Ehrschutz in Germany: Defamation, Insult and the §§ 185 to 187 StGB Framework

Germany protects personal honour as a legal interest in its own right, and it does so through the criminal law rather than leaving it entirely to private litigation. The Grundgesetz builds that in: Art. 5 Abs. 1 GG guarantees the free expression and dissemination of opinion in word, writing and image, and Art. 5 Abs. 2 GG names das Recht der persönlichen Ehre as one of the express limits on that freedom. Ehrschutz, honour protection, is the collective name for the body of law that follows.

This hub maps the whole area: the three core offences in §§ 185 to 187 StGB and how to tell them apart, the aggravation structure that decides the real maximum in any given case, the deadline that governs the criminal route, the civil claims that run alongside it, and the constitutional balancing that decides most contested cases. Each section links onward to a dedicated page. For German law more broadly, see German law explained.

Information last verified on 20 July 2026. This page provides general legal information and does not constitute legal advice in an individual case.

The three way distinction that organises everything

German honour protection does not have a single offence of defamation. It has three, and almost every practical question begins with working out which one a statement falls under, because the answer changes what has to be proved and by whom.

§ 185 StGB, Beleidigung, is the provision for the insult and the value judgment. It is a strikingly short section: it states the penalty and leaves the definition of the offence to the courts, which treat it as an expression of disrespect or disregard directed at an identifiable person and capable of attacking that person's honour.

§ 186 StGB, üble Nachrede, deals with a claim of fact about another person that is capable of making them contemptible or of lowering them in public opinion. § 187 StGB, Verleumdung, deals with a claim of fact the speaker asserts or spreads wider besseres Wissen, against better knowledge, meaning knowing it to be untrue.

The dividing line between the first row and the other two is the classic opinion versus fact distinction, and it is not always obvious. A statement capable of proof or disproof is treated as a factual claim; an evaluative statement is an opinion. Mixed statements, where an evaluation rests on an implied factual core, are among the most contested cases in this whole area.

Why § 186 StGB is the provision that surprises people

§ 186 StGB contains a structure with no close equivalent in most common law systems. The offence is committed by a person who asserts or spreads a factual claim about another that is capable of making them contemptible or lowering them in public opinion, wenn nicht diese Tatsache erweislich wahr ist, that is, unless the fact is demonstrably true.

The consequence is a burden allocation, and it runs the opposite way to what many readers expect. Where the truth of the claim cannot be established either way, that non provability operates against the person who made or spread the statement rather than against the person the statement was about. Truth is a complete answer, but it is an answer that has to be capable of proof.

A worked illustration makes the point concrete. Suppose someone writes publicly that a named contractor overcharged a client on a specific job. If that is established, § 186 StGB is not engaged. If a court cannot establish it, because the only evidence is a private conversation nobody documented, the claim is not erweislich wahr, and the statutory structure treats it as falling within the offence, subject to the defences set out below. None of that turns on the speaker having been dishonest.

§ 187 StGB is a different animal. It requires the speaker to have acted wider besseres Wissen, so it is not enough that a claim turned out to be false. The higher penalties in § 187 StGB attach to that knowledge element. See knowingly false defamation for how that element is established in practice, and defamatory false claims for the full mechanics of § 186 StGB.

The aggravation structure decides the real maximum

Reading a single maximum figure off a provision produces a misleading answer, because the same aggravation structure runs across all three offences and raises the ceiling where the act took a public or distributed form.

The five year figure attached to § 187 StGB is quoted constantly and is almost always quoted wrongly. It is the aggravated tier. The base offence of Verleumdung carries up to two years or a fine, and the higher ceiling applies only where the act was public, committed in an assembly, or committed by distributing an Inhalt within the meaning of § 11 Abs. 3 StGB.

That last term matters more than it looks. The 60. Strafrechtsänderungsgesetz of 30 November 2020, in force on 1 January 2021, modernised the older term Schriften to the broader Inhalt in §§ 186 and 187 StGB, which is what brings an ordinary post, message, image or video squarely inside the wording. The same reform added the öffentlich, Versammlung and Verbreiten aggravation to § 185 StGB for the first time. It did not raise the § 187 StGB ceiling, which already stood at five years in its aggravated form.

