Freedom of speech

33% of Germans feel they cannot freely speak their mind on any and all subjects.

56% say there is true freedom of speech in Germany, 11% were undecided.

The question posed by the YouGov poll was (our translation):
Do you believe you can freely voice your opinion on any subject in Germany?

In the age group 25 - 34 years, a whopping 43% said "no", and 41% said "yes".

It's nice to have numbers, but what do we make out of them? For starters, we do not have historical data, for example, what did people think about this in the 1980s?

Before we make one of our usual half-baked attempts at an explanation, here is what the Germans call freedom of speech: "Meinungsfreiheit". It's one of their beloved compounds, "opinion" + "freedom".

Where's the speech? You can hold any opinion you want, it's uttering it that may cause a problem. So, everybody ignores that obvious bit and thinks "voicing an opinion".

One of the reasons why some people will claim that there is no freedom of speech is that they think of it in absolute terms, as in either I have this freedom or I don't. Not everybody's brain is wired for nuances. You find the same people in the U.S. too.

Still, that does not explain 33%.

Another reason, we think, is that a majority of Germans will encounter examples of "broader" freedom of speech from the U.S., to wit some episodes of South Park. Sure, they see some of this as ridiculous or overblown, but there may be a little of "the grass is always greener..." in there. 

Yet another reason may be what you could call the fence in your head. The cultural phenomenon where you do not cross an imaginary line despite the fact that there are no legal sanctions. So, there is the "legal can't say" and the "cultural can't say".

And there is the "you can say it but they won't listen". Sometimes, the fact that you can say something but are alone with your opinion or summarily dismissed is lumped into the statement "we have no freedom of speech". In other words, some people expect a consequence of their speech where the law simply protects the act of the speech itself.

And there are high profile cases that can reinforce the negative view. For instance, a few years ago, an artist in Germany created a garden gnome that showed the nazi salute. If you are like most people, you would see this as a joke, not as a devious way to infiltrate German front lawns, especially when the piece is a unique piece destined for a museum, not for a factory in China to the bewilderment of Chinese workers. The artist was taken to court. He won, but the message some people get is different.

What about episodes like the exchange between a policeman and a person stopped by the officer, where the civilian says "Well, there are people who might call this stupid", referring to an action or utterance by the policeman. If that officer has a bad day, you end up with a fine for that sentence.

The Germans had one of their most wide reaching freedom of speech debates in the last decades of the last century when a quote from 1931, "Soldiers are murderers", became prominent in the peace movement. There were bitter debates, court cases up to the highest court, which let the defendants  go in a verdict that had one dissenting opinion. A conservative bill making this and similar statements a crime was defeated only a few years ago. A German friend of the K-Landnews who was a soldier during that time said: I figured part of my job was to ensure that these folks could say what they said. No, that was not the prevalent feeling in the army, and I was not a "good" soldier - I overheard the general say to the adjutant ''he does an excellent job but he is very independent". But what else do you want to fight for -- equitable justice for parking misdemeanors, cheap oil?

What about the delimitation of private sphere and public sphere? As witnessed in Tweets and other areas on the web?

The philosophical question is our last one. At the end of the day, does it even matter that a certain percentage of our contemporaries say there is no full freedom of speech?

Next time someone does a freedom of speech poll, can you please find comparable previous polls so we can get a little bit of a perspective?

One more thing: Does one of you eggheads out there know of any study or treatise on the benefits of television drama or movies on the perceived extent of freedom of speech in a country?  I wonder if, for example, someone calling a company director "dumb a**hole" in a movie gives people the impression of greater freedom of speech even if they themselves could not do it in real life.