Dlaczego cenzura pruska nie była skuteczna?

Abstract

The author of the article talks about the conditions of Prussian censorship functioning on the Polish territories in the 1 9th and 20th century, with special attention to obstacles met by the Prussian censorship apparatus on its way to such effectiveness which would be satisfactory in the eyes of its political supervisors. There were two types of the above mentioned obstacles: internal ones i.e. underlying the very logics according to which censorship functioned in the country of the Hohenzollerns and external ones caused by authors and publishers' attempts to avoid restrictions imposed by censorship. Until 1848, the first group of causes had been mainly connected with the quality of censors' work. In this regard, the situation was far from acceptable to censorship supervisors in Berlin - not only on the territory annexed by Prussia. After the Spring of Nations, as a result of which preventive censorship was abolished in Prussia and replaced by the repressive one, internal difficulties were mainly caused by the lack of proper (from the point of view of the Prussian authorities) between justice administration - prosecution and courts - with the Prussian police. Both before and after the Spring of Nations, publishers and authors of censored works used a wide spectrum of means to avoid restrictive practices. They took advantage of inaccuracies in the censorship law (for instance, by expanding volumes of prints or parliamentary interpellations exempt from censorship) and used an old method of referring to Aesop's language or evoking in Polish readers negative associations with Prussians (Germans).