International News-Migration Reporting

By Alex Norbrook

 

As Martin Kohler strolled down Sonnenallee, the main drag of the Berlin borough of Neukölln, he could not contain his dismay to the camera. Along the street, kebab shops sizzled, sending the aroma of roasting meat drifting through the cold winter air. Shoppers in heavy coats browsed clothing outlets that advertised headscarves and perused grocery stores that boasted halal meat. Kohler’s reaction was blunt: “No integration,” he said in English.

 

Kohler spoke about how immigrant-populated neighborhoods like the one in Neukölln were cropping up across the city, altering its character for the worse. His companion on the street, an up-and-coming conservative YouTuber from England, asked him in a concerned tone whether the average German wanted this expansion in a city like Berlin. Without missing a beat, Kohler replied, “No. Absolutely not.”

 

At least, that is what Kohler hoped to convey to the 270,000 viewers of the video his colleague produced. The reality in Berlin, though, is a little more complicated.

 

Kohler, a tall man with bright blue eyes and close-cropped brown hair, is a rising voice in Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, which is notorious in Germany for its hardline policies on immigration and ties to extremist organizations. Despite these associations, or perhaps because of them, AfD has surged in popularity. It now boasts of being the most popular party in the country. 

 

But Berlin, which counts as a state in Germany’s federal system, is different. The city is celebrated as the most progressive, multicultural, and migrant-friendly place in Germany—the kind of place where “Because we love you” is the motto of the subway system. The kind of place where, when Kohler approached a group of young people on the street in Neukölln, they flipped off the camera and cheered: “fuck AfD!” When the right surged during February’s federal elections nationwide, Berlin bucked the trend—it moved left.

 

When I spoke with Kohler in mid-October, he told me that this challenging environment only makes him more determined. “As a patriot,” Kohler said, “if you give up the capital city, you can give up the whole project of getting in power and conquering your country back.” With an election in Berlin coming later next year, his party is preparing to take on that project. What would it take for them to succeed?

 

***

 

The AfD has been on the rise since 2013, when the party burst onto Germany’s political scene with a populist conservative program. Its founders lashed out against Angela Merkel’s government for bailing out southern European countries during the Eurozone crisis. Then, when Merkel opened Germany’s borders to Syrians fleeing civil war in 2015, uttering her famous phrase “Wir schaffen das” (“we can do this”), AfD rebutted, suggesting Germany couldn’t—and shouldn’t. Soon, it unveiled its vehement opposition to migrants, especially to those coming from Arab countries.

 

Since its founding, AfD has evolved with the times, fanning flames of animosity against whatever coalition was in power. When Covid hit Germany, party leaders adopted an anti-lockdown, anti-vaccine position, allying themselves with the far-right group PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West). When energy prices began to soar after the Russia-Ukraine war, AfD directed its ire toward renewable energy, blaming climate policies that incentivized wind and solar energy installations. Party members even began to attack proposals to put speed limits on the Autobahn to save on gas. “They are really strategically clever crisis entrepreneurs,” said Manès Wiesskircher, a political scientist at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB), “rejecting all government policies in order to benefit from the dismay among significant parts of the population.”

 

With these strategies, the party has surged in popularity to become one of the largest and most energetic political movements in the country. It shocked the country with its performance in the 2025 federal elections, winning over 20 percent of the vote share. “There’s only three parties in all of the history of the Federal Republic of Germany who made it above 20% in a federal election,” said Robert Eschricht, an AfD state representative for Neukölln. “We really are up and coming.” The AfD now tops opinion polls as the most favored party nationwide.

 

But what is true for the country has not yet become a reality in Berlin. At the state level, a center-right coalition is firmly in power, a large left-wing bloc wields influence, and people are skeptical of the AfD’s restrictive approach to migration. [need a bit more context here]

 

“They think we are the devil,” said state party chair Kristin Brinker. As the 2026 federal elections approach, AfD’s mission in Berlin is to convince the public otherwise.

 

***

 

On a warm June evening in 2023, Peter Kurth hosted a party at his apartment and rooftop terrace in Berlin. A former state politician for the center-right CDU party, Kurth has deep ties with the Identitarian Movement, a pan-European neo-fascist organization that claims it seeks to protect white identity from multiculturalism and migration into Europe. Invited to the event were the who’s who of Europe’s radical right, including AfD’s top candidate for the European Parliament elections in 2024, a “right-wing extremist” publisher known for publishing a book called “Regime Change from the Right,” and an Austrian Identitarian politician. The attendance of one partygoer was more of a surprise. That person was Kristin Brinker.

 

Few people know when Brinker left the party. Brinker claims she made a quick exit, “shocked” by the evening’s discussions, which included tk. Others say she stayed for quite some time and enjoyed herself, with one AfD politician recalling that he spoke with her until “a very advanced hour that evening,” according to a local publication. 

 

Either way, the optics of the face of the AfD in Berlin appearing at a private right-wing extremist event were less than ideal. When the story broke that Brinker attended the party, Berlin’s otherwise-doughy political scene erupted. The scandal threatened to undermine the self-presentation Brinker had worked hard to establish for herself, and her party in Berlin. 

 

Brinker, an architect by trade, joined the AfD in 2013. Sporting bright blond hair and speaking with a warm, cheerful tone, Brinker possesses a calming demeanor that could not be farther from the stereotypical image of a far-right politician. Brinker is highly aware of this image, referring to herself as “not the typical AfD politician.”

 

“She’s not a very radical person,” said Robert Kiesel, a columnist on Berlin politics at Taggesspiegel. “ She is a professional politician.” 

 

Brinker, who describes herself as “more liberal than my colleagues,” became chair of AfD Berlin in 2021, after a fierce internal leadership competition between her and Beatrix von Storch, a duchess and the maternal granddaughter of Adolf Hitler’s finance minister. Von Storch is known to be more radical than many in the party on the national stage. But in Berlin, she lost to Brinker by two votes. 

 

Since then, Brinker has pursued several strategies to try to moderate AfD’s image in Berlin.

 

Part of that effort involves in-person interactions. During election seasons, she can be found on the street under a light-blue AfD umbrella, handing out leaflets to passersby with a smile. This effort, Brinker hopes, makes the AfD seem more approachable. “A lot of people say, ‘oh, I saw something on TV, and then I make my opinion about the AfD,’” she said. But if she can speak with people face-to-face, she elicits a more favorable reaction. “Many people say to me, ‘wow, you are the AfD? It’s okay what you say. I can understand it,’” she said.

 

Brinker told me that she has also forged closer relationships with the media. For the past two years, she has held a parliamentary conference in Copenhagen and invited journalists to come. “It shows the journalists that we are thinking in a normal way, [that] we are normal people,” she said. “They can call me, I can call them.”

 

In doing so, she has diverged from her party’s longstanding mistrust of mainstream media. The AfD has traditionally __[context tk]_. “As a journalist working for serious media, it’s very hard to find people who are willing to talk with me,” Kaisel said. “Because for them, serious media is like an enemy.”

 

Under Brinker’s leadership, the state party has stuck to a coordinated messaging strategy to emphasize its moderation, according to Agnes Sundermeyer, a journalist at RBB who covers Berlin state politics. Extreme statements from national leaders are not reflected at the state level. Where AfD co-chair Alice Widel calls for “remigration,” the forcible return of migrants, including German citizens, to their country of origin, AfD Berlin’s parliamentary group has avoided the term. “Under the leadership of Kristin Brinker, it avoided appearing with radical or neo-right-wing positions,” Sundermeyer said. “Anyone within the parliamentary group or the state branch who does so is not allowed to put themselves in the spotlight.”

 

To some commentators, though, Brinker’s personal image has more sinister effects, distracting from the more radical figures in the state party. “You have this Brinker in the front for the serious masquerade, but in her back you have really tough guys,” Kiesel said. Other Berlin Parliament members have traveled to Russian conferences or tk tk tk. But according to Kiesel, Brinker’s tone draws attention away from her colleagues.

 

If anything, Sundermeyer suggests that Brinker has tolerated these right-wing elements in her state party, rather than cracking down on them. “She pursued a strategy of integration and inclusion,” Sundermeyer said. But it is unclear whether Brinker could marginalize AfD Berlin’s right flank even if she wanted to.

 

The question of how long Brinker stayed at Kurth’s party remains unresolved. So does the question of her motivations. Brinker may not publicly voice an opinion on more contentious topics like remigration. But her silence does send a message of what she is willing to tolerate in her own party. “She’s not saying, ‘this is not what I stand for,’” Kiesel said. 

 

***

 

Standing in a plaza in the eastern district of Lichtenburg, Gottfried Curio, an AfD member of the Bundestag, riled up a crowd of supporters waving German flags and cheering. Do you know how many Syrians there are in Germany? he asked his 200-person audience. One million! Even if 0.1 percent are criminals, that’s a thousand people. A thousand assassins. Do we want them in our country?

 

The immediate target of Curio’s ire was a block of hotels in the neighborhood, which the Berlin state government was planning to rent out to shelter 1,200 migrants. The move was part of Berlin’s strategy for addressing the surge in migrant population it has faced since 2015. Within a year of the original migrant surge, Berlin was reported to receive more than 10,000 refugees in one month; since 2016, the country as a whole has received an average of 210,000 new asylum applications per year, excluding Ukrainians. This influx put strain on Berlin’s already tight housing system, prompting the government to act. 

 

Among a slate of policy measures, Berlin began to rapidly build new shelters and convert existing buildings to accommodate migrants. The state government even transformed a former airport into refugee housing, in addition to office buildings, houses, hostels, and hotels, like the one in Lichtenburg. When new conversions are announced, Kiesel noted, “the AfD will go there and try to make some noise.”

 

According to Kiesel, these policies have been rushed, and are inadequate to the scale of the housing crunch at hand. Mainstream parties fumbling the ball on migrant shelter has opened up room for attacks on the right. “We have people in Berlin who came as refugees years ago and they are still living in camps because German politics was not able to make solutions,” Kiesel said. “It’s a very easy play for the AfD.”

 

Berlin’s AfD has used these shelters as political ammunition for its anti-migration mission. Representatives frequently make shelter conversions the target of their ire, and point to the level of government spending required to support refugees—through housing, and also government-funded stipends for migrants seeking work. Of Berlin’s $40 billion annual budget, Brinker noted, more than $3 billion is spent on migration-related expenses: “only so that people can live in a flat, in a hotel, in a tent, whatever.”

 

Concerns about the cost of support for migrants soon blurs into racialized fears about how well migrants “integrate” into German society. On Kohler’s tour through Berlin with his English influencer, he stopped by another building that was soon to be converted into new accommodations: 950 for asylum seekers, and 550 for students. “I asked the mayor of this district, ‘would you put your daughter, when she goes to university, into a house with 950 Afghans, Syrians, and so on?’”

