The passive shifts the spotlight from who acts to what happens. You reach for it when the agent is unknown, irrelevant, obvious, or general — and whenever you want the cool, formal register of reports and reportage.

The dynamic passive describes an action being done. Formula: werden + Partizip II. Only werden is conjugated for tense — the participle never moves. Here is the full ledger for lesen.

The stative passive describes the resulting state, not the action. Formula: sein + Partizip II. Think of it as the crime scene after the deed.

When the file does name the agent, the preposition encodes what kind of agent it is.

Add a modal and the cluster grows: modal + Partizip II + werden. This is where Case C1-7’s Ersatzinfinitiv resurfaces.

Here’s the trap that catches almost everyone. Verbs that take a dative object (helfen, danken, gratulieren, vertrauen, folgen…) do not promote that object to subject in the passive. The dative stays dative — and there is no nominative subject at all.

The subjectless passive

German can even passivize intransitive verbs that have no object at all. The result is a subjectless clause that simply asserts “this activity is going on.”

The passive often travels incognito. These Passiversatzformen carry passive meaning without werden — and a good C1 essay rotates through them instead of repeating “wird … gelesen.”

Exhibit E said a dative object can’t become the subject. There’s exactly one loophole — the Rezipientenpassiv with bekommen / kriegen / erhalten, where the recipient finally takes the stand as subject.

Transform each statement as instructed.