Press release of March 6, 2026
Nazi stuff sacred, AI advises the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution?
The Munich public prosecutor’s office is investigating Jan Fleischhauer, a journalist and founding member of PEN Berlin. This is because he asked, in an ironic manner, in a podcast: »What is the AfD youth movement actually called now? ›Generation Hope‹ or ›Generation Germany Awake‹?« The public prosecutor’s office is accusing him of ‘using symbols of unconstitutional and terrorist organisations’ (Section 86a of the German Criminal Code) because he asked this question.
PEN Berlin is shocked. As with the search of media scientist Norbert Bolz’s house in October 2025, where four state agencies — the »Hessen gegen Hetze« reporting office of the Hessian Ministry of the Interior, the Federal Criminal Police Office, the Berlin public prosecutor’s office, and the Berlin-Tiergarten district court — failed to recognise that Bolz had used a Nazi slogan ironically in response to an unfortunate headline in the taz newspaper, German investigative authorities have once again opted for a highly disconcerting interpretation of this criminal law provision.
»The purpose of Section 86a cannot be to sacralise Nazi slogans«, said PEN Berlin spokesperson Deniz Yücel. »According to this interpretation, one cannot even use a historical slogan for satirical purposes against neo-Nazis and right-wing extremists. The investigating authorities are acting as if their motto were: ›Nazi stuff is sacred; you don’t joke about the Führer‹«.
The sharp rise in the number of speech offences recorded in the Federal Criminal Police Office’s ‘politically motivated crime’ statistics in recent years is also due to this idiosyncratic interpretation of the law by the investigating authorities. The situation is not improved by the fact that such investigations only lead to convictions in very few cases. Even the opening of an investigation has an intimidating effect, which is probably exactly what is intended.
German Bookshop Award
The Minister of State for Culture, Wolfram Weimer, has strongly defended the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution’s review of the bookshops nominated for the German Bookshop Award, as well as the subsequent removal of three bookshops from the list of award winners. However, he has failed to answer crucial questions, such as what the bookshops are actually accused of. In light of the investigations against Jan Fleischhauer and Norbert Bolz, we now have another question that is not as far-fetched as it might seem at first glance.
The website of the Berlin bookshop Zur schwankenden Weltkugel (The Wobbling Globe), one of the three affected bookshops, lists two events that may have been the deciding factor in their removal. One was entitled »Fröhlich, mit Hitler-Kopf unterm Arm«, (Happy with Hitler’s head under his arm), dealing with a famous photo from May 1945 showing a Soviet soldier happily standing with a bust of Hitler in the ruins of Berlin. The other event was a book presentation entitled Buchvorstellung »›Arbeit macht frei‹« (Work sets you free). Neither the author nor the bookshop endorsed this cynical concentration camp slogan; rather, it was a quotation. The book’s subtitle is »Approaches to a Nazi motto’.
Could the Office for the Protection of the Constitution have concluded from these event titles that the bookshop was right-wing extremist? Did the Office’s AI even come to this conclusion?
This suspicion sounds absurd. However, as Thea Dorn, spokesperson for PEN Berlin, says, »the whole process is worthy of a Kafka novel, but not of a constitutional state. Or has the reading weakness so often lamented among German schoolchildren now also spread to the judiciary and the Office for the Protection of the Constitution?«
PEN Berlin. We stand by our word.