How to use the passive voice in German?

Like in English, the passive voice in German is used when the focus is on the action and not on who did it. Let’s see an example.

passive voice

Mein Auto wurde mal wieder abgeschleppt.

Translation: My car was once again towed.

I don’t know who towed and it doesn’t really matter who did. What matters is that it happened.

Notice that the subject of a passive verb undergoes the action!

In this post, we’ll go through all the most important things about the German passive voice: the different ways to form it, how to use it in different types of sentences, and when you might want to use it. Let’s have a look!

In German, there are two different forms of the passive voice: the statal passive and the processual passive.

• The statal passive describes the result of a completed action (a.k.a. a state):

  statal passive

  Die Reifen sind gewechselt.

  Translation: The tires have been changed.

  The action of changing the tires is complete.

• The processual passive describes an ongoing action or a process:

  processual passive

  Die Reifen werden gewechselt.

  Translation: The tires are being changed.

  The action of changing the tires is ongoing.

They are both versions of the passive voice, which we can see when we compare the meanings above to the active voice equivalent below:

However, when we’re using the term “passive voice” in German, we’re usually talking about the processual passive, so this is the form we’ll cover in this post. If your curiosity has been piqued about the statal passive, though, check out our post on how to use the statal passive in German!

The processual passive voice is formed by combining the auxiliary verb werden and the past participle form of the main verb.

Changing the tense of werden changes the tense of the passive verb. Although it exists in all the tenses, the good news is that the most common tenses of the passive voice are the present tense and the simple past. Use the following formulas:

Check out this table of the German passive voice to see all the forms of werden and sein that you’ll need to fully conjugate verbs in the passive voice.

We’ve seen, now, how to form a passive verb in German. Let’s look more closely about how this affects the form of the complete sentence. The easiest way to understand this is to compare the sentence structure in the active voice to the passive voice. The basic differences are:

• Classically, in the active voice:

  ACTIVE	Role	Case
  agent (do-er)	subject	nominative
  undergoer	direct object	accusative

• In the passive voice:

  PASSIVE	Role	Case
  undergoer	subject	nominative
  agent (do-er)	optional, follows von / durch (meaning by)	dative / accusative

Let’s look at some pairs of active and passive sentences and discuss the differences!

In German, you’ll need to form the passive using the impersonal es if, in an active sentence, the verb does not assign accusative case to its object. In other words, we form the passive this way when the active version of the sentence has no true direct object, as in the example below:

Because there is no direct object in the sentence above, that direct object will not automatically be made into the subject of the passive. But we still need to fill the “position” in the sentence associated with the subject.

One way we can fill this position is to use impersonal es, which looks like this:

However, if the active version of the sentence has other elements such as an indirect object, an adverb, or a prepositional phrase, you can use them in the first position instead, which might look like this:

This means that passive sentences in German do not necessarily need to have a subject. Let’s look at our two options through a couple other examples!

In German, you can use the impersonal pronoun man (meaning one, they, someone) as the subject of an active sentence if there is no specific agent. This creates an effect much like the passive, but it uses an active verb. For example:

The meaning of this is similar to the passive, but the structure of the sentence is different:

Here are a few more examples:

Let’s review the most important information of this article:

• In the passive voice, the subject undergoes the action.

• To form the passive voice use the auxiliary verb werden and a past participle. It exists in all tenses.

• The usual German word order rules still apply.

• To include the do-er (agent) in a passive sentence, use the dative preposition von (meaning by), for animate agents, or the accusative preposition durch (meaning by), for other agents.

• Modal verbs follow the same rules in the passive voice: they carry the tense, the main verb is in the past participle + werden.

• When the active voice sentence has no direct object, use the impersonal es or a sentence element (for example an indirect object, an adverb, or a prepositional phrase) in place of a subject in a passive voice sentence.

• To achieve a similar meaning to the passive while using an active verb, just make the impersonal pronoun man as the subject.

If you want to practice the passive voice and apply what we discussed today, check out our German passive voice exercises. Or, if you’d rather learn more about German passives, check out our follow-up on the statal passive voice in German.