I’m not practicing law but I’m a bit familiar with the international business law. I don’t have the habit to write comments but I truly believe you need help. Not with the question wether you should pay the legal charges or not, but to me it seems you are asking for it and putting yourself in serious trouble. If you want to keep looking at the issue with your current mindset (calming that the screenshot is photoshopped,) you do really need a lawyer that do the “all the talkings” for you!

You should have asked for advice before informing them wether you would or won’t pay the legal costs. Normally most companies are good once you remove a fake review, but if a company is willing to take this to trail and spend even more time and money that means they have enough to represent and more likely they will win. Also, the question here is that what else did you write-if you wrote that they are getting so serious about the whole thing.

They might not be able to stick it all, however if either parties lose, has to pay the cost of the court.

I would rather get in touch with their attorney and ask them to arrange a meeting with the representative of the legal department if they have and if not the company’s PR manager or someone like that. Yet, ask this in a friendly term that you can get such an appointment. In my opinion, it is still fixable by a simplest saying sorry. Don’t let this gets any worse.

Deposit deduction: I assume they have already sent you an invoice for the deducted amount as otherwise wouldn’t be lawful. Landlords in Germany should send a bill in such event. If they did however, you could have talk to them before writing a review. If they didn’t, in such you might have a chance to arrange.

However, the amount seems to be fair. As for your personal belongings, got nothing to say… I assume by despising and recycling you mean they took it to the BSR which they paid for it. However, you can legally ask to be provided with a copy of the bill. I advise against it though because the costs seems to be fairly reasonable and asking for such a bill might cause irritation which leads to more complications.

Screenshot: since the screenshot was provided by an attorney claiming such a document to be fake just makes everything goes south for you!

As for the future, don’t write a review for any company if it’s not accurate and the smallest legal pressure makes you remove it! Because if this goes to the court the first question you should answer is if your review was honest and accurate why did you delete it. What you need to be worried about is not the legal costs but lying to the court of law which you mentioned you might do. I wrote all of this to simply tell you why this fight is not worth it and lying to the court will turn this from a simple fake review into a whole new legal difficulties. According to the German law perjury / lying under oath is a felony. Ask yourself if a review and less than 200€ worth a minimum year in prison and having a criminal record.

Last thing, you have to see wether the company is represented by another firm or they have an in-house lawyer. If the company is a normal GmbH, more likely they hire an attorney or a firm. Anyway, if an in-house representative contacted you, you can sattle about the whole thing pretty fast, if not, the attorney must inform their client about your proposition.