Article 1 of the consitution of Germany: Human dignity is inviolable. It is the duty of all state authority to respect and protect it.
Article 5 of the constitution: Everyone shall have the right freely to express and disseminate his opinions in speech, writing and pictures and to inform himself without hindrance from generally accessible sources. Freedom of the press and freedom of reporting by radio and film are guaranteed. Censorship does not take place.
These two articles are the relevant bases for the laws talked about the video.
I don't understand, how does this correspond with the 60 minutes video of the German prosecutors saying if you insult someone you will be prosecuted? It would seem their comments conflict with the constitution.
Also Hate-Aid is exactly the state sponsored organization who collect "Hate-Speech" that is below law-action, and certifies "trusted-flaggers" in social media.
In regards to censoring/limiting free speech on the bs grounds of "protecting people's dignity" and "not repeating Nazi past", mostly yes it's the same shit as in Germany.
As a German the American understanding of free speech is always an interesting clash of cultures. Germans generally see free speech as a freedom of opinion and the expression of opinions as something to protect. Historically such free speech has often been under threat by using actual threats and insults, especially in Germany. As such people should have ways to prosecute such attacks against their free speech legally. Additionally people do have their dignity and when you start attacking someone's dignity that very quickly leads to leaving facts behind and focusing emotional persecution of people or groups. That's why both the human dignity and free speech have a very high standing in the German constitution, but the human dignity does rank somewhat higher.
The US on the other hand seems to focus more on being allowed to say anything and people have to defend themselves against any verbal attacks with little protection from the state. From my perspective that seems to be in conflict with fostering actual free speech. The president or anybody else could put up a wrong statement about you or even tell people to attack you and that seems to be protected as free speech, even though it will prevent you from voicing your own opinions and as such restrict your own free speech.
Now of course treating insults or attacks against the human dignity as crimes is a two-edged sword. Such laws can and are misused. Regulating such a field is hard and often ends up being a court decision. But there are plenty of people who are sent threats and insults every day, just because they are politically active and giving them a way to protect themselves is important for our democracy. And there are plenty of other laws getting misused as well. The solution is refining them to make them harder to abuse and punishing people who do abuse them. It is not a solution to just give up regulating something, just because it might be hard at the start.
Now maybe people from the US will never agree with Germans here. But maybe that is just part of our differences in culture. Germany went through fascism before and our constitution is part of our way to protect ourselves from going down that path ever again. Putting human dignity as the first articles is a big part of that as are our way of protecting free speech. Inciting public violence against minorities was one of the ways fascism started in Germany and as a result we have laws against that. We learned from our history because we don't want to repeat it and criticising our interpretation of free speech without understanding how we arrived at our interpretation of it feels somewhat rude. Which doesn't mean I don't welcome discussion around it, but if you want to discuss it, please try to understand the context around it instead of just pointing at how you are doing things differently and picking one or two negative examples.
>As a German the American understanding of free speech is always an interesting clash of cultures.
Not just Americans, the rest of Europe also thinks that Germany's "freedom" of speech laws are a bunch of horse manure and are laughing at Germany.
>As such people should have ways to prosecute such attacks against their free speech legally.
All other western democratic countries already have that, minus Germany's Stasi speech censorship, it's called libel/slander/defamation laws, except unlike Germany you actually have to prove in court that untrue comments caused you some form of harm (monetary or otherwise) and not just hurt feelings to your "dignity" whatever that is.
>Additionally people do have their dignity and when you start attacking someone's dignity that
What's the exact definition of "dignity" here? It just feels like a synonym for "hurt feelings" from the context on this thread. I don't agree that free speech and facts should be blocked just because someone(usually a rich/powerful criminal) claims their feelings are hurt. Like that German politician who had comments regarding his documented Nazi/Stasi past blocked because it "hurt his dignity" even though that was the truth. This is just a legal loophole for criminals to hide their crimes from the public and doesn't really protect anyone innocent. Basically state legalized censorship.
