I live in Germany. It's repressive as fuck. Not being repressive in the standard ways isn't the same as not being repressive. You can say you don't like the chancellor or the party all day long, but you can get arrested for even calling the P_________n situation a g______, for saying anything bad about any person (even if true), doing pretty much anything requires a government license, owner-operators have unlimited liability for everything their business does unless they jump through a whole bunch of hoops and put up a $25k bond, and the government still keeps a registry of where every Jew lives just in case they need that again.

Everything interesting mostly flies under the government radar. There's a lot of it.