German Passive Voice: werden Plus a Participle, Again
By Michael McGettrickUpdated 27 September 2026
The German passive is plus a past participle. That is the entire construction, and it is worth saying up front because textbooks tend to make it look like a new tense system. It is not. The tense sits on , the participle sits at the end and never changes, and if you can already build the perfect tense and the future tense, you already own both halves.
.- The house is being built.
The same that builds the future also builds the passive. The only difference is what goes at the end: an infinitive for the future ( ), a participle for the passive ( ). Same skeleton, different last word.
What the passive is for
An active sentence starts with whoever does the action. A passive sentence starts with whatever it happens to, and lets the doer drop out or turn up at the end:
.- The man is building the house.
.- The house is being built.
.- The house is being built by the man.
The object of the active sentence ( ) becomes the subject of the passive one. That is why the passive exists in every language that has it: sometimes the thing matters more than the person, and sometimes nobody knows or cares who did it.
werden, conjugated
You need in the present and the simple past. Both are irregular, but only mildly:
| present | simple past | |
|---|---|---|
| | |
| | |
er / | | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
Note and er : the stem vowel changes and the d disappears from the form. The simple past is regular once you know the stem -.
Every tense in one table
Here is one sentence taken through the passive in each tense. Read down the middle column: the participle never changes. Only the helper does.
| tense | German | English |
|---|---|---|
| present | . | The house is being built. |
| simple past | . | The house was built. |
| perfect | . | The house has been built. |
| pluperfect | war . | The house had been built. |
| future | . | The house will be built. |
| with a modal | . | The house has to be built. |
Three things to notice:
- The simple past is the one you will actually use. For most verbs, spoken German prefers the perfect over the simple past. The passive is an exception:
- The perfect uses
, and the participle is. Not.means become (Er, he has got old);is kept for the passive. This is one of the commonest passive mistakes. - The future passive is rare.
.
Who did it: von and durch
If you want to name the doer, German gives you two options:
plus the dative for the agent, the person or thing that does the action:Kind .(The book was written by a child.)plus the accusative for the means or cause, the thing it happened through:Die .(The city was destroyed by the fire.)
In practice covers far more ground, and in most passive sentences you name nobody at all. That is usually the point of using the passive.
The passive with sein: states, not actions
German has a second passive that English speakers walk straight into, because English writes both with is:
Die .- The door is being closed. (someone is doing it)
Die .- The door is closed. (it is shut)
The version is the action. The version is the state the action left behind, and the participle is really working as an adjective. German grammars call them the Vorgangspassiv (process) and the Zustandspassiv (state). The test is simple: if you could add right now, someone is... in English, you want . If you are describing how something is, you want .
.- The car is being sold. (the sale is happening)
.- The car is sold. (it is gone)
Passive sentences with no subject
German can put a verb in the passive even when there is no object to promote, which English cannot do at all. The sentence says that an activity happens, with nobody in particular doing it:
.- No work gets done here.
Am .- In the evening there is dancing.
There is no subject, so goes into the form, . It sounds odd at first and is common in notices, rules and descriptions of what happens somewhere.
The dative stays dative
Verbs like take a dative object, not an accusative one, and German refuses to turn a dative object into a passive subject. The dative stays dative and falls back to or :
Man Kind.- People help the child.
Kind .- The child was helped.
Kind is wrong, and so is . The German is . It feels upside down from English, where anybody can become the subject of a passive, but it is consistent: the case belongs to the verb, and the passive does not get to change it. The German cases explain which verbs take the dative.
man: the passive Germans actually speak
In conversation, Germans often skip the passive and use man (one, people, they) with an active verb. It does the same job of not naming anybody:
.- The house is being built here.
Man .- They are building a house here.
Both are correct. The passive sounds more formal and is what you will read; man is what you will hear in a kitchen. Learn to recognise both, and use man whenever the passive feels stiff.
Turning active into passive, step by step
The conversion is mechanical, and doing it a few times by hand is the fastest way to make the pattern stick. Take an active sentence:
Die Kind.- The police find the child.
- Find the accusative object. Here it is
Kind. It becomes the new subject, so it goes into the nominative. Forthe form does not change; for a masculine noun,becomes. - Conjugate
for the new subject, in the tense of the original verb.is present, the new subject is singular, so. - Send the participle of the original verb to the end.
gives. - Add the old subject with
, or drop it.
Kind .- The child is found by the police.
Now the same thing in the past: Die Kind becomes Kind . And with a masculine object: Die becomes , where the article changes from to because the doctor is now the subject. That article change is the case system doing exactly what it always does, and it is the step learners most often skip.
Mistakes English speakers make
Using for the action. English the house is built is ambiguous. German is not. If you mean the building is happening, it is ; means it is finished.
Saying in the perfect. is wrong. The passive participle is : .
Confusing the future with the passive. Er is he will see. Er is he is being seen. The ge- at the front of the last word changes the whole meaning, so look at that last word before deciding what is doing.
Promoting a dative object. looks like I was helped and is wrong. Keep the dative: .
Forgetting the participle goes last. Like every second verb in German, the participle sits at the end of the clause: , not . In a subordinate clause, goes after it: ..., .
What to do next
Learn the simple past first: and plus a participle. That form covers most of the passive you will read in news and history, and Germans use it in speech too. Then practise the against contrast with the same few participles (, , , ) until the difference between an action and a state feels obvious.
After that, put the passive next to the future tense and read them in pairs. The fact that one verb builds both is not a coincidence to memorise but a pattern to lean on, and once it clicks, a German sentence with in it stops being a puzzle. The German course introduces the passive in chapter 9 using participles you already know from the perfect tense.