 

[one graf about integration fearmongering]

 

By focusing on these migrant shelters, local AfD members seek to capitalize on a generalized anxiety around immigration. But in cities like Berlin, the effectiveness of this strategy has been mixed, according to Katja Salomo, a research associate on far-right extremism at the Social Science Centre Berlin (WZB) who studies anti-immigrant messaging and voting behavior in German cities. Oftentimes, the people most persuaded by anti-immigrant rhetoric are those who do not live in areas with low immigrant populations, such as wealthier districts, and who encounter immigration mostly through media platforms. “You just have this fearful media discourse and no immediate personal experience” with immigrants, Salomo said.  “When it comes to immigration, people fear the unknown.”

 

Meanwhile, when urban residents live among immigrant communities, they are more likely to interact with them: interactions which studies show reduce stereotyping and fear. “As soon as they live with [immigrants] in their neighborhood, these foreigners become neighbors,” she said. In these cases, support for AfD tends to weaken. 

 

In Berlin’s poorer districts, though, Salomo found that the decline in AfD support is less pronounced, as lower-income individuals in these areas are drawn to the AfD because of its economic populist messaging: a trend that is ubiquitous across Germany, according to tk. “They are very, very dissatisfied with the economic outlook and the economic situation and are therefore more susceptible” to the AfD, Salomo said. 

 

AfD support in Berlin is currently highest in the economically disadvantaged boroughs in former East Berlin. Gläser told me that this was because they could discern elements of East Germany’s authoritarian ambitions in the policies of the city’s left-wing parties. But if people support the AfD for economic concerns, rather than migration-related fears, then the party’s migration messaging may be less useful than it believes. And the party may be more vulnerable as a result, Salomo said.

 

But the political power AfD generates by critiquing migration policy has already left a mark on Berlin. Nearby the Lichtenburg apartments, a derelict building was slated to be converted into another refugee shelter. After AfD pressure, the local council pivoted to building a school there, instead. 

 

***

Sections TK:

1. Youth
   1. Young AfD – Kohler. 
   2. 2 other young AfD people
   3. End with chaotic launch
2. Covid movie scene – focus on inflammatory rhetoric and being a minority party critiquing everything.
   1. Gläser
   2. Eschricht
   3. The guy I spoke with at the event
   4. JWM

 

***

 

Berlin will hold state-level elections again in 2026. The AfD members I spoke with were optimistic about their chances. If federal elections were held tomorrow, the AfD would gain 26% of the vote and tie with the CDU, Chancellor Merz’s party, according to DW. In Berlin, the party is projected to surge from 9% to 15% of the electorate, pulling ahead of the Greens. 

 

[TK here]

 

“All we ask for is a fair trial,” said Eschricht.

When Nazira Khairzad, former goalkeeper of the Afghan Women’s National Soccer Team, flew out of Germany, she risked never being allowed back in. On October 31st, she and her sister, Nazima, were three days out from the Ultra-Trail du Mont-blanc, a technical 26-kilometer race through Mallorca’s Serra de Tramuntana mountains. Nazira’s legs were still sore from the marathon she’d run the week before. But as she waited to display her refugee travel document to the security officer at Frankfurt am Main, Nazira had bigger concerns on her mind. 

Nazira’s status in Germany is tenuous. After the Taliban took over Afghanistan, she fled to Italy, where she obtained asylum. But in 2023, she moved to Frankfurt to support her sister, who was ill, and her parents. Reuniting with her family came with a price. As a non-resident in Germany, Nazira isn’t allowed to work or travel. The status she holds, called duldung, denies her residency but delays her deportation. Still, its protections are limited. Each time Nazira leaves the country to do what she loves most–play sports–Germany can refuse her re-entry. 

To Nazira, the risk is worth it. 

 

Nazira is used to hiding. As a young girl, she and her sister started the first girls’ soccer team in their native Bamiyan, a city in central Afghanistan. They snuck off to early morning practices multiple times a week, telling their parents they were going to an English class that met before school. Mostly in secret, Nazira’s love for sports took hold. At 11, she won a 10k, crossing the finish line in a long dress and tattered sandals. Her parents only discovered she ran when, after a race, she was broadcast on their home TV.

Born in 2004, Nazira came of age after U.S.-led coalition forces ousted the Taliban regime. In the two decades that followed, women ran, swam, and biked in triathlons abroad. Powerlifters won gold medals in India and Kazakhstan. The Afghan Women’s National Team formed in 2007, winning its first international match in 2012. By 2013, female Afghan athletes had accumulated some 100 medals. Through running, soccer, and skiing, Nazira added to that tally. As a female athlete, she was a minority in a conservative culture. But for most of her life, she was safe. 

That changed in early 2021, when the Taliban started to gain control of the provinces surrounding Kabul. One night, Nazira woke up to her phone ringing. It was a driver from Free to Run, the organization that sponsored Nazira’s first race, offering to help her escape. Calling from the city center, he said Talib soldiers had entered Bamiyan.

Violence had been on the rise in Bamiyan for the first time since the Taliban’s regime. In September of 1998, Taliban soldiers first entered Bamiyan and killed an estimated 500 people. Three years later, the group exploded the towering Buddhas of Bamiyan, hollowing out a cliff the height of a ten-story building. 

This history fresh in her mind, Nazira pushed a desk in front of her door. She changed into a long black dress, threw clothes into a small suitcase, and gathered the trophies, medals, and certificates that adorned her room, tying them up in a tapestry. At around 4:30 in the morning, her father called to tell her their neighbors were driving to Kabul. “You should go with them,” she recalls him saying. 

When Nazira got to Kabul, she joined her sister Nazima, who’d left home months earlier, in the basement room she was renting with several other women. For months, they shared a twin bed, their heads resting on opposite ends of a top-bunk mattress. 

It was around this time that Nazima–an athlete with a unique hunger for adventure–ventured into the black market. She’d won a scholarship to study in Malaysia, and needed a visa so she could travel to Pakistan for her appointment at the embassy (there is no Malaysian embassy in Afghanistan). Between odd meetings with a network of fixers, she traveled around the country, giving tours to English-speaking tourists. In May of 2021 she moved to Pakistan, narrowly escaping her country’s fall to the Taliban. Meanwhile, Nazira joined the Afghan Women’s National Team as a goalkeeper and started training for a match in Tajikistan, set for the end of August. 

These plans were upended on August 15th, 2021, when the Taliban reached Kabul. As a high-profile female athlete, Nazira was especially at risk. During this time, photos were circulating online of Mahjabin Hakimi, a volleyball player, her head severed from her body. The message was clear: women in sports should fear for their lives.   

Nazira took refuge with her ski coach, Gul Hussain Baizada. Through his work as a tour guide, Baizada had contacts outside the country who he said could help them flee. Nazira called her parents from the airport. “If you stay in Afghanistan,” she recalls them telling her on the phone, “the Taliban will kill you.” 

 

It was family, not escape, that brought Nazira to Germany. After the Taliban took over Afghanistan, she fled to Italy with her ski coach. In a matter of months, she obtained asylum and made plans to take college courses, and in February of 2023, earned a spot on AC Milan. “I see football like a member of my parents, like my brother or sister,” she said in her introductory video for the team. “I cannot live without football.” 

But just when she started gaining a sense of stability in Italy, everything changed. Her sister, Nazima–who went to Germany on a short-term Schengen visa, after her visa to Malaysia was denied–had been dizzy for months. She blamed her symptoms–vomitting, fatigue, and short, acute headaches–on stress. But soon, her illness became impossible to ignore. On July 27th, 2023, Nazira left her new team, her asylum status, and her college career in Italy to reunite with her family after nearly two years of separation. A month later, Nazima underwent an emergency operation to remove a brain tumor. Nazira stayed in the hospital for three months as her sister recovered, sleeping on a chair or, sometimes, in a supplies closet. 

Sure she was in Germany to stay, Nazira applied for asylum. After over a year of waiting, her application was processed and rejected. By EU law, refugees can’t apply for asylum in two countries. A non-resident, Nazira now straddles a bureaucratic contradiction. “Exclusion of deportation (Duldung),” it says in German on her ID. And under that: “No residence permit! The holder is required to leave the country!” 

As her relatives obtained asylum one by one, Nazira adapted as best she could to her second country of refuge. As she had in Italy, she started to learn the language and joined a team, FC Mittelbuchen. In August, the opportunity arose for her to play at the professional level, for FIFA’s newly inaugurated refugee team. Selection camps would be held in Australia and England. By duldung rules, Nazira was supposed to stay in Germany. But for Nazira, the risks of leaving Germany–a country that seemed to want her gone–were worth it. 

 

“Duldung is not a right to stay,” said Nazira’s lawyer, Elke Gabsa. “It’s the opposite.” Roughly translated as “toleration,” duldung puts a temporary hold on deportation. To put it simply, Germany wants duldung holders to leave, but for some reason, can’t deport them yet. 

“There’s actually like a hundred different reasons,” said Emily Frank, a social scientist and immigration scholar in Berlin. In 2021, the German government listed the reasons it issues duldung at the request of a group from parliament. According to the document, some duldung holders are too sick to travel. Others are caring for a sick relative. Some are studying, while others are in the midst of vocational training. Many are missing (or withholding) travel documents. A small number are kept in Germany to await criminal proceedings. The most common reason listed is “other.” Often, the grounds for duldung are up to the discretion of the immigration official. Nazira’s is an apt example. Of her case, Gabsa told me, “We ask our authorities to give a residence because we think a special person is good for our country and there are serious reasons for the person to stay.” 

Despite these reasons, Nazira faces the same restrictions as other duldung holders. Unable to participate in many aspects of daily life, people with duldung live in limbo. They can’t work unless they get permission from the office of immigration. Some forms of duldung–and there are numerous–require holders to live in shared refugee housing, limiting their mobility, privacy, and ability to integrate into German life. As a rule, people with duldung can’t access language courses, though there are exceptions. The limited time stamp on duldung presents new, less formal challenges. Employers often hesitate to hire people with duldung who, even with permission to work, are often regarded as short-term candidates. For the same reason, landlords keep from renting to people with duldung. When Nazira completed an intermediate German course, she couldn’t enroll in the next level, a six-month course, because her duldung is only valid for three months. 

In many ways, duldung holders are much like asylum-seekers, barred from work, travel, and school. But people still awaiting an asylum decision have one vital thing duldung holders lack: hope. “In a sense, a decision has already been made,” Frank said of duldung holders. 

