From what I understand the game would be released there but wouldn't be allowed to contain any reference to Nazi's or imagery to that effect. How does this game dance around such a core theme the plot?

Ah just make em' robots, robot Nazis should be fine.

I'm surprised the gore wasn't censored at all, it usually is in german games.

@corruptedevil: Not as much as it used to. The tolerance for gore is pretty high though there are some weird cases. It can be fairly inconsistent. The gore in Wolfenstein or Dead Space gets a pass but the one in Dead Rising or Silent Hill Homecoming gets banned. Nazi symbols never get a pass though.

@altairre: I remember Left 4 Dead 2 having to have grey blood and no dismemberment, and TF2 before that made everybody robots.

I dont understand why germany does this. It makes it seem like they're denying that nazis even existed. Its not like these games that are censored are glorifying nazis or something like that.

@schreiberty: I think one of the big reasons they do it is because Nazis aren't just history there. The Nazi government fell a long time ago but the ideas are still around and there's a certain extremist segment of society that glorifies Nazism.

@heyguys: thats true, however many of those neo nazi subcultures exist all over the globe. I am not sure how prevalent that is in Germany compared to many other the other European countries.

@mb: Das Kablowie is probably the highlight of that video.

Every character is a robot.

The video MB posted is very helpful, and I encourage you to accept it as the answer.

Germany is often referred to as a nanny state. It doesn't trust its citizens (or visitors) to react to things in a mature way so they are quick to stifle anything that may cause objection, even from other countries. In Germany is it illegal to talk negatively of another country's leader. It makes sense they wouldn't want to show anyone with a symbol from their times as meany wienies. Heck it's even against the law to question anything holocaust related. You could end up in the slammer for trying to discover more about it.

People are very touchy when it comes to Nazis, Germany more so than most.

In that video he says "the father land", is that a real thing? Is Germany refereed to as the Father Land? Like Mother Russia? I don't think I've ever heard that before.

I guess I should have started that off by saying, forgive my ignorance. I'm far too old to have never heard this before.

Never mind. It is! And not just them. Interesting.

I saw a guy complaining on the steam facebook page once that he couldn't buy 'Mavis Beacon teaches typing' because he lives in Germany XD

@schreiberty: It's a simple matter of following the (admittedly outdated) laws. Nazi symbols are against the constitution.

The problem is that while they can be used for educational reasons and in art, videogames aren't recognized as such unlike let's say movies which is why you see swastikas in Inglorious Basterds even in Germany. Updating laws is a slow fucking process (just look at copyright laws).

@sterling: Our national anthem refers to Germany as "Vaterland". So yes that is totally a thing.

As a guy recently moved to Germany, I find all this very confusing, intimidating and awkward. I felt bad watching Wolfenstein trailers, and if I bought the game I would probably want to play it with headphones on so my neighbors don't hear it.

The only context to this censorship I understand is that I wouldn't want to play or hear of a game where it is glorified to kill and massacre a group of people of whom my grandfather was a part of, no matter how fucked up that group was. And I guess, here in Germany that's not that far fetched.

What if you buy the game on Steam in Germany but you want to play the English version? Is the dialog removed only in the German VO?

You are completely and totally unable to play Wolfenstein in English in germany. Steam just won't let you. Unless you use a proxy, but then you're not "in" germany anymore as far as the Internet is concerned.

Wanna know the really fucked up part? Switzerland and Austria also have to put up with this bullshit, in spite of having no such laws in their books. Also, because of all this crap, in Switzerland only the German version is sold. Which is amazing, considering less than half the country speaks German at all.

Looks pretty much like this....

Does anyone know how or if these laws extend to books? I mean, purely the text of the books, not cover art. In fiction, specifically. Like, let's say someone wrote (in english) and self-published an ebook in such a way that it would be available in Germany, but didn't give it a second thought...

The use of mother or fatherland is quite interesting, before the enlightenment was the ruler king duke etc, instated by god the national glue. After the the enlightenment did a new kind of patriotic feeling appear. This feeling was based on the nation with the people as the unifying element. The nation had people with a common language, culture and a special connection to each other. To describe the nation and the national sentiment, was images of the strongest intimate relationship available, family ties used.

The distribution of farther mother countries are more or less random with most countries having both options but preferring one over the other .

Other than Mother Russia (Rossiya-Matushka) when talking about their country does Russians use (rodina) place of origin' or 'homeland and (otetjestvo) fatherland / homeland. (Rodina-mat) was created by the soviets a combination of mother and fatherland.

@astromarine: Thank you very much for mentioning it. I don't know German well enough to play the entire game in it, even if I did I wouldn't want to...

No new Wolfenstein for me then...

Is the "nightmare" sequence also censured?

And honestly if you can't understand how it came to that, you need to learn some history.

While it may seem extreme nowdays without the context of fresh memory of ww2, it's not hard to see why this is the case.

Think of it the same as the crazy hypersensitivity and confusion regarding racism in regards to African americans that people of the usa have.

It's uncomfortable to think about either side - the game being released unedited or the game being released with crazy edits. Just kind of weird to wipe an entire piece of history from the mind and not maybe learn from mistakes, unless you happen to think it wasn't a mistake.

Well, it's in the national anthem but I've never met a person who actually referred to Germany as Father Land. Don't really know where this is coming from.

@schreiberty said:

Its part of the denazification, an allied effort to remove power to some German organizations (specifically, the nazis) by disbanding them and removing them of the public consciousness. This creates some dichotomy, especially with the newest generations, because while they can't be shown publicly in Germany, it is not like the rest of the world will let them forget their role in WW2. It is also part of their constitution now, so while changing it is possible, it is hard enough, and no one will fight politically for it.

