In relation to universities and academia, 'censorship' in Germany essentially means any restriction on the professional self-determination of professors/academics. According to Article 5 III of the Basic Law, this professional self-determination includes not only the freedom of research and teaching, including freedom of speech, but also the freedom of self-determination of non-oral, i.e. textual and visual, publications. This self-determination is also bound solely to loyalty to the constitution. Any further prohibitions on thought or expression are expressly excluded. What may appear to be reasonably easy to determine in legal terms is, however, quite complicated in terms of university and academic history.
Historical review
Let us therefore begin with a brief review. Around 1700, mostly younger professors at (Protestant, in particular Lutheran) universities, especially in the field of philosophy, fought for a groundbreaking right for the modern university and academia. Namely, the right to include subjects (ideas, methods, authors) in their teaching, research and publishing activities without hindrance and without being asked, which appeared suspicious or even dangerous to the church-state establishment, but which did not overturn the ruling order and its supporting pillars of class society, religion and morality. This meant topics that originated from non-Christian (e.g. Muslim), non-denominational - in this case: Catholic and Calvinist-Reformed - or even atheist authors or that represented such worlds, specifically Descartes, Spinoza or radical rationalism in general, but also Machiavelli and Machiavellianism, which was considered atheistic.
The claim of the innovators was successfully justified with the argument that only such academic freedom would enable objective knowledge, genuine progress in knowledge and survival in national and international academic competition. What was believed in was therefore the existence and recognisability of objective truth or reality, which scientists, regardless of their origin and background, were called upon to approach through objective science or research. For example, one's own medicine could only remain attractive if corpse dissections were possible without hindrance, as was the case elsewhere. The Bible and faith could only be interpreted convincingly if one knew the interpretations of others and could counter them with arguments if necessary.
Only those who had been exposed to, read and processed all relevant authors and texts could participate in the philosophical debate of the Enlightenment. The fact that some rebellious professors of this phase, including the arrogant Christian Wolf, were firmly convinced that in the end their own doctrine would emerge victorious from the free critical debate is another story, which will not be explained here.
However, what was gradually conceded primarily to professors and secondarily to the academically educated in general was by no means intended to apply to the general public, with the exception of a brief phase of unbridled Enlightenment euphoria. Despite all the efforts at enlightenment, the general public was soon recognised as only partially capable of understanding, subject to false influences and therefore once again or still in great need of guidance and leadership.
Freedom of thought, opinion and speech should therefore only ever be administered in small doses, if at all, and in a skilfully pedagogical manner. Suppressing information and controlling communication, as was also the case with the Jesuits and other allegedly unteachable spoilsports, seemed indispensable. This is why many professors took part in the open or silent pre- and post-censorship of the general book, newspaper, magazine and thus opinion market, both as experts and in public statements, and were by no means in favour of unrestricted freedom of opinion or communication.
In addition, the respective professorial establishment felt called upon to engage in radical criticism and thus censorship in its own field - an area of activity whose exploration is still highly taboo today. Namely in situations in which subjectively or objectively extreme use of the privilege of academic freedom by individual lecturers/professors either seriously jeopardised the respective subject configuration (hierarchy, group identity (denomination, 'chemistry'), comment, paradigm) or even the status of subjects, faculties and universities guaranteed by the state or science as a rational enterprise as a whole. Radical critics or denunciators of their own professors had to be prevented from spreading their reputation-damaging messages. Unrepentant professors had to disappear. In any case, their own university had to be protected from loss of reputation. Critics of the state and princes had to be silenced.
The forms of this criticism, which often enough escalated into censorship, were diverse. However, they were more or less clearly aimed at disciplining, if not marginalising or even excluding these lecturers/professors from university academic discourse. The most important examples can be found in the political and cultural disputes around 1848, according to which Prussia's great cultural politician Friedrich Althoff is said to have famously appointed a lecturer who was ultimately intellectually inferior but well connected in terms of family and friendship only on the condition that he would never publish anything again. The fact that Catholics could not be appointed because of their alleged submission to the papal church and Jews only with restrictions was a matter of course for the Protestant rulers.
After 1918, nationalist and conservative-reactionary professors prevented, at least temporarily, the emergence of new research foci and special subjects, such as the history of political parties and labour or sociology, through expert opinions, denunciations and the mobilisation of student helpers. Lecturers with social democratic and pacifist leanings, such as the mathematician Emil Julius Gumbel and the theologian Günther Dehn, were prevented from lecturing, publishing widely and pursuing appropriate careers by a joint front of students and reactionary professors around 1930. Only in very few cases did republican professors as well as cultural and academic politicians defend themselves against their radical enemies by means of censorship measures, such as refusing to appear at university ceremonies.
