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Home > Official Documents > Government Censorship in Public Libraries: Germany
Government Censorship in Public Libraries: Germany
There are now more than 30 reports by international human rights organizations and government bodies criticizing the German government for violating the rights of Scientologists and other minority religious members.
It is against this climate of intolerance that we examine the refusal of state and city libraries in Germany to make available to the public the works of the founder of the religion of Scientology, publications produced by the Church of Scientology, and even books with a favorable reference to Scientology or Mr. Hubbard.
In 1997, the Church of Scientology commissioned a survey by Opinion Research Corporation International into the degree and type of information possessed about Scientology by the German population. The survey found that less than 5% of Germans had any first-hand information about Scientology at all, ie, they had never visited a Church of Scientology, did not know any Scientologists, and had never read a book on Scientology written by Mr. Hubbard or produced by the Church. Instead, ninety-eight percent had received any information they possessed about Scientology from the media.
Unfortunately, as the U.N. Special Rapporteur noted in his 1998 report on Germany, the media “all too often portrays matters relating to religion and belief in a grotesque, not to say totally distorted and harmful light.”
To counter the misinformation and lack of accurate information about Scientology aggravating the climate of intolerance against Scientologists in Germany, the Church of Scientology and individual Scientologists have made a number of attempts to place literature describing the nature and activities of Scientology in public libraries throughout the country. The need for the actual texts of the Scientology religion to be available in public libraries is especially urgent given the predominance in those libraries of books written by non-Scientologists portraying the Church and its members in derogatory, stereotyped and prejudicial terms. Such works are replete with false and distorted information.
These efforts to place factual material in libraries, however, have been met with government censorship of Mr. Hubbard’s works. Citing government orders or recommendations, libraries not only refuse to stock Mr. Hubbard’s religious and philosophical books, but even his fiction.
One basis for this censorship of books is a strong recommendation, tantamount to an order, from the Berlin Senate of Science, Research and Culture to all libraries not to accept Mr. Hubbard’s books, even when offered as donations. Any library which accepts them is instructed to keep them out of public view and to give a book out only in response to a specific request.
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