“An insult is slander in abbreviated form.”
Arthur Schopenhauer
Our firm’s practice includes a wide range of noteworthy cases in German criminal, immigration, and civil law. Clients from every walk of life, income level, and profession come to us for legal help. Regardless of a client’s financial situation, social status, or personal conduct, a professional lawyer’s core task is to thoroughly examine the legal case, establish the legal basis of what happened, and then take every possible measure to protect the client’s rights and legitimate interests, or to defend the client against an unjust punishment — and, where the client is in fact at fault, to ensure that the sentence strictly matches the law, taking every circumstance of the case into account. One case that ended successfully involved having charges dropped for an offense punishable under §185 of the German Criminal Code (Strafgesetzbuch, StGB) — insult (German: Beleidigung). A woman once came to us facing charges of insult.
Under German legal doctrine, insults affect a person’s honor and dignity, and are therefore treated as a fairly serious criminal offense punishable by law. Under German law, an insulting remark directed at another person is punishable by imprisonment for up to one year or a substantial fine (§185 StGB). Even where the insult is spoken in a foreign language, the law makes no distinction or allowance for that.
An insult is understood as the degradation of another person. It may be spoken publicly or privately, in the presence of the person concerned or in their absence. Negative statements about a person published in print (books, periodicals) or online may likewise amount to an insult. Whether the degrading statement is factually true is irrelevant — even if a person is telling the truth, if they do so in a sharp manner, using profanity and humiliation, they may rightfully be punished for it.
For the law to be able to act against a clear display of disrespect toward a person, the insult must be uttered publicly and directed at a specific addressee. What can actually be considered an insult, and how to draw the line between an insult and a sharp or blunt remark, is what we discuss in this article.
Client Story: A Dispute on the Train Platform
A woman named Irina (name changed) who visited our firm told us the following story. Irina had moved to Germany from provincial Russia together with her husband under the “late resettler” (German: Spätaussiedler) program about three years earlier. However, for a number of reasons, married life in the new country did not work out, and shortly after the move the couple decided to separate. Irina rented a small two-room apartment in Potsdam together with a friend and took a job at a grocery store on the outskirts of Berlin. As a result, her daily commute took about forty minutes each way by commuter train.
On a gloomy November evening, Irina was heading home after a hard day at work, carrying bags of groceries. In a somber mood, she climbed onto the platform and wanted to check how long she had until her train arrived. The electronic display, however, was out of order for some reason, and she tried to work out the schedule on her own. Unable to find the arrival time of the next train, Irina decided to ask the woman at the information desk. The consequences of this seemingly harmless step nearly turned out to be disastrous. The conscientious information-desk employee printed out the arrival schedule for trains running from Berlin to Potsdam. According to the printout, the next train was due to arrive in exactly 40 minutes. Irina decided to calmly go down from the platform to the nearest kiosk to buy cigarettes and coffee to pass the time. As she was walking down the stairs, she heard a train pulling in. She hurried back up to the platform as fast as she could, but unfortunately the train doors had already closed, and it pulled away.
Missing the train through what she saw as the indirect fault of the information-desk employee was the last straw for our future client. She angrily dropped her bags and marched determinedly back to the information desk to have it out with the careless employee who had now left her stranded on a cold platform for over half an hour. Irina, in broken German, first tried to explain to the employee that she had been given wrong information and demanded an apology. The woman at the desk had no interest in talking; she merely shrugged, explaining that she had only given the information available to her, and sharply told Irina to leave. At that point, our future client, having given up on getting a fair hearing, struck the counter with her fist several times in anger and swore loudly in Russian. She then went back to the platform to wait for the next train to Potsdam.
Unfortunately for Irina, an elderly German woman happened to witness the exchange and observed our client’s heated behavior. She would later become the official witness in the case. After the incident with Irina, the information-desk employee called the police, vividly describing Irina’s behavior and interpreting the swearing as having been directed at her personally — an insult to her honor and dignity. The police drew up an incident report that included the witness’s statement as well. Our future client’s surprise was considerable when she later received a letter from the police informing her that she was charged with an offense under §185 StGB, carrying a substantial fine or up to one year’s imprisonment. On the advice of the friend she lived with, Irina turned to our law firm for legal help.
The Lawyer’s Work: Where the Line for an Insult Lies
The lawyer who took on Irina’s case, without unnecessary dramatization, carefully established every relevant circumstance with the client. He then requested the criminal case file from the police and compared what the client had described with the information held by the police. To defend our client, he prepared a detailed petition to the public prosecutor’s office, setting out every relevant circumstance of the alleged offense. He described the background of the incident, explaining what had prompted our client’s somewhat heated reaction. He then explained that the swearing our client had uttered in Russian had not, in fact, been directed at the information-desk employee at all. What was said had been an expression of frustration with the situation and could not be interpreted as an insult to the woman.
As a general rule, if a person points out that someone else is wrong, comments on mistakes that person has made, disagrees with another person’s view, or expresses dissatisfaction with someone’s conduct, such actions do not automatically amount to an insult. In such cases, a person is simply expressing their own opinion, even if this is done too emotionally. Under German law, every citizen has the right to express their own opinion — this is an inherent part of a democratic society. It is when a person, while defending their position, uses profanity or abuse, deliberately humiliates their opponent, mocks them, or causes them emotional pain and suffering that one can speak of an insult to honor and dignity. In such a case, the injured party may pursue the offender by turning to the authorities. In our case, there was no evidence whatsoever that the harsh words Irina spoke in Russian had been directed at the woman who filed the complaint.
Based on the circumstances of the case set out in the petition, the lawyer, defending the client’s interests, requested that the case be discontinued under §170 of the German Code of Criminal Procedure (German: Strafprozessordnung, StPO) for lack of sufficient grounds. Taking into account all the circumstances of the case and the arguments presented in the lawyer’s petition, we received the good news just ten days later that the case had indeed been discontinued for lack of sufficient grounds. Needless to say, our client’s relief knew no bounds — she thanked the lawyer who had successfully closed her case for the excellent work, while we, for our part, advised her to be more careful in the future with sharp remarks made in the presence of others, which can be interpreted as being directed at them.
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