We do not need to go into the 1933-45 era here, although certain Nazi leaders, including even Heinrich Himmler, advocated specific, namely instrumentally narrow ideas of academic freedom. Specifically, in defence research, for example, anything and everything that was useful was permissible. After 1945, professors tried to prevent many people who had been forced into exile from returning and, for example, in the debate about the Reichstag fire at the beginning of 1933, they were eager to suppress contributions that supported the thesis of Van der Lubbe's sole guilt for 'national educational reasons'.
A similar situation arose at times with regard to the question of unleashing the First World War. To attribute it to the imperial elite and thus to 'the German people' seemed unreasonable to some, especially in the context of the Cold War, in which unity and the will to defend oneself were undoubtedly important once again. As is well known, these mainly politically motivated tendencies intensified around 1968. And for the first time, the tension or opposition between academic freedom and freedom of opinion broke out dramatically, albeit hardly analysed, in the course of the now proverbial "demolition of the ivory tower". The university's protected academic and academic-pedagogical space, i.e. the space created for the purpose of training students to become academic personalities, was finally perceived and denounced as problematic, undemocratic and the illegitimate refuge of an arrogant elite, at the latest in the Humboldtian university reform at the beginning of the 19th century. We cannot go into the details of this historical process here. However, it must be noted that, despite this, the basic pattern established since the 19th century - academic freedom, including the right to censorial intervention on a case-by-case basis, as essentially reserved for professors and established academics - nevertheless remained in place for the time being.
The current situation
However, in the 21st century - we are making a historical leap - a new phenomenon has emerged: the massive questioning of professional academic freedom and freedom from censorship not by the state, but from within the university itself, essentially intensified, as was already the trend in 1968 and, as at that time, fuelled to a large extent by US developments, in conjunction with corresponding social forces. On the one hand, the progressive expansion, de-hierarchisation and internal differentiation of the university and academia can be cited as the cause of this.
For every question or debate that arises, it no longer seems that just one subject is responsible, but rather many subjects and specialists from different disciplines and academic positions. A recent example is the scientific and public debate surrounding the coronavirus pandemic, in which not only virologists, but also physicians, medical statisticians, sociologists, economists, etc. were and are involved. The chorus of professors has therefore become highly polyphonic and even dissonant, partly thanks to the increase in the number of subjects and positions, and has therefore lost its comprehensibility and persuasiveness. On the other hand, most subjects are being utilised more directly and more strongly than ever before for socio-cultural-political purposes: They are intended to legitimise these purposes or provide succour to rival groups in the battle of purposes and goals in each case. The right to academic freedom or the legitimacy of academic criticism and, in extreme cases, censorship, is no longer attributed exclusively or primarily to professors who are fully recognised as experts in their field and therefore established.
Rather - this aspect will have to be taken up again - it is now also legally supported for every 'serious researcher', in legal logic ultimately down to the student. And in addition to the specialist representative who is intellectually and practically interested exclusively in his or her science, the agenda scientist (Sandra Kostner) has finally emerged, for whom the socio-political-cultural mission of his or her discipline is most important. The trend that began with the introduction of political science and other social sciences as democratisation sciences has thus reached a climax.
However, the agenda endeavour also has to do with the fact that the concept of truth or reality itself has become questionable or even fragile. To put it simply, firstly, certain natural sciences, above all quantum physics and chaos theory, have shown us that knowledge is directly dependent on the technical means of acquiring knowledge (observation). Secondly, constructivism has long held the view that ultimately only what the respective scientific or knowledge-acquisition community agrees on is valid as knowledge. Thirdly - and this is new in its radical nature - it is postulated that knowledge of reality or truth depends on the socio-cultural situation and identity or state of mind of the person endeavouring to gain knowledge. In Protestantism, it was long claimed that only a Lutheran could really grasp and understand Luther and the Reformation. Then came feminism, which claimed the same pseudo-argument for recognising womanhood and then gender in general. Now all minorities, or better: the agenda groups claiming a special identity, claim to be able to recognise their own reality and, if necessary, change it for the better by specifically 'researching it themselves'.
