A German Grammar Investigation
Crimes Without
a Culprit
In a passive sentence, someone did it — but the file doesn’t always say who. The passive demotes the doer, sometimes naming them, sometimes letting them vanish. Here’s how German hides, and reveals, the agent.
Agent: UnknownWhy hide the doer at all?
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 act in progress: Vorgangspassiv
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.
| Tense | German | English |
|---|---|---|
| Präsens | Das Buch wird gelesen. | is being read |
| Präteritum | Das Buch wurde gelesen. | was (being) read |
| Perfekt | Das Buch ist gelesen worden. | has been read |
| Plusquamp. | Das Buch war gelesen worden. | had been read |
| Futur I | Das Buch wird gelesen werden. | will be read |
Nuance · worden, not geworden
In the passive perfect the participle of werden drops its ge-: ist gelesen worden. You only see geworden when werden is a full verb meaning “to become”: Er ist Detektiv geworden — “He became a detective.”
The aftermath: Zustandspassiv
The stative passive describes the resulting state, not the action. Formula: sein + Partizip II. Think of it as the crime scene after the deed.
Naming the culprit: von / durch / mit
When the file does name the agent, the preposition encodes what kind of agent it is.
Nuance · who vs. through what
Rule of thumb: von for the acting person or institution, durch for an impersonal cause or intermediary, mit for the concrete tool. So an earthquake destroys a city durch ein Erdbeben, not von einem Erdbeben.
Orders from above: the modal passive
Add a modal and the cluster grows: modal + Partizip II + werden. This is where Case C1-7’s Ersatzinfinitiv resurfaces.
The witness who can’t be promoted
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.”
Aliases: the passive’s disguises
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.”
Nuance · they’re not interchangeable
sich lassen and -bar lean toward possibility (“can be”); sein + zu + Inf. can mean possibility or necessity depending on context (“can/must be”). Pick the alias whose modal flavour matches your meaning.
The recipient steps forward: bekommen-Passiv
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.
Nuance · the one promotion that works
Compare: Dem Detektiv wurde geholfen (dative stuck) vs. Der Detektiv bekam geholfen. Only the bekommen-passive lets the recipient become the grammatical subject — that’s its entire reason to exist.
The usual suspects
01 “geworden” where “worden” belongs
02 Promoting a dative object
03 Dropping “werden” in a modal passive
04 “von” for an impersonal cause
Test your instincts
Transform each statement as instructed.
1. → Vorgangspassiv Perfekt: „Man hat den Täter verhaftet.“
2. → Passiv: „Man half dem Opfer.“ (careful — dative verb)
3. → sich-lassen: „Der Code kann geknackt werden.“
4. → bekommen-Passiv: „Man schickte ihr die Akte zu.“
Reveal the case files
★ The Verdict ★
The passive is a choice about visibility: keep the doer on stage, push them into a von/durch phrase, or remove them entirely. Master the two passives, the agent prepositions, the dative trap, and the alias forms, and you control exactly how much of the culprit the reader gets to see.
In a C1 essay, that control reads as authority — you’re not hiding behind the passive, you’re directing the spotlight on purpose.
End of File C1-9 · Crimes Without a Culprit · Agent status: your call