>Germany went through fascism before and our constitution is part of our way to protect ourselves from going down that path ever again
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here. Based on the prosecutors in that video showcased and what you just explained, it has the exact opposite effect: Germans have let themselves ruled by fascist speech police who controls what they can and cannot say in public, but have gaslit themselves into thinking that it's somehow justified because "m'uh dignity", which is just criminals exploiting the law to escape public scrutiny for their crimes and for the state to censor speech.
I really hope you guys wise up at one point and snap out of it, but knowing German mentality on blindly following orders and rules even when they're obviously stupid, and national arrogance on how your rules and laws are faultless and must be followed to the T (used to work for one of the top 3 German luxury car brands) I doubt it. Don't mean to offend you even though my language seems so, but from the perspective of someone from a country with actual free speech who worked a lot with Germans, your arguments on Germany's bullshit laws sound like someone defending their Stockholm syndrome, which I guess is a good metaphor for the German populations' mentality. Damn, I was rude again, but I'm not good at doing that thing Germans do in the Zeugnis where they say something negative wrapped in glitter and sprinkles so that it seems positive, hope I don't get swatted by the Bundespolizei.
> Not just Americans, the rest of Europe also thinks that Germany's "freedom" of speech laws are a bunch of horse manure and are laughing at Germany.
Do you have anything to back that up? This doesn't represent my experience, so we basically end up in a situation of anecdotes vs anecdotes, in which case we can't really argue this point further, I'd say.
> All other western democratic countries already have that, minus Germany's Stasi speech censorship, it's called libel/slander/defamation laws, except unlike Germany you actually have to prove in court that untrue comments caused you some form of harm (monetary or otherwise) and not just hurt feelings to your "dignity" whatever that is.
Right, but how does that protect your freedom of expression? If you have to prove you have experienced harm, that makes it very hard to argue that people shouldn't send you death threats. There is no real harm that happened because of that, but it regularly stops people from doing their political work. Heck, people get letters sometimes from AfD associated organisations, that their sexual orientation isn't welcome in Germany and that they will soon "fix" that: https://www.mimikama.org/afd-drohbrief-an-kirche-gefahr-oder...
Insults, threats and verbal attacks are not essential to having a discussion, as such it is very much possible to just word things differently and make the same arguments without forcing other people out of the discourse by making them feel endangered. It's not censorship if you just restrict how people word things. It might fall under censorship to disallow threats, slander and insults, but frankly do you really consider those essential to free speech? Freedom in a society always has limits. Your freedom ends when it restricts the freedom of others. And why would that be different just because you send someone a threat via a letter or post it online instead of punching them in the face? Both of them result in someone being scared of expressing their opinion.
> What's the exact definition of "dignity" here? It just feels like a synonym for "hurt feelings" from the context on this thread. I don't agree that free speech and facts should be blocked just because someone(usually a rich/powerful criminal) claims their feelings are hurt. Like that German politician who had comments regarding his documented Nazi/Stasi past blocked because it "hurt his dignity" even though that was the truth. This is just a legal loophole for criminals to hide their crimes from the public and doesn't really protect anyone innocent. Basically state legalized censorship.
"dignity" here is hard to define exactly, as is the case with most constitutions. But no, it is not hurt feelings. You can hurt someone's feelings in a lot of ways without it being malicious. As such there is often discussion around what this part of the German constitution actually means, but in general the consensus is that it means the state has to make sure its citizens can live a humane life. This means people shouldn't be the target of excessive cruelty (i.e. torture) and should in general be able to live their life as freely as possible without encroaching on other people's freedom.
You are understanding it as "hurt feeling" because of the framing in the video at the root of this thread. That's because the video overly focuses on certain aspects of how Germany "polices" the internet. It barely touches on how many politicians, political activists and minorities are often the target of threats, because people assume the internet is a lawless place and the anonymity and physical distance encourages them to act even more violent than they would likely dare to act in person. That's not hurt feelings anymore, people's free s...
