The German Passive: Why Every Official Letter Uses It

German has two passives, and almost everything you need rests on one choice of auxiliary. werden + Partizip II describes a process happening to something: Die Tür wird geöffnet - someone is opening it, right now. sein + Partizip II describes the resulting state: Die Tür ist geöffnet - it stands open, and we do not care who did it. Learn the first one properly and you can read most of the German that arrives in your letterbox. The second one is rarer than textbooks imply and is half-adjective anyway.

The reason to care is not grammatical tidiness. It is that the passive is the default voice of German officialdom, instructions and news, precisely because it lets the writer delete the person responsible. Ihr Antrag wurde geprüft. By whom? The Bescheid will not say, and that is the point. If you live in Germany, the passive is not an advanced topic you can postpone - it is the grammar of your mail.

Two passives, one difference

The test is simple: can you film it? If a camera would see something changing, it is Vorgangspassiv with werden. If the camera would see a situation holding still, it is Zustandspassiv with sein.

A pair worth memorising as a unit: Das Geschäft wird um 20 Uhr geschlossen (they close it at eight) versus Das Geschäft ist geschlossen (it is shut now). Learners who translate English "is closed" mechanically produce wird geschlossen and accidentally announce a closing ceremony.

One warning: not every sein + Partizip II is a Zustandspassiv. Er ist gekommen is just the Perfekt. The Zustandspassiv only works with verbs that could take an accusative object in the active voice.

The tenses: conjugate werden, and never say geworden

The passive looks like six new forms. It is really one verb - werden - conjugated as usual, with a frozen Partizip II parked at the end. Take prüfen (to check) and der Antrag (the application):

The single most common error in the whole topic is one syllable: in the passive Perfekt, werden loses its ge- and becomes worden, not geworden. Er ist gewählt worden (he was elected) versus Er ist Bürgermeister geworden (he became mayor). Drill that pair until it is automatic; examiners at B1 and B2 notice it instantly.

Two practical notes. In writing, the Präteritum passive (wurde geprüft) is far more common than the Perfekt, so prioritise it - the reverse of what you learn for the active voice. And Futur I passive is rare in real texts; Germans use the present with a time word: Der Antrag wird nächste Woche geprüft. Full conjugation tables and the modal-plus-passive patterns live in the grammar library.

von, durch, and the agent that is missing on purpose

When the doer does appear, the preposition tells you what kind of doer it is.

The rough division: von for the one who decided, durch for the thing that did it or the channel it went through, mit for the tool. Der Patient wurde von der Ärztin mit einem Laser behandelt. Both are correct in the same sentence because they answer different questions.

Here is the honest observation, though: in official German the agent is usually absent altogether. In a page of a typical Bescheid you may find a dozen passive verbs and not one von. That is a deliberate rhetorical move - responsibility is dissolved into procedure. When you read Es wurde entschieden, Ihren Antrag abzulehnen, the grammar is hiding a person, and knowing that is part of understanding the letter.

The impersonal passive and the dative trap

German does something English cannot: it forms a passive from verbs with no object at all. Hier wird nicht geraucht. Sonntags wird nicht gearbeitet. Im Nebenzimmer wurde laut gelacht. There is no subject, only an action presented as a rule or a general fact - which is exactly why signs and house rules love it.

When nothing else occupies first position, a dummy es fills the gap: Es wird nicht geraucht. Put anything at all in front and the es disappears: Hier wird nicht geraucht. It is a placeholder, not a subject.

The related trap is dative verbs. helfen, danken, gratulieren, folgen, antworten, zuhören take a dative object, and datives do not get promoted to subject in German. So:

• Correct: Mir wurde geholfen. Also correct: Es wurde mir geholfen.
• Wrong: Ich wurde geholfen. This is English leaking through, and it is extremely common.

Worth knowing as a bonus: the colloquial bekommen-passive turns the recipient into the subject where the standard passive cannot. Er bekommt den Vertrag zugeschickt. Sie kriegt das Formular ausgehändigt. Very frequent in speech, still slightly informal in writing.

Where you meet it - and what Germans say instead

Four registers account for nearly all the passive you will encounter: Amtsbriefe and Verträge (Die Frist wird verlängert), Bedienungsanleitungen and recipes (Die Zwiebeln werden gewürfelt und angebraten), news reports (Drei Personen wurden verletzt), and academic writing (In dieser Arbeit wird untersucht, ob...). Notice what they share: no named actor, and a strong preference for the third person.

In conversation, Germans often dodge the passive entirely:

• man - Man hat mir gesagt, dass... This is the everyday substitute, and it is genuinely more common in speech than the passive.
• sich lassen - Das Fenster lässt sich nicht öffnen (it can't be opened).
• sein + zu + Infinitiv - Das Formular ist bis Freitag einzureichen. Pure Amtsdeutsch, and you will meet it in every deadline sentence.
• -bar adjectives - machbar, lesbar, nicht zustellbar (the note the Post leaves you).

So here is the concession. If your goal is holiday conversation and small talk, the passive is a low-priority topic and man plus a good stock of verbs will carry you further per hour invested. And if you specifically want transformation drills - rewrite twenty active sentences as passive, check the key - a paper workbook such as Cornelsen's Grammatik aktiv does that better and cheaper than any app, ours included. Buy it. What a workbook cannot do is make the forms survive in your memory six months later, or show you the pattern embedded in a real Bescheid.

What to do this week

Split the topic in two, because recognition and production are not the same skill. For recognition, read three passive-heavy texts - a news item, an appliance manual, and any letter from an Amt - and underline every wird/wurde + Partizip II. Our reading texts are graded, so you can do this at your level instead of drowning in legalese on day one.

For production, pick a handful of forms and put them on a schedule: wird geprüft, wurde geprüft, ist geprüft worden, muss geprüft werden, mir wurde geholfen, hier wird nicht geraucht. Six items, reviewed on a spaced-repetition schedule with native audio, will outlast six pages of exercises. The grammar library has the full paradigms, collocations covers the fixed official phrases like in Kraft treten and zur Kenntnis genommen, and you can add them all straight to your decks. The next letter from the Amt is the exam.