Censorship at the Police Exhibition?

Sexological knowledge and framing sensationalism in Weimar democracy

Abstract

On 25 September 1926 the doors to the major International Police Exhibition opened in Berlin. It aimed at bettering the image of the police within and outside Germany. Over four weeks the exhibition and a range of events including theatre, film premieres and a criminological congress commanded the attention of its diverse audience, including sexological experts. The ambitious public displays projected a vision of the police force as modern and progressive, especially in relation to the single, national standard of censorship created in 1919, which had annulled imperial censorship ordinances and practices.

This article shows that, when it came to the depiction of sexuality, the exhibition drew widely on sexological expertise, and sexological visual archives. It examines the regulatory practices framing the display of photographs and objects related to sexual matters in the Great Police Exhibition and sheds light on the divergences in the larger ongoing workings of censorship in Imperial Germany and during the Weimar Republic. It argues that sexologists became a crucial part of the exhibition’s trust-signaling strategy to experts and created a strong rhetorical defense against the specter of Imperial regulatory practices of the past. While sexologists were not provided with the opportunity to shape much of the public facing side of the exhibition, the considerable scope, scale, and overall public reach of the exhibition project, they shaped the vibrant change and pluralistic debate about policing, cultural values, and regulatory practices in the Weimar Republic. Such valorization of the use of visual materials furthermore functioned as a catalyst for a new wave of sexological publications that embraced photography and visual materials from the mid-1920s onwards.