The aforementioned expansion of the circle of those supposedly or actually qualified for academic freedom and the change in this qualification is correspondingly important. Academic freedom and ultimately censorship competences are now almost naturally also claimed by the sub-professorial groups competing more fiercely than ever with the professors for decision-making power, resources and reputation: Lecturers (mainly the so-called 'Mittelbau'), above all full or part-time graduates working in the media and even students, although their academic qualification, their training for scientific knowledge rather than the reproduction of mere opinion, is by no means complete.
On the one hand, as indicated above, the claim of these groups is based on allegedly better, i.e. also more sensitive, experience of reality and therefore better recognition of relevant socio-cultural-political needs and necessities, which have been lost to the aloof, foreign talar bearers and their entourage, i.e. also on anti-academism and general hostility towards elites even in the area of general culture or from this general culture. On the other hand, it is based on the self-assurance of having to teach universal values, i.e. true humanity, human rights, eco-social responsibility, etc., to a university and science that is morally and politically discredited (through National Socialism, nuclear research, participation in armaments, human and animal experiments, participation in environmental destruction, lack of thematisation of slavery and colonialism, plagiarism, sexual assault, nepotism, etc.), i.e. deficient or at least suspect (western-modern).
This sense of mission is underpinned by beliefs in progress and/or end-time expectations: firstly, universal historical civilisational fulfilment is inevitable; those who appear to be standing in its way are irredeemably behind, have already lost, but are essentially to blame for preventing it. Secondly, we are the last generation that can still prevent climate collapse, so everything else counts for nothing.
Within the horizon of these convictions, any opposing position or criticism must be met with incomprehension and indignation. Academic freedom and the legitimacy of censorship are thus removed from their conventional cognitive-rational context. It is therefore possible to evade the argumentation obligations of scientific discourse, and the entire debate is recoded in moral-political terms. Firstly, factually or thematically: for example, the scientific-technical dimensions of global warming and the complexity of researching it are marginalised. In the history of slavery, which is currently receiving a lot of attention, it is almost exclusively the 'European' or 'German guilt' that is emphasised and debated, while African and Arab slavery, for example, or the still unfinished abolition of slavery starting from Europe or the West, are hardly mentioned. To state that colonialism also brought medical progress, for example, borders on heresy.
Secondly, this moral-political recoding concerns the manner of discourse. The sober-abstracting-analytical-objectivising scientific language is seen as inherently harsh, typically male-white-insensitive brutal. It offends, hurts, despises, suppresses and makes diversity impossible. It is therefore no coincidence that even maths in the USA has become the focus of this criticism. Insisting on academic language therefore means compromising human dignity, the right to equalisation and the right to support vulnerable groups.
At the same time, however, representatives of academia have to publicly (public shaming) confront at least equally hurtful accusations that have arisen in real-life political and moral contexts and are therefore categorised in scientifically blurred and unsuitable terms and transported into the university and academia: Transphobia, Islamophobia, racism, fascism, sexism, anti-Semitism, etc. To summarise: academic freedom is amalgamated with freedom of opinion and this freedom of opinion, which is unbounded and superordinate in relation to academic freedom, is politically, morally and activistically charged.
In this political-moral-activist debate, which, as already mentioned, is inevitably highly emotional and therefore largely disrespectful, disregarding civic decency and professional-objective fairness, not only can anyone and everyone seemingly participate on an equal footing, regardless of their qualifications. This is not only a not insignificant additional element of their attractiveness, but also conveys self-confidence and pleasure in being able to criticise the arrogant scientists and belong to the moral elite. After all, their own historical mission apparently legitimises the use of all means, including all variants of the harshest personal criticism and even censorship, which seem to be able to help their own convictions to victory, despite all claims to sensitivity.
