently worked to push the boundaries of sexual discourse within a framework of bourgeois respectability. Until the end of World War I, it did so by prioritizing aesthetic discourse, with contributors undertaking progressive, sexually explicit readings of the Western canon, challenging controversial censorship decisions - using 'high' culture to appeal to an educated Bildungsbürgertum readership - and exploring a new Darwinian-inspired sexual ethics. While the institutional and intellectual history of the furor sexualis as a paradigm of modernity has largely been mapped since Foucault, with historians charting the 'scientification', 'biologization' and 'medicalization' of German society in early twentieth-century modernity, this article positions aesthetic discourse as a key aspect of the pursuit of the truth of sex. It also shows how this cultural paradigm largely disappeared in the Weimar era, when shifts in middle-class demographics led to an increasing focus on science in discussions of sex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes as its starting point Frauennot-Frauenglück (Women's Misery - Women's Happiness), a film representative of health education films on sex hygiene in Weimar Germany. This paper opens by situating the film in the landscape of German health education films from World War I to the Weimar era. I document the evolution of interest in sexual health education films in the early decades of the twentieth century and show how their narratives changed as a result of the increasing popularity of feature films in the Weimar period. The article then focuses on the lectures which accompanied health education films. I argue that an analysis of these under-investigated lectures can raise new stimulating epistemological questions on the historical status of health education films, as these lectures changed the filmic dispositive. I show how this common practice served as a technique of rhetorical reworking in efforts to adjust or orient the visuality of what was shown to the public. Drawing on two very different lectures which accompanied Frauennot-Frauenglück, the article identifies two approaches to lecturing. While one consisted in enabling controversial films to be screened to the public, the other (socialist) approach transforms initial censorial intentions, allowing the speaker stress his personal or new positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article centralises a unique collection of ego documents created under Communism in which Polish former child forced labourers articulate their war experiences. A comparative analysis of them with recent testimonies reveals that these ego documents offer a more nuanced depiction of Germans and display richer information on the specific working conditions and daily routine for children than the contemporary ones. A comparative reading of the archival testimonies with their published equivalents shows how the streamlining of a publicly acceptable version of the past under Communism went both ways, that is, at times foregrounding the propaganda content of autobiographical wordings, but also at other moments downplaying this element. The collection increases our understanding of child forced labour experiences during the Second World War, specifically the ways in which children perceived that experience, and offers insights into the negotiated appropriation of Communist ideology at the individual level. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

China has always maintained relatively-strict content censorship and has prohibited works with illicit or immoral content (offending works) from publication and dissemination. This article examines and compares UK, U.S., and German practices, and whether such works are copyrightable, and if so, to what extent they are protected by Chinese copyright law. In particular, it focuses on the implications of the revised Chinese Copyright Law of 2010 pursuant to the ruling of the WTO Dispute Settlement Body (DSB) of 2009 in the dispute, China - Measures Affecting the Protection and Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights, as well as the effective protection and remedies available with respect to foreign works against copyright infringements, which have already been published or disseminated in China, but without a successful completion of the required content review. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While censorship touched upon the careers of every German writer in the nineteenth century, a few cases stood out to contemporaries, defining their era. If the Demagogenverfolgung stamped the early 1820s and the prohibition of Young Germany the 1830s, the assault on left-wing or “Young” Hegelianism in 1842–43 was the major censorship case of the decade. Banning the Deutsche Jahrbücher, Rheinische Zeitung, and Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung was part of a significant, coordinated effort to undermine a small but influential faction of radical social critics. This wave of intellectual persecution radicalized the left, sowing the seeds for Marx's thoroughgoing assault on the foundations of European state and society. Understanding these cases in the context of a broader process of the transformation of censorship practices in modern Germany, however, remains an incomplete project for historians. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using the Humboldt University Library in Berlin as an example, this article examines the laws and regulations, enacted by the Soviet Military Administration and the GDR leadership, for the removal of National Socialistic and militaristic literature from academic libraries after World War II. In addition to the procedures and the bibliographic documentation of the enforced removal, the impact of the measures on daily library operations is also analyzed. Finally, the article addresses the return of the media in the 1990s and the consequences of the the removal that are felt to the present day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship has cautioned us that censorship does not require a censor, nor can it be described merely as the repression of information by power. Censorship can be discursively productive, and historically it has worn many guises. This article treats a case in which state censorship practices were unstable, their execution uncertain, and their target cunning, if ultimately open to compromise. Sparked by an antiaristocratic short story in Ernst Keil's Gartenlaube (arbor, bower), the most widely read German periodical of the era, the Amazon affair involved not only its namesake ship—the Prussian S.M.S. Amazon (Amazone), a wooden corvette that sank in a storm off the coast of Holland in 1861—but an extraordinary confrontation between the conservative Prussian state and the liberal popular press. From the misstep of a weekly family magazine arose a multiyear press ban and a struggle over liberal-democratic public opinion in Germany. If no clear winner emerged from the Amazon affair, the episode nonetheless speaks to the malleability of German political culture at a moment of profound transition, as well as to the ability of the state to shape it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Forschungsjournal Soziale Bewegungen is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article discusses how World War I is viewed historically as of 2013, with information on the lack of agreement among historians regarding the cause of the war. Topics include censorship, or preemptive historiography, in Germany of its central role in the outbreak of the conflict and the impact on public opinion, the reinterpretation of precipitating events by German historian Fritz Fischer finding that the country had exploited the circumstances to pursue its foreign policy objectives, and continued historical debate regarding responsibility for factors that lead to the war.

