Modern Book Burning in New Normal Germany

It was probably always just a matter of time until the German Thought Police raided my home.

The raid took place on November 26. I published a short piece about it that day, and promised to update readers with details once I got them.

I don’t have any details. My attorney requested the case file from the authorities, but they haven’t sent it to him.

In the meantime, the raid has received a bit of coverage from the independent press, and I’ve done a few interviews about it, so I can share that with you.

Also, a Swiss organization defending freedom of speech in Switzerland and Germany, Bündnis Redefreiheit (Free Speech Union) has taken on my case, and they published a rather good introduction to it and the issues in question.

The German version is on their website. The English version is below.

Before you read it, I want to say a few words about “book burning,” which the folks at Bündnis Redefreiheit mean metaphorically, of course. The German authorities are not literally burning books or organizing public book-burning rituals like the Nazis.

However, I am being criminally investigated for publishing and promoting a book. The police raided my home looking for evidence that I am the publisher of a book. That is the “crime” that is cited as grounds for this second investigation.

Please, reflect on that for a minute.

The book in question has been banned in Germany since the summer of 2022. As far as I know, the German authorities still deny that it is banned, but it is. It was pulled from distribution by German booksellers (presumably by Libri and the other major German book distributors) at the same time that it was officially banned in Germany by Amazon and the previous criminal investigation of me was launched. And now I’m being criminally investigated for the second time, and having my home raided and searched by the police, for the “crime” of publishing, distributing, and promoting it.

A book.

Obviously, at this point, it is clear that the German authorities have absolutely zero respect for the law, or the rule of law, or the Grundgesetz (i.e., basically the German constitution), or basic democratic rights and principles like freedom of speech. The fact that a German judge actually signed a search warrant authorizing the police to raid my home because I wrote and published a book, well, I don’t know what to say exactly, other than … welcome to the New Normal Reich!

I’ll have more to say about it as time goes by, and after the German authorities send my attorney the new case file, and after I recover and regain my strength a bit. I am extremely worn out at the moment. I just did an exhausting two-month road trip all over the USA. And of course I caught a nasty winter bug upon my return. And, well, honestly, I’m utterly burnt-out from the last five years of opposing this new form of totalitarianism that is taking hold, not just here in Germany, but all throughout the West. I’ll dig into all that once again after I get my sea legs back.

For now, here’s the overview of my case(s) by Bündnis Redefreiheit.

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The C. J. Hopkins Case: Modern Book Burning

Bündnis Redefreiheit

On the morning of Wednesday, 26 November 2025, three armed police officers arrived at the Berlin apartment of American writer C. J. Hopkins with a search warrant issued by the Amtsgericht Tiergarten. As he reports on his Substack, the officers not only searched the apartment but also confiscated his computer and interrogated his wife.

Hopkins is an award-winning playwright, novelist, and political satirist. In 2022, he published The Rise of the New Normal Reich: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III (2020–2021), a book that delivers a sustained and sharply argued critique of the authoritarian tendencies that emerged during the Covid era. It was this book that brought the police to his door that morning.

The cover of the book makes Hopkins’ point immediately visible. Drawing on the familiar design of William L. Shirer’s history book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which features a large swastika, Hopkins’ version shows the same symbol partly obscured by a Covid mask. It is a direct visual statement: in Hopkins’ view, the coercive measures of the Covid period bore an uncomfortable resemblance to an earlier authoritarian system that also invoked emergency measures to override basic rights. The image is unmistakably political commentary of the anti-authoritarian kind.

But the Berlin state prosecutor sees it differently. According to the warrant for the house search, the cover allegedly violates §86a of the German Criminal Code, the law that forbids the use of unconstitutional symbols when used in a supportive way. Hopkins is accused of publishing, selling, and displaying his book, and of showing the cover on his website. In other words, the prosecutor is treating an anti-authoritarian book as a criminal act.

The police search was authorized to determine whether Hopkins published, distributes, and promotes his book, and whether he is the owner and operator of his blog, consentfactory.org, where the book is advertised. But these questions are not mysteries. The answers are public knowledge. Hopkins is the author. His website bears his name, his photo, and his biography. His books are advertised and sold by booksellers worldwide. There is nothing hidden here.

A house search, however, is one of the most invasive measures the state can take. It must be proportionate and requires a clear need to uncover evidence that cannot be obtained in any other way. That bar was not met. There was no serious question that required armed officers to enter the home of an author. The search served no legitimate investigative purpose. It served a symbolic one. It sent a message: we can come into your home and harass you for what you write.

This alone should concern anyone who values free expression. But the core issue runs deeper. Hopkins’ book does not promote fascism. It warns against it. It uses the symbol of the swastika not to support Nazi ideology, but to condemn modern political trends that he believes resemble it. The entire point of the book is to say: “Be careful. This looks familiar.” And the phrase “The New Normal Reich” carries just a trace of satire, enough to signal discomfort and alert the grey cells that danger is afoot.

In any healthy democracy, such a warning falls squarely under protected political speech. It is the kind of analogy that writers, historians, and political thinkers have always made. One may find it exaggerated, uncomfortable, or even unfair, but that is not the same as illegal. Satire is not propaganda. Criticism is not endorsement. A warning is not a celebration.

