When Mickey Mouse ended up on the stake in Aargau

Brugg, May 1965. Young people are busy collecting notebooks to be burned at dusk. The action is led by the teacher Hans Keller, also known as the “SchundPopst”.

The goal is to burn so-called garbage literature. This is to protect the youth from the bad influence of inferior literature. Wild lands on the pile Mickey Mouse, lass, Fix and Foxi or the Swiss magazinebut also books such as Sunday or life and faiththat would otherwise not be counted as waste.

Everything is neatly strung: The Migros sponsors the food, the publisher bookplate offers “good books” as a substitute for the garbage sheets, even Swiss television is on site.

The Brugger action is the dress rehearsal for a Swiss fight against immoral writing. According to the plan of a working group consisting of representatives of cantonal youth organizations, a bonfire should be lit from pulp literature in each canton on the national holiday on August 1. The Federal Public Service Home Affairs also wants to declare war on waste.

Since the beginning of the discussion in the late 19th century, there has been no agreement on what waste actually is. While “dirty literature” referred to pornographic texts and images, “pulp literature” included anything considered immoral, allowing for a wide range. This repeatedly caused debate both inside and outside the morality movement from right to left. All the more unanimous was the harm that pulp literature would do to young people.

Trash destroys the sense of truth and reality, violates moral standards, brutalizes the readership, and thus promotes crime — especially detective and robber novels whose leitmotifs are “treacherous, corruption, violence, brutality, and murder,” according to a 1959 federal report The fear of juvenile delinquency was one of the most common arguments against pulp fiction and remained so after statistics showed that juvenile delinquency tended to decline in the post-war period.

However, the American comic books, imported from Germany, fulfilled the desire for children’s literature, which had not been served by Swiss publishers for a long time. Who in Switzerland a Nick CarterHeft was able to get hold of it, so secretly passed it on. Barter trade flourished. One teacher, who admitted to reading pulp literature himself, was surprised to find that there were “gifted” readers among the readers. Yet this must be stopped.

Legally, Swiss law only provided a basis for the confiscation of “impermissible eroticism”, the so-called dirty literature, but not garbage literature. Moral associations tried several times to change this. Inspired by the German Rubbish and Dirty Law from 1926 in 1931 also increased in Switzerland Working group for the protection of young people against waste and dirt for a new article in the Penal Code.

This was immediately followed by resistance from artists, writers and publishers, who saw Swiss literary culture and their freedom threatened. The Federal Assembly eventually rejected the bill in favor of freedom of action and freedom of the press.

However, the topic was not off the table. Twice, in 1948 and 1959, the federal government asked how the cantons acted against pulp literature. For Federal Councilman Philipp Etter, the “debris and grime overflow” was a “boiling point” and a “cancer plague” – old terms used in medical-hygiene treatises. In 1963, Etter therefore founded the documentation center for printed matter that was harmful to young people and the public.

This kept lists of forbidden dirty and waste literature as a basis for searches in the cantons. It was an attempt to create binding criteria. But what was considered immoral or lewd remained highly controversial; There were few convictions based on these lists. The Commission’s decision-making practice was increasingly criticized until 1974, and liberty increasingly took precedence over morality in the public mind.

As the battle against dirty fiction and pornography continued, the battle against pulp fiction ebbed in the 1960s. The decisive turning point was the Brugg burning action. Some media criticized the burning of rubbish and drew parallels with book burnings during the National Socialist era.

Due to the devastating reaction of the press, the Bundesrat stopped participating in the action group and the planned cantonal fire actions on the national holiday were called off. The failed main rehearsal was not a guarantee for a successful performance, but the beginning of the end of the waste incineration.