Sylvia Klötzer and Siegfried Lokatis

In the cabaret sketch "Little Moritz and the Press," ¹ we meet a young
trainee on his first day on the job in a newspaper office. The news
comes in over the wire that "Sicily has drifted away from Italy and
is now stranded on the western coast of England." In the paper the
next day, no mention is made of the event. Instead, the headlines
read, "Harvest Saved." "Notice," the chief editor says to the aston-
ished young man, "our newspaper's task is not to inform our citi-
zens, but to confuse our class enemies."

This skit about censorship never appeared on stage. Yet it serves
as a model of the regime's censorship policies. In the GDR, even the
word "censorship" was censored. One spoke instead of "recommen-
dations" and "procedures to approve publication." In the following,
the term "censorship" serves as a way of describing the pervasive
system of information control that encompassed archives, films,
newspapers, ministries, and ZK offices as well as cabaret and liter-
ature. The two areas of the spoken and the printed word will be
used to examine certain aspects and individual practices of censor-
ship in the GDR.

The main goal of the state's censorship of satirical criticism (that
had the GDR itself as its object) was to limit the public's access to it.

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