Despite the humiliation life with duldung often entails, thousands of people stay in Germany with this status for years. Out of more than 240,000 people with duldung in 2021, over 46,000 of them had been in Germany for over three years, according to the government report from that year. Almost 15,000 of them had been in Germany for over a decade. They continue to face restrictions to employment, education, housing, and travel–rules that, it would seem, sap the German economy. So why does Germany keep issuing duldung? “My impression is that it’s a deterrence mechanism,” Frank said. “Maybe some people will give up on it and leave.” 

More than an effective deterrent, duldung is a convenient catch-all for non-residents whose deportation Germany can’t justify. It’s also a buffer: as soon as the grounds for duldung go away, the German government may revoke its protections. In other words, duldung offers some safety–but only for as long as Germany deems it necessary. 

 

St. George’s Park spans 330 acres of land in Staffordshire, a county in the West Midlands of England. An on-site Hilton Hotel looks onto the National Football Centre, which boasts fourteen outdoor pitches, bright green against the gray England sky. Since its inauguration in 2012 by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, St. George’s Park has been home base to England’s 28 national football teams. In September, Nazira and twenty other candidates for FIFA’s new Afghanistan women’s refugee team got a chance to play there. 

Worried travel would jeopardize her ability to stay in Germany, Nazira didn’t initially plan on going. But after Gabsa, her lawyer, told her she could use her Italian refugee document to travel, she left for an eight-day trip, where she reunited with several players she knew from her stint on the Afghan Women’s National Team. 

Two weeks after her trip, Nazira was selected as a goalkeeper for the Afghan women’s refugee team. The first match, set for October 26th in Qatar (and later diverted to Morocco, after Qatar denied the team visas), conflicted with Nazira’s plans to run the Mallorca race. She and her sister had been training for nearly a year, often going on five-mile jogs together through Neuberg. Not one to flake, Nazira packed a bag for the 26-kilometer trail run, determined to keep goal in the next match. 

For the second time, Nazira broke the rules of duldung, leaving her German ID at home on the day of her flight. Again, as she left Germany and re-entered–still feeling the high of a successful race–with no deportation scare. 

Nazira faces a future speckled with these moments of uncertainty. Now a member of two soccer teams, she alternates between practicing in Hanau with FC Mittelbuchen and lifting weights on Zoom with the scattered refugee team. Between practice, she cares for her parents, often accompanying her mother, who has diabetes, to doctor’s appointments. Each session with her lawyer seems to signal an ongoing limbo. In mid-November, Gabsa told Nazira that her third request for asylum had been denied. Gabsa is working on another appeal. “I tried to argue that it can also be a human rights violation if members of a family need each other for private reasons,” she told me. 

Nazira got asylum in Italy in 2023. Within the next year, this status will expire. Without asylum, Nazira will lack the documents she needs to travel. Unable to travel, she won’t be able to play in matches with the Afghan women’s team. Still, Nazira’s chances for obtaining asylum in Germany will stay the same. 

Nazira faces one clear path out of limbo. She could go back to Italy, wait five years, and apply for residency, which would allow her to travel freely to Germany. Each asylum rejection is a reminder of this alternative. But after two years of involuntary separation from her family, life with them seems impossible to abandon. Her mother needs a medical interpreter. Her father needs a caretaker. She needs her family as much as she needs soccer. “I moved to Italy and then I lived alone,” she told me. “Completely alone.” 

 

 

Christopher Tamm, 25, is an influencer for the far-right Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party. He defines ‘real men’ in his social media posts. Often wearing a MAGA hat or sporting his coiffed short cut with a sharp side part, Tamm and his social media account exudes a certain masculine aura far right groups hope to create in order to enlist similarly-minded young men to their causes. 

In July, Tamm posted a photo of himself sitting on a couch, reading a book titled “Remigration,” a term used by the far-right to express support for state sanctioned mass deportation for immigrants. In mid-September, Tamm is pictured at a vigil for Charlie Kirk and Iryna Zarutska, with the caption #whitelivesmatter. 

One of Tamm’s most popular posts, which has received over one million views, was published in late May. In this compilation video, several people introduce themselves with their pronouns including someone who describes themselves as a fox, followed by Tamm driving in sunglasses stating that he is “male, white, German.”

Influencers like Tamm, who is in his mid twenties, have helped generate a new wave of AfD support primarily from young, white German men. For Tamm, he wears provocation as a badge of honor: “I like to be the provocateur.” Tamm approaches his social media posts like a “business” with his videos making fun of left wing beliefs. “If you want to be successful, you have to do something that nobody is doing, and you have to find a niche that isn’t occupied. I found a niche with my provocative videos.” 

Jasmine, who is a graduate student at Freie University in Berlin, noticed her younger brother has been pulled to the political right by his social media feed. Her brother, a 17-year-old who now lives in the US but was born in Germany, has been telling her that more deportations are needed and immigrants are going to “replace us in the culture.” She believes that social media algorithms can “indoctrinate you into [an] anti-migrant racist.”

She also explained how the AfD made refugees “scapegoats” for a wide range of problems, as the party advertised that “if we stop the migrants coming in, then suddenly everything will be better.” And far too many, she believes, fell for this promise that she considers a trap.

The AfD party was formed in 2013 as a single-issue party in response to global financial crisis policies that provided bailouts for struggling countries. The AfD promoted beliefs of nationalism that have intensified over the years, with their focus shifting to immigration issues in 2015. 

During the Syrian Civil War, the German government had opened its doors to refugees seeking asylum. Many families were driven from their homes, and the Assad government tortured many who did not support the authoritarian regime. Almost 300,000 Syrian refugees entered Germany in 2015, with an overall 46% migration increase from 2014. Amid this major immigration influx, the AfD shifted focus to anti-immigration politics and began dramatically increasing their party support. 

Tamm resonates with key AfD messaging, specifically “remigration.” He feels that immigrants, especially Muslim practicing immigrants, do not belong in German society.

“If you’re somebody who wants to wear a hijab, you don’t fit into Germany.”

Though Germany does not recognize any specific religion, many women are discriminated against for wearing a hijab, and certain states have banned women from wearing hijabs in government, public education, and clerical positions. While Tamm believes a hijab is a symbol of female suppression, many Muslim women disagree. 

Tamm also believes that immigrants should migrate to countries in which they are most culturally similar, and that leaving one’s country due to hardship was “weak.” For many Syrians, however, Germany offered the greatest promise for opportunity and leaving Syria was not a matter of choice, as they faced torture. 

To recruit others to the AfD cause, Tamm has taken to posting images and short-form videos on social media. Along with several “remigration” posts and messages in support of the MAGA movement, Tamm also targets LGBT+ groups, as there is mixed LGBT+ sentiment within the party. 

In the US, the MAGA movement has been using similar strategies to attract younger male voters, and the Trump administration has similarly cracked down on illegal immigrants. It is unsurprising that the two groups have begun to show signs of unity. 

Back in early 2025, Vance spoke out against the firewall that had formed in Germany against the AfD, stating that it was challenging free speech in the country. 

Since then, Deputy leader of the AfD Beatrix von Storch and AfD Politician from western Germany Joachim Paul had a meeting in September with representatives of the national security council, the vice president’s office and the State Department. Most recently, German influencer and MAGA advisor Alex Bruesewitz visited Berlin in early November and spoke with AfD leaders about their shared goals. 

The spreading popularity of this movement was on full display following the assasination of social media influencer and far-right supporter Charlie Kirk on Sept. 10, as protests and gatherings drew large crowds across the country and in Europe. 

Country leaders and officials have posted reactions to Kirk’s death, many of which are aligned with the far-right rhetoric. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán described the left as “hate mongering,” Santiago Abascal, a Congressman in Spain, wrote that the left “wanted this assasination,” and Germany’s Alice Weidel, co-leader of the AfD party, posted on X that “liberal’s hate the left’s way of life.” 

“I am totally not surprised that a party like the AfD that’s still on its way up trying to take power, is going to try to learn everything it can from ideologues and activists in other countries who are singing from the same sheet of music,” one former Foreign Service Officer in the Department of State told me.

Most recently, the US has started to introduce the “remigration” term that is already used throughout the European far-right group. 

Though the growth of the far-right movement worldwide undoubtedly has numerous contributing factors, the AfD grew in tandem with the influx of immigrants. In this wave of Syrian immigrants that caused instability within German society, reporting points towards Russia as an instigator for European refugee immigration. In 2015, Russia’s involvement in the Syria was seen by some as a strategy to destabilize European governments. 

“There were so many Syrians forced into European borders, essentially by collusion,” one former Foreign Service Officer in the Department of State told me. “Putin was trying to use forced migration as a tool to further undermine political stability in Europe.”

“This pressure weakens left wing governments and strengthens the right wing populist movements.”

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has similarly caused high levels of asylum seekers in Europe, and continual issues involving Finland and Belarus raise further concerns about Russian interference in migration. 

Connections between Germany and Russia are of high concern for many in the government, especially with regard to the military. Last week, members of the Bundestag accused AfD politicians of leaking sensitive defense information to Russian intelligence. Plans for AfD officials to visit Russia has also sparked anger from other parties in government. 

The AfD’s position towards the Russia-Ukraine war is also mixed. Martin Kohler, creator of the youth wing for the AfD, told me that, “Maybe it’s not the official position of my party, but … my opinion is that Zelensky is a bad president. There are many rumors about corruption.”

Many former state department officials have told me that Germany is “soft on Russia.” When asked about the Ukraine war, Tamm said that “we have to clear the problems in our country, and then we can talk [about] what’s happening in the world.”

As support rises, many are alarmed about the implications of far-right and extremism politics. 

Josef Schuster, President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, spoke about concerns for jewish Germans due to increased AfD support. In November, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier warned about the dangers of extremism in a speech given on the anniversary of the Nazi Kristallnacht, hinting towards the AfD. 

Antisemetic rhetoric was recently a major news story in the US when chats from a Young Republicans’ group chat were published, causing major outrage. 

The AfD youth group, Young Alternative, was dissolved in 2024 due to mounting pressure to avoid broader implications for the AfD party as it faced a potential ban by the German government. Because this group was not directly under control of the AfD party leadership, AfD leaders immediately began pushing for a new group to form for younger audiences. 

“When you want to become a major party in the future, you need the youth because the youth is the future,” Martin Kohler, an AfD politician who played a key role in the creation of the Young Alternative, told me. “It’s much easier for young people to do politics with other young people, because different age groups have different priorities. You are the only young girl or young boy among people over 50, then it’s not that attractive for joining the party.”

On Nov. 29, the AfD moved to officially create a new youth branch affiliated with the larger party in what became a weekend of mass protests against the far-right. Reports estimate that around 25,000 protesters took to the streets in various locations, attempting to delay the meeting in which AfD politicians would formalize the youth group.

“Generation Germany,” as it will now be called, is the name of the youth organization. Over the weekend, AfD party member Alexander Eichwald gave a speech at the founding meeting. The Jerusalem Post reported that the speech was “Hitler-like,” and encouraged a devotion towards Germany. 

