With its nuclear bunker, textured walls and Bauhaus furniture, the former training school for combat troops might not look like a hotel, but for a dozen journalists, photographers, social media activists and artists from Iran, Afghanistan, Kenya and South Africa, the House of Critical Voices is also a home.
Political repression and a rising number of attacks on global press freedom have forced thousands of journalists to leave their countries in recent years. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, there were 99 reporters killed last year, up 44% on 2022 and the highest toll since 2015.
The detention of journalists, suppression of independent media and dissemination of misinformation have significantly intensified in the past year, according to the annual World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders (RSF).
In the small Brandenburg village of Schmerwitz, an hour by train from Berlin, the German non-profit organisation Media in Cooperation and Transition (MiCT) is providing a place of safety for exiled or refugee journalists who have made it to Germany in its House of Critical Voices, allowing them to continue to report on human rights abuses in their own countries.
“Here, I feel safe enough to carry on my reporting,” says Hawar, a Kurdish environmental activist who fled from Iran when the authorities threatened him for reporting on the impact of dam-building on his city. After a tortuous passage through Iraq, Turkey, Russia, Belarus and Latvia, followed by nine months in a German refugee-processing centre, he is one of a dozen “fellows” invited by MiCT to stay in the hotel in Schmerwitz.
“The Iranian government has built three dams to divert our water to non-Kurdish cities and I’m telling the world of the damage being done,” says Hawar, who hid from police for 50 days after his brother was arrested and a friend was tortured. “You cannot live like that for ever. I had to leave.”
Each of the 12 fellows has their own bedroom – a luxury after the eight-person dormitories of the processing centres – but they shop and cook together, taking the MiCT minibus to supermarkets in nearby Bad Belzig for groceries. Their house in Schmerwitz is also equipped with satellite internet, a podcast studio, video-editing suite, co-working spaces and even a small gym.
In the lobby, the MiCT project manager, Johanna Lucht, is discussing tripods and lights with a photographer who fled Tehran after being interrogated for publishing images of women without hijabs.
Sareh, the first fellow in the house when she arrived a month ago via Georgia and Turkey, says: “They took my password, shut down my Instagram account and told me to make a living photographing babies instead. In Iran we think about basic things. Here, people can think about the next level.”
The house also gives those who have to leave their homes a sense of community. Discussion at the dinner table swings from food, cooking and music to tales of Belarusian police dogs, impenetrable Polish forests, and friends left behind.
The House of Critical Voices is just the latest MiCT hub for media exiles. The organisation has eight flats in Berlin for journalists who have found their own way to the city, and a co-working space for exiled journalists in the Mitte district, where Aya, a writer for the Sudanese website Beam Reports, has just been interpreting for a Russian journalist and his Egyptian interviewee.
“I miss the social capital I’d built in Khartoum, but I’ve a responsibility to tell people what’s happening in Sudan, because it’s not the focus for the west,” she says.
It’s a sentiment shared by Lorens, a citizen journalist who fled Syria with his wife and three children after he was targeted by car bombers and his brother was abducted. “It’s hard living in Berlin, because social connections are a big thing in my culture,” he says. “But it feels good to meet people from similar situations.”
MiCT sometimes helps journalists to flee from their country. After Kyaw, a newspaper editor, was detained for a third time by the Myanmar junta, MiCT helped in his daring escape via Thailand with his wife and two children, which included crossing rivers, trekking through jungle, scaling walls and hiding in safe houses.
MiCT’s work is supported by the Hannah Arendt Initiative, part-funded by Germany’s foreign ministry. “We began offering help to journalists inside their countries,” says MiCT co-founder, Klaas Glenewinkel, “but when people say ‘we need more’ … what else can we do but bring them here?”
Back in Schmerwitz, Sareh says that after years of living in fear, the House of Critical Voices has given her back a sense of freedom and hope for the future.
“I couldn’t stop crying when Klaas found me in the processing centre,” says Sareh. “Every morning I’m here, I thank God I have life. This is a big chance for me – for all of us.”
