The old DDR criminal code defined many offences unknown to Western liberal democracies. Foremost among these was the crime of “defaming the state.” You could spend up to two years in prison if you ventured publicly to “slander or defame” the “state order or state organs, institutions or … organisations, or their activities or members.” This statute was expanded in 1977 to criminalise further those “who publicly disparage the state order or state organs, institutions or organisations or their activities or measures.” Still later, in 1979, the law was extended again to include “anyone who distributes … writings, objects or symbols that are likely to impair state or public order” or “disrupt socialist coexistence.” We were always told that, in the West, you can criticise your government and your politicians all you like. Only in the communist East was one denied such basic democratic freedoms.
As I’ve been documenting here, that is no longer the case. The pandemic appears to have broken something fundamental in German politics. Beginning with the Covid protests in 2021, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) took it upon themselves to define a new area of unconstitutional (and therefore potentially illegal) political agitation. This bears the cumbersome title of “Delegitimisation of the State,” and the concept has much in common with the DDR crime of state defamation. You can read more about what this “delegitimisation” amounts to here. Among other things, the “delegitimisers” are said to be guilty of drawing comparisons between the Federal Republic and the DDR, which makes this very post a case for the BfV. Perhaps they will tap my phones or simply put me in touch with their deradicalisation advisers who will provide counselling on how to climb out of my conspiratorial rabbit hole.