The three month Antragsfrist governs the criminal route

This is the fact most likely to determine what actually happens next, and it is procedural rather than substantive. § 194 Abs. 1 Satz 1 StGB provides that die Beleidigung wird nur auf Antrag verfolgt, and § 194 StGB governs the Strafantrag requirement across the honour offences in this part of the code. Without a Strafantrag from an entitled person, prosecution generally does not follow.

§ 77b Abs. 1 StGB supplies the deadline: an act prosecutable only on application is not prosecuted where the entitled person fails to file within three months. Under § 77b Abs. 2 StGB the period begins at the end of the day on which the entitled person gained knowledge of both the act and the person of the offender, so a statement discovered late, or an anonymous author identified late, starts the clock later than the date of publication.

Three refinements are worth carrying. Under § 77b Abs. 1 Satz 2 StGB a period that would end on a Sunday, a general public holiday or a Saturday runs to the end of the next working day. Under § 77b Abs. 3 StGB, where several people are entitled to file or several took part in the act, the period runs separately for and against each. Under § 77b Abs. 5 StGB the running of the period is suspended while an application for a Sühneversuch under § 380 StPO is pending with the Vergleichsbehörde, until the certificate is issued.

Worked through on dates, an insulting post published on 4 March and seen by the affected person, who also identifies its author, on 10 March produces a period that begins at the end of 10 March and expires on 10 June. Where the post is seen at once but the author is only identified on 2 May, the clock starts at the end of 2 May instead, because § 77b Abs. 2 StGB requires knowledge of both elements.

There are narrow constellations in which no application is required, set out in § 194 Abs. 1 and Abs. 2 StGB, principally where the affected person or a deceased person was persecuted as a member of a group under National Socialist or another violent and arbitrary regime and the statement is connected with that persecution. In the cases of § 188 StGB and § 192a StGB, prosecution may also follow where the prosecuting authority considers intervention of its own motion called for because of a special public interest in prosecution.

The criminal route in practice

§ 158 Abs. 1 StPO sets out where a Strafanzeige or a Strafantrag can be filed: at the Staatsanwaltschaft, at the authorities and officers of the police service, and at the Amtsgerichte. The two documents are not the same thing. A Strafanzeige reports an offence; a Strafantrag is the separate declaration by an entitled person that they want it prosecuted, and for these offences it is the Strafantrag that carries the legal weight. § 158 Abs. 2 StPO requires the identity of the person filing and their intention to have the matter prosecuted to be secured.

What follows is where expectations most often part company with the system. The offences in §§ 185 to 189 StGB are listed as Privatklagedelikte in § 374 Abs. 1 Nr. 2 StPO, provided the act was not directed at one of the political bodies named in § 194 Abs. 4 StGB. § 376 StPO then provides that for those offences the Staatsanwaltschaft brings public charges only where that lies in the public interest.

So a well founded complaint can still end in a referral to the Privatklage route rather than a state prosecution, and that referral is not a finding that nothing happened. The Privatklage route has its own gate: § 380 Abs. 1 StPO makes a private charge for Beleidigung admissible only after an unsuccessful Sühneversuch before a Vergleichsbehörde designated by the Landesjustizverwaltung, with the certificate submitted alongside the charge. § 380 Abs. 4 StPO allows the attempt to be dispensed with, by closer order of the Landesjustizverwaltung, where the parties do not live in the same Gemeindebezirk.

The step by step mechanics, including how the three month clock runs on real dates and what a prosecutor actually does with a complaint, are set out on criminal insult under § 185 StGB.

The civil route runs in parallel

Criminal liability is only one of the two tracks, and for many situations the civil track is the one that produces the practical result, because it is the one that gets a statement removed and kept down.

The claim to have a statement removed and to restrain its repetition is built on § 1004 Abs. 1 BGB applied by analogy. § 1004 Abs. 1 BGB is written for interference with property: where ownership is impaired otherwise than by dispossession, the owner may demand removal of the impairment from the disturber, and where further impairments are to be feared, may sue for an injunction. German courts apply that structure by analogy to protect other absolute rights, including the allgemeines Persönlichkeitsrecht, the general personality right developed from Art. 2 Abs. 1 GG read together with Art. 1 Abs. 1 GG.

Damages come through § 823 BGB. § 823 Abs. 1 BGB imposes liability on a person who unlawfully injures the life, body, health, freedom, property or another right of another, intentionally or negligently, and the allgemeines Persönlichkeitsrecht is treated as such a sonstiges Recht. § 823 Abs. 2 BGB adds a separate route: the same liability attaches to a person who breaches a statute intended to protect another person, and the honour offences of the StGB are exactly that kind of protective statute.