By treating a critical image as criminal use of Nazi symbols, the state prosecutor collapses distinctions that are essential to free debate. It is a category error with serious consequences. If this interpretation of the state prosecutor stands, then any critical representation of a Nazi symbol, whether in a documentary, a satirical cartoon, a historical comparison, or a work of fiction, could be targeted in exactly the same way.

The result is predictable: people stop speaking. Writers avoid certain topics. Artists censor themselves. Publishers become nervous. And so, the range of permitted thought narrows. This is how censorship works today: through the banning of books, and the steady pressure of enforced legal threats backed by bureaucratic intimidation.

The fact that this search occurred at all is evidence of such pressure. A police raid is frightening, disruptive, and humiliating. It disturbs daily life. It seizes tools required for work. It intrudes into private space. And it does all this without any real necessity. The message is unmistakable: writing and publishing this book will cost you.

As Hopkins’ lawyer has rightly argued, the raid was not merely a procedural excess but an assault on several of the most basic guarantees of a democratic society: freedom of opinion, freedom of the press, artistic freedom, and the inviolability of the home. These principles are not decorative features of a constitution; they are the very bedrock by which a people keep power from coagulating into something unaccountable and oppressive. That the German authorities are acting arbitrarily here is beyond question, since Der Spiegel and Stern have already employed the swastika critically on their respective magazine’s covers, without police searching their offices.

It takes only a moment’s honest reading to see that Hopkins cannot, by any stretch available to common sense or literary judgment, be aligned with fascism or Nazism, for his entire argument depends on the premise that the Covid era represented, in miniature and in embryo, a repetition of the authoritarian temptations that disfigured the twentieth century. A man does not praise what he holds up as a warning sign; he does not revere the very phenomenon he uses as the yardstick of political decay.

Hopkins invokes the Third Reich not as a beacon but as a boundary, the outer edge of what a society must never again permit itself to become. And in doing so he places Nazism in the same conceptual space one reserves for toxic substances, useful only as a reference point for recognizing when the air has gone foul. To accuse him of sympathy with fascism is to miss the entire structure of his criticism, to mistake the smoke alarm for the fire. Hopkins is not flirting with Nazism; he is arguing that its ghost walks more easily in modern halls than we care to admit, and he is pleading for the vigilance necessary to keep that ghost from taking on flesh once more.

Germany no longer burns books in the literal sense. Instead, it restricts their distribution. It removes them from platforms. It harasses their authors. It treats political criticism as criminal offenses. The flames are gone, but the censorial principle survives. Indeed, you can no longer buy Hopkins’ book in German book stores, nor on Amazon in Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands.

One does not have to agree with C. J. Hopkins to recognize what is at stake. Today, it is a satirical book cover. Tomorrow, it could be Shirer’s history book about the Third Reich (which is still freely available in Germany). The next day, a political cartoon. Once the state begins treating dissent as danger, and criticism as extremism, the slope quickly becomes very slippery and steep.

In this case, the German authorities have done something abominable in a state that still considers itself liberal and democratic. They have taken a critic of authoritarianism and responded to his critique with authoritarian methods. And that is precisely the problem Hopkins has been writing about all along.

C. J. Hopkins wrote about the house search on his Substack: https://cjhopkins.substack.com/p/a-visit-by-the-german-thought-police

Hopkins’ lawyer gave Junge Freiheit an interview about the house search and the charges filed: https://jungefreiheit.de/debatte/interview/2025/sonst-haetten-auch-spiegel-oder-stern-bestraft-werden-muessen/

A note on an earlier, pending case

Hopkins’ has had dealings with the German state before. That first trouble began with two tweets he posted in August 2022, each accompanied by the same image of his book now at the center of this newest case: a medical mask over a still visible swastika. One tweet quoted Germany’s then health minister saying that masks “always send a signal,” and the other described masks as symbols of ideological conformity. The meaning was obvious: Hopkins was criticizing coercive government measures, not supporting Nazism.

But the Berlin prosecutor treated the image as “dissemination of Nazi symbols,” ignoring the context entirely and pursuing him as if he were a propagandist rather than a satirist. What should have been recognized instantly as a political warning was instead hauled into court as a criminal offense. This case of Hopkins’ tweets is currently pending in Germany’s constitutional court.

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And here are links to other articles about my case and a few recent interviews, some in English, some in German.

Lena Böllinger, Multipolar: “Das ist verrückt” (this is the best, most thorough piece about Germany’s censorship and intimidation system that I am aware of. It is worth machine-translating if you don’t read German.)

Jacob Mchangama, International Politics and Society Journal: Satire Under Siege: The CJ Hopkins Case and the Indiscriminate Use of Germany’s Hate Speech Laws

Matt Taibbi, Racket News: Is Germany Previewing America’s Speech Future?

Milosz Matuschek, Freischwebende Intelligenz: Widerstand gegen die widerwärtige Welt

Roberto De Lapuente, Overton Magazine: C.J. Hopkins: “Die ganze Welt kennt den neuen Autoritarismus in Deutschland”

Andrea Seaman, Bündnis Redefreiheit: Interview with C. J. Hopkins (video, English)

Demokratischer Widerstand: The New Normal Reich | US author CJ Hopkins speaking with journalists Sodenkamp & Lenz (video, English)

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