The article discusses the issues regarding the 1929 Krolloper production of Richard Wagner's "Der fliegende Holländer." It mentions the cultural and political description of the production in relation to Germany's crisis in early 1929 and the absence of censorship. A review by Paul Zschorlich in the newspaper "Deutsche Zeitung" of the production is discussed. The details of the score conducted and directed by Otto Klemperer and the stage design by Ewald Dülberg are also noted.

Copyright of Communicatio Socialis is the property of Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The name of publishing house Contact is associated with Anne Frank's diary, of which Contact was the first publisher. In this article, Lisa Kuitert shows how Contact, established in 1933, operated during the Second World War. Although Contact was not a publisher for the resistance, both of its publishing directors, in various ways, supported authors who had been banned from publishing. The means also existed for them to do this because precisely in these five years, the publisher did well financially. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on a December 2009 conference of the Seminar for Middle and Later Church History of the Catholic Theological Faculty held at the Westphalia Wilhelm University in Μünster, Germany. The convention was titled "Inquisitions and Book Censorship in the Enlightenment Era" and addressed such topics as the Jesuit Benedict Stattler and the motivations of the book censors.

Having been asked to review the constitutionality of the civil law-rulings in the case Esra, the German Federal Constitutional Court confirms the ban on every form of publication and dissemination of Maxim Biller's book Esra In its essence, the case deals with the conflict between the freedom of art and personality rights, both fundamental rights, which are - in principle -protected without any limits, but nevertheless can predominate each other in a specific case. The Constitutional Court now develops the presumption that a novel, even if it contains fiction as well as reality, has to be regarded as a protected work of art. In the present case of recognisability of real persons the Court judges the explicit and detailed description of sexual activities as the decisive factor for a serious violation of personality rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The year 1926 marked the passage of Germany's Law to Protect Youth from Worthless and Obscene Publications. In combination with the Reich Motion Picture Law of 1920, this legislation sought to shelter minors from the corrupting forces of cultural narrative and imagery. As the discourse surrounding these laws attests, the terms of Germany's so-called 'cinema debate' were ambivalent, and discussions about films thematizing crime were especially complex. Whereas many detective and crime films were condemned for glorifying delinquency, brutalizing the senses and exposing youth to excessive details about criminal activity, educational films and films that sounded a warning were viewed by reformists as ideal means to teach moral responsibility and good citizenship. This paper explores the purported connection between visual imagery, sensual-psychological stimulation, crime and censorship during the early years of the Weimar period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Rijec (Word) is the property of Croatian Philological Society and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The sometimes parallel, sometimes conflicting careers of Bertolt Brecht and Béla Balázs are examined through the focus of their engagements with film and in the context of their experience of exile. Both were anti-fascist and at least nominally communist; yet neither was fully accepted by the communist governments of East Germany (in Brecht's case) and post-World War II Hungary (in the case of Balázs) and both were subjected to official criticism and censorship despite their attempts to conform to political orthodoxy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information on the catalog of prohibited music that the Jesuits' provincial administrator in Bavaria, Germany appended to a set of supplemental instructions regarding the use of music by colleges in the sixteenth century. It states that majority of the banned pieces include verbal texts treating drunkenness and erotic love. It explains that the catalog was derived solely from a review of the music collection of Munich's college upon its move to a new building in 1591. Moreover, it notes that the music catalog reflected the understanding of Bavaria of its role as a principal post-Tridentine defender of the true faith.