hi guys, I'll slowly be moving to @kcnsas as my main blog over the next few days. this one will still exist for anyone who wants to use the hulknussen archive this blog started out as, but I won't be logged in here anymore. if you want to be moots or reach me in some way I'll be over there!
hi guys, I'll slowly be moving to @kcnsas as my main blog over the next few days. this one will still exist for anyone who wants to use the hulknussen archive this blog started out as, but I won't be logged in here anymore. if you want to be moots or reach me in some way I'll be over there!
yeah I went to horrible person island this weekend. no no you weren't there I was just revisiting. yeah I was born there. wow I never told you haha? that's crazy. anyway how was your weekend
wait everyone out in the tags where u were when u found out about the nationwide/global covid shutdown. i was eating a bag of chips on the roof of the remote building where i was leading a retreat and i had to help break the news to 50 high school students who didn’t have their phones
First he came for Berlin’s film festival. Now it’s books. Wolfram Weimer seems to be on a mission to curb progressive thinking, says Guardia
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.
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