Volksverhetzung
Based on Wikipedia: Volksverhetzung
The Crime of Stirring Up Hatred
In Germany, you can go to prison for saying certain things. Not for threatening someone directly. Not for shouting "fire" in a crowded theater. But for stirring up hatred against groups of people—for making speech that poisons the well of public discourse so thoroughly that it threatens the peace of society itself.
The Germans have a word for this crime: Volksverhetzung.
Pronounced roughly "folks-fair-HET-soong," the term translates literally as something like "incitement of the people" or "agitation of the masses." But those English phrases miss the weight the word carries in German law and German memory. This is a crime that exists because Germany learned, in the most terrible way imaginable, what happens when hatred is allowed to metastasize unchecked through a society.
What the Law Actually Says
Section 130 of Germany's Criminal Code, the Strafgesetzbuch, defines exactly when speech crosses the line into criminal incitement. The law targets anyone who, in a manner capable of disturbing the public peace, does one of two things.
The first: inciting hatred against a national, racial, religious, or ethnic group, or calling for violent or arbitrary measures against them.
The second: assaulting the human dignity of others by insulting, maliciously maligning, or defaming members of these groups.
The punishment? Three months to five years in prison.
Notice that phrase embedded in the law: "capable of disturbing the public peace." This is crucial. Germany doesn't criminalize mere offensiveness or hurt feelings. The speech must have the potential to tear at the fabric of social order, to make violence more likely, to poison relations between groups of people who must live together in the same society.
The Ghost of History
To understand why Germany takes this approach, you have to understand what Germans call Vergangenheitsbewältigung—the struggle to come to terms with the past. The Holocaust didn't happen in a vacuum. It was preceded by years of speeches, pamphlets, radio broadcasts, and newspaper articles that systematically dehumanized Jewish people, Roma, disabled individuals, and others. The Nazis understood that before you can kill people, you first have to make them seem less than human in the public imagination.
This is why Holocaust denial falls squarely within Volksverhetzung. Denying that the systematic murder of six million Jews occurred isn't merely historically wrong—German law treats it as an assault on the dignity of survivors and their descendants, and as a form of incitement that could pave the way for future atrocities.
One notable case involved Ernst Zündel, a German-born publisher who spent decades in Canada and the United States spreading Holocaust denial through books, pamphlets, and eventually the internet. In 2007, a court in Mannheim convicted him of Volksverhetzung for content he had published online from North America. The German courts reasoned that because his websites could be accessed from Germany, and because they disturbed the public peace and violated the dignity of German citizens, German law applied.
This extraterritorial reach is remarkable. It means that if you publish something on the internet that constitutes incitement under German law, and it can be viewed in Germany, you can theoretically be prosecuted in German courts—regardless of where you are in the world.
Freedom of Speech, German Style
Germany does have constitutional protection for free expression. Article 5 of the Basic Law, Germany's post-war constitution, guarantees freedom of opinion and freedom of the press. But here's the critical difference from the American approach: these freedoms are not absolute.
The Basic Law explicitly allows for restrictions on speech. Personal insults can be punished. The display of symbols associated with unconstitutional organizations—most notably, Nazi symbols like the swastika or the SS insignia—is banned. And Volksverhetzung is explicitly carved out from protected speech.
The German approach reflects a fundamentally different philosophy than the American one. The United States, with its First Amendment jurisprudence, generally treats free speech as a near-absolute right, trusting that the remedy for bad speech is more speech. Germany, scarred by the experience of watching democracy die in the 1930s partly through the exploitation of democratic freedoms by those who wished to destroy democracy, takes a more protective stance.
Germans sometimes call this wehrhafte Demokratie—militant democracy, or democracy capable of defending itself. The idea is that a democratic society is not obligated to provide a platform for those who would use democratic freedoms to undermine democracy itself.
The Boundaries Keep Expanding
When Volksverhetzung was first codified in its modern form in 1960, it focused primarily on preventing the resurgence of Nazi ideology. But the concept has evolved.
Today, the law protects not just racial and religious groups, but also covers incitement based on sexual orientation and gender identity. In January 2015, following amendments from the European Parliament, the German law was updated to align with broader European standards on combating hate speech.
Germany places particularly strict limits on anything reminiscent of right-wing extremism or Nazism. This isn't symmetrical—far-left speech, while it can certainly violate other laws, doesn't trigger the same historical alarm bells. The asymmetry reflects the specific historical trauma that shaped German law.
A Global Phenomenon
Germany isn't alone in criminalizing incitement to hatred. Similar laws exist across Europe and beyond, though they go by different names and have somewhat different contours.
Austria, Germany's neighbor and the birthplace of Adolf Hitler, has Verhetzung—essentially the same concept under Section 283 of its Penal Code. Given Austria's own complicated relationship with its Nazi past, this isn't surprising.
In the United Kingdom, incitement to ethnic or racial hatred is criminalized under the Public Order Act of 1986. The British approach developed partly in response to the National Front and other far-right movements that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s.
Sweden calls its version hets mot folkgrupp—"agitation against a population group." Finland has a similar provision. Ireland has its Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act.
