ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the use of passive in the German grammar. The passive voice is used to shift the emphasis away from the agent (i.e. the ‘doer’) of the action described by the verb to the recipient of the action. Passives are often used when a speaker/writer does not want or need to specify the agent. The passive can be used in all the main tenses. It is formed using the appropriate tense of the auxiliary verb werden plus the past participle of the main verb. If the passive is used in a general statement not referring to any specific person or thing, the sentence can appear without a proper subject, e.g. ‘There is a lot of smoking going on’, where the emphasis is on the action of the verb and not on who is actually doing the smoking or what is being smoked. In English, such sentences often begin with ‘there’, which has a very general meaning.