Today, Tamm serves as a member of the district council in Prignitz with the AfD, and hopes to continue his career in politics. He was quoted in a New York Times article at an AfD protest, telling a supporter who had his arm in a Hitler salute to “keep your arm up like this a little bit longer.” 

Just a note about this draft, when writing I was really struggling to figure out what additional content should be added. I know the story now is far from the proper word count, and I am still trying to think of additional ways to add new reporting. I also have lots of other interviews that were done for this article but don’t quite fit I’m afraid. 

Baptists across borders: How Ukrainian and American evangelicals are reviving Christianity in Europe 

What happens to Christianity when the citizens of eastern Europe’s Bible Belt are forced to move across the globe?

GUMMERSBACH, GERMANY — In a run-down theatre in Gummersbach, a small German town on the banks of the Rhine, a group of Americans and Ukrainians might seem out of place. 

It’s an unusual cast of characters: eight Americans, who signed up for a mission trip with First Baptist Church (FBCH), a megachurch in Hendersonville, Tennessee; and 20-or-so Ukrainians affiliated with Almaz Church, who have shown up on a dreary Wednesday to help out. They are united in their intention to transform this abandoned, cavernous theatre — still displaying signs for Indiana Jones 4 in its ticket booth — into a church. 

Upstairs, four college students sift through a pile of wooden planks and rubbery strips of wallpaper, occasionally landing on artifacts of the past: a dusty matchbox, a crinkled movie poster, a Hello Dolly vinyl, a half-full liquor bottle. Downstairs, people of all ages drill holes and haul branches into large containers in the front yard. 

Among them is Almaz Church’s leader Pastor Nikolas Skopych, an unassuming man with a wiry salt-and-pepper beard and kind eyes. In the wreckage, you might find him wielding a sparking electric floor-grinder or else quietly circulating to ensure everyone has a task. 

He spent a year searching – and praying – for a sprawling space like this to replace the cramped office they had previously used. “I believe that God gave us [a] unique opportunity to buy this cinema,” he said. 

The new property, which includes the theatre and a set of apartments, will serve the community of Ukrainian refugees now residing in Gummersbach, estimated by Skopych at upwards of 3,000 individuals. This is just one of 64 Ukrainian Churches which have sprung up in Germany since the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022. In total, 152 Ukrainian churches have been planted across Europe, according to Almaz’ website. 

Now, some American missionaries are hopeful they will launch a larger religious awakening on a continent where religiosity has been declining for decades. Michael McClanahan, head of missions at FBCH, expressed his hope that the new Almaz will become “a central training hub.”

“It will be an opportunity, not only for Ukrainian churches to be expanded, but also, I feel that this is the beginning of a revival of Christianity in Europe,” he said. 

And many see Ukraine as their biggest opportunity. American evangelicals have flip-flopped in their views on Ukraine, often echoing U.S. President Donald Trump’s America-first stances, but  some have recently become more supportive of Ukrainian independence as Ukrainian pastors appeal to their Christian sensibilities. In the U.S., American evangelicals have welcomed Ukrainian refugees into their churches. But they don’t plan to stop there at home. Some have already begun to make arrangements to dramatically up missions to Ukraine when the war ends. 

***

“EUROPE NEEDS NEW MISSIONS AND NEW CHURCHES,” reads the bolded text on a Ukrainian Missional Movement (UMM) Powerpoint slide. Pastor Nickolas Skopych delivered the presentation last April to the FBCH congregation on his visit to Hendersonville, Tennessee, urging members to join the effort to establish and grow Baptist churches across Europe. 

Skopych grew up in Kyiv, Ukraine, born to parents who, he said, did not believe in God. At 18, feeling disillusioned and aimless, he stumbled across American evangelical missionaries on the street who were distributing brochures about Christianity. 

“I took [the brochures] because we didn’t have literature about Christianity. It was impossible to have the Bible, or New Testament,” Skopych explained. 

Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, American evangelicals had already been smuggling religious literature across the Iron Curtain and lobbying for greater religious freedom in the U.S.S.R. Ukraine is now known as the Bible belt of eastern Europe, but at the time, religion was systematically suppressed in the USSR, including in Ukraine, as it conflicted with the state’s communist-atheist ideology. When the Iron Curtain fell in 1989, American evangelical missionaries began appearing on the streets of cities across Ukraine. 

The brochures changed the trajectory of Skopych’s life. “I take this brochure, and read it, and think about life. I understand that the very high meaning of life, I can only find with God,” he said. “It helped me.”

When Catherine Wanner, Professor of History, Anthropology, and Religious Studies at Penn State travelled to Ukraine for dissertation research in the early 1990s, she pivoted topics upon realizing the ubiquity of American evangelism in Ukraine. 

“Every single place I looked, I was sitting next to some missionary who was coming to Ukraine to engage in church planting,” she recalled. Wanner has now published a book called Communities of the Converted: Ukrainians and Global Evangelism. 

Church planting is the process of establishing a new Christian congregation in a region, often involving the physical construction of a church building with the goal that it will eventually operate independently. In the 18th century, American Baptists and Methodists engaged in church planting, fueling the growth of early religious movements in the U.S. 

Wanner described how in post-Soviet Ukraine many missionaries, unable to speak Ukrainian or Russian, spent their holidays traveling to Ukraine, where they would publicly mime scenes from the Bible. 

According to Wanner, Protestants were demonized during the Soviet period as bearers of American values and capitalism, which Soviet propaganda condemned, but there has now been a shift. “[Missionaries are] now associated with democracy and the provision of humanitarian aid,” she explained. 

The flock of Evangelicals who proselytized in Ukraine during the 1990s shared a belief that former Soviet citizens had been deprived of religion and were “godless,” Wanner said. Though the Soviet anti-religion agenda may have quashed belief in the short-term, however, it failed to achieve its atheist aims in the long-term. 

Now, an estimated two to four percent of the Ukrainian population identifies as Baptist, while the vast majority are members of the Orthodox Church. But though small in number, they are fierce. “Those 4% are very influential, very visible, and they have a significant impact on political and social policy,” Wanner noted. 

Skopych has become one of these influential Ukrainian Baptists. After graduating college with a degree in electrical engineering, he attended seminary and became a pastor of Almaz church in Ukraine, which did not have its own building, but rented space in Kyiv. It was only by chance that the new Almaz church now sits in a small town in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. 

In February 2022, Pastor Nickolas was visiting a friend in Gummersbach. But on the TK day of this visit, Russia invaded Ukraine. Skopych and his family suddenly became stranded in Germany. 

As the war continued, hundreds of Almaz congregants joined Skopych, along with friends and family. Skopych and his family helped Ukrainian refugees gain German citizenship and settle into lives drastically different from the ones they had left behind. As a community, they faced the challenges of learning German, living in small apartments, and leaving family in Ukraine. 

“We were really tired of this immigration process,” said Martin Skopych, the pastor’s son, “But we put our life on pause and tried to help other people.”

In March, 2025, Skopych met Bruce Chesser, the senior pastor of FBCH. Chesser went to Germany seeking a “native, German-speaking church” with which to collaborate on a future mission. But when he met Skopych, he was so moved by the pastor’s story that he changed course. 

A year later, eight Americans from FBCH ended up in Gummersbach, stripping down the walls of an abandoned theatre, replacing Indiana Jones with a house of worship. Ukrainian community members joined from far and wide to aid in the effort. Liza TK and Viktoria TK, two young Ukrainian women living near Düsseldorf, found out about the mission through social media and made the two-hour journey by train that morning. “It was a great opportunity,” Liza told me. 

“For me, it’s like a miracle from God,” said Martin Skopych. “It’s encouragement that we are on [the] right way and doing everything great.”

***

One reason American evangelicals are so committed to helping their Ukrainian counterparts is that they know them, in some cases, intimately. 

Michael Bible, an FBC Hendersonville congregant who was also on the mission trip to Gummersbach, told me that he has sponsored four Ukrainians to come to America through Uniting for Ukraine (U4U), a Biden administration initiative meant to streamline the process of entering the U.S. for fleeing Ukrainians. When the Trump administration entered office in January, 2025, the program was put on pause. In August, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration services resumed processing renewal applications, but the program remains suspended for potential newcomers. 

Bible, a self-identified conservative Republican, expressed his disappointment at the Trump administration’s policy change. “The one thing that I was always very supportive of in the former administration was that their policy on Ukraine was absolutely right,” he said, adding, “It’s a different animal when you know these people.”

Bible has long had a personal connection to Ukraine. His brother-in-law, Richard Matheny had made several trips to Ukraine prior to 2022 , when he married Larysa, a Ukrainian woman.  He was waiting in a town near Kyiv for Larysa to get a visa to come to the U.S. when the war broke out. Bible helped them escape over the border to Poland from afar, following the route on Google Earth to offer updates on where Russian guards were least likely to be stationed. Richard then sponsored Larysa through U4U to come to the U.S., where they now reside. 

“When Richard got home, he was the one that said, ‘We need to start sponsoring these folks,’” Bible explained. “I said, ‘Well, I’m already up to my eyeballs in forms anyway, so let me fill them out.” 

Tetiana “Tanya” and Serhii Kravchuk became the first to join Bible and his family in Tennessee, sponsored by Richard, who had known them in Ukraine. Tanya was nearly nine months pregnant when she arrived. “I think if I hadn’t been pregnant, I wouldn’t have gone anywhere,” she said. “I just wanted to be safe somewhere, and I didn’t have anybody in Europe.” 

Serhii and the rest of her family have since joined her. Bible sponsored Tanya’s parents, Serhii’s mother, and Tanya’s cousin. Though earlier in the war, Tanya considered returning to Ukraine, she now feels certain that she will remain in Tennessee, where her family has built a life. “We want to stay, but we just have to find a way to stay here legally,” she said.

FBCH is not the only U.S. church to have made the journey to Gummersbach. Oak Ridge Baptist Church (ORBC), based in Texas, ran a baseball camp there in the summer of 2024. Lania Cooper, Head of Missions at ORBC, explained that the church uses sports “as an introduction to the gospel of Jesus Christ.” 

Pastor Skopych visited ORBC in April 2024 and expressed his interest in bringing the baseball camp to Gummersbach. Two months later, ORBC sent 17 people to Gummersbach. 

“A lot of places kind of fall in our lap,” Cooper explained. “The Lord just kind of will navigate us to the right place where we’re supposed to be.” 

They stayed with Ukrainians in their apartments and converted a soccer field into two baseball diamonds. In the evenings, they held fellowship and bible study sessions.According to Cooper, 90 Ukrainian children in total participated in the Gummersbach baseball camp. 