The two tracks are genuinely independent. A prosecutor declining public charges under § 376 StPO has no bearing on a civil claim, and the three month period in § 77b StGB applies only to the criminal application. A statement can also be dealt with purely civilly, with no criminal complaint at all.

Art. 5 Abs. 1 GG and the narrowing of Schmähkritik

No German honour case is decided by reading the words alone. Art. 5 Abs. 1 GG protects expression, Art. 5 Abs. 2 GG limits it by the general laws and by the right of personal honour, and the honour provisions of the StGB are among those general laws. Every contested case is therefore a weighing of two constitutional positions in the specific context in which the statement was made.

German doctrine recognises a narrow category, Schmähkritik, where a statement is so exclusively directed at degrading a person rather than engaging with a matter at issue that the balance tips without a full weighing exercise. Lower courts had begun to use the label as a shortcut, and the Bundesverfassungsgericht corrected that in 2020.

Its press release 049/2020, issued on 19 June 2020, announced a clarification of the constitutional requirements for criminal convictions based on honour impairing statements, reporting decisions of 19 May 2020. Press release 095/2020, issued on 29 October 2020, announced a successful constitutional complaint against a conviction for Beleidigung, reporting the Beschluss of 19 August 2020 in 1 BvR 2249/19. The consistent message is that Schmähkritik is narrow, that harsh, polemical or exaggerated expression does not become Schmähkritik merely by being harsh, and that a court applying the label still has to show the balancing rather than substitute the label for it.

The defences that decide ordinary cases

§ 193 StGB, Wahrnehmung berechtigter Interessen, is the provision that resolves a large share of everyday disputes. Critical judgments about scientific, artistic or commercial performance, statements made to exercise or defend rights or to pursue legitimate interests, reproaches and reprimands by a superior towards a subordinate, official reports or assessments by an official, and similar cases are punishable only insofar as the presence of an insult follows from the form of the statement or from the circumstances in which it was made.

That is a two step structure rather than a blanket permission. Pursuing a legitimate interest takes a statement out of the offence in principle, and the protection falls away where the insult lies in the chosen form rather than in the point being made. A critical review, a complaint to an employer, a submission in a dispute and a supervisor's performance criticism all sit comfortably inside it, provided the wording stays tied to the point.

Two neighbouring provisions round out the picture. § 192 StGB provides that proof of the truth of an asserted or disseminated fact does not exclude punishment under § 185 StGB where the presence of an insult follows from the form of the assertion or the circumstances, so a true fact cannot be packaged in a gratuitously degrading way. § 199 StGB allows a court to declare one or both parties free of penalty where an insult was returned auf der Stelle, on the spot, which is why arguments that escalated in both directions frequently end without a conviction for either participant.

Special constellations

§ 188 StGB applies a heavier regime where the target is a person in the political life of the people, the act was committed publicly, in a Versammlung or by distributing an Inhalt, the motives are connected with that person's position in public life, and the act is capable of significantly impeding their public work. § 188 Abs. 1 StGB sets imprisonment of up to three years or a fine for a Beleidigung in that setting. § 188 Abs. 2 StGB sets three months to five years for üble Nachrede and six months to five years for Verleumdung under the same conditions.

§ 189 StGB protects the memory of a deceased person, with imprisonment of up to two years or a fine, and § 194 Abs. 2 StGB gives the right to file to the relatives named in § 77 Abs. 2 StGB. § 192a StGB, verhetzende Beleidigung, addresses content capable of attacking human dignity by reviling, maliciously disparaging or defaming a group defined by national, racial, religious or ethnic origin, worldview, disability or sexual orientation, or an individual because of membership of such a group, where that content is sent to a member of the group without being asked to, with imprisonment of up to two years or a fine.

§ 200 StGB allows a court, where the insult was committed publicly or by distributing an Inhalt and a penalty is imposed, to order on application that the conviction be published on request, with the manner determined in the judgment and, where the insult was distributed as an Inhalt, publication in the same manner where possible.

Where the statement was recorded

A distinct body of law governs recordings themselves, separately from what was said in them. Whether a recording of a conversation was lawfully made, and whether it can be used, is not answered by the honour provisions at all. See German recording law for that question, which frequently arises alongside an honour dispute and is decided on entirely different rules.

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