The Germans have ways of making you talk — and shut up

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When JD Vance accused European countries of “Soviet”-style censorship, he caused audible gasps, visible anger and palpable pearl clutching at the Munich Security Conference in February. Obviously, his trip wasn’t about making new transatlantic friends and so the vice president could be his blunt and brutal self with no need for any diplomatic decorum. Which gave the Europeans a perfect excuse for not taking any of his points to heart and resorting to, well, gasping and pearl clutching.

Shortly afterward, on a Sunday night, I heard a familiar accent on TV — my own. When turning to the screen I saw a stern, steely-eyed female lawyer who was in the middle of lecturing her American interviewer on the self-evident and universal truths of German constitutional law. “Free speech needs boundaries,” she pronounced solemnly while slightly pausing between each word. “Boundaries” seemed to be her favorite word, since it kept popping up in each sentence that followed. Had she been cast in “Hogan’s Heroes,” her line might have been, “Ve haf vays of shutting you up.”

The interview was part of a CBS story with the lengthy title “Posting hateful speech online could lead to police raiding your home in this European country.” It aired on “60 Minutes” two days after Vance had caused universal uproar in Munich when he talked about suppression of free speech in European countries.

It’s true, they do have ways in Germany. If you cut loose on X, formerly Twitter, and don’t watch your language, you can indeed get a late night visit from some guys in trench coats who will take your phone and laptop away. And you don’t even need to advertise plans to kidnap the chancellor or topple the government in Berlin before you hear from your local prosecutor. Sometimes all you have to do is make fun of thin-skinned politicians who try to boost their public image by parading their personal hobbies.

Case in point: Annalena Baerbock, German minister of foreign affairs, who never misses an opportunity to remind journalists of her passion for trampoline gymnastics and the three (three!) bronze medals she won as a teenager in national championships. Which tends to produce catchy headlines like “From trampolinist to diplomat: Germany’s Annalena Baerbock catapults to politics and human rights” or “A former medal-winning trampolinist, Annalena Baerbock is no stranger to aiming high.”

For a 66-year-old retiree from the northern state of Lower Saxony in Germany, it seemed obvious that “aiming high” (or actually too high) was what had caused Baerbock to be stuck in a childlike, attention-seeking state of mind. And therefore he joked that “Annalena will never grow up because she hit the ceiling too often when she was bouncing up and down on her trampoline as a kid.” He loved his line so much that he recently typed it in the contact form of Baerbock’s foreign office website and hit “send.” The answer to his message came within days — breathtakingly fast for a German government agency. It was a letter from the district court that slapped a penalty of 800 euros on him “for violating Annalena Baerbock’s honor.” Since the defendant’s monthly pension was just 1,500 euros before taxes, the court’s offer to swap the fine for a 10-day prison sentence must have looked really attractive to him.

Why, you may ask, should you care about a German politician with zero sense of humor and a legacy as cabinet member that’s not any bigger? Because Baerbock is coming your way. To New York, to be exact. She’ll be president of the U.N. General Assembly — not to be confused with the role of secretary-general — at the beginning of June, and hopefully none of the 193 member countries will come into her crosshairs for making trampoline jokes.

So, JD Vance has a point, but the U.S. bears some responsibility for Germany’s obsession with speech control:

The First Amendment is about free speech; Article 1 of the Basic Law, Germany’s constitution, is not. Instead it states that human dignity “shall be inviolable” and that “to respect and protect it, shall be the duty of all state authority.” That’s definitely not good for business if you have to make a living as a comedian or cartoonist in Germany — and yes, they do exist over there. Making the protection of human dignity front and center in the West German constitution was an understandable reaction to the Nazi regime whose top priority was the destruction of human dignity.

It gets tricky though when you apply a law from 1949 literally to today’s cyberspace. The resulting court decisions seem just as strange and out-of-this-world as the attempts to interpret the term “well-regulated militia” in the 21st century. Funny that there are originalists on both sides of the Atlantic. I wonder if JD Vance is aware that the Basic Law with its emphasis on dignity protection — whether outdated or not — only became effective after it had received the stamp of approval by the U.S. and the other occupying Western Allies. I guess they don’t teach that at Yale Law School. Or JD skipped the course.

Henning Schroeder is a professor emeritus who taught in the College of Liberal Arts (German Studies) and the School of Pharmacy at the University of Minnesota. His email address is schro601@umn.edu and his Twitter (X) handle is @HenningSchroed1.