@rowr said:

It is a little bit more complicated than that.

When the allies occupied Germany after the war, they took control of most TV channels, radio stations and newspapers, and heavily censor them. Part of that was to prevent bad press in regards to the occupation forces, and to dismantle every potential focus of propaganda it could lead to the reformation of the Nazi party. This leaded to the new constitution of the German state to have clauses that prevented the people to publicly exhibit or display any support for an organization with morally questionable values (which was typified as "the nazis", but it was later generalized) and even to verbally attack foreign policies (because of their original intention).

That is why it might be of poor taste to express some opinions in USA (like the african americans one of your example), but in Germany its punishable by law.

Very good point. Comparing the swastika in Germany and the n-word in the USA goes a pretty long way. Except that the swastika as actually banned in Germany (and understandably so).

That, in turn, has some irony about it. The USA is a way more law centric nation than Germany.

Trust me, that piece of history is in no way wiped from the mind, especially in Germany.

Thanks for the posts and the vid MB. Glad I wasn't the only one with mixed ideas/feelings to this topic. I spent alot of time years ago researching ww2 europe and the pre and post era thereof. So much so that I then took 5 years of Deutch to try to understand more. However, I very much lack the understanding contemporary Germany's attitude, or lack thereof, towards this understandibly sensitive subject. Alas, I have yet to visit there personally.

Then again its not hard to see that similar, albeit by no means one to one, comparison to the controversy of the confederate flag here in the States. Something I have no heritage, personal or regional perspective of. Does banning the confederate flag ease the perception of of a national mind, and sum thit it up as tetamount of the ultimate evil in domestic national policy, so deserving of damnation. Does not banning it leave open social wounds that may still hinder national healing? Or does not banning it continue a conversation that ideally leads leads to greater understanding and examination of a slew of very complex personal and social issues.

In any case, I have no answers. I very much enjoyed reading all the insights, however. And I am very much enjoying the latest iteration of Wolfenstein. Pleasantly surprised that it managed to be a good game.

huh? You know, I will have to ask my German friends on how it looks like. But most of the time they mention gore is more removed, and then characters are Robots or Green Blood like for example NES Contra and Left 4 Dead 2.... Although it took Germany about 2011 when they finally got Doom 1 and 2 after a famous 17 year ban.

@cujo_dog: I'll give you a possibility I'll bet you didn't think of. How about if instead of banning or even condemning the Confederate flag the government very explicitly celebrates it? Sounds crazy right? Well here in South Carolina the Confederate flag was raised above the state house in the 60s as a kind of middle finger to the civil rights movement and integration. It still flies on the state house grounds today where politicians still support it.

Obviously U.S. law and German law are very, very different and short of a constitutional amendment banning a symbol no matter how offensive it is never going to happen. The issue of governments supporting the flag is much more common than anyone suggesting it be banned. As a southerner my whole life I will tell you that there is still some extreme weirdness about the Civil War here and the Confederate flag in particular.

There's a wiki entry on the law. The fucked up thing is, certain movies may show the symbol no problem, like the Indiana Jones flicks, whilst videogames may not, not even the Indiana Jones adventure games... because obviously the German state doesn't regard videogames as a cultural asset and art. It's all for the Children, or something twisted like that. Hell - they'd probably have the audacity to proclaim Children's videogames art, whilst denouncing more mature-themed videogames as filth.

Essentially showing the sybol in entertainment is okay, if it isn't glorifying nazis. However it's never okay in videogames, because they're something less than *proper* entertainment. Fuck those people and their shitty laws.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafgesetzbuch_%C2%A7_86a

@cujo_dog said:

It has some parallels, to be sure, but the analogy breaks down after a while. The major difference is that the CF was the symbol of a section of your nation during a civil war, while the Nazis were basically a political party that never faced INTERNAL opposition on an armed level. When they were relevant, they were national, and when they got destroyed, their supporters fled the ideology because of the incredibly strong connotation with the atrocities and the Holocaust.

So in America currently, the CF isn't used anymore, but it is still a signifier of a certain section of the population, the South. Banning or otherwise restricting it (beyond what's there now, which is mainly social pressure) would come off as an attack on that population. The flag doesn't mean "secessionists", it means "the South" at this point, rightly or wrongly.

As for the nazi symbols, noone but a couple nutjobs actually identifies with it anymore. Not only that, but it's tainted to such a degree that identifying with it is basically suicide. Because of that, it's the kind of thing that everybody will try to come out as MORE AGAINST IT THAN MY OPPONENT politically, because there's no reason not to, and a million reasons why it would be terrible.

I think the closest US analogue in terms of the attitude towards it would actually be something like sex offender laws. NOBODY wants to even come close to being seen as "on the side of the pedos" so you will never see any politician come out for anything but keeping them in jail longer and making them live in shittier ghettos when they come out, regardless of what any science might say. (and oh god am I not at alllllll interested in turning this into part of the discussion, I only used it as the example of politicians' attitudes, fuck the actual merits of the different approaches)

Though I gotta be honest with you: as an euro, I'm actually all for banning hate speech and hate organizations. No matter how much the Germans bungle the ACTUAL enforcement of the law when it comes to MEDIA portrayals, the fact is that I would be peeeeeeerfectly happy if Jobbik, Golden Dawn, Front Nationale, hell even germany's own NPD were banned and told to fuck off.

I found it weird that there are no nazi salutes in the game. You see some statues depicted doing it but with the wrong (right) hand. Does anyone know the reason behind this? Is it to be able to sell it in Germany?