Leipzig Book Fair cancels novel presentation by AfD politician Maximilian Krah

Top priority: protecting the audience

The reason given was that there would be massive security concerns for the event because of Krah’s “high profile” and his “publicly controversial positions.” The top priority is to protect all visitors, especially the many school classes, families and young people. The security concept expressly stipulates that events with significant risk potential are not permitted or are transferred to a different setting.

Krah, in turn, told the “Pioneer” portal, which first reported on the cancellation, that he was “surprised” to note this decision by the Leipzig Book Fair. “Nobody needs a book fair that is afraid of discussing a “non-political” book. He rejected the safety concerns cited by the trade fair. His publisher will try again to change the organizer’s mind. An event “where everyone has to agree in order to be able to present themselves is intellectually dead.”

Krah’s “Journey to Europe” is a novel “about Europe’s injured geography, its layers of memory and guilt, and the courage not to conceal these fault lines, but to transform them into a sustainable future,” says the Castrum Verlag announcement, which measures a culture of remembrance “that does not remain in mere blame.”

Castrum Verlag, based in Vienna, was founded in 2020 by Ledio Albani, a 38-year-old German with Albanian roots, with the aim, as it says on the publisher’s website, “to give young authors with a great future a stage in a world of countless new publications”.

One of them is Sebastian Schwaerzel, born in 2002 near Freiburg im Breisgau, whose novel “Schizoid Man – Heil Hyperpop” is about the life of a Gen Z bodybuilder and fascist who wants nothing more than to become a suicide bomber. Götz Kubitschek’s Antaios Verlag also passed on this novel as a “recommendation” in 2024. The publisher’s portfolio now also includes the Dresden magazine “Tumult”, an organ of the New Right in which the writer Uwe Tellkamp, ​​for example, also likes to publish texts.