Why independent bookshops strike fear in the heart of Germany’s culture tsar | Fatma Aydemir

First he came for Berlin’s film festival. Now it’s books. Wolfram Weimer seems to be on a mission to curb progressive thinkingThere is a particular kind of danger that smells like paper and dust. You find it in independent bookshops. Those with uneven wooden floors and handwritten staff recommendations, where someone has shelved next to Karl Marx and a debut novelist from Neukölln. Places where no algorithm is trying to guess who you are before you have the chance to change your mind.I walk in for a novel and walk out with a theory of the state, a pamphlet on housing struggles, a Palestinian poet I had never heard of. No “for you” page in an online store would have suggested it. The bookseller did. Independent bookshops are dangerous because they interrupt us. They do not optimise our curiosity. They derail it. Is that the reason why Germany’s culture commissioner, Wolfram Weimer, is now consulting the domestic intelligence agency before ?Fatma Aydemir is a Berlin-based author, novelist, playwright and a Guardian Europe columnist