The most disconcerting thing about the year after year recurring campaign, which calls for bans on so-called right-wing publishers from the Frankfurt Book Fair, is the commitment that intelligence services attribute to their findings.
While it is usually a matter of honor in the literature business to grapple with every longlist, because the jury cannot be ruled out that the special interests of the jurors can influence the jury, this routine exposes the suspicion to precautionary inquiries once the constitutional protection authorities have formalized their suspicions.
So now Vladimir Balzer, editor at Deutschlandfunk Kultur, confronted Juergen Boos, the director of the book fair, with the fact that the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution is listing the One Percent Association as a "suspected case" - as if it automatically meant that the small publishing house headed by one of the association's founders Young Europe could not be tolerated at the fair. Boos, whose patience when explaining the principle of freedom of expression, which the left used to like to denounce as formal or bourgeois, deserves admiration, replied that apparently the Office for the Protection of the Constitution had not yet made a decision. Apparently, the Federal Office has not yet proposed to the Minister of the Interior to ban the suspicious association.
As can be learned from dealing with the AfD or Islamist organizations, the public opinion is on the advance that in such a situation social ostracism must anticipate the legal prohibition. As a result, the observation by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution replaces the sanction it is supposed to prepare because the exclusion from public communication must be the ultima ratio of the rule of law, i.e. it is tied to the strictest conditions.
The section on the One Percent Association in the Federal Office's annual report shows how dubious the unchecked adoption of ratings, which may be consistent with the internal logic of the security authorities, is. He is characterized as "an actor who, in order to achieve his goals, first wants to shape the discourse in his own way, in order then to be able to initiate the hoped-for political turnaround". What is described is not a terrorist cell, but a group that has dedicated itself to persuasion and sees “its own publications and publishers” as a “strategic instrument”. The name of the association means: one percent of the citizens are enough to bring about a change. The mention in the report for the protection of the constitution is intended to prove the dangerousness, but what the report describes is ordinary publishing ("materials,Publications and Marketing ”) from an idealistic drive.
The authorities may call the motivating ideas unconstitutional, but the book fair is not a state event, and books may also propose to amend the constitution sentence by sentence or to abolish it completely.
The suspicion of political fantasy can only damage the defensive democracy.