Raise Your Voice!? German Artists’ Protest Campaign #allesdichtmachen and the Question of Freedom of Expression During the Pandemic

Both the Covid-19 pandemic as well as the political and social discussions it forced upon liberal Western democracies on limitations of fundamental rights provide me with the framework for this paper’s topic. I will address it through the question of how German artists – in this case mostly TV actors – with the social Media campaign #allesdichtmachen drew attention to their situation in times of widespread lockdown and contact restrictions in spring 2021. The question will be whether the constraints of free expression felt by these artists, or the public reactions to their voicing a sense of being unheard, can be captured by the vocabulary of censorship in the narrower or broader sense.