take it easy, but you have to take it

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.