ABSTRACT
The film censorship question and the reaction to the dancing mania both illustrate aspects of the limits of freedom of expression in revolutionary Germany. When some workers’ and solders’ councils took over editorial control of local newspapers in the first days of the revolution, the Government of People’s Commissars ordered them to stop this practice, and declared that the Reich government protests most emphatically against every forcible curtailment of free speech. The government demands that workers’ and soldiers’ councils uphold the full freedom of the press which is one of the original planks in its platform. In the city of Kassel the revolution brought about a change in the leadership of the former Prussian royal theater, but this change was of limited significance. In the absence of ideologically inspired political supervision of the arts, any reflection of the revolution in the popular arts had to arise spontaneously.