I'm not reading all that, can you please post this in a meme format and then we can judge it based on whether or not you get swatted by the police. JK. Your comment is just mental gymnastics to justify how existing German laws are somehow not a threat to free speech even though the end results and actions of the state and abuses prove that they are.
Let me quote German law on the matter:
"Freedom of speech is granted by Art. 5 Section 1 GG. It mainly protects opinions but also facts relevant to forming opinions, unless those facts are proven false or intentionally false. Freedom of Speech can be infringed acording to Art. 5 Section 2 GG for protection of ones honor, visible in Section 185 and Section 188 german penal code, that punishes insulting. When free speech and protection of ones honor collide, the court has to weigh, which in a specific case is more important."
TL;DR: no matter how much copium you sniff, you actually don't have freedom of speech in Germany.
So in Germany your speech is not protected from the government anymore and is entirely subject to opinion of judges and the public. To some extent Germans do not even have freedom of expression because the guilt culture makes people default to calling illegal migration critics Nazis so nobody speaks publicly about this.
I'm your east side neighbour, not an American. Our speech here has much better protection, you'll only get in trouble if you make threats or call for violence (as it should be), not for calling politicians "a willie" or "an old woman", because we remember our oppressive communist past and worked to not repeat that level of government censorship, while Germans tried so hard to "not be Nazis" that they put their heads so far up their own ass that they turned back into the same Nazis they say they're fighting. Crazy shit really.
Again, I would suggest you stop picking particular examples without context. The case where a politician was called "willie"/"Pimmel" was a senator overreaching and as a result the police dropped the case: https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/hausdurchsuchung-pimmelg...
Of course it was still a scandal, but it is not like anyone had to pay a fine over it or went to prison.
Yes, there are limits to free speech in Germany, when it encroaches on other people's freedom of speech. But that doesn't mean there is no free speech and the examples you pick are mostly cases where someone tried to use those rules against free speech and failed. So they actually show the opposite, you can't just sue someone for their opinion. Only if their opinion encroaches on other people's freedom. I don't think I am the one doing mental gymnastics here. Yes, insults generally don't fall under free speech in Germany and neither does inciting violence, but I simply don't see that as a problem, since you can express opinions also without including direct insults. So from my perspective I can only see you arguing, that insulting other people should be protected by free speech, which we can disagree on, but is a very small aspect of free speech from my perspective and imo even one that harms free speech in the long run.
> But there are plenty of people who are sent threats and insults every day, just because they are politically active and giving them a way to protect themselves is important for our democracy.
I think this logic is flawed. By that same logic, the solution to terrorist attacks in cars would be to ban cars.
My point is that the countermeasure sounds disproportionate to me.
16 comments
[ 141 ms ] story [ 1117 ms ] threadArticle 5 of the constitution: Everyone shall have the right freely to express and disseminate his opinions in speech, writing and pictures and to inform himself without hindrance from generally accessible sources. Freedom of the press and freedom of reporting by radio and film are guaranteed. Censorship does not take place.
These two articles are the relevant bases for the laws talked about the video.
Also, searching homes is a last resort, and having your home searched also hurts the dignity of a person.
https://se-legal.de/criminal-defense-lawyer/house-searches-s...
https://winheller.com/blog/en/unlawful-house-search-germany/
Also Hate-Aid is exactly the state sponsored organization who collect "Hate-Speech" that is below law-action, and certifies "trusted-flaggers" in social media.
https://hateaid.org/trusted-flagger/
BTW one of the very few good german movies on netflix:
The Lives of Others
The US on the other hand seems to focus more on being allowed to say anything and people have to defend themselves against any verbal attacks with little protection from the state. From my perspective that seems to be in conflict with fostering actual free speech. The president or anybody else could put up a wrong statement about you or even tell people to attack you and that seems to be protected as free speech, even though it will prevent you from voicing your own opinions and as such restrict your own free speech.
Now of course treating insults or attacks against the human dignity as crimes is a two-edged sword. Such laws can and are misused. Regulating such a field is hard and often ends up being a court decision. But there are plenty of people who are sent threats and insults every day, just because they are politically active and giving them a way to protect themselves is important for our democracy. And there are plenty of other laws getting misused as well. The solution is refining them to make them harder to abuse and punishing people who do abuse them. It is not a solution to just give up regulating something, just because it might be hard at the start.
