German Journalist Sentenced to Seven Months’ Probation for Meme Poking Fun at the Interior Minister’s Lack of Commitment to Free Speech
David Bendels, the Chief Editor of the AfD-adjacent Deutschland Kurier, has been threatened with prison time and sentenced to seven months of probation for an X meme. It is the harshest sentence ever handed down to a journalist for a speech crime in the Federal Republic of Germany.
This is the illegal tweet, which Bendels posted via the official Deutschland Kurier X account on February 28th 2024:
In the original photo – posted by the official X account of the Interior Ministry on January 26th 2023 on the occasion of the Memorial Day of Victims of National Socialism – Faeser’s sign reads “We remember”.
It shows German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser holding a sign that has been manipulated to read “I hate freedom of speech!” Bendels posted the image to satirise Faeser’s disturbing plans to restrict the speech, travel and economic activity of political dissidents in Germany, which she had announced at a press conference a few weeks earlier.
Faeser personally filed criminal charges against Bendels for defamation after Bamberg police brought the meme to her attention. Last November, the Bamberg District Court summarily ordered Bendels to pay an enormous fine for this speech crime “against a person in political life”. This is yet another prosecution that proceeds from our lèse-majesté statute, or section 188 of the German Criminal Code, which provides stiffened penalties for those who slander or insult politicians, because politicians are special people and more important than the rest of us.
The same Bamberg prosecutor’s office and the same Bamberg District Court had previously pursued the German pensioner Stefan Neihoff for the crime of posting another meme implying that German Economics Minister Robert Habeck might be a moron. That case, too, seems to have been brought to Habeck’s attention by Bamberg police, who requested that Habeck file charges. The Bamberg police apparently have very little to do beyond trawling the internet for political memes and protecting democracy by suppressing democratic freedoms.
Bendels appealed his summary penalty, and so the Bamberg District Court put him on trial. Yesterday the judges found him guilty and sentenced him to seven months in prison, which they suspended in favour of probation. The judges claimed that Bendels was guilty because he had distributed a “factual claim about the Minister of the Interior, Ms Faeser… that was not recognisably… inauthentic”, and judged that his meme was “likely to significantly impair [Faeser’s] public image”. The presiding judge demanded that Bendels submit a written apology to the Interior Minister for having so egregiously slandered her.
What is there even to say about these cases any longer?
First, there is the rich irony of Interior Minister Faeser, who finds the suggestion she might hate free speech so enraging that she takes active steps to abridge the free speech of anyone posting memes to that effect. Second, there is the paradoxical reasoning of the Bamberg District Court, where judges would have us believe a meme casting Faeser as an opponent of free speech is likely to “make [her] public activities substantially more difficult” (the legal standard required for conviction under section 188), whereas an actual speech crime conviction procured at Faeser’s behest is totally fine and in no way proves Bendels’s point in the most public way possible. Finally, there are the flatly retarded judges who betray their lack of internet experience (or perhaps merely their hamfisted malice) by suggesting that Bendels’s meme “was not recognisably… inauthentic” and therefore especially grave. The reasoning would seem to criminalise a great part of political satire and internet image culture in general.
The sentence is not yet binding, and Bendels has announced he will appeal:
We will not accept this judgment and we’ll fight it with all the legal means at our disposal. The Deutschland-Kurier and I personally will continue the just struggle for freedom of the press and for freedom of opinion with determination, resolve and consistency, for this fight is indispensable for the continued existence of democracy in Germany.
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“likely to significantly impair [Faeser’s] public image”
She is already doing that herself, in bucket loads.
I assume there is a word for Irony in Germany, but that perhaps German politicians don’t know it!
Die Ironie. The sign refers to hating freedom of opinion. She is at liberty to contradict this in meaningful ways to repair any damage to her public image.
Germany is falling fast into the mire of Authoritarianism and Tyranny, we are following on its heels.
Picking up from Brecht’s poem Questions of a reading worker,
what’s the precise difference between
a ministry for the security of the state¹,
a federal agency for protection of the constitution²
and a secret state police³?
English translation of something I wrote in German a few weeks ago.
¹ Ministerum für Staatsicherheit, Stasi
² Bundesamt für Verfassungschutz
³ Geheime Staatspolizei, GeStapo.
Once this Theatre of the Absurd finds its way to Blighty, stand by for cases of retrospective speech-crime against elderly scriptwriters of That Was The Week That Was, Monty Python, Spitting Image, etc, etc, etc.
Can’t have dangerous old reprobates wandering around with Zimmer frames boasting of past crimes against past political windbags, airheads and non-entities.
And that’s before the exhumations start – the late Sir Robin Day must be quaking in his grave at the consequences of challenging a here-today, gone-tomorrow politician, during the Falklands War.
Meanwhile, the AfD are doing great in the polls;
”The Alternative for Germany (AfD) has become the most popular party nationwide for the first time in its history, edging past the CDU/CSU in the latest Ipsos poll.
The survey, conducted April 4–5, 2025, shows the AfD at 25 percent, just ahead of the CDU/CSU at 24 percent. The polling marks a dramatic turnaround since February’s federal election, when the Christian Democrats attained 29 percent and the AfD came second, four points behind.
Following February’s election result, AfD co-leader Alice Weidel accused Merz of betraying his voters by cozying up to left-wing parties.
