German Chancellor Olaf Scholz's speech at the opening of the Leipzig Book Fair was interrupted several times by demonstrators on Wednesday.
Several activists scattered around the hall shouted loudly but largely unintelligibly in his direction.
Large parts of the protest were drowned out by sustained applause from the audience.
"The power of words brings us all together here in Leipzig - not shouting," said Scholz, accompanied by more applause.
Scholz is very much a bookworm, even amid the pressures of the top job in Germany.
"We all - and I include myself in this - share a love of reading," he said.
"Whether as a child in the evening before falling asleep, as a young politician on the train between Hamburg and Bonn, or now, whenever my time allows - books have accompanied me through my life for as long as I can remember."
Scholz, like one the world's top book trade fairs, is not committed to a particular genre.
"If you let yourself, there's a surprise waiting behind the book cover that we often miss out on online, because algorithms there mainly show us what we think is good anyway, or should think is good," he said.
"Reading is therefore daily proof that we can understand each other despite our differences, that our societies in Germany and Europe are by no means doomed to drift apart."