Now maybe people from the US will never agree with Germans here. But maybe that is just part of our differences in culture. Germany went through fascism before and our constitution is part of our way to protect ourselves from going down that path ever again. Putting human dignity as the first articles is a big part of that as are our way of protecting free speech. Inciting public violence against minorities was one of the ways fascism started in Germany and as a result we have laws against that. We learned from our history because we don't want to repeat it and criticising our interpretation of free speech without understanding how we arrived at our interpretation of it feels somewhat rude. Which doesn't mean I don't welcome discussion around it, but if you want to discuss it, please try to understand the context around it instead of just pointing at how you are doing things differently and picking one or two negative examples.
Not just Americans, the rest of Europe also thinks that Germany's "freedom" of speech laws are a bunch of horse manure and are laughing at Germany.
>As such people should have ways to prosecute such attacks against their free speech legally.
All other western democratic countries already have that, minus Germany's Stasi speech censorship, it's called libel/slander/defamation laws, except unlike Germany you actually have to prove in court that untrue comments caused you some form of harm (monetary or otherwise) and not just hurt feelings to your "dignity" whatever that is.
>Additionally people do have their dignity and when you start attacking someone's dignity that
What's the exact definition of "dignity" here? It just feels like a synonym for "hurt feelings" from the context on this thread. I don't agree that free speech and facts should be blocked just because someone(usually a rich/powerful criminal) claims their feelings are hurt. Like that German politician who had comments regarding his documented Nazi/Stasi past blocked because it "hurt his dignity" even though that was the truth. This is just a legal loophole for criminals to hide their crimes from the public and doesn't really protect anyone innocent. Basically state legalized censorship.
>Germany went through fascism before and our constitution is part of our way to protect ourselves from going down that path ever again
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here. Based on the prosecutors in that video showcased and what you just explained, it has the exact opposite effect: Germans have let themselves ruled by fascist speech police who controls what they can and cannot say in public, but have gaslit themselves into thinking that it's somehow justified because "m'uh dignity", which is just criminals exploiting the law to escape public scrutiny for their crimes and for the state to censor speech.
I really hope you guys wise up at one point and snap out of it, but knowing German mentality on blindly following orders and rules even when they're obviously stupid, and national arrogance on how your rules and laws are faultless and must be followed to the T (used to work for one of the top 3 German luxury car brands) I doubt it. Don't mean to offend you even though my language seems so, but from the perspective of someone from a country with actual free speech who worked a lot with Germans, your arguments on Germany's bullshit laws sound like someone defending their Stockholm syndrome, which I guess is a good metaphor for the German populations' mentality. Damn, I was rude again, but I'm not good at doing that thing Germans do in the Zeugnis where they say something negative wrapped in glitter and sprinkles so that it seems positive, hope I don't get swatted by the Bundespolizei.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHPMF5L-fo4
Do you have anything to back that up? This doesn't represent my experience, so we basically end up in a situation of anecdotes vs anecdotes, in which case we can't really argue this point further, I'd say.
> All other western democratic countries already have that, minus Germany's Stasi speech censorship, it's called libel/slander/defamation laws, except unlike Germany you actually have to prove in court that untrue comments caused you some form of harm (monetary or otherwise) and not just hurt feelings to your "dignity" whatever that is.
Right, but how does that protect your freedom of expression? If you have to prove you have experienced harm, that makes it very hard to argue that people shouldn't send you death threats. There is no real harm that happened because of that, but it regularly stops people from doing their political work. Heck, people get letters sometimes from AfD associated organisations, that their sexual orientation isn't welcome in Germany and that they will soon "fix" that: https://www.mimikama.org/afd-drohbrief-an-kirche-gefahr-oder...
