Germany is silencing “hate speech”, but cannot define it

“WHAT the hell is wrong with this country?” fumed Beatrix von Storch to her 30,000 Twitter followers on December 31st: “Why is the official police page in NRW [North Rhine-Westphalia] tweeting in Arabic?” The MP for the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party detected in the force’s multilingual new-year greeting a bid “to appease the barbaric, Muslim, rapist hordes of men”. The next day her tweet—and, for 12 hours, her entire account—vanished from Twitter. In the subsequent political storm Alice Weidel, co-leader of the AfD, came to Ms von Storch’s defence: “Our authorities are subordinating themselves to imported, rampaging, groping, punching, stabbing migrant mobs,” she tweeted. That, too, was promptly deleted.

Germany’s memories of the Gestapo and the Stasi undergird its commitment to free speech. “There shall be no censorship,” decrees the constitution. Even marches by Pegida, an Islamophobic and anti-immigrant movement founded in 2014, receive police protection. But the country of Kristallnacht and the Holocaust also takes a punitive attitude to what it deems “hate speech”. Inciting hatred can carry a prison sentence of up to five years, Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” is available only in annotated form, and it is illegal to single out any part of the population for insult or other abuse that could “breach the peace”. Irmela Mensah-Schramm, a Berlin pensioner who spray-paints over swastikas and other racist graffiti, is a national hero.