Mr Dennis Leiffels, five years ago you reported for the first time in a YouTube documentary about Rainer Winkler, who is known on the Internet as the "Dragon Lord", has been bullied for years and has just been sentenced to two years in prison for bodily harm.

How did it all start?

Sebastian Eder

Editor in the Society department at FAZ.NET.

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As a heavy metal music fan, Winkler uploaded dance videos to Youtube and viewers started teasing him. That rocked up very quickly: if he leaves his home village, his haters are looking for him - a kind of scavenger hunt. Find him, send him prostitutes and lots of pizza to his hotel room. They sent messages to Lufthansa claiming that Rainer Winkler had a bomb on board. This eventually became the so-called "dragon game", which Internet users watch like a television series. For example, my documentaries were perceived as the season finale, just like the trial now. There are people who just look at it and smile at it. There are people who go to his house and provoke him. And there are people who become really criminals.In 2016, the Nuremberg Regional Court sentenced a man to several years' imprisonment who had committed a number of crimes on behalf of Rainer Winkler. A man who ran for the mayor's office in Konstanz has just received a death threat - allegedly from Rainer Winkler. This is an internet phenomenon that gets a lot of shit with the name. And this internet phenomenon is huge!

How did you come up with the subject?  

Cyberbullying has preoccupied me for a long time. It's incredibly difficult to make that tangible. This microcosm around the Dragon Lord is an example of what is possible on the Internet. What power you have as a person there, what violence and what damage you can cause - but how you can also behave wrongly on the other side by repeatedly looking for the public, provoking and posting questionable things on the Internet. This can create a spiral. And you can see very well how overwhelmed everyone is with it. At the beginning, I asked the public prosecutor what exactly would happen if you file a complaint in such cases. The responsible investigators were sometimes unable to distinguish Twitter from Facebook. It is still the case today that even politicians are threatened by some anonymous Hanseln,and since nobody can do anything against it. This not only applies to the dragon lord microcosm, professional politicians also have to deal with being threatened every day. The internet is not an unlawful area - but one with no legal consequences.

The case now has consequences for Rainer Winkler: He is supposed to be jailed for two years because he was violent against people who had provoked him with the declared aim of putting him in jail. Both the public prosecutor and Winkler have appealed the judgment. Has the wrong person been condemned here?

It was the haters' stated aim to bring the Dragon Lord to justice.

But I don't see the judicial failure there.

I don't know the exact circumstances, but if someone is hit with a flashlight over the head, the perpetrator should be convicted.

The failure happened earlier.

If you stand in front of Winkler's house for a day, you feel sick.

There are misanthropists who want to finish him off.

Much is certainly worse than what Winkler has now been convicted of - the rule of law has been watching for years.

And now people are laughing themselves dead because he might have to go to jail.