Cooper also expressed a particular affiliation with the Ukrainian struggle, describing the story of one Ukrainian family which has been attending ORBC for two years. 

“They literally just walked into our church one day,” said Cooper. “It was pouring down rain. I just remember it so clearly.” Cooper described the family’s integration into ORBC as a “success story.” 

Not all Ukrainian churches in Germany have benefited from American involvement, however. Many have received significant assistance from German Churches. 

Two hours from Gummersbach, in Gensingen, Pavlo Khystov serves as a deacon at a church that was half German and half Kazakhstanian before Ukrainians began arriving in 2022. Because the Kazakhstanians speak Russian, the church now provides Russian translation via headphones for Sunday services. They also organize Ukrainian meetings five nights a week. 

Erkinzhan and Daria Rafikov, members of the Christian Bible Church in Bad Hersfeld, also integrated into a pre-existing German church when they left Ukraine. Now, Erkinzhan serves as a youth leader, preacher, and one of the founding members of the church, and Daria is the worship leader and participates in youth ministry. 

According to the Rafikovs, a translator initially interpreted for Ukrainians from German to Russian, but as the number of Ukrainian attendees increased, they began to hold independent services. They wrote to me that the Ukrainian church has 50 official members, but approximately 80 people attend Sunday service in the German Baptist church’s building. 

For the Rafikovs, the greatest challenge has been the diversity of Christian denominations with varying traditions and expectations. “This makes building something new quite difficult,” the Rafikovs wrote in an email. 

They also stressed that the impacts of the war are ongoing. “The reason for our existence as a church is rooted in the war, which continues,” they added. “This ongoing situation creates a constant burden and emotional stress from which we cannot fully escape.”

Further south, in Albstadt, Oleg Serbo serves as the second pastor in a Ukrainian church called “Revival.” The congregation rents its space from Seventh-day Adventists. Around 60-70 people typically gather for services, most of them from eastern regions of Ukraine, Serbo said. Before the full-scale invasions, Serbo lived with his wife, five biological children, and nine adopted children in Kramatorsk, Ukraine. He was a pastor in a Baptist church in Slovyansk, 15km away.

“Of course, there are certain difficulties,” he wrote me in a Whatsapp message. “We, like most Ukrainian refugees, do not have our own building for worship.” 

The congregation participates in fellowship with other recently formed Ukrainian churches in the area.

“German brothers helped us at the beginning, with paperwork and finding housing. In matters of church organization, praise the Lord, we manage with God’s help and our own efforts,” Serbo wrote. 

***

In Kaufman, Texas, Pastor Brent Gentzel is preparing for the war to end. 

[Insert Gentzel quotes]

Gentzel contacted ORBC asking if it would be one of 50 churches preparing to move into Ukraine when the war is over to evangelize and serve through missions. “They’re wanting to raise up an army of Evangelical people to be prepared for that,” Cooper said. 

As American evangelicals await a resolution to the war, their opinions on Trump’s recent approach to negotiations has varied, as reported by the Kyiv post. [Insert quote from Valerii Antonyuk]. 

However, both ORBC and FBC affiliates involved with mission planning stressed that they do not see their involvement in the Ukrainian cause as political.  

“We have no political agenda at all,” Cooper said. “We’re very Jesus-centered.”

Jeremiah Williams, the leader of FBC’s mission trip in Gummersbach, also understands missions as a strictly religious project. He cited Matthew Chapter 28, which states, “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” 

Williams, who grew up the son of a missions pastor and had already spent five years on missions in Europe, was struck by the “joy in spite of the pain” he witnessed in Gummersbach. “We don’t know what that [pain] is like, unless you’ve experienced having to be a refugee yourself,” he said.  

The FBC mission remained in Gummersbach for eight days. During that time, they stripped walls, demolished floors, and cleared trash. They shared bountiful lunches during work-breaks, heaping their plates with potato salad, tomatoes and cold cuts, and finishing it all off with fresh, doughy Ukrainian cream puffs. One evening, the American college students trekked 3-miles just for McDonalds, but most of their time was spent together, in work or in prayer. 

By the end of the week, the theatre was unrecognizable from what it had been. Still, Almaz has a long way to go before it brings to life its blueprint, which boasts a grand hall, cafe, meeting room, office space, and many more miscellaneous rooms to come. It will also likely face a stringent permitting process down the line according to Bauordnungsrecht, standard German building law.

Skopych hopes that this future space, with all its bells and whistles, will allow Almaz to extend its reach beyond Ukrainians. The church runs a telegram group with 1,381 members, where it sends out Ukrainian lunch invitations far and wide and shares stories, job opportunities, and more. Though these efforts are currently focused on Ukrainian community-building, Skopych rejects insularity in the long-run.

“We share things like this,” Skopych said. “It’s not only for churches; it is for society.”

Important gaps: I’m scheduled to speak with Valerii Antonyuk this Thursday, and am trying to get a hold of Pastor Brent Gentzel, so sorry that the end is pretty messy. Once I get that stuff, I will cut some of the German church stuff to lower word count. Also, please pardon the TK’s. 

A youth group in Almaz Church looks like any other gathering of young evangelicals: teenagers in flannels and hoodies lounging around a table, snacking on chips and discussing how God has touched their lives. 

But these are not ordinary evangelicals. Almaz is a Baptist congregation in Germany, a country where the denomination accounts for only about 1 percent of the population. The congregants aren’t even German; they’re Ukrainians who have fled the full-scale invasion, and in youth group, the teens and 20-somethings might swap stories of this relative or that cousin who had been saved from a drone or a missile strike thanks to God’s hand.

Almaz is one of at least 60 Ukrainian Baptist congregations that have sprung up since 2022 in Germany, the largest single destination in the world for refugees of the full-scale invasion. In an increasingly secular country, the churches and their gospel teachings have become a cultural and spiritual lifeline for young Ukrainians seeking to make sense of Russia’s war. 

Martin Skopych, one of Almaz’s youth group leaders, grew up going to services run by his father, a pastor, in Almaz’s original location in Kyiv. But for most of his life, Skopych had resisted accepting his family’s faith, feeling that he did not truly believe the gospel. 

In February 2022, the Skopyches were visiting friends in Gummersbach, an unremarkable German town just east of Cologne. Then Russia launched its full-scale invasion, and their short vacation turned into an indefinite stay; Skopych had just a backpack of clothes with him. Having to start from zero allowed him to take the leap and decide to get baptized.

“It was [a] period of hard times where you can see miracles,” Skopych said. “It was helpful for me to believe that God [could] control a situation in my country, in my city, my family, in my church, in my life.” 

The wave of young evangelical conversions also extends to the United States, which has admitted at least 270,000 Ukrainian refugees since 2022. In any evangelical church, the name of the game is proselytization: spreading the sound of the gospel to as many people as possible. But the American and German versions of the Ukrainian Baptist movements have taken surprisingly different approaches to their divine mission. While Almaz and its peers in Germany have focused on the Ukrainian refugees continuing to enter the country, Ukrainian Baptist churches in the United States are increasingly looking to non-Ukrainians to support historically fragile congregations.

“The UBC’s goal is not only to be available for Ukrainian Christians,” said Vlad Shanava, the president of youth ministry of the Ukrainian Baptist Convention of America. “Obviously we were in America, and we’re available to all cultures, all ethnicities, and the gospel is to be preached there until, as He says in the Bible, till the end of the world.”

***

Almaz never had a permanent building until it came to Gummersbach. Before the full-scale invasion, the church rented from place to place in Kyiv. This summer, a Baptist congregation in Hendersonville, Tenn., helped them acquire an abandoned movie theater to transform into a worship space. 

The renovations are no small task. The property appears to have been neglected for nearly two decades; its last showing was the fourth Indiana Jones movie in 2008. Almaz has stripped it down to the bones, ripping down tiles and knocking down walls on a recent visit. In addition to the main cinema space, the theater also has several small apartments that need serious fixing-up and a debris-filled backyard. 

The renovations are slapdash in nature — many of the tile removals, for instance, were conducted with sledgehammers and little protective equipment for the resulting dust besides gloves (there’s no telling how they will fare with German fire, electrical, and gas inspections). Still, they’ve generated real enthusiasm beyond Almaz’s congregation, with Ukrainians traveling from hours away in western Germany to assist with the construction. The construction has also caught the eye of American churches, including the Hendersonville congregation, which sent a week-long mission in October. Relying on such volunteer help, the Skopyches are optimistic the renovations will take a year.

For now, Almaz is still using space from a nearby German evangelical congregation. The church can attract some 200 people at a Sunday service from a variety of religious backgrounds, with services held in Ukrainian. Skopych estimated that as many as 60 young people show up to his groups every week. 

In part due to Almaz’s vigorous efforts to assist Ukrainian refugees, the town of 50,000  now has about 3,000 Ukrainians, I was told repeatedly on my visit, although it hasn’t released census data since 2022. Some of the church’s liveliness might be a matter of convenience; Almaz is the nearest Ukrainian cultural institution around, with the next Ukrainian church 30 miles away. But there also appears to be specific resonance in Baptist teachings, which emphasize the idea of God’s and Jesus’ unconditional love.

“It’s clearly said that you’re not perfect. You cannot be perfect. Nobody can be perfect. But Jesus still loves you, Jesus still died for you and died for your sins,” said Viktoriia Hluschenko, who lives in Düsseldorf but often attends services at Almaz. She grew up going to Ukrainian Orthodox services with her grandmother but was not embedded in a particular religious tradition until she came to Germany. “It’s not so easy to explain.”

Anastasia Omelchenko, who fled with her family from Mariupol, had an awakening on the last day of a small summer camp for Ukrainian teens for Germany. 

“We were watching a video about … how we are never alone, because Jesus is always with us or something like that. And at that moment, I thought about my whole life, and suddenly I understood that I was never alone, actually, and Jesus was always beside me,” she said.

“I just couldn’t stop crying,” Omelchenko added. “I don’t know how to explain it. It’s like when the Holy Spirit touches your heart.” She was baptized the next summer when she came back as a camp counselor.

Baptists are a significant minority in Ukraine; the official association of Ukrainian Baptist churches claims only about 120,000 members, while more than three in five Ukrainians identify in some way with the Eastern Orthodox church. 

“When I go to Orthodox Church, I don’t understand what happens here,” said Lisa TK, who also attends services at Almaz. “When I go to my church, I understand what my pastor says … these people try to be like Jesus. It’s really good for me.”

Baptism and other evangelical denominations are unique in practicing a so-called believers’ baptism: the church only baptizes those who have publicly and consciously accepted Christ, as opposed to automatically accepting children of families in the congregation.

“The only requirement is for you to repent and to be saved by the faith,” said David Pavlyuk, a youth minister at the Church of New Hope near Charlotte, N.C. “That’s not something that we can judge about one another. When you repent, we believe that that’s a completely personal experience.”

