As a British writer living in Berlin, I recently attempted something that now passes for quietly provocative: I tried to buy a book. Not just any book, but On Democracies and Death Cults, the latest from Douglas Murray.
On Democracies and Death Cults has been born of the last 18 months in Israel, beginning with the massacre by Hamas of Israeli citizens on 7th October. Douglas has sat with the families of those still held hostage in Gaza, mapped the long historical path that led us here, and examined – through first-hand testimony and serious scholarship – how the civilised world is losing its grip on moral clarity.
In most western countries, Douglas’s book has been reviewed, debated and discussed. Here in Germany’s capital though, it has not been challenged or rebutted. Instead, it has largely been sidelined.
To buy the book, I visited Dussmann – the self-anointed KulturKaufhaus (Culture Department Store) on Friedrichstraße, where you can browse books and media in many languages. Its ‘English bookshop’ section (unironically marked by a fluttering tartan banner) is the largest in the city. Yet On Democracies and Death Cults was curiously absent from its shelves.
I asked the woman at the counter where I might find it. Her eyes lit up, not in recognition, but in triumph. ‘Oh, we don’t stock Douglas Murray,’ she beamed.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘He’s a right-wing author,’ came the reply, as if that explained everything.
‘So this is a leftist bookshop then?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she insisted. ‘It’s not a leftist bookshop – we just don’t sell books for things we don’t agree with.’
I remarked, gently, that it seemed a strange policy for a shop in a democracy: excluding dissent rather than engaging with it. She gave the impression I’d asked her to stock Mein Kampf.
This is not a fringe anarchist zine stand – it’s Berlin’s 7,000 square meter grand central bookstore, widely regarded as a Berlin cultural institution. And yet, here we are. In a city once famed for burning books, we’ve arrived at a more refined approach. You don’t burn books anymore, you just refuse to stock them.
To ensure this wasn’t simply a Dussmann quirk, I visited three other reputable establishments in the city – each with a substantial English-language section.
First, Relay at Hauptbahnhof (Central Station), Berlin’s equivalent of WHSmith: no sign of Murray’s book there, not even listed. Next, Hugendubel by Ku’damm, a two-storey flagship with a wide English collection. Once again, no trace of it on the shelves. When asked, staff confirmed it wasn’t part of their standard selection, though they kindly offered to special-order it – a quiet concession that some books are available, just not openly.
Finally, I stopped by KaDeWe – Berlin’s equivalent to Harrods– where a helpful bookseller showed me the inventory screen on her iPad. The replenish value for the title was zero. The only similar exception was Jordan Peterson’s We Who Wrestle with God. Perhaps it slipped through the net because its title is more poetic.
Meanwhile, entire sections of bookstores across the city are dedicated to ‘Gender and Identity’ – a literary cul-de-sac in which the only destination is terminal self-absorption. You can read all about why ‘women’ is a contested term, but not why liberal democracy might still be worth defending. Douglas Murray, of course, believes it is – and that, these days, is heresy.
His real offence is not extremism, but clarity. He writes what many suspect and fear to say. He defends the very values this country once promised to protect. He chooses reason over slogans. And for this, his books are quietly exiled from German shelves – even when they’re about Jews being held hostage in the Middle East. Germany, of all places, should know better.
You don’t have to agree with Murray, but you should be able to buy his book. The fact that you can’t – in the capital of a country that once swore it would never again erase the voices of Jewish suffering – is more than hypocrisy. It’s a quiet return to selective memory. And we’ve all seen how that ends.
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