Russia, interestingly, also criminalizes incitement to hatred under Article 282 of its Criminal Code. The Russian Constitution explicitly prohibits propaganda that instigates hatred on social, racial, national, or religious grounds. Of course, how Russia actually applies these laws—often targeting political dissidents rather than genuine hate speech—illustrates that such laws are only as good as the legal system enforcing them.
Even Uruguay, far from Europe both geographically and historically, has adopted similar provisions in its Penal Code, criminalizing incitement to hatred or violence based on race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, or gender identity.
The American Exception
The United States stands apart. The First Amendment's protection of free speech is so robust that there is no direct equivalent to Volksverhetzung in American law.
This doesn't mean all speech is legal in America. You can be prosecuted for "true threats"—direct, credible threats of violence against specific individuals. You can be held liable for defamation. You can face consequences for speech that creates a "clear and present danger" of imminent lawless action—the famous standard from the 1969 Supreme Court case Brandenburg v. Ohio.
But general incitement to hatred? Speech that dehumanizes entire groups? Holocaust denial? In America, these are protected expression. The theory is that the government cannot be trusted to decide which ideas are too dangerous to express, and that the marketplace of ideas will ultimately reject the bad ones.
Whether this faith is justified is one of the great ongoing debates in democratic theory. Americans look at European hate speech laws and worry about government overreach and the chilling of legitimate discourse. Europeans look at American tolerance for extremist speech and worry about the normalization of hatred and the vulnerabilities of minority communities.
The Deeper Question
Behind the legal technicalities lies a profound philosophical question: What is speech, exactly?
Is it merely the expression of ideas, which should be free to compete in the marketplace of thought? Or is it a form of action that can cause real harm—harm that a society is entitled to prevent?
The German answer, forged in the aftermath of genocide, is that some speech is functionally equivalent to violence. When you spend years telling people that their neighbors are subhuman vermin who threaten everything they hold dear, you are not merely expressing an opinion. You are laying the psychological groundwork for persecution and murder. You are making atrocity thinkable.
There's a concept that has gained currency in recent years: stochastic terrorism. The idea is that even if you don't directly order violence, if you consistently demonize a group and predict that violence against them would be justified, you are statistically likely to inspire someone to act. You may not know who will pull the trigger or when, but you've made it more probable that someone will.
Volksverhetzung law is, in a sense, an attempt to address stochastic terrorism before it was given that name. It recognizes that the inciter and the person who ultimately commits violence are both responsible—that hatred doesn't spring from nowhere, but is cultivated, nurtured, and spread.
The Historical Irony
Here's a twist that often goes unmentioned: the concept of Volksverhetzung predates the Nazi era.
In the early nineteenth century, following the Napoleonic Wars, the German-speaking lands were a patchwork of kingdoms, duchies, and principalities loosely organized into the German Confederation. The dominant power was Austria, and the guiding figure was Prince Klemens von Metternich, the conservative Austrian statesman who sought to suppress liberal and nationalist movements across Europe.
In 1819, the Karlsbad Decrees cracked down on what was considered dangerous speech. And guess what counted as Volksverhetzung back then? Democratic ideals. Calls for a unified German nation-state. The very ideas that would eventually triumph and shape modern Germany.
The irony is bitter. A concept originally used to suppress liberal democracy was repurposed, after the catastrophe of Nazism, to protect liberal democracy from those who would destroy it. The same word can serve opposite masters depending on who wields the power.
Living with Limits
Germans today generally accept these limits on speech as reasonable and necessary. Polls consistently show majority support for laws against Holocaust denial and Nazi symbolism. The idea that democracy must be able to defend itself has become deeply embedded in German political culture.
But the system is not without its critics. Some argue that driving hatred underground doesn't eliminate it—it just makes it harder to monitor and counter. Others worry that the definition of prohibited speech can expand over time, creeping from genuine incitement toward mere controversial opinion. Still others point out that enforcement can be selective, that the powerful rarely face consequences while the marginal are prosecuted.
These are not idle concerns. Any law that restricts speech requires trust in the institutions that enforce it. Germany has strong courts and a robust legal tradition, but not every country with hate speech laws can say the same. The same tools that can protect vulnerable minorities can, in other hands, silence legitimate dissent.
What Speech Is For
Perhaps the deepest question is what we think speech is for in the first place.
If speech exists primarily to enable the search for truth, then maybe even hateful speech serves a purpose by allowing bad ideas to be exposed and refuted. If speech exists primarily to enable democratic self-governance, then speech that undermines the equal citizenship of some community members might actually be anti-democratic. If speech is fundamentally about human dignity, then speech that denies the humanity of others might forfeit its own claim to protection.
The German answer to these questions, encoded in Volksverhetzung law, is that the equal dignity of all persons is the foundation on which everything else rests. You cannot have meaningful free speech if some people are terrorized into silence. You cannot have genuine democracy if some citizens are dehumanized to the point where their voices don't count. The protection of dignity, in this view, is not a limitation on freedom—it is the precondition for freedom.
Whether you find this persuasive probably depends on your deeper philosophical commitments, your reading of history, and perhaps which side of the Atlantic you call home. But as the internet connects the world's speech communities in unprecedented ways, and as hateful rhetoric seems to be rising globally, the German approach offers one answer—born of terrible experience—to the question of how a free society should handle the freedom to hate.