Despite thousands of miles of distance, these Ukrainian churches in the United States and Germany adhere closely to the Baptist tradition. The scenes at a 12 p.m. service at the Church of New Hope or any Sunday at Almaz are strikingly similar: singing in Ukrainian to off-key worship, hands of the performers and congregation raised in swaying prayer. Better description TK. In the wake of the full-scale invasion, these churches have also worked to assist Ukrainian refugees in the practical aspects of moving to a new country, helping them find apartments, obtain drivers’ licenses, and furnish their new housing. 

“It’s definitely a melting pot,” said Pavyluk. “We have people who come from different Protestant denominations: Pentecostals, different types of Baptists. We have people who come from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. We have people who went to Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine. And obviously we have people who never attended church.”

While many of Germany’s Ukrainian churches have popped up in the last three years, the Ukrainian Baptist coalition in the United States stretches back about 80 years, beginning with a group of Ukrainian Baptists in Chester, Pa. seeking to support refugees from the so-called Bible Belt of the Soviet Union. Since then, these churches’ congregations have been bolstered by successive waves of migration: missionaries from South America in the 1960s and 1970s, priests and Christians escaping Soviet thaw in the 1990s. 

But the community has not always been stable. The Ukrainian Baptist Convention’s website is littered with churches across the country that have merged closed their doors: Brooklyn, Milwaukee, Kansas City, Fresno, Calif. Many of the now-defunct congregations overly focused on traditional services, said Pavyluk, an obstacle when trying to retain American children of Ukrainian immigrants, who could more easily jump to another Baptist church.

“There have been cases where churches have stopped existing because they just weren’t able to assimilate — not so much into their culture, but so much into their time period,” he said. 

“Four years ago before the war, I feel like  … we were moving into the direction of potentially more American-centered services,” said Shanava. “But the war definitely brought us back a little bit because of the influx of refugees.”

The Ukrainian Baptist Convention currently has 24 registered churches, half of which are clustered in southern New Jersey and the Philadelphia suburbs, totaling to about 3,500 adult members. The full-scale invasion has brought them another wave of refugee members. The Church of New Hope’s congregation has doubled in size, Pavyluk estimated, with their youth population tripling. 

No longer able to fit all its parishioners for a single sermon, the church has started offering an additional English-language service in addition to the usual Ukrainian. This new service attracts Ukrainian-Americans as well as Ukrainian refugees looking to improve their English, on average 50–100 people compared to well over 200 for a Ukrainian-language service.

“There is a lot of immigrants that came within the past three years,” said Yuriy Rudnitsky, who leads the church’s English ministry. “Their kids, being immersed in American culture, are already learning English very, very quickly. And so they go, ‘Okay, I’m starting to attend this, one, to help my own English out … and then I’m bringing my kid’ because they already understand English at a level that vastly outpaces their own.”  

“It is somewhat familiar, but speaking English,” he added.

Not every church has been as successful as New Hope. In the past year, the Ukrainian Baptist Convention has recorded only 100 new baptisms nationwide — up from previous years, said Shanava, the president of the convention’s youth ministry, but still “unimpressive.” 

The foothold of evangelical conversions among Germany’s Ukrainian refugees is not universal, either. Omelchenko recalled feeling alienated from other Ukrainian teens in her school in Wesel, a small town in the west.

“I looked at them and I see that I’m not like them,” she said. “They’re interested only in, like, drinking, and having parties and stuff like that.” Not having many friends was one of the factors that pushed her to seek out the church, she said.

Still, the movement is notable for a country — indeed, a continent — where religiosity has been sharply declining for decades, including among youth. Now, refugee churches like Almaz — many of whom are still getting settled in Germany — are already looking to engage in missionary work. Skopych’s family, for instance, considered going back to Kyiv to proselytize. Meanwhile, Ukrainian Baptist churches in the United States are increasingly looking to expand their congregations outside of Ukrainians.

“There is community around us that isn’t Ukrainian, that also requires the gospel to be preached to them,” said Shanava of the Ukrainian Baptist Convention. “I believe there’s a revival going on in America. A lot of people are coming back to Christ. A lot of people are coming back to religion.”

At New Hope, this has meant engaging in the local community — working with charities, holding a fall festival, evangelizing on the street — as churches do, Ukrainian or otherwise. Many of the church’s refugees have started to give back in this manner. The English-language service has also been a major step in its outreach efforts, allowing congregants to easily bring their friends without worrying about a language barrier.

“We have a lot of young people, or even college age kids, that go, ‘Oh, yeah, I can invite my friend.’ And they do,” Rudnitsky said.

New Hope has also attracted a smaller number of Americans with no social connection to the church but who want to support Ukraine. [I want to talk to one of these guys so bad and am still working on it]. Rudnitsky cited a U.S. military veteran who had reached out to him looking for a way to get involved in Ukraine. The man now attends New Hope’s men’s group regularly. 

The efforts of New Hope and Ukrainian Baptist churches come as Baptists in the United States have navigated increasingly unstable congregations. The Southern Baptist Convention reported in April that its membership had hit a 50-year low, while also baptizing 250,000 people, up 10 percent from the previous year. In Germany, Baptists number only about 73,000, and the number of Protestants and Catholics has continued to shrink. An April survey by the research group Fowid estimated that, for the first time ever, a plurality of Germans had no religious affiliation.

So the Baptists do what they can. Skopych, for instance, has become a vigorous street evangelist in addition to his leadership in Almaz’s youth groups. 

“Even in Germany, for example, I see big opportunity in Cologne to work with students, and to share gospel. I think for me, it’s possible to do something bigger,” Skopych said. 

“All you have to do is believe and come to Christ. He’s done all the hard work,” Shanava said. “I just think it’s the truth.”

Jack Goldfrank was uneasy on his way to the German town of Neustadt – the same land his father had been forced to leave in 1933 for fear of Nazi persecution. 83 years old, he still wonders if his parents, gone for decades, would approve of this pilgrimage to their homeland almost a century after their escape. 

Upon arriving in Neustadt, Jack and his wife, Jane, were greeted by the Mayor, who announced that they were the second Jewish Americans to return to Neustadt in connection with their family’s history. Welcoming them into his office, he opened what he called “The Book of Remembrances,” with the name of every Neustadt Jew who had fled Nazi persecution from 1933 onwards. 

The Mayor then accompanied Jack and Jane to the town’s Jewish cemetery – a burial ground Jack called “not in pristine shape,” but “decent.” “There were a lot of Goldfranks in the cemetery,” Jack tells me. “But the last burial there was in 1937.” No Jews who escaped Nazi persecution had ever returned to live in Neustadt.

Jane adds, “The mayor was very nice. But, in my mind, I’m always remembering that these people, or their parents, were Nazis. It was always like, do they really feel this, or are they doing what they think is right? Does it matter? For me, it was confusing.” 

“My big feeling was discomfort,” Jack says. 

This trip was the first Jack Goldfrank took on his new German passport after reclaiming his German citizenship in the first months of 2025. This encounter with the mayor of Neustadt would fade in his recollection of the visit, overshadowed by lively memories of Berlin light festivals and museum tours. It wasn’t until sitting with me, his granddaughter, that he and his wife began to revisit the feelings of unease they experienced in Neustadt.

My family is just one of the many American Jewish families that have reclaimed their German citizenship in recent years. Since 2016, the German Consulate in New York City has reported a more than 300% increase in applications for citizenship reclamation, parallel with President Donald Trump’s rise to power. Yet for some Jews who return to Germany generations after their ancestors fled Nazi persecution, the reality reveals that the nation has not moved as far from its past as they once imagined – encountering an overextension of Germany’s “memory culture” around the Holocaust that can manifest in instances of fetishization of Jewish culture and an overperformance of repentance.

Many recipients of reclaimed citizenship are two to three generations removed from the  Holocaust themselves; these individuals do not connect reclamation efforts to a traumatic history, but rather an opportunity for smoother travel. Maya Shwayder, a journalist based in New England who reclaimed her citizenship in 2014, said she remembers thinking, “This is great! We can travel so much more easily. This is really, really useful.” 

Laura Moser, Texan author and former politician, laughs, telling me, “Why wouldn’t we want a second passport?” Moser continues, “The people who were my generation immediately started applying once we got it because, once you have all the documents and the place, everyone can get it. The older people did not get it right away.”

Jack Goldfrank is only one generation removed from the traumas Nazi Germany inflicted upon his parents, yet for him too “the driving force was really to have the ability to explore other countries pretty easily.” He continues, “My mother and father never talked about their life in Germany, and, shame on me, I never asked them. They never volunteered, and I never raised the issue… I’m not sure if my parents would be proud of what I’ve done, or if they would feel very negative.”

Younger Americans, with a less vivid and recent recollection of the Holocaust, make up the majority of those with reclaimed passports who then decide to move to Germany permanently, mostly for job opportunities or the hope of an improved quality of life. Shwayder and Moser are in their ranks. Sitting in a noisy Berlin cafe, Moser tells me, “There’s definite practical aspects [of living in Germany], like the schools here, and it really does have a functioning social democracy.” 

However, upon moving to Germany, Moser did not necessarily encounter the socialized democratic utopia she expected. Instead, she describes a very different reality. 

“They fetishize Jews,” she tells me. “The ones who don’t are lying. They’re like, ‘Oh, wow, it’s so beautiful. Thank you. Thank you so much.’ They feel exonerated… like they’re forgiven. And I’m like…no, I literally just wanted healthcare and like good schools…I don’t volunteer that I’m Jewish anymore.”

Germany often receives praise for the ways in which the nation has memorialized historical wrongs and continues to acknowledge the mass atrocity of the holocaust in their lives. There is even a word for it, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, which translates to “confronting the past.” 

American philosopher and Jew who relocated to Germany herself, Dr. Susan Neiman wrote a book in 2019 called Learning from the Germans, making the case that Germany had successfully faced its Nazi past and urging Western countries, the United States in particular, to follow the German example.

However, when I reached out to Dr. Neiman to discuss her thoughts on this topic, she told me that her views, and the world, had changed considerably since she wrote the book. “I’d have never written that book had I not thought that things were getting significantly better,” she says. 

In a stark contrast from her previous position, Dr. Neiman tells me that she believes German vergangenheitsbewältigung has gone too far. “It’s to the point that some of them call themselves the perpetrator nation. But, if that’s how you essentialize yourself, then there has to be a victim nation, and that victim nation is the Jews.”

Psychologist Dr. Jasmin Spiegel writes that, “The need for historical ‘closure’ is greater for perpetrator groups, combined with the desire to “get rid of” the guilt…These tendencies are reinforced the less contact (non-Jewish German) people have with minorities (here, Jews in Germany). This lack of contact tends to be the rule rather than the exception in Germany, given its current demographics. In the absence of contact, stronger stereotypes and prejudices as well as a layman’s understanding of history are used to understand “the foreign.” 

