“All neighbors are bad, but the ones upstairs are worse than the ones downstairs.”
Konstantin Melikhan
Living in an apartment building requires, above all, tolerance and respect for the people living around you. Yet as everyday experience and case law show, life among neighbors — including in Germany — does not always run smoothly. Fortunately, most conflicts are resolved quickly and without further consequences. But sometimes things escalate to actual physical violence. In such “serious” cases, help from law enforcement and a lawyer is usually unavoidable. As is well known, violations of another person’s personal space in Germany, including physical violence, are strictly protected under the law. In particular, causing bodily harm (German: Körperverletzung) is a criminal offense prosecuted under the Criminal Code (StGB). Under German law, causing bodily harm is divided into: simple bodily harm (§223 StGB), bodily harm involving a weapon, dangerous objects or substances (§224 StGB), and grievous bodily harm (§226 StGB). Simple bodily harm involves causing minor injury to a person’s health without the use of a dangerous object (for example, a kick). Bodily harm with dangerous objects means using a weapon, a dangerous object or a substance while committing the offense, or committing it in a more dangerous manner, for example together with other people. Such injuries involve minor or moderate harm to health. Grievous bodily harm means causing serious harm to a person’s health — for example, if the victim loses their eyesight, hearing, or is left permanently disabled as a result.
Under §223 of the German Criminal Code, liability for causing bodily harm takes the form of imprisonment for up to five years or a fine. For bodily harm involving a weapon or dangerous objects, or for grievous bodily harm, the law provides for more severe penalties — from one to ten years of imprisonment.
Unfortunately, it also happens quite often that a person is charged with causing bodily harm in a fight that, in essence, never took place — sometimes because of false accusations, sometimes because of an absurd coincidence of circumstances. When such charges are brought, it is essential to act quickly and decisively. A lawyer specializing in criminal law can provide invaluable help here, since they know the finer points and nuances of handling such cases properly. This helps an innocent person avoid an unjust punishment, and helps someone who is actually guilty receive a sentence strictly proportionate to the severity of what they did, taking every mitigating circumstance into account. In this article, we describe one case in which we were able to help an elderly client avoid an undeserved punishment.
Client Story: A Conflict With the Neighbors Upstairs
An elderly man came to us — let’s call him Vyacheslav, born in 1941. By that age he had accumulated an entire “bouquet” of various chronic conditions — from partial loss of hearing and eyesight to early-stage senile dementia. Having buried his beloved wife about five years earlier, he lived alone in a small “bachelor” apartment on the outskirts of town. His children had long since grown up and started their own families; they would visit their father occasionally and take him along on trips out of town. Most of the time, however, he spent in “proud solitude.” Vyacheslav had long since settled into a fixed daily routine, every day resembling the one before, with a two-hour afternoon nap being a fixed part of it.
Everything would have been fine, had a new family not moved into the apartment above our client’s — a woman who had immigrated to Germany from Ghana with her two twin boys. It was precisely the twins’ behavior that became the sticking point in the relations between the neighbors. The boys would come home from school right when our client was settling down for his afternoon rest. Having sat through half a day at their desks, they naturally wanted to burn off their pent-up energy. On fine days they would run outside to play with their friends. When it was rainy, the twins stayed home and played football in the living room — complete, of course, with the corresponding sound effects.
Vyacheslav put up with about two weeks of this “torment” before deciding he’d had enough and heading up to his upstairs neighbor’s apartment to sort things out. Unfortunately, that encounter did not go according to plan at all. Instead of apologizing and asking her children to be quieter, at least for part of the day, the woman responded to Vyacheslav’s angry words with a long, loud tirade in a language our client didn’t understand, and was about to slam the door in his face — but he wasn’t having it. Vyacheslav managed to wedge the cane he used for walking into the doorway, still determined to get some respect for his rights and his age. The woman, however, yanked the door shut with such force that the cane, which was above her head, slipped out of Vyacheslav’s hands and struck her on the head. Our readers can no doubt imagine the furious reaction this provoked from the neighbor. While she shouted curses in her native language, Vyacheslav hastily retreated to his own apartment. Meanwhile, the woman grabbed a thin metal object resembling an antenna and ran down the stairs after the retreating Vyacheslav. Fortunately, he had already made it back into his apartment and locked the door. The enraged woman struck the door several times with the object in her hand, then, “with a sense of duty fulfilled,” returned home to her children. The story did not end there: the neighbor decided to go to the police, reporting an injury to her health caused with a dangerous object (in this case, the cane), claiming she had suffered severe headaches that day and the next.
The Lawyer’s Work: From the Interview to the Trial Hearing
Vyacheslav, initially confident that the whole matter was “not worth a fuss,” decided to attend his first police interview alone, where he told the whole story as it had happened — without mentioning that the “victim” had herself chased after him with a metal object in her hand. Our client had apparently considered that detail too embarrassing or too insignificant to mention. Vyacheslav only came to our firm after the public prosecutor’s office had already issued an indictment and a trial hearing had been scheduled in a case that carried a potential sentence of up to five years’ imprisonment.
Our criminal defense lawyer took up the case immediately and requested the case file from the police. Initially, the goal was to have the case discontinued before it reached trial. The lawyer prepared and filed several detailed petitions with the public prosecutor’s office, arguing that, given:
- first, that our client had not intended to cause the woman harm,
- second, the absence of any lasting consequences from the incident,
- third, the conduct of the woman herself, who had initiated the criminal proceedings,
the case could be discontinued for lack of sufficient grounds for prosecution under §170(2) of the German Code of Criminal Procedure (Strafprozessordnung — StPO).
In this instance — perhaps because the lawyer had joined the case relatively late and the important circumstances had not been brought to the authorities’ attention in time — the case nevertheless proceeded to a trial hearing. Naturally, our firm’s lawyer, defending the client’s interests at trial, presented every compelling argument demonstrating our client’s innocence, laying out the available evidence, invoking the applicable legal provisions, and citing relevant case law.
Just as we had rightly expected, the court decided to discontinue the criminal case under §153a of the German Code of Criminal Procedure due to its minor significance. Our client was nonetheless required to pay a compensation of 250 euros to a charitable organization — a far cry from the punishment originally facing him. The elderly man’s relief was boundless: only the day before, he had been bracing himself for the worst outcome, believing that nothing and no one could save him from spending the rest of his life in prison.
This case is highly instructive for anyone who has unexpectedly found themselves in an unpleasant situation requiring legal help. The timely involvement of a qualified and experienced lawyer can significantly shorten the proceedings and effectively prevent serious consequences. We hope our readers only ever hear of such situations secondhand and never experience one directly — but if the unexpected does happen, our team of professionals is always at your service.
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