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The Protokoll, and why German journalism runs on the subjunctive
Two genres keep Konjunktiv I alive, and both are worth knowing about because you will read them long before you write them. The first is das Protokoll. German meetings of any formality produce written minutes, and the job usually rotates, so being asked to write them is a normal early task rather than a sign of anything. There are two recognized kinds. Ein Ergebnisprotokoll records only outcomes and who is doing what by when, and it is what most working meetings actually need. Ein Verlaufsprotokoll records the course of the discussion, who said what in what order, and is used where the reasoning matters — committees, works council meetings, anything that might be revisited. The second kind is where the subjunctive earns its keep, because the whole document is a chain of reported claims. A Protokoll is normally circulated afterwards, corrected by the participants, and then treated as the record, which is why the wording gets argued over: once it is genehmigt, it is what happened. The second genre is journalism, and here the subjunctive is not a convention but a safeguard. German law distinguishes sharply between reporting that someone made a claim and adopting the claim as your own. A publication that relays an allegation in a way that reads as endorsement can be liable for it in a way that a publication which clearly attributes it is not. Konjunktiv I is the cheapest available marker of attribution, which is why German news writing is saturated with sei, habe and werde, and why the indicative in the same sentence would be a substantive error rather than a stylistic one. The Deutscher Presserat, the press council, publishes a code that makes the general duty of care explicit, and the habit of attribution is one of the places it shows up in the language itself. A practical note for your own writing. Alex's last line is the working rule: Anführungszeichen oder Konjunktiv, eines von beiden. If you have the exact words, quote them and the mood question does not arise. If you are summarising, use Konjunktiv I. What you should not do is summarise in the indicative, because that is the one option that silently puts your name to someone else's claim. German quotation marks, by the way, are »like this« or „like this“ depending on house style, and the typewriter pair is acceptable everywhere; the convention of a comma before the verb in a reported clause is not optional. Finally, a reassurance about the forms. Native speakers do not use Konjunktiv I consistently in speech, and many avoid the awkward parts in writing too by falling back on Konjunktiv II, which lesson 81 covers properly. Nobody will think less of your German for saying Er hat gesagt, dass er die Zahlen geprüft hat in conversation. The place you cannot avoid it is on paper, in exactly the two genres above.