Therefore, Dr. Spiegel hypothesizes that it is a lack of contact between Jewish community members and Germans that reinforces this idea of fetishization, fueled by stronger stereotypes and prejudices that cannot be disproven by in-person communication. 

“All these comparisons between America reckoning with slavery versus German memory culture…” Laura Moser hesitates. “It’s like we, everyone in America, has met a Black person before. Nobody in Germany has met a Jewish person before. So it’s completely a monument culture. It’s just, it’s like they think we are the things on the street… they don’t even engage with diversity.”

Dr. Neiman says it’s not only non-Jewish Germans who display this obsession with Holocaust remembrance. “The people who count as real Jews of the official Jewish community are constantly focusing on the victimhood of the Nazi Period,” she says.

Her words jar me: “The people who count as real Jews of the official Jewish community.” Did that mean that there were fake Jews? Or Jews who didn’t count as part of the “official” community?

Moser, explaining her feelings of relative separation from the Jewish community in Germany, tells me, “Almost all the congregations here are led by Germans who converted…It’s a thing, and I find it really distasteful to sort of adopt this victim’s mentality when their grandparents were literally Nazis.”

When I begin to ask Dr. Neiman about Germans who adopt Jewish identities, she interrupts me. She exclaims, “Oh, the fake Jews? There are lots of them!… Half of the rabbis in the country!”

While I could not find any data to support both Moser and Neiman’s shared claim of a rabbinical space dominated by recent converts, their confident assessment does point to, at the very least, a common feeling of a strong convert presence within Jewish community leadership. 

“Who would you rather be, a child of a victim or a child of a Nazi?” Dr. Neiman asks me. “It’s almost to the point where if someone starts really earnestly telling me that their great aunt was Jewish,” she starts nodding uncomfortably and mimes walking away, laughing.  

Dr. Spiegel assesses the psychological motivations for what she calls “transgenerational posttraumatic identity confusions.” 

“By choosing a victim identity, painful emotions of shame and guilt following the experience of collective trauma on the side of the perpetrators, as well as historical and moral responsibilities, do not need to be dealt with. The gain is the acquisition of a morally unattainable position….Anyone who can take refuge behind the protective shield of a – supposedly – Jewish identity can expect to be unassailable. The moral judgment of those who invent Holocaust victims is essentially a mockery of all those who really were tortured and killed by the Nazis.” 

In the 1950s, following the end of World War II, there was a significant uptick in Germans who wanted to convert to Judaism. While there were approximately 25,000 Jews living in former West Germany and only a few hundred in East Germany, thousands of applications were submitted by Germans who Barbara Steiner – historian who penned a book called Die Inszenierung des Jüdischen or “The Staging of Jewishness” – says were burdened by feelings “of guilt and shame and shock” over the Holocaust. 

The Central Welfare Board of Jews in Germany reported that, within the past twenty-one years, 1,697 Germans have converted to Judaism. 

“You still cannot be there as a rabbi speaking the prayer for remembering Holocaust victims who were murdered, maybe by your own ancestors,” Steiner is quoted as saying in an article for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “There is definitely a red line…You cannot give this [Nazi] heritage away with a bath in the mikvah,” referring to the ritual conversion bath.

Dr. Neiman describes this phenomenon of the very Germans who once traced their lineage in an attempt to prove they had no Jewish ancestry now scouring their relations for proof of a connection to Judaism, leading to what she calls “these perennial Jew scandals.” 

Neiman tells me about several cases in which young Germans claimed Jewish heritage when their ties to Judaism were murky at best. 

“There was a big case a couple of years ago, a young writer named Fabian Wolf… he claimed his mother had told him he was Jewish, and it turned out that there was pretty definite proof that he wasn’t, and it turned very nasty…There are just Jew scandals of various kinds that get a lot of attention from the press. And with Fabian, I think people were vicious towards him, but vicious because he took a fair stand on Israel and Palestine.”

Neiman asserts that it is oftentimes the voracity of one’s support for the state of Israel, or rather lack thereof, that accrues media skepticism regarding one’s Jewish identity, rather than the validity of their tie to Judaism itself. 

“There are other people, Max Czollek, for example,” Neiman says, “Czollek’s claim to be Jewish is maybe just slightly better… but he explicitly stays out of any questions about Israel and Palestine. He says he’s critical of lots of things in Germany, but he says it’s antisemitic to expect [him] to have an opinion on Israel. Now. I think this is such bad faith…I just don’t think that one can do that when this is a country whose government claims to represent us; you cannot just simply say, “Eh, not my problem.” But anyway, hey, let me prop myself up on just a little bit of Jewish background and not a word on Israel.”

The larger issue of the tie between anti-semitism and protest acts committed by Israel seems to be very prevalent for Jews in Germany, with Germany’s draconian guidelines for protest resulting in the arrest of Jewish Germans for the offense of anti-semitism. 

Dr. Neiman explains the irony here, “Polls show that a great majority doesn’t like the German policy towards Israel, which is even more extreme than the U.S. and Trump’s. Okay. So people don’t like it, but they are… It’s just a complete taboo to say anything bad about Israel. And there’s a tendency to embrace any Jew whatever they do or don’t do, unless they criticize Israel.”

Moser tells me that this dichotomy has caused significant discomfort for her during her time in Germany.  

 “I don’t know how much you followed, but it’s insane. They’re like arresting Jews left and right for nothing. Phrases you can’t say, like from the river to the sea… It’s like, get in jail. They don’t understand…And that’s where they’re equating the anti-Israel with antisemitism. I mean, for millions of reasons, but they don’t really understand… They have no nuanced understanding of what Judaism is or what Jewish people are,” she says. “That’s the thing that’s made me be like, why do I live here? Because these people have not learned anything.”

At the end of our time together, I ask Dr. Neiman the question that to this day plagues me, one that has become glaringly apparent throughout my discussions with American Jews: Can there ever truly be redemption for these historical crimes against humanity?

She laughs. “I’m laughing only because it’s a question that I’m left with, having spent a good…Thank God, not all of my work is about this, but I’ve certainly written two whole books on the subject and thought about it a great deal, and at this point, I don’t know…. And I count as one of the people that ought to have an answer to it, but well, I thought I did…I really did think I had an answer to your question, and I don’t anymore,” she tells me. 

Neiman hesitates for a moment. “There’s a nice saying by an Irish professor who suggests we should build a monument to amnesia and forget where we put it.”

Is that really the way forward? Would erasing the past, with its guilt, shame, and persistent need for forgiveness, erase the labelling and fetishization that American Jews feel so deeply in Germany? 

When I speak to Maya Schwayder, an American Jew who reclaimed her German citizenship and worked in Berlin for years as a journalist, I ask what it felt like to live as a German there. Without hesitation, she says, “That is something that you and I never will be.”

Can amnesia truly bridge the chasm between “real” and “fake” Jews and between those who are allowed to be German? Or does forgetting simply make this dichotomy more hidden, intensifying barriers that are too etched into Germany’s past and present?

As we leave a Berlin cafe, Moser turns to me to tell me one last thing, “I have no illusions about Germany… I don’t expect anything from the German people… But also, I have my bag packed. I’m not from here. I don’t care. I’m not gonna be, like, weeping over the earth that I was raised on.”

Her grandfather, like my own ancestors, was forced to leave his whole life behind as Nazis stormed Jewish towns, homes, and businesses. He fled to the U.S., ready to begin a new, safe life for his family. How could he know that, about eight decades later, his granddaughter would move to Germany, escaping the threats of fascism seeping into her own home country? And, now, that she would be contemplating leaving Germany once again, with no idea where her next supposed safe haven may be? 

“I think there’s something very Jewish about having exit plans,” Moser says. “It’s like keeping your bag packed by the door.”

By the time Tahmina Ataee arrived at Bard College Berlin, she had already studied under three education systems, crossed two borders, and learned four languages. But the opportunity that once made her journey possible has disappeared for nearly all Afghan girls, as the door that once led to education and brighter futures is being forcibly shut.

Over the past two decades, a generation of Afghan women proved what was possible when educational doors were open. As Afghan sociologist Abdul Wahid Gulrani explains, the transformation of women’s education after 2001 was not simply academic. “Girls who grew up in dusty courtyards and unsafe neighborhoods suddenly entered classrooms, universities, and public life. They became teachers, journalists, and community leaders,” he said. For women like Tahmina, it meant the chance to imagine a different future.

Today, Afghanistan stands out tragically as the only country in the world where secondary and higher education are forbidden to girls and women, according to UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. The agency estimates in 2025 that nearly 2.2 million girls are now banned from attending school “beyond the primary level,” a reality UNESCO warns almost wiped out two decades of progress for education in Afghanistan. 

Meanwhile, “women have been banned from universities” since December 2022, cutting off one of the few pathways for higher learning, UNESCO reports. The consequences of these actions are profound. UNESCO estimates the “suspension of women’s higher education alone” is expected to cost the country up to US$9.6 billion in lost potential by 2066.

Today, formal schooling for many Afghan girls has been driven into hiding. According to NPR, some teenage girls now attend secret tutoring centers hidden in basements and private homes, where they study English, the Quran, and high-school level subjects. As Gulrani observes, “education in Afghanistan is not dead, it has gone underground.” “Across the country, girls continue to study secretly in homes, basements, and informal community classes. Some are taking online courses through their phones and laptops. Mothers are teaching daughters at home,” Gulrani said. This quiet but resilient movement, he says, shows that “while the Taliban can close schools, they cannot extinguish the will to learn.”

In this landscape of shrinking horizons, stories like Tahmina Ataee’s stand out as a glimpse of the talent and ambition now at risk. In Kabul, her education reflected the mix of schools that emerged after 2001, when private, international, and public institutions expanded opportunities for girls. She first attended a global private school, then an all-girls Turkish high school where, as she put it, “we had to learn everything twice, once in Persian and once in English.” She even enrolled in an American university in Kabul before her education was disrupted by the Taliban takeover.

Ataee’s path is not unusual for her generation. She is part of a generation of Afghan women whose lives were shaped by two decades of expanded access to education. Between 2001 and 2021, millions of girls entered classrooms for the first time as private and international schools opened alongside a growing public system. Many of those students later left the country, some as refugees and others on scholarships; however, their education enabled them to build new futures abroad. 

Still, national progress often masked the realities inside individual classrooms. For Ataee, the experience looked very different from many of her peers. In Kabul, her classmates were often the daughters of politicians and businessmen, while she was the only Hazara ethnic minority student in her grade. The difference, she said, wasn’t only social. “They put a lot of emphasis on religion and like religious practice,” she said. “We even had a mosque inside the school. That was uncommon.”

