My impression is that most restrictions to the freedom of speech in Germany are rather in civil law than in criminal law. It is very easy to get (successfully) sued for saying things that is.
It is nearly impossible to speak about sexual harassment - because the perpetrator can sue you for intruding his private life.
More generally it is basically impossible to say anything negative about someone if you can't prove it true - it is considered slander. By contrast in the U.S. as far as I know it's up to whoever accuses you of slander to prove that what you say is untrue.
That creates a whole large area where you can speak freely about someone while not being able to accuse them legally before the court - in Germany that would either fall into "slander" bucket (if what you say has public significance but you can't prove it) or "private life" bucket (if what you say has allegedly no public significance even if you can prove it true).
Most Americans would be surprised that the German interpretation of “the untouchable dignity of man” prohibits even insults (“Beleidigung”). There was a case in 2018 of an American who got in a tussle with German airport police, called them Nazis, and was subsequently charged with defamation.[1] Clearly she wasn’t literally describing them as students of the philosophy of Adolf Hitler, but rather calling them authoritarians in a demeaning and insulting way. In the U.S. one might expect her to be charged perhaps with disorderly conduct or something similar, but punishing her for her words would require that there be some actual injury done to the officers’ reputation. Obviously ridiculous statements that no reasonable person would believe don’t fall under defamation in the U.S. A famous example was in the 1980s when Jerry Falwell unsuccessfully sued Hustler for publishing a fake interview with him claiming he drunkenly lost his virginity to his mother in an outhouse.
Certain depictions of violence are also considered to inherently violate human dignity as a whole (“Gewaltdarstellung”). That seems to be why there’s traditionally been so much video game censorship in Germany, like green blood or replacing all characters with robots[2].
Most Germans, on the other hand, would be surprised that insults are legal in many countries. Wikipedia has a map of this.[1]
There is another aspect regarding the legal situation in German that might be relevant to understand the difference to the US: The US constitution speeks only of the "freedom of speech", while the German consitution (Grundgesetz) goes much more into the detail:
(1) Every person 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 means of broadcasts and films shall be guaranteed. There shall be no censorship.
(2) These rights shall find their limits in the provisions of general laws, in provisions for the protection of young persons and in the right to personal honour.
(3) Arts and sciences, research and teaching shall be free. The freedom of teaching shall not release any person from allegiance to the constitution.[2]
So the right to personal honour is directly acknowledged.
As an aside: "teaching" ("Lehre") refers to higher education only, but includes both, teaching in the narrower sense and learning. As a consequence a student at a German university has the right to learn as he or she seems fit and can only be forced to attend a course, if his or her physical presence is really necessary as there is no other way to learn a particular skill. So the presence at laboratory courses or courses focused on discussions can be made mandatory, but not at lectures. (The student must only attent the course exam, if there is one.) Isn't it interesting that a student in Germany has a constitutional right to be an autodidact?
Given how freely some people use “nazi” as an insult, I am not surprised that visitors to Germany may be unaware quite how strong an insult it is here.
I’m still a mere Ausländer here myself, so I only have a rough sense of it, but can say that every few hundred meters along the streets you can find a gold-coloured paving stone memorialising separate victims, either an individual or a family.
I've also heard from Germans that they have been called Nazis in the U.S. just for being German. So the police officers could also perceive it as an ethnic slur.
Read some history of how that came to be. You might still disagree when you're done, but I suspect you'll at least be able to answer your own question.
I'm very used to engineers' quibbles, very focused views ending up being very narrow views, clever/stupid explanations of why various laws can't be enforced, and so on.
But this has the be the biggest instance of missing the point, intentionally or not, I've seen in quite some time.
> [...] and also there were events in history like china's cultural revolution, Stalin's great cleansing and the killing fields in Cambodia (to name a few) [...]
Under the assumption that is meant to be a sincere argument:
The difference between the holocaust and those crimes is that Germany's the country primarily responsible for the former, giving special meaning to the denial of that crime and the law banning its denial.
No legal system anywhere can be absolute about not determining what the "truth" is, even when it comes to speech. The most common example is yelling "fire!" in a crowded theatre and causing a panic. Or posting a bomb threat to social media. That kind of mischief is illegal in most places as there's actual harm. And the law will have to determine the truth that there was no fire or no bomb, and that your speech had no purpose except to cause harm.
