College and Research Libraries By HOMER ASCHMANN An Example of Censorship of A Scholarly Periodical O NE ASPECT of the plans for the new letters and science college of the University of California at Riverside was that students in the upper division were to be expected to read the literature of their major fields in a foreign lan- guage. In practice this goal is not always reached, but it does provide additional justification for acquiring the back files of scholarly journals so essential to re- search. The initial complement for the library was liberal enough to permit re- questing a few such back files before in- struction began at the new college. As a geographer I took the opportu- nity to request a complete back file of Petermanns Geographische Mitteilun- gen} should such a file or a major frac- tion thereof appear on the market. This distinguished journal has been in exist- ence for more than a century and is a mine of accurate information on all as- pects of geography. If some of the older physical geography is deficient in terms of modern concepts, the scholarly de- scriptions of landscapes of the past have an appreciating worth to the historical geographer. Great numbers of excellent original maps of all sorts have been pub- lished there only. Today, despite its pub- lication at Gotha behind the Iron Cur- tain, the journal's prestige is such that it gets the cream of the non-political arti- cles written in V\Test as well as in East Germany. It now also features a fine bib- liography of recent geographical publi- Dr. Aschmann is assistant professor of geography} Division of Social Sciences} Universit')' of California (Riverside). MAY} 1957 cations in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. It was a happy event then when a British dealer with connections in Ger- many-Lange, Maxwell and Springer (now Maxwell's) -offered at a good price a nearly complete back file, and funds were available to purchase it. Bindings of the older volumes proved to be in bad shape, and careful collation by the library staff located a few torn and missing maps, but down to 1933 the set proved to be in good condition. The vol- umes from 1933 to 1938 and that for 1942 told another story. They had been thoroughly censored with many pages removed and others pasted over in whole or part. Great care had been taken to cover not only certain articles and re- views, but their titles as well. All non- censored material, however, was pro- tected. Sometimes only phrases or para- graphs were co':'ered. The soft but fully opaque covering paper was attached with an adhesive that resisted completely all the solvents the library tried. The initial suspicion that the Nazi government had carried out the censor- ship was groundless, of course. Since the magazine was published in Germany, censorship before pub 1 i cation would have been feasible and more economic. In one instance in 1944 a map was pre- pared, but a printed notation in the ta- ble of contents indicated that the govern- ment had refused to permit it to be dis- tributed at that time. As a student at the University of Cali- fornia at Los Angeles in the 1930's, I had consulted this journal and recalled no defacement of the issues in question. The 213 relevant part of the file at UCLA .could be borrowed, and the contents of the cen- sored material were determined. Peter- manns is a remarkably non-political geographical journal. Its editors never acquired much interest in or respect for geopolitics, and published very little in that field. What they did publish was completely excised by the censor. A geopolitical survey of the world by Manfred Langhans-Ratzeburg which ran in six parts in the 1935 volume was com- pletely removed. The one paper by Karl Haushofer, published in 1942, was simi- larly treated. In 1935 a department in the magazine called "Military Geogra- phy" was instituted and ran in several issues through World War II. The de- partment consisted primarily of a run- ning bibliography of newly published topographic maps; in most countries such maps are produced under the direc- tion of military engineers. The censor- ship consisted of covering the title word "MiliHir-Geographie" wherever it ap- peared. Occasionally items in the bibli- ography were covered, but the bulk of the cartographic information was al- lowed to remain. A rather good and not flagrantly propagandistic article on the former ·German Colonies by the distin- guished geographer Albrecht Penck was cut out of the 1936 volume. Other items censored were fourteen short reviews of books on geopolitics, military geography, those which ques- tioned the frontiers which placed Ger- man minorities in other countries, a category that might be identified as ir- redentist literature, and one review of a book on Spanish politics and the then ac- tive Spanish Civil War. It is difficult to recall precisely what might have been es- pecially objectionable from a political standpoint in 1945, but I got the feeling that the censor was diligent but not no- tably literate, politically or geographi- cally, in selecting the book reviews to be deleted. If the title said something about geopolitics, or military geography, if the author was a well known member of Karl Haushofer's Geopolitical Insti- tute, or if the title said something about German minorities in Eastern Europe, the review was likely to be pasted over. Reviews of other books on the same sub- jects, especially when the title was less explicit, were not covered. Often the cen- sored reviews were critical and had some- thing of an anti-Nazi flavor, more so than some of those which were allowed to re- main. The remainder of the censoring was even more selective. Paragraphs, sen- tences, and even phrases were carefully pasted over. These deletions occurred primarily in the professional reports and news notes sections that reported on con- ventions of geographers or the position of geography in the German public school curricula. The paragraphs deleted generally dealt with the organization of geographic education so as to promote a feeling of patriotism on the part of the students, though it is hard to see that the statements on the subject were as flam- boyant as those that appear regularly in American e ducat ion a I journals. The phrases and sentences censored common- ly referred to the presence of a govern- mental dignitary such as Reichsminister for Culture Bernhard Rust, or the par- ticipation of the association of geography teachers in the Nationalsozialistischen Lehrerbund. From an article on recent Arctic ex- plorations a sentence was covered which made reference to the political mania in- volved in establishing as place names off Northern Siberia such expressions as "Sound of the Red Army," etc. (The ap- parent pun does not exist in German.) In one instance in the 1937 volume a rather insignificant article was ended with the salutation, "Heil Hitler." Those two words only were carefully pasted over. My first suspicion was that this labori- 214 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES ~ I I l I /~' ..,.. ) ous censoring operation had been carried out as a big boondoggle by the Amer- ican Military Government in Germany on some private library