SBC Banned Books Read-In Goes International

Guest post by Aline Franzus, organizer of Silent Book Club Münster

Aline Franzus organizes the Silent Book Club chapter in Münster, Germany. A local journalist by trade, she wrote her MA thesis on book banning in 2023 and has helped organize banned book–themed outreach events with the Banned Books Network Münster, which a group of scholars at the University of Münster founded in January 2025. This Banned Books Week, Aline brought those worlds together: SBC Münster, the Banned Books Network, the Münster city library, and university and library colleagues in Trier, Germany, teamed up on a collective program that included a banned books edition of Silent Book Club at the library on October 7 and a conversation about book banning and SBC on stage at the Frankfurt Book Fair on October 10. Here’s her recap of the read-in!

The history of censorship in the US is as old as the nation’s founding. The global history of censorship, however, is much older. National histories don’t exist in silos. Right now, we should all pay close attention to what is happening in the US when it comes to book banning. 

Not only to stand in solidarity with US-American authors, bookstores, librarians, and readers. But also, to understand the larger mechanisms behind this movement – before it may be imported to the countries we live in.

The world around us is moving at an ever-faster pace. Reading in community is a form of resisting the increasingly solitary screen-heavy realities of our day-to-day lives. Reading banned books is resisting the decisions of others about what we and the younger generations are and aren’t supposed to read. Reading banned books in community then is doing both at the same time. 

This year’s Banned Books Week, the Silent Book Club in Münster, Germany, teamed up with their local library and the Banned Books Network Münster (BBNM) to raise awareness of the increase in book banning.

In January 2025, the University of Münster’s Chairs for Book Studies and American Studies founded the BBNM. Its purpose is to draw attention to the rise in book bans, and to create space for engagement with banned books and the wider repercussions of these bans.

On Wednesday evening, about 150 people cycled through the cobblestone streets of Münster and made their way to the city’s public library to learn about and read banned books on a cozy fall night. We had the entire library to ourselves, which meant we could hide among the bookshelves or make ourselves comfortable in one of the library’s many reading nooks.

Before and after the silent hour of reading, folks browsed through the banned books exhibition at the library and—since one of the founding members of the BBNM had joined us—engaged in a conversation about the current wave of book censorship.

Although many banned titles were featured in the post-reading book stack, surely not everyone had come to Silent Book Club that night specifically to read a banned book. But even the ones who hadn’t brought a challenged title went home with ideas about which books to add to their ever-growing tbr-lists.