Germany’s Freedom of Expression Week 2025

Freedom of Expression Week 2025 (May 3-10) focuses on debate, book bans, and democracy, featuring events across Germany to promote open discussion and free speech.

on Mar 20, 2025

'Arguing Better'
As readers of Publishing Perspectives know, the 2025 iteration of Germany's yet-young annual Freedom of Expression Week has a theme this year: Argue? Absolutely!
This is a campaign started by the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, Germany's booksellers and publishers association, which organized this focal week 2021 to get the population involved in a discussion of freedom of expression in different contexts and to define more clearly what it involves to preserve and safeguard freedom's values. This year's dates are May 3 to 10.

Especially following the recent German elections, it is interesting to note that programming on book banning is now being brought into the spotlight by organizers in their response to news outlets. While much global reporting on recent right-wing book banning has concentrated on the wave in much of the United States, examples of efforts to stifle literature have been observed in other nations, and it may be that further such exercises are found as freshly galvanized autocratic forces are viewed as being part of the political cocktail being mobilized in some areas of Europe.

A kick-off campaign for the week is to be based on bookstores under the title Giving the Banned Book a Voice. The team at the Börsenverein tells us, “As places of democracy and meeting places for open and free exchange, bookstores are currently more important than ever. Therefore, Freedom of Expression Week is calling for a nationwide kick-off campaign in retail for the first time on Saturday, May 3.
Independent Bookstore Week will also be likely to enhance the effectiveness of the Freedom of Expression Week campaign.
A list of books by the Freedom of Expression group on freedom of expression and democracy promotion is now available at Freedom of Expression Week – Börsenverein. Those seeking downloadable materials to demonstrate their support for the week should be able to find them towards the end of this month at that location.
In Munich, NS Documentation Center will organize a discussion panel on banning books on May 9.
Here an exhibition "Burned Places: Book Burnings in Germany in 1933" will present places where book burning occurred.
The project also expects a panel discussion on May 8 at the Federal Agency for Civic Education in Bonn, and the following questions are among those to be addressed: "What do 'burned places' look like more than 90 years after the historical events? What developments can be discerned from society's approach to these sites?"

The Importance of Disagreeing
As its name indicates, the program will try to move aside from an easier tendency not to disagree and from the disabling breaches that then widen when citizens aren't truly sincere and considerate in addressing each other. Today's statement (March 19) by the Börsenverein to the press media begins laying out programming with "lighthouse events" starting in Berlin, Munich, and Frankfurt.

Opening, as is customary, at Frankfurt's Paulskirche, the series Speak Out will host journalist Michel Friedman. medical ethicist Alena Buyx, and actress Iris Berben, on the thin line between controversy and consensus.

On May 6, Chinese writer Liao Yiwu will give a reading at the Urania in Berlin on his new book, 18 Prisoners from S. Fischer, on China escape stories.

More such events are on the planning table for Hamburg and Cologne.

The Börsenverein cites that its connected partners in the production coalition of the week include the Polytechnische Gesellschaft, which asks students from the 10th grade and higher to join in an essay contest with the title The Indifferent Among Us. The awards are being given away during Freedom of Expression Week and awarded at the House of Books on May 8.

Initiated by the Fantastic Teens Foundation, a writing workshop entitled "Nevertheless! – Arguing Better" will take place from May 5 to 9 at the Lurup District School in Hamburg. On May 14, six winning stories will be read in the school auditorium.

According to the slogan I read, make up my own mind, and don't allow anyone to tell me a lie, VEMAG Verlags- und Medien AG in Cologne is sending 5,000 book bags to children from socially underprivileged districts as part of Freedom of Expression Week.

The bags hold not only publications from its own children's book publisher, Schwager und Steinlein, but also the booklet "WAS IST WAS Demokratie" (What Is What Democracy) from Tessloff Verlag.

The message and programming involvement of Freedom of Expression Week in its initial years are said to have touched over 500 million individuals in its approximately four years, a speed and force of influence that gained the effort the International German PR Award of 2022.

Meinungsfreiheit, the website for this new edition of this influential week of activities is online and welcoming visitors on line to Mach mit!, join in.