in 1945-46, not being able to imagine that any other country would have the money to waste on such a project. A complaint to the British dealer who had represented the set as in perfect condition, however, was in order. At the same time the dealer was queried as to the provenience of the set. The dealer promised to try to replace the damaged volumes, and also stated that those published after 1933 had been obtained from the stock of the publisher, Justus Perthes, in Gotha. Gotha is in the Russian Zone, and al- though the city was occupied b y Amer- ican forces for a few weeks in 1945, there was practically no chance that so pains- . taking a censorship operation could have been organized in such a brief time. A subsequent development showed clearly that the censorship had been done under Soviet sponsorship. Some eight months after complaint about the condition of the censored vol- umes had been made, Maxwell's notified the library that it had acquired replace- ments for several volumes and was for- warding them. They arrived as absolute- ly unused, unbound copies directly from Eastern Germany. Obviously they had come from the publisher's stock. The volume for 1912, where some missing maps had caused a replacement to be re- quested, was in perfect shape. All the numbers of the four volumes for 1933-36 appeared to be perfectly new, but inspec- tion showed them to hav~ been censored in precisely the same way as those we had first received. V\Then a paragraph, sen- tence, or phrase was covered, the result was identical down to the last word. The tables of contents on the covers of these unbound numbers even had the titles of censored articles pasted over with color matched paper. All record of the offend- ing article had been erased. MAY., 1957 A reconstruction of the whole censor- ship project was possible. The censor had gone into the publishing house with instructions to denazify all material pub- lished from 1933 to 1945. He had pre- pared a master index of items to be de- leted and methodically proceeded to re- move or obscure all the unacceptable items from every unsold copy of the magazine in the publisher's hands. I have not obtained any data concerning what efforts were made to eliminate the of- fending material or to restrict its circu- lation from private, university, or public libraries. Restriction of circulation rath- er than destruction is the more probable technique employed on the major re- search collections. In any event, the cen- sorship ~as a project of such scope that in the short period of American occupa- tion of Gotha, just as the war was end- ing, it could not have been achieved. It was unquestionably a Soviet act, though to what extent it was carried out by the East German puppet government is not known. The problem for our library remains unsolved, and the chances of ever find- ing uncensored volumes now seems to be pretty small. For those volumes where no pages were actually cut out, we ma){-ask the chemistry department to try to find solvents for the all too successful glue, without at the same time taking the print off the pages. More likely we will get photostatic copies of the damaged or removed pages from the perfect copies at UCLA, trying to get the seller to foot the bill. A few philosophic comments on cen- sorship in general and this act in partic- ular may be appropriate. The most men- acing aspect intellectually is the mechan- ical thoroughness with which the work was done. The replacement of the vol- umes we had complained about with others damaged in just the same way im- plies that the publisher has become con- vinced that the politically unacceptable 215 material never existed or at least no longer exists. The rewriting of history seems now to be an established practice, and Eastern Europe is already enjoying the intellectual life of I 984. The collec- tion of evidence of similar censorship of other books and journals, as it can be gathered, could provide a vital insight into what has gone on in Eastern Europe since 1945. My limited investigation has produced the following data. This kind of censor- ship did not affect a considerable store of periodicals to which American uni- versities had subscriptions through such dealers as Harrassowitz in Leipzig, and which accumulated during the war. After negotiations carried on by the American Cooperative Acquisitions Project with the Soviet authorities, a considerable amount of this material was released to the American owners in 1946 and I947. 1 The files u It i mate I y received by the UCLA library were far from complete, but publication and delivery in Germany during the later war years was so erratic that there are many other likely causes for broken files. Specifi-cally, the I 942 volume of Pet ermanns was received com- plete at UCLA after the war, while the one obtained later by the Riverside cam- pus was censored. In a letter, Mr. Robert Vosper, Direc- tor of Libraries of the University of Kan- sas, has advised me of another example of censorship of the same nature on a different kind of material. The Univer- sity of Kansas recently purchased fill-in volumes of the Almanach de Gotha for the years I936 through I939. The vol- umes were obtained in New York, with no record of their earlier history, but the sections on Germany and Italy had been cut out or inked over. My supposition is that the Soviet cen- sorship project in Germany developed its thorough detailed form and began to 1 R obert B. D owns , "Wartime Cooperative Acquisi· tions," Library Quarterly, XIX (1949) , 157-65. go through publisher's stocks of slightly objectionable material after 1946. It may well be continuing at present. On the brighter side, it is good to be able to exonerate the American and Brit- ish military governments in Germany from this anti-intellectual activity. I can- not help but feel more secure from the threat from the Soviets. Their willing- ness to go to such tremendous effort to prevent the reading of unapproved mate- rial betokens not only insecurity but also a level of bureaucratic stupidity and in- efficiency that can afford some confidence to their opponents. MILC Chemical Abstracts Project (Continued from page 192) Thanks to this happy turn of events, and thanks to the cooperation of the MILC member librarians during the tedi- ous preliminaries, the project got off the ground last December, when the first sub- scriptions were placed. The geographic spread of the 837 periodicals reaches to fifty countries, with places like Trinidad and Mozambique represented, and with Italy leading the list. An attempt is being made to have all subscriptions begin with .January 1957 issues. The National Science Foundation sup- port has had the effect of moving the project from the regional into the nation- al scene, since it has underscored the ob- ligation which the MILC group recog- nizes of making obscure and hard-to-find journals available to bona fide research workers outside the MILC membership. It is anticipated, therefore, that as files build up at the Center there will be an increasing interest in them and use of them by scholars and laboratories every- where in the nation. 2I6 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES ·-{