Insults, threats and verbal attacks are not essential to having a discussion, as such it is very much possible to just word things differently and make the same arguments without forcing other people out of the discourse by making them feel endangered. It's not censorship if you just restrict how people word things. It might fall under censorship to disallow threats, slander and insults, but frankly do you really consider those essential to free speech? Freedom in a society always has limits. Your freedom ends when it restricts the freedom of others. And why would that be different just because you send someone a threat via a letter or post it online instead of punching them in the face? Both of them result in someone being scared of expressing their opinion.
> What's the exact definition of "dignity" here? It just feels like a synonym for "hurt feelings" from the context on this thread. I don't agree that free speech and facts should be blocked just because someone(usually a rich/powerful criminal) claims their feelings are hurt. Like that German politician who had comments regarding his documented Nazi/Stasi past blocked because it "hurt his dignity" even though that was the truth. This is just a legal loophole for criminals to hide their crimes from the public and doesn't really protect anyone innocent. Basically state legalized censorship.
"dignity" here is hard to define exactly, as is the case with most constitutions. But no, it is not hurt feelings. You can hurt someone's feelings in a lot of ways without it being malicious. As such there is often discussion around what this part of the German constitution actually means, but in general the consensus is that it means the state has to make sure its citizens can live a humane life. This means people shouldn't be the target of excessive cruelty (i.e. torture) and should in general be able to live their life as freely as possible without encroaching on other people's freedom.
You are understanding it as "hurt feeling" because of the framing in the video at the root of this thread. That's because the video overly focuses on certain aspects of how Germany "polices" the internet. It barely touches on how many politicians, political activists and minorities are often the target of threats, because people assume the internet is a lawless place and the anonymity and physical distance encourages them to act even more violent than they would likely dare to act in person. That's not hurt feelings anymore, people's free s...
Let me quote German law on the matter:
"Freedom of speech is granted by Art. 5 Section 1 GG. It mainly protects opinions but also facts relevant to forming opinions, unless those facts are proven false or intentionally false. Freedom of Speech can be infringed acording to Art. 5 Section 2 GG for protection of ones honor, visible in Section 185 and Section 188 german penal code, that punishes insulting. When free speech and protection of ones honor collide, the court has to weigh, which in a specific case is more important."
TL;DR: no matter how much copium you sniff, you actually don't have freedom of speech in Germany.
So in Germany your speech is not protected from the government anymore and is entirely subject to opinion of judges and the public. To some extent Germans do not even have freedom of expression because the guilt culture makes people default to calling illegal migration critics Nazis so nobody speaks publicly about this.
I'm your east side neighbour, not an American. Our speech here has much better protection, you'll only get in trouble if you make threats or call for violence (as it should be), not for calling politicians "a willie" or "an old woman", because we remember our oppressive communist past and worked to not repeat that level of government censorship, while Germans tried so hard to "not be Nazis" that they put their heads so far up their own ass that they turned back into the same Nazis they say they're fighting. Crazy shit really.
Of course it was still a scandal, but it is not like anyone had to pay a fine over it or went to prison.
Yes, there are limits to free speech in Germany, when it encroaches on other people's freedom of speech. But that doesn't mean there is no free speech and the examples you pick are mostly cases where someone tried to use those rules against free speech and failed. So they actually show the opposite, you can't just sue someone for their opinion. Only if their opinion encroaches on other people's freedom. I don't think I am the one doing mental gymnastics here. Yes, insults generally don't fall under free speech in Germany and neither does inciting violence, but I simply don't see that as a problem, since you can express opinions also without including direct insults. So from my perspective I can only see you arguing, that insulting other people should be protected by free speech, which we can disagree on, but is a very small aspect of free speech from my perspective and imo even one that harms free speech in the long run.
Here is another example, where the police overreached and was called back: https://netzpolitik.org/2025/kunstfreiheit-berliner-polizei-.... But I don't think the police ignoring the law is a problem with the law, it is a problem with the police.
I think this logic is flawed. By that same logic, the solution to terrorist attacks in cars would be to ban cars.
My point is that the countermeasure sounds disproportionate to me.