Another example is speech used to commit fraud or extortion. Were your profitable lies to exploit the vulnerable based on a genuine belief, or did you have criminal intent? The law will have to decide, and the situation will not always be clear, and often it comes down to determining intent.
In the case of holocaust denial, in Germany the potential harm of allowing it is seen as more genocide, so they've calibrated their free speech laws in respect of that. But there's never an exact place to draw the line; every legal system is going to have to make such judgment calls.
I believe your reasoning is faulty. In the vast majority of cases the law lays out rules and a court will attempt to determine various facts (ie truths) and interpret the rules in some broader context.
Codifying truth into law is quite unusual and seems like a bad idea to me. But then prosecuting people for hurling insults also seems like a bad idea to me - I guess I'm just thoroughly American.
Are you aware of difference between iterated and non iterated games in game theory?
Good. Now play the free speech game in an iterated manner where there exist a chance that a Nazi party comes to power and that likelihood is being lowered by a making holocaust denial illegal. From history you should now that there is no free expression under Nazis and that it takes them losing a world war to oust them (unlike communist regimes which collapse easier).
Does the US model really have free speech if it allows a nazi party getting to power in the future?
That is the paradox of tolerance and is what people learned from the fate of Weimar and what people incorporated into democratic constitutions made after 45.
Iterated games and future Nazis you say... How can you tell that banning holocaust denial won't result in a reactionary movement in the future that will result in Nazis getting into power again, ąs people might start questioning the holocaust precisely because they're not allowed to question it?
Given that neo-Nazi marches have more attendants in Germany than they do in US, I would question the assertion that it actually does anything to prevent the Nazis from coming to power.
The "paradox of tolerance" is not a paradox at all when one contemplates the difference between speech and action. Tolerating intolerant speech, no matter how extreme, is not a problem. Tolerating intolerant actions is where tolerance breaks down.
Dude, you recently had a right wing mob storm your parliament in an attempt to overthrow a democratic election in favor of a leader with clear fascist tendencies. Come on.
From Wikipedia: "The United States does not have hate speech laws, since the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that laws criminalizing hate speech violate the guarantee to freedom of speech contained in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution." [1]
If the threat is credible and imminent, yes. That's because killing people is obviously illegal, and those you threaten can reasonably take you at your word when you make a credible threat against them and respond accordingly to protect themselves. The speech is merely evidence of intent, not the crime itself. (Morally speaking, of course. Consult a local lawyer for legal advice applicable to your jurisdiction, as the law is not always moral or just.)
The US does not have laws against 'hate speech', this is completely incorrect. Libel is a civil matter, and the US is commonly described as having the highest bar to proving libel in the developed world
Yeah, I was mistaken about hate speech laws, sorry about that. My point though was that all countries do restrict speech in _some_ manner (for perfectly valid reasons), and I don't understand this fascination with "free speech" as some sacred concept that must be either whole or completely useless.
I believe libel in the US involves demonstrating actual harm.
The only thing I'm aware of here that I would consider a true infringement of freedom of speech is our obscenity laws. SCOTUS has (sadly) upheld at least some of them.
There is no "free speech, but". It's a binary. You either have free speech, or you don't. Limited free speech is, by definition, not free. It's limited.
Germany also bans "extreme" political parties. And no, that doesn't just mean the Nazis - the Communist party was also banned under the same law, for example. In general, it seems to cover any party with a platform that is in conflict with liberal democracy (even if, say, it's a platform of radical direct democracy, although I don't think this was ever tested in practice)?
> Another article by Haverbeck-Wetzel in the Voice of Conscience (November/December 2005) posited a thesis that Adolf Hitler was "just not to be understood from the believed Holocaust or his alleged war obsession, but only by a divine mission in the world-historical context."
> In the Hamburg court, she insisted the status of Auschwitz as a place of death is "not historically proven" and is "only a belief".
Did you read the article? She's been a vocal Holocaust denier since the end of the war. She's not a random person doubting the Holocaust and stupidly saying it in public. She was the wife of one of the higher ups in the Nazi party.
What do you mean by this word? I’ve seen it used as a political meme, but the usage always makes it seem like the supposed victim has some kind of entitlement to be a widely admired public figure regardless of what they say or do, without regard to the fleeting nature of fame and the fickleness of public admiration.
We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. Not cool.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Do you mean "free speech"? Here in germany have free speech, except for denying the holocaust (And this makes really sense, as this is simply wrong)