We document the Börsenverein’s statement on the German Booksellers’ Prize 2025 with an addition from the board of the Northern Regional Association:

The German Publishers and Booksellers Association comments on the current discussion about the fact that three bookshops that were nominated for the German Bookseller Award were subsequently removed from the list of award winners. Sebastian Guggolz, Chairman of the Börsenverein: “The German Booksellers’ Prize is a valuable award that has been honoring independent bookshops and their commitment to local cultural life, our society and democracy for years. Freedom of art and freedom of expression are of the utmost importance for the work of bookshops and our entire society. It is therefore all the more important that decisions on award winners are transparent and primarily based on cultural criteria.
In our view, there are considerable doubts about the Haber procedure that appears to have been applied here. The assessment procedure and the results remain secret for those concerned and are therefore not contestable. We fundamentally reject making the recognition of a bookshop’s cultural achievements dependent on the political orientation of its product range. Suspecting ‘extremist and terrorist organizations, groups or individuals’, as the Haber procedure is supposed to do, remains extremely questionable as long as no concrete evidence is disclosed.

We as the Börsenverein are expressly committed to the freedom of the word, the diversity of literary offerings and the independence of bookshops as places of open, critical exchange.”

Against this background, the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels Landesverband Nord is calling for the decision to be reversed and for the bookstore prize to be awarded to all three nominees. Two of the bookshops come from our association area, where these bookshops make a valuable contribution to cultural diversity in their area. Both bookshops have already been awarded the Bookshop Prize in recent years and it is incomprehensible to us why this should no longer be possible. The reasons for this unprecedented measure, which does not respect the freedom of the book trade, must be disclosed in full, as otherwise the book trade prize will suffer irreparable damage.

The Executive Board of
Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels – Landesverband Nord e.V.
Stephansplatz 12, 30171 Hannover
Telephone: 0511 – 336529-0
E-mail: info@boersenverein-nord.de
www.boersenverein-nord.de