Drawing on his new book Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature, Robert Darnton declares that censorship is “essentially political; it is wielded by the state” – but also finds that its historical use has gone far beyond just banning certain texts:
Reading was an essential aspect of censoring, not only in the act of vetting texts, which often led to competing exegeses, but also as an aspect of the inner workings of the state, because contested readings could lead to power struggles, which sometimes led to public scandals. Not only did censors perceive nuances of hidden meaning, but they also understood the way published texts reverberated in the public.
Their sophistication should not be surprising in the case of the GDR [East Germany], because they included authors, scholars, and critics. Eminent authors also functioned as censors in eighteenth-century France, and the surveillance of vernacular literatures in India was carried out by learned librarians as well as district officers with a keen eye for the folkways of the “natives.” To dismiss censorship as crude repression by ignorant bureaucrats is to get it wrong. Although it varied enormously, it usually was a complex process that required talent and training and that extended deep into the social order.
It also could be positive. The approbations of the French censors testified to the excellence of the books deemed worthy of a royal privilege. They often resemble promotional blurbs on the back of the dust jackets on books today. Column 16 in the secret “catalogues” of the India Civil Service sometimes read like modern book reviews, and they frequently lauded the books they kept under surveillance. While acting as censors, East German editors worked hard to improve the quality of the texts they vetted. Despite its ideological function, the reworking of texts had resemblances to the editing done by professionals in open societies. From start to finish, the novels of the GDR bore the marks of intervention by the censors. Some censors complained that they had done most of the work.
Jonathan Yardley offers more details on the situation writers faced in East Germany:
As for East Germany between the end of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, “censorship was not supposed to exist,” because “it was forbidden by the constitution, which guaranteed freedom of expression.” Like so much else during the hegemony of communism there and elsewhere, that was institutionalized hypocrisy pure and simple. The system of book censorship was elaborate and rigidly hierarchical, starting at the top with Erich Honecker, general secretary of the central committee of the Communist Party, who took an active interest in the system’s quotidian operation, but becoming somewhat less rigid lower in the ranks. Darnton was able to talk to two “veterans of the state machinery for making books conform to the Party line,” who did not like being called censors and who insisted that “most censorship took place in the heads of writers, and what the writers failed to cut usually got filtered out by editors in publishing houses.” Anyone who has written for an institution is familiar with the practice of self-censorship, but it is a far more risky and ambiguous task when performed within an institution as inflexible as the Communist Party than it is when performed by a writer for an American newspaper or magazine.
The Dish 