German Culture Minister cancels award ceremony following scandal over bookstore exclusions

Wolfram Weimer, German Minister of State and Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, has canceled the German Bookshop Award ceremony, which was scheduled to take place on March 19 at the Leipzig Book Fair.

The official reason for the cancellation was that a scandal surrounding the exclusion (for alleged extremism) of three bookstores from the state award shifted focus away from the event’s main objective.

“The controversy surrounding the jury’s rejection of three nominees has increasingly shifted focus away from the event’s main objective, which is to honor and celebrate independent bookstores. Properly honoring the winners under these circumstances seems almost impossible. Therefore, we are canceling this year’s award ceremony on March 19, 2026,” Weimer’s statement read.

Awards and certificates will be sent directly to the 115 winners, and the grand prizes will be announced separately. The ministry promised to “organize a public dialogue on freedom of art and expression and the role of state-funded awards” at a later date.

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The decision to scrap the awards ceremony and revoke top prizes from excluded bookstores was preceded by a wave of solidarity within the industry with the three excluded. All 115 nominated bookstores publicly supported the three, and some announced that they were prepared to collect and forward the monetary equivalent of the prize to them. A rally in support of the three bookstores was also planned in Leipzig. The Hanser publishing house is even planning a party to which all 118 bookstores are invited.

According to Börsenblatt, the jury had nominated two of the three disqualified bookstores for the top prizes, but the ministry informed them that they would receive only the basic award. A lawyer representing one of the bookstores confirmed that the ministry had, in fact, misled them.

In early March, Weimer removed the Berlin bookstore Zur schwankenden Weltkugel, Bremen’s The Golden Shop, and Göttingen’s Rote Straße from the list of recipients by applying the “Haber procedure,” a system of security checks enabling intelligence services to screen recipients of public funding, which had never before been applied in the cultural sector.

All three bookstores learned of their disqualification through the media — they received no official notification from the ministry. The bookstores’ lawyers are preparing lawsuits demanding that the award be granted in accordance with the jury’s decision and challenging the legality of the Haber procedure itself.

The ministry’s decision was met with outrage. Representatives of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association (Börsenverein), the European and International Booksellers Federation (EIBF), and the International Publishers Association (IPA) called on the minister to either restore the bookstores’ recognition as winners or provide solid proof for why they were excluded.

In 2025, German publisher Sebastian Guggolz, founder of Guggolz Verlag, a publishing house that has published Ukrainian classics, became president of the Börsenverein. In March, Guggolz publicly criticized the minister’s decision to exclude the bookstores. The Leipzig Book Fair, set to host the ceremony on March 19–22, released its program in February, listing Russians among the invited participants.

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Main image: The Golden Shop/Facebook

Copy editing: Joy Tataryn