The stenographers © German Bundestag

Every sitting of the German Bundestag is recorded verbatim and is available to the public in the form of the minutes of plenary proceedings (also known as the stenographic record).

Each speaker checks the transcript of his or her speech before it is published. If any corrections are made, the meaning of the speech and its individual parts may not be changed. The first few pages of the minutes of a plenary sitting can be found on the Internet as a preliminary publication before the sitting is even closed.

Interjections and other remarks are included in the minutes of plenary proceedings.

The minutes of plenary proceedings are already available the next working day as simple text files or pdf files to download. Older minutes of plenary proceedings going back to 1976 can be downloaded from the PARFORS document server.