3 hours ago
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There is a particular kind of danger that smells like paper and dust. You find it in independent bookshops. Those with uneven wooden floors and handwritten staff recommendations, where someone has shelved Audre Lorde next to Karl Marx and a debut novelist from Neukölln. Places where no algorithm is trying to guess who you are before you have the chance to change your mind.
I walk in for a novel and walk out with a theory of the state, a pamphlet on housing struggles, a Palestinian poet I had never heard of. No “for you” page in an online store would have suggested it. The bookseller did. Independent bookshops are dangerous because they interrupt us. They do not optimise our curiosity. They derail it. Is that the reason why Germany’s culture commissioner, Wolfram Weimer, is now consulting the domestic intelligence agency before approving funds to bookshops?
Every year, the German Bookshop prize, awarded on behalf of the federal government’s commissioner for culture and the media, serves as a financial injection for more than 100 independent, owner-managed bookshops all over Germany. An independent jury selects the winners, based on criteria such as carefully curated literary selection and cultural events. Usually, the public doesn’t take much notice of the prize; its weight on the public purse is barely significant. But for small bookshops operating on narrow margins, the prize money of between €7,000 and €25,000 makes a tangible difference.
This year, for the first time, three bookshops disappeared from the jury’s list, according to an investigation by the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. The ministry of culture deleted them, due to “information of relevance to the domestic intelligence agency”, it states. What kind of information? Nobody knows, not even Germany’s commissioner for culture himself, since the domestic intelligence agency (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz) is not allowed to divulge it. A quick look at the three bookshops is telling: they are antifascist, they are proud of it and they are institutions in their communities.
Germany’s literary scene is outraged, and with good reason. Because what sounds like a minor issue is actually another highly alarming intervention into Germany’s cultural scene by Weimer. Last month, he dominated headlines when it was revealed that he was considering dismissing the Berlin international film festival’s director, Tricia Tuttle, because a film-maker had made a pro-Palestinian speech during the festival’s closing gala. After an open letter of protest, signed by nearly 700 international film-makers, Weimer dropped the plan to sack Tuttle and instead imposed a “code of conduct”on the Berlinale and appointed an advisory board to oversee its director in the future. To many observers, this looks like the plain repression of dissenting artists.
Weimer, by the way, is a publisher himself. He founded the conservative monthly magazine Cicero, whose trademark themes are anti-wokeness and hostility to immigration. Weimer’s obsessions are no secret – they were probably the reason Christian Democratic Union chancellor Friedrich Merz appointed him as commissioner for culture and the media.
Shortly after taking office last year, Weimer advocated a ban on gender-inclusive language in publicly funded institutions. He has also urged the German film industry, which traditionally has strong arthouse funding, to make more blockbusters or, as he put it, “audience desires, the market, on things that actually work”. With no party-political affiliation, Weimer avoids using words and phrases associated with the far right. But he understands very well that influence is most effective when it appears administrative. There is no need to ban books if you can redefine what counts as worthy of support and funding.
The mere fact that Weimer is requesting information about bookshops from Germany’s domestic intelligence agency is not only unusual; it is, at the very least, legally questionable.
The Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz collects data of all kinds as part of its mandate to monitor extremism. In practice, it functions largely as a black box. We simply don’t know what kind of information is gathered or why certain establishments were being monitored. Did these bookshops sell works by radical thinkers? Did informants merely identify them as meeting places for the leftwing scene? Or was having an “antifa” sticker on the wall enough to justify an investigation?
The bookshops themselves apparently had no idea that the intelligence service had collected data about them, and they cannot meaningfully respond to the allegations – because the content of these allegations remains unknown. All three bookshops are preparing to take legal action against “the covert interference of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency”, according to a joint statement.
Whatever it is that these bookshops are accused of, I’m sure they behaved badly in the best possible way: recommending inconvenient books, hosting uncomfortable discussions, allowing readers to encounter ideas they did not know they were ready for. If culture policy begins to treat such unpredictability as a reputational risk, we should be honest about what is at stake. It isn’t extremism, but the simple, radical possibility of changing your mind. And that has always been the most dangerous act of all.
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Fatma Aydemir is a Berlin-based author, novelist, playwright and a Guardian Europe columnist
