What you need to know
The Passive is not difficult to learn and as it is widely used in the scientific realm and also for instructions or descriptions of situations as well as in news you should know of it as early as possible. It puts the listener’s focus on the action instead of the person who is performing that action and helps to express information objectively. You already know all components of the passive. Let’s put them together:
| Das Auto wird repariert. werden + participle | The car is being repaired. |
All you need is the appropriate form of werden and the past participle which is the same form that you use to express the Perfekt past tense [see level A1]. A few more examples before we move on:
| Ich werde dazu gezwungen. | I am being forced to this. |
| Du wirst sofort eingestellt. | You will be employed immediately. |
| Fisch wird hier nicht gekocht. | Fish is not being cooked here. |
In German courses you will come across exercises where you have to transform a normal sentence – also called active clause- into a passive clause. This is helpful to understand the more advanced usage of the passive. Let us go through a few simpler examples for now:
| Der Koch bereitet eine Suppe zu. subject verb accusative object | The cook is preparing a soup. |
As you can see, there is an accusative object (=eine Suppe). This is very important to notice. To turn this sentence into a passive one you’ll need to take this accusative object and make it the subject (‘the boss’):
| Eine Suppe wird zubereitet. XXXXXXXXX subject verb participle no accusative obejct left |
As the soup has turned into the subject, there is no object left over. And that’s fine. Also, the cook is gone as with the passive we want to focus on the action (=cooking soup) instead on who is doing it. But let’s say you would like to toll the cook a little bit of respect while not giving up your focus on the action. For that you could, but wouldn’t have to, integrate him or her with the help of von:
| Eine Suppe wird von dem Koch zubereitet. XXXXXXXXX subject verb Täter* participle |
Again there’s no accusative object left. In fact they remain pretty absent until very much later on, so don’t bother for now. The cook is what your teacher or book will call the *Täter perpetrator. For now the Täter is integrated with the help of von which always requires the dative. One last example:
| Der Maurer baut einen Bungalow. subject verb accusative object | A mason is building a bungalow. |
Again there’s no accusative object left. In fact they remain pretty absent until very much later on, so don’t bother for now. The cook is what your teacher or book will call the *Täter perpetrator. For now the Täter is integrated with the help of von which always requires the dative. One last example:
| Without Täter | With Täter |
| Ein Bungalow wird gebaut. subject verb participle | Ein Bungalow wird vom Maurer gebaut. subject verb Täter participle |
Finally here are the forms of werden that you need to build the Passiv Präsens:
- ich werde
- du wirst
- es wird
- wir werden
- ihr werdet
- sie werden
This topic is covered in: B1-RL22 (Ps. R stands for review)