It was very late at night/early morning when I read this, so I was likely too sleepy to understand it properly. Thanks for the explanation.Could you not open the hyperlink? PG has not been blocked by order of the German authorities, PG did it themselves.
The TLDR (as I understand it) is that the PG staff are currently appealing the verdict on a civil court case brought against them by a German publisher (actually a global publishing conglomerate, which also owns e.g. MacMillan), in a German court, with respect to (alleged) copyright-infringement on the texts of 18 books, written by 3 long-dead German authors (including Thomas Mann), for which the US copyright has long-since expired, putting those works into the public domain in the USA (but apparently not in Germany, at least according to the German publisher's claim).
The court ruled against the publisher's demand that those 18 texts should be removed from PG altogether, but did rule that they be made unavailable for download by German PG-users (i.e. effectively, that German copyright law should apply to a website which is not based in Germany/Europe, nor staffed by German/European citizens, and whose content is primarily in languages other than German).
However, PG's position is that no court inside or outside the USA should be allowed to assume (by precedent) the legal power to demand that PG remove (or block) any (US) public-domain works from its shelves, at the whim of any publisher with the resources to pursue such (frivolous) cases — hence their appeal. But until that appeal has been ruled on, they have blocked Germany as a precaution, to avoid prejudicing their case.
So it seems that Project Gutenberg didn't really want to do it, but felt they had to. Hopefully this will be cleared up soon. In the meantime, is there anything in particular you wanted to read there?