Franz Kafka would have been intrigued twice over by the small Berlin bookshop with the unusual name.Called Zur schwankenen Weltkugel (loosely translated as The Heaving Globe), the small store is a favourite in Berlin’s leftist, literary circles thanks to its thoughtful selection of philosophy, political and feminist titles, supplemented by more radical leftist and anti-fascist magazines.More than its stock, Kafka would have been tickled by how the bookshop has found itself trapped in a real-life version of his 1925 dystopian novel, The Trial.The shop was on a longlist for a state-sponsored bookseller cash prize until it wasn’t, removed after an intervention by Germany’s federal cultural minister of state, Wolfram Weimer. He struck three left-leaning bookshops from the list after receiving “intelligence information” about them. Asked what the intelligence was, Weimer said he neither knew nor was allowed to know. His inquiry was made via a decade-old procedure allowing German politicians to access intelligence service assessments of organisations receiving public funding, without domestic intelligence having to reveal the operation – or grounds that lead to their assessment.The shop was removed from a longlist for a state-sponsored bookseller cash prize after an intervention by Germany’s culture minister of state, Wolfram Weimer. Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images When the story broke Weimer defended his stance in a newspaper interview: “If the state awards prizes using taxpayer money, then not for political extremists.”That prompted Marion Leibhold, owner of Zur schwankenen Weltkugel, to file an injunction against Weimer, saying his description of her had a stigmatising effect.Last week Berlin’s administrative court agreed with her. It criticised the lack of transparency of the procedures used by Weimer, ruled that “there is no conclusive factual basis” for Weimer’s “extremist” claim and ordered the minister not to repeat it. Liebhold’s lawyer, Jasper Prigge, described the culture minister’s intervention as “attempted discreditation by the state”.“The state is allowed to publicly criticise a citizen, but needs a basis on which to do this and it turns out that Weimer couldn’t present anything in his defence,” he said.Weimer’s intervention sparked widespread outrage in the book trade, the wider cultural world and even at a memorial event attended by the minister to mark the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp. His speech was drowned out by cat calls and whistles, while descendants of survivors in attendance noted that “our relatives could have customers of these three bookshops”.For some, the Kafkaesque bookshop campaign is symptomatic of how the year-old administration of chancellor Friedrich Merz engages with civil society.Weimer (61), a journalist and publisher with a chequered career, sees himself as a warrior against political extremes in a wider culture war. And though he is a political novice, Weimer has the ear of Merz, a personal friend, and a €2.75 billion annual campaign budget.For some, the Kafkaesque bookshop campaign is symptomatic of how the administration of chancellor Friedrich Merz engages with civil society. Photograph: Frank Ossenbrink/ullstein bild via Getty Images Asked at the weekend by Der Spiegel about the bookshop controversy, Weimer – mindful of the court order – declined to repeat his extremist claims. Instead he suggested his loudest critics are stuck in an old left-right paradigm, unaware how today’s debates are being hijacked by “resent-driven” extremists who are “not based on the foundations of the Enlightenment”.Weimer says his motivation is to reactivate the political centre to challenge the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which “lives from resentment and authoritarianism”.“We have to tackle this, it’s a major conflict of values,” he said to Der Spiegel, which pushed back vigorously. Der Spiegel asked Weimer why, for all his assertions, he had “no vision” for the political centre and, instead, presented positions and assertions that exist “only in opposition to” real and imagined opponents, in particular the AfD.Germany’s political opposition go further, suggesting his interventions – against book stores or, in February, the Berlin Film Festival – have damaged civil society and trust in mainstream politics.The opposition Green Party suggests Weimer’s attempt to steal a march on the AfD could end in disaster.A year into Weimer’s culture war, the Greens point out, the AfD has not been cut down to size but has surged instead to the top of opinion polls. A Green parliamentary inquiry into the intelligence service revealed that the Weimer intervention against the three bookshops was not a one-off. In the seven years to 2025, federal government ministries filed about 3,000 background check requests with the domestic intelligence agency on people or organisations in receipt of public funding. In reply, the agency flagged 302 organisations and persons for non-specified “intelligence-relevant reasons”. For Green politician Konstantin von Notz, such background checks are “highly questionable from a legal standpoint and open to opaque and random decisions”.After her first legal victory last week, Berlin bookshop owner Marion Liebhold said she is “totally relieved the defamation is at an end”.But the real legal battles are still ahead: to return her shop to the prize longlist and to overturn the German state’s Kafkaesque background checks on cultural actors. Jasper Prigge, Liebhold’s lawyer, says Weimer’s predecessors in the role would never have acted this way. “His actions are indicative of a new kind of cultural war,” he said. “But the court result shows that the rule of law is working, and courts are controlling effectively the executive and administration.”[ Row over protest at Buchenwald memorial event highlights rising sense of danger in Germany ]