Germans are flocking to cinemas to see this year’s Berlin Film Festival winner Yellow Letters, a gripping drama about how Turkey silences regime critics.
The feature film dramatises how, whether an Istanbul civil servant or an artist in Ankara, an official letter of warning on flimsy yellow paper can end your career, endanger your livelihood and destroy your family.
The threat is clear: before you speak, consider your position carefully.
For film-maker Ilker Çatak, a German director and screenwriter of Turkish origin, his story is a universal warning about a growing “assault” on academia, the arts and free speech.
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“We in the West always thought that these were just values taken for granted,” he said. “We sometimes forget that somebody had to bleed for them.”
Official Germany doesn’t send yellow letters. But since the Hamas-led October 7th, 2023, attacks, and Israel’s response in Gaza, the country has found creative ways and means to silence – or threaten to silence – those with views it finds problematic.
Leading the campaign is Wolfram Weimer, the conservative federal culture minister and friend of chancellor Friedrich Merz. Last week he removed three leftist bookshops – in Berlin, Gottingen and Bremen – from a longlist of a publicly-funded prize for national bookshop of the year.
Weimer said he acted after handing the award longlist to the domestic intelligence agency and asking if it had any concerns with the nominees. The agency flagged the three bookshops but, in line with standard need-to-know intelligence procedures, did not say why.
Weimer has stood by his action, calling it the new norm for all future publicly-funded prizes.
“If we distribute prizes and grants with state funds,” he said, “then, in my opinion, this can’t go to enemies of the state or extremists.”
This has triggered alarm in German cultural circles including Mechthild Rottering, co-owner of one of the three blacklisted shops, G’ttingen’s Roten Strasse (Red Street).
“I don’t think culture should be checked by domestic intelligence,” she said. “We will take legal action against this attack on cultural freedom and against the domestic intelligence service.”
Weimer’s move, based on these unspecified “intelligence-relevant findings” has prompted alarm, and black humour, in many quarters.
Thea Dorn, a German author and head of writers’ group PEN Berlin, said: “This game of ‘I know something that you don’t know but I won’t tell you what’ is worthy of a Kafka novel, not a state governed by the rule of law.”
Weimer’s bookshop drama follows his intervention in this year’s Berlin film festival. The Berlinale ended with a bang when Syrian-Palestinian director Abdallah Alkhatib collected the debut feature prize, then denounced Germany from the awards stage as “partners in the genocide of Gaza by Israel”.
Wolfram Weimer said such “Israel hatred and activist aggression” was “difficult to bear” at a publicly-funded festival.
After an emergency meeting, Weimer announced a new oversight board for future editions of festival but allowed festival director Tricia Tuttle keep her job.
The same cannot be said for Berlin-based photographer Adam Broomberg. Three years ago, days after burying his Jewish mother, Broomberg read on his phone that he was “not afraid of legitimising terrorism against Jews”.
The accusation was the first of many incendiary remarks from Hamburg’s state anti-Semitism commissioner Stefan Hensel, apparently reacting to Broomberg’s social media posts and long-term support of Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS).
The Palestinian-led campaign calls for economic and cultural boycotts of Israel and has come under fire in Germany.
Broomberg grew up in a Holocaust-survivor family in Apartheid-era South Africa. He says Hensel’s denunciation campaign against him has seen him lose work – including a long-term teaching position at a prestigious Hamburg art school – with huge financial consequences and no comeback.
“I do not and never have advocated legitimising terrorism against my own people nor against Israel. I criticise the Israeli government and its policies, not the Israeli people nor the Jewish people,” he said.
“But it is likely I will never get a job as a teacher [in Germany] or be able to work as an artist with a cultural institution because, as it stands, I am an anti-Semite and a terrorist.”
The last years have seen a surge of unofficial blacklists in German cultural circles, based variously on private and public denunciations, whispering campaigns and online surveillance of every social media post and like. From BDS-supporting artists to a Christmas market stall selling Palestinian handcrafts, the crowdsourced archiveofsilence.org documents 249 such cases in the last three years. As anger builds over the bookshop ban, some wonder if Weimer has gone too far.
Even the conservative daily Die Welt, where Weimer was once editor-in-chief, joked that the federal cultural minister had taken on a new role as Germany’s cultural “Big Brother”.
Yellow Letters director Ilker Çatak, a rising star in the German film world, has already registered his protest.
At a screening of his new film in Berlin, he said he will never show his work at the Berlin festival, telling the audience: “Why do you think political leaders are waging an assault on culture? It’s because if you control culture, you control power and you control the people.”