“If the CDU commits electoral fraud against its own voters by forming a coalition with the left, the next election will come sooner than you think,” she warned. “Then, we will overtake the CDU as the strongest force!”
https://rmx.news/article/afd-tops-the-polls-for-first-time-in-its-history-as-merzs-public-support-for-chancellor-plummets/
I’m expecting Alice Weidel to get arrested before the next German election, in line with the boasts of that French guy that they had killed Romanian presidental election and would do the same in Germany if need be.
I guess they are having regrets post election now they have seen the disastrous outcome.
Faeser obviously doesn’t hate freedom of opinion (literal translation of Meinungsfreiheit) because that’s defined as the freedom to do anything which isn’t supposed to change the given political order of the Federal Republic of Germany in its Foundational Law (literal translation of Grundgesetz) and she’s totally fine with that. There is no freedom of anything in Germany as everything is explicitly subject to political prerogative. Even property law. You only own something if the German state doesn’t deem that you are using it in ways governing politicians would disapprove of.
NB: This is literally stated in the mentioned legal text.
Memes Are not Crimes
Great public comment by wattyler on this from the Breitbart article:
“In 1990, everyone thought that West Germany was taking over and absorbing East Germany, as German reunification took place. Three decades later, we see how naïve that was. In fact the Marxists of East Germany took over West Germany. Germany is now a full-blown, neo-Marxist, totalitarian police state. The Stasi is back with a vengeance.
There is one difference. The old East Germany was a dictatorship to hold power largely for the sake of power.
The neo-Marxist, Globalist regime now in power in Berlin has a much more sinister agenda – the ethnic cleansing by population replacement of the indigenous white German people.”
The DDR was Communist. The goal of Communism is and always has been world domination. Of course the East took over the West and the west paid – the ‘victor’ got the bill, funny that.
I must admit that I was completely taken in at the time, watching the newsreels in amazement as the Berlin Wall came down, and cheering the German people on as they did it. What a thrilling triumph of Good over Evil, I thought! Little did I know…
Shortly afterwards¹, Helmut Kohl (CDU) held a speech in Berlin where he hinted at the possibility of German reunification. The governing mayor of Berlin, Walter Momper (SPD) replied to that with: Why are you blathering about reunification now, when nobody here wants to hear about that? That’s the same SPD which governed Germany (Olaf Scholz) until the recent election, which changed the German election law such that a government without won’t ever be possible again and which will again become part of the next government despite it clearly lost the election. There are still two German states although it’s illegal to mention this, Germany and Austria, meaning a state for the SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) and a state for the SPÖ (Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs) and the SP party would have loved keeping another German state for the cunningly named SDP (Sozialdemokratische Partei, the GDR-branch which refounded itself shortly after November 1989) and they’d probably loved it even more if West-Berlin had remained it’s own state as this would have meant 4 potential SP party governments instead of just two. Wilhlem II. once aptly referred to these guys as vaterlandslose Gesellen, literally fatherlandless fellows, a somewhat old-fashioned and strongly derogatory (for… Read more »
How many realise now that people were still being shot for trying to escape from East Germany across the Berlin Wall as late as 1989?
20-year-old Chris Gueffroy was the last person to be shot by East German border guards for trying to escape across the Wall in 1989.
List of deaths at the Berlin Wall – Wikipedia
And in 1986, Angela Kasner Merkel was in the East German Youth Stasi…
MERKEL’S MURKY PAST: More evidence of her Youth Movement/Stasi past in the DDR – The Slog
I trust that no politician in Germany has impugned the name of Alice Weidel thus.
A bit like in the run up to 1914, the English and German government’s are engaged in a race; then to build dreadnoughts, now to build the most flagrantly abusive police state.
And we know how that ended.
There wasn’t really a naval arms race between England an Germany before 1914 as the stated goal of the German fleet building programmes was always just to create a navy that was large and capable enough that they Royal Navy couldn’t just “copenhagen¹” it without risk (the spiritus rector behind the imperial German navy, Alfred v. Tirpitz, called this der Risikogedanke — the risk strategy, literally, the risk idea).
Likewise, there’s nothing being newly built in Germany. This is just the FRG as envisioned by the allied powers after WWII who even directly created the west German inland secret service (BfV, the federal agency for protection of the constitution I mentioned in another comment). Only applying the principles tested so thoroughly on Germany and the Germans to other less-than-desitable countries (according to the opinions of the people behind this) is a relatively new development.
¹ Referring to Nelson’s assault and destruction of the Danish navy at anchor at Copenhagen to stop Napoleon from gaining access to the ships.
It is apparent to me that the tip of this iceberg is since now 17 European countries, plus Canada and Israel, put laws in place that make Holocaust denial a punishable offence. That is the precedent from which the right to question, to hold an opinion and to say, perhaps to some, objectional things has failed to be defended and thereon, by extension, it has spread to now allow politicians to make a decision on what can and cannot be said – as it clearly best suits them. Who would have guessed. D’oh!
And who knows: what is banned from being said may be actually true, based in fact, based on new evidence, based on a better understanding. But we are silenced, a flagrant risk that is not correct in a free society.
That’s a very good point, because I read that Putin not only made Holocaust Denial a punishable offence, but also punished Russians for mentioning the Ukrainian Holodomor, in his zeal to re-habilitate Stalin.
Pakistan has been lobbying the UN for years to criminalise all criticism of Islam worldwide, which will just be echoing the criminalisation of all criticism of Judaism, which may soon become the criminalisation of all criticism of Third World Ethnic groups, or criminalising all criticism of women, which may lead back to the good old days when criticising the Catholic Church would get you burnt at the stake.
I thank the Good Lord for sending the great idea to Sir Toby about founding the Free Speech Union!