IN HER ANALYSIS of the relationship between literature and censorship during the Restoration period, Edda Ziegler discusses the difficulty of determining precisely the effect of press controls on contemporary texts. Drawing attention to the importance of Selbstzensur in writing practices during the period, Ziegler points out that this process starts with the “gedankliche […] Konzeption eines Textes” and therefore can never be reconstructed in its entirety. It is impossible to know how much material was suppressed due to censorship pressure and never written down.

Ziegler's reminder of the indeterminable reach of censorship controls is important and calls to mind the image of censorship as a “Schere im Kopf” that prevents not only the recording, but also the development of subversive thoughts within the consciousness of writers. Indeed, one can go a stage further and speculate about the broader influence of tightly controlled public discourse upon contemporary imaginations. At the end of Briefe aus Berlin, for instance, Heine describes how the literary tastes of contemporary German writers were shaped by the conditions under which they operated. Censorship is not mentioned explicitly among the restrictive factors, but, given the references to censorship measures that permeate the text, one imagines that Heine counted state press controls among the major causes of a turning away from social reality: