Further open questions regarding bookstore prices: What Wolfram Weimer knew and what he didn’t know

Three bookstores were not given the prize by him in the spring: “Rote Straße” in Göttingen, the Berlin bookstore “Zur swaying Weltkugel” and the “Golden Shop” in Bremen. And this despite the fact that, as a report from the news portal “t-online” suggested a few days ago, its specialist officials also considered these three stores alongside 115 others to be worthy of the award in October of last year: “It is recommended to follow the jury’s vote,” they wrote. “All recommended bookstores meet the eligibility requirements for an award.”

In January of this year, however, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution was called in on the basis of the so-called Haber proceedings, and they ultimately had “relevant information” about the three bookstores and considered them not to be worthy of the award. In a later interview with “Zeit,” Weimer said that his specialist officials, “who are very familiar with the bookstore scene,” had “fundamental doubts about its worthiness.”

But according to the documents available to “t-online”, his specialist officials only had “minimal information” on which Weimer’s officials relied, namely no more than the short portraits of the “Red Street” and the “Golden Shop” on their website. And in the case of the bookstore “The Shaking Globe,” it was simply the “obvious” political orientation.

Intensive Research?

That doesn’t sound like intensive research from Weimer’s house, and it remains unclear what additional findings the Office for the Protection of the Constitution has.

But now the BKM press office has felt the need to at least make the chronology of the events a little more transparent. According to a statement issued on Friday afternoon, Weimer knew nothing about the recommendation of the “responsible BKM specialist department”, “since shortly afterwards there were indications from publicly available sources at the BKM specialist level that led to the formal initiation of the Haber proceedings at two bookstores at the end of October 2025.”

Then the “BKM specialist department” was informed by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution “in the second half of November” and it explained its “constitutionally relevant findings” in response to “oral questions”. Weimer himself is said to have only been informed of this at the beginning of December and then made his decision to withdraw the price from the two bookstores. In January, “the Haber proceedings were initiated again due to further publicly available information about a third bookstore,” with the same result.

First specialist department, then specialist level

BKM specialist department, BKM specialist level, BKM department – ​​it all sounds a bit confused. The specialist level as superior to the specialist department? There also seems to have been no more than “the publicly available sources,” i.e. the bookstores’ self-portraits on their websites. In addition, there is a Minister of State for Culture who, according to this chronology, was not always up to date with the level of knowledge of his officials.

There was immediately increased criticism of Weimer from the opposition. Misbah Khan, the deputy leader of the Green Party in the Bundestag, told “t-online”: “Either the work under Minister of State for Culture Wolfram Weimer is amateurish, or he tried to deliberately mislead the public in order to justify an extremely questionable and momentous intervention in an independent jury decision.”

In any case, a good start to the book fair week for the Minister of State for Culture looks different; His press office did not want to provide any information until the end of this week about which appointments Wolfram Weimer is attending there and whether he is coming at all.