The specific means involved are only partly new, namely drawn from the tabooed external and internal censorship of universities and radical criticism, and are currently the subject of much public discussion, so that we can leave it at a more abstract summary and a few examples:
Firstly, within the university: e.g. the case of brain researcher Peter Singer in Frankfurt am Main in 1989 and then of biologist Marie-Luise Vollbrecht at HU Berlin); prevention of teaching (Bernd Lucke case in Hamburg); prevention of guest appearances by certain lecturers (so-called no-platforming, e.g. the case of Martin van Creveld in Trier in 2011); rejection/enforcement of certain teaching, debate participation and language conventions by refusal or direct/indirect blackmail (the gender complex, including the cases of devaluation of grades due to non-gendering (i.e. adherence to the generic masculine, refusal to use special characters contrary to spelling standards, etc.) in Kassel and the University of Applied Sciences in Berlin).etc.) in Kassel and the enforcement of genders in political science courses in Halle and Zurich; the perception, denunciation and condemnation of certain terms, gestures and other expressions as so-called microaggression; the enforcement/refusal of certain teaching literature (cf. the well-known prelude 1968f. regarding the reading of Karl Marx); making qualifications/appointments/appointments dependent on non-scientific, but agenda-politically correct criteria (the highly problematic complex of minority promotion; the case of Michael Grünstäudl's habilitation (bioinformatics; alleged right-wing extremism) in Berlin, the case of Paul Cullen (medicine; anti-abortion) in Münster); corresponding additions to what are actually purely scientific reports; Corresponding interventions in the acquisition of third-party funding, from the imposition of certain participations (women, politically correct subjects) to the enforcement of genders in the application text; control of publication activity (topics, frequency, type and place of publication) through direct requests or indirectly via funding policy (exclusion of certain publication venues through refusal of funding); Appropriate disciplining of professors/lecturers/students through inclusion on an "enemies list" (the REVERSE project in Marburg), warnings (case of Günther Roth (social policy) at Munich University of Applied Sciences), refusal of support or public distancing up to cancellation/revocation. public distancing up to cancellation/relegation etc. (the case of Martin Wagener in Trier, Haar and Berlin); calls for the establishment of positions for so-called diversity officers based on the US model, who are supposed to enforce diversity, equality, inclusion and the promotion of minorities at the university by forcing current and applying academics to submit written diversity statements.
Secondly, outside the university: Influence on publishing activity through public and non-public appeals to/public suppression of publishers and editors as well as corresponding review policies of important journals and newspapers; subsequent self-censorship by publishers and editors, also with regard to market opportunities; as in the USA, demand for authors of specialist journals to make corresponding self-declarations; negative labelling of certain publication venues, preference for certain others; emerging censorship of academic manuscripts as well, not just literary and fiction manuscripts as in the past, by means of "sensitivity reading" by editors or specially appointed readers; corresponding selection or participation in the selection of "experts". Participation in the selection of "experts" in print and non-print media (recommendation of an activist doctoral candidate to public broadcasting); control of the selection of consultants and experts for governmental and non-governmental issues and bodies, taking into account the financial aspect (no public funds for Mr X or Ms Y); corresponding participation in the selection of political personnel, currently in particular of 'commissioners' for certain special areas (e.g. anti-racism and anti-discrimination commissioners since 2022); Corresponding influence on state funding policy (grants, projects/programmes) with equal treatment of state and party-political research funding with independent, scientifically autonomous funding (e.g. Hans Böckler Research Training Groups with DFG Research Training Groups); one-sided, politically correct and therefore ultimately unscientific preparation and presentation of results, e.g. in migration research.
Balance sheet
In the Anglo-American university and science sector, the development outlined above has already progressed further. There, two specific elements jeopardise the freedom of science and censorship even more than in this country: on the one hand, the financial dependence on public reputation and social demand (student enrolment), especially of private universities. On the other hand, the state (i.e. certain political elites) is once again beginning to participate in the business of academic censorship, as evidenced by initial cases (legal bans on the establishment of certain degree programmes (Florida), the procurement and availability of certain literature in public and university libraries, Florida, Wyoming and others, prohibition of the establishment of positions for diversity officers and the installation of corresponding programmes). In contrast, only relevant appeals, declarations of intent, attempts at intervention and a limited number of specific cases, most of which have been stopped by the courts, can be cited for the German sector. However, it can be assumed that the factors not discussed here, bureaucratism and managerialism, also represent important threats. Accordingly, we must at least speak of a relevant challenge to the freedom of science and censorship in this country, which has proven its worth despite certain restrictions.
To summarise: despite all the censorship attempts mentioned above, there will hardly be any banned books in the academic world in this country in the future. The pluralistic market, which will offer anything and everything if there is (still) a correspondingly profitable demand, and not least the text-transporting, never fully controllable Internet, will ensure this. However, the scientific messages that we need to receive orally, in print or in images in order to shape our living environment in an ecologically responsible, civilisationally appropriate and sustainable way, also in the interests of our descendants, are now in danger of only reaching us in a politically and morally optimised and thus reality-selective, i.e. censored form. What appears necessary is the consistent restoration of free scientific discourse among academically qualified people and its clear separation from public opinion discourse. To denounce this endeavour as a reconstruction of the ivory tower or even a restoration of the rule of the professors would already be another denunciation.
