After Ali Sonboly went on a rampage that killed nine people, he stood on the roof of a parking garage and engaged in a strange shouting match with a man on a nearby balcony. Thomas Salbey, a 57-year-old backhoe operator, hurled a seemingly never-ending stream of epithets at the teenage gunman and threw a beer bottle at him; the profanity-laced exchange was captured in a cellphone video that was widely shared on social media and TV news.
A local woman requested charges be brought against Salbey after watching the clip on television — and, if charged, Salbey could have ended up in jail for a year or faced a hefty fine for his coarse language. [...]
There were 218,414 cases of insults filed with prosecutors in Germany in 2015, down slightly from 225,098 in 2014, but far above numbers of around 150,000 recorded a decade ago. Americans and other foreigners living in Germany sometimes run afoul of the law, unaware of it, and end up being called into police or prosecutor’s offices to explain their side of the story, before their cases are usually dismissed.
Hardly anyone ends up in jail for insulting their neighbor in the midst of a heated dispute, or for flashing the middle finger — the Stinkefinger, or “stinky finger” as Germans call it — at another motorist in heavy traffic. But cases do wind up in court and fines are sometimes handed down. [...]
A Berlin court awarded one person 8,190 euros in 2011 for insults published against him in social media; in a 2012 case, a trainee who made disparaging remarks about her boss on Facebook had to pay 2,500 euros in damages. A student accepted a 5,000 euro out-of-court settlement in 2013 for racist remarks made in a rap song about him posted on YouTube. The 13-year-old's family had originally demanded 14,000 euros in court.
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