Religious expectations felt unfamiliar to her. “I have not grown up to be like that,” she said. “My dad is a very, very non-religious person. My mom has had a bit of a background, but she’s also chill.” Yet pressure to conform was constant. “It’s also not peer pressure, but I guess it is, because they’d be like, oh, it’s lunch break, we have an hour-long lunch, and I would go eat first, but they’re like, no, we have to go pray,” she said. “I wouldn’t call it brainwash, but I was also traumatized, so I would call it that.”

At home, faith mattered less than education. Her father, who worked for a German nonprofit in Afghanistan, encouraged her to focus on learning. Among Hazara families, this emphasis on education was common. “Not only just my family but friends I know and also relatives, they put a lot of emphasis on education,” she said. “They always like push their kids to study.”

Tahmina’s education was interrupted when the Taliban captured Kabul in August 2021. “We had to leave everything behind,” she said. “We used to live in a flat, and then everything we owned was gone. I don’t have that sort of attachment to materials anymore.” With help from her father’s German employer, her family left Afghanistan, first to Pakistan and then to Germany. “We were one of the first families they got out,” she said.

Arriving in Germany, Tahmina recalled, “it was a bit chaotic when we got here as well, because they thought we were undocumented or, like, illegally entering, which was not the case.” They spent their first weeks in quarantine camps, navigating new rules and procedures. “It was scary because you don’t know what’s going to happen,” she said. “One day they’d wake you up to do blood tests or like very procedural things, but like to us, I was like, what are we doing?”

As they settled, Tahmina continued her studies online. Before leaving Afghanistan, she had been enrolled “in an American school,” she said. “Then, because of the whole takeover, they were like, okay, our current students can continue their studies online without any tuition, so that’s how I was able to do two semesters while I was in Germany.”

When the university reopened a branch in Qatar, she realized she could not continue there. “I was like, this is not going to happen because I’d have to be there,” she said. “My brother was like, oh, there’s a branch here, you can apply.” At the time, she was learning German and preparing to apply to a local university. “Everyone had the same sort of plan,” she said. “You study German, get to university level, and then apply to a German school. That was my idea of how it’s going to be.” Ultimately, Bard College Berlin offered a different path. “I applied and I checked and I was like, oh, okay, I guess I got accepted,” she said, laughing.

Now at Bard, Tahmina is excelling academically, consistently earning top grades. She is also channeling her experience into research on Afghanistan’s brain drain, investigating why the country’s brightest students and professionals leave and how the loss of educated women affects Afghan society. “I’m trying to understand how the talent that was built in the country can be sustained, there is not a lot of research on it,” she said.

Tahmina said the past few months have been a period of intense transition. “It has been quite a chaotic month as I’ve been finishing my senior project,” she said. Completing her bachelor’s degree, she added, feels like “one of my biggest academic achievements so far.” She has also stayed involved with Ejaad Berlin, an initiative that financially supports Afghan women through embroidery. “I haven’t held a formal leadership role,” she explained, “but being part of it has helped me strengthen my reporting and communication skills.” Beyond that, she has taken on several jobs over the past few years, including two and a half years as an Orientation Leader and a position as a German tutor. Since July, she has also been working with the examination department at another private university. “All in all, these experiences, big or small, have made me feel proud of how far I’ve come,” she said.

For Tahmina, her education is deeply important. The barriers she faced in Afghanistan, and the millions of girls whose education is now stifled, inform her understanding of what is at stake. Her work highlights both the potential of educated women and the societal cost when that potential is denied. She hopes her future job will do more than study the problem as she hopes to work for an organization that helps people.

While Tahmina’s departure marked a significant loss for Afghanistan, she is not the only young Afghan woman whose education has been disrupted by the Taliban. Madina Sarabi, another student from Kabul, also had to leave her home country to continue her studies.

Madina grew up in Kabul, attending school in Afghanistan until 10th grade. She said she loved her school, describing it as a place that helped students “grow academically and grow socially” and offered extracurricular activities such as drawing and painting classes. Her family, she explained, “really prioritized education” and invested in courses and programs to help her and her siblings succeed.

Her education, however, was abruptly halted in 2021 when the Taliban regained control. Madina recalled leaving school during a history exam as staff and security guards told all students to evacuate. While boys eventually returned, girls were barred indefinitely. She described this period as one filled with fear, “Fear was always there…if I didn’t follow the rules, I could get arrested.” Despite the risks, she continued participating in school programs and cultural events wherever possible.

Madina was determined to continue her education abroad, but obtaining a student visa proved challenging. Because Afghanistan had no functioning embassies, she first had to travel to Iran to process her Italian visa. “It was risky because if the Taliban would know that I was going out of the country,” “they would not allow me,” she said. She eventually secured the visa and traveled alone to Italy to complete the International Baccalaureate at UWC Adriatic, a two-year pre-university program.

In Italy, Madina adapted to a new academic system taught in English, which she described as “one of the hardest educational systems in the world.” She also took part in social initiatives, volunteering at a women’s shelter and participating in arts and crafts programs for women facing domestic violence.

Madina is now a student at Bard College Berlin, studying politics, economics, and social thought in a seminar-based program. She participates in Afghan student initiatives, including the Afghan Development Academy, and engages in student-led projects and discussions. She said Bard has provided “a lot of opportunities and spaces to get educated in every topic” and allows students to start their own initiatives.

Madina’s journey highlights what Afghanistan has lost due to the Taliban’s restrictions on education. Her intelligence, leadership, and dedication to learning, which could have contributed to her home country, are now being realized abroad. Reflecting on her peers still in Afghanistan, she said, “They are so brave, they are so courageous, and they’re so resilient…if I made it out, I was no better than them. They all can do it.”

Afghanistan’s loss is visible not only in the students forced abroad, but also in the women who went on to build influential careers overseas after being pushed from home, women like Zulaikha Aziz.

Zulaikha Aziz immigrated to the United States as a child, and the path she built for herself was shaped by an unwavering belief in education. She went on to earn a bachelor’s degree from McGill University, a Master of Science from the London School of Economics, and a law degree from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. After completing her studies, she returned to Afghanistan in 2002 to work on development projects, focusing intensely on expanding opportunities for women in rural areas. “A lot of my focus [is] integrating women into our activities,” she recalled, describing the early post-Taliban years when rebuilding the country meant ensuring women could once again participate in public life.

During her work, however, she began to see the limitations of development without law. “None of the work that we were doing would make a lasting impact if there weren’t legal structures… guaranteeing people’s rights and… a way to enforce those rights,” she said. Motivated by that realization, she shifted paths, embracing legal education and human-rights advocacy, eventually working with international organizations on governance and legal-rights projects.

After many years in law and human-rights work, Aziz found herself drawn back to an earlier passion, jewelry. Jewelry had been “the only tangible thing that my family was able to bring out,” she said, heirlooms handed down by her grandmother that were now symbols of culture, memory, and identity. Burnout and the weight of conflict pushed her to reconsider her path. “I was so burnt out on my last assignment in Afghanistan that I was like, okay, I’m going to take some time to really explore my creative side,” she recalled.

Back in the United States in 2019, she enrolled in the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) in California, a move that would mark the birth of her new vision. By March 2021, she launched Mazahri, naming it after her grandmother. The brand revived traditional Afghan motifs and embedded them within fine jewelry made from 18-karat gold, ethically sourced gemstones, and carefully crafted designs.

From the beginning, ethical sourcing and social responsibility were non-negotiable for Aziz. She insisted that all pieces use only certified materials like fairmined gold, traceable stones where possible, and production by small, fairly treated artisanal workshops. She said she was “adamant that the materials I use had to be materials that were not causing more harm to people or the environment.”

The reception to Mazahri was strong and immediate. Collectors and clients responded not just to the craftsmanship, but to the story behind the jewelry. Her pieces attracted attention and sales. Online customers around the world began to place orders.

Running a jewelry business is never easy, she admits, but for Zulaikha, it is a labor of love. Her legal training helps her navigate the practical side of business, while her cultural heritage shapes the vision and meaning behind each piece. From the very beginning, she built her company with a purpose beyond profit, supporting Afghan women and girls.

As she explained, “profits from sales go to helping women’s rights or girls’ rights. So we partnered with Women for Afghan Women our first few years. And then this year, we are partnering with Malala Fund to support their Afghanistan initiative.” The new collection, she added, was “inspired by Afghan girls and their fighting for their right to equal access of education.”

Through Mazahri, Aziz transformed hardship into a story of creativity, ethics, and success. Her journey shows what happens when education, identity, and determination converge. Afghanistan may have lost her. But the world gained a steward of its heritage, a champion for ethical craftsmanship, and a tangible reminder of the talent that a country lost when so many were forced to leave.

The stories of Tahmina Ataee, Madina Sarabi, and Zulaikha Aziz highlight both the talent Afghanistan has lost and the resilience its women continue to show. Forced abroad by the Taliban’s restrictions, they have turned education, creativity, and determination into paths for impact. While their country has been deprived of their full potential, their achievements abroad serve as a testament to what Afghan women can accomplish when given the opportunity.

On the morning of March 31, 2025, Ekaterina Fomina waited anxiously in Berlin. She was expecting a message from her lawyer, Yulia Kuznetsova, with an update on her case. It was only the fourth session, and her lawyer had not yet been allowed to present their defense.

Then her phone flashed. It was not her lawyer, but a colleague. More notifications followed. Fomina’s name began to appear across Russian media. Within half an hour, the Moscow court handling her case had sentenced her in absentia to eight and a half years in prison for “spreading fake news” about the Russian army, one of the heaviest penalties under the law.

“I was crying a lot,” she said. “Because it is not about committing a crime and receiving a fair sentence. It is about realizing that your country calls you a terrorist.”

Fomina’s sentence is part of the Kremlin’s sweeping campaign to silence independent journalists since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, forcing the majority to flee the country. Berlin, where Fomina now lives, has become the informal capital of this fractured press in exile. Since the war began, hundreds of Russian journalists have relocated to the city, supported by a fragile network of advocacy groups and NGOs. They continue their reporting, but they struggle to find an audience. 

Inside Russia, their work is banned, criminalized, or drowned out by a state-media ecosystem that has reshaped public opinion with relentless discipline. Outside Russia, they face a different form of suspicion due to their country of origin. It’s softer, diffuse, often unspoken, but no less corrosive. They speak from a position that is simultaneously authoritative and unwanted: those who know the system best have become the least trusted narrators of its violence. Their exile had quickly become epistemic.

The foundations of the paradox lie inside Russia itself. The prosecution of journalists like Fomina rests on a public narrative that has been cultivated for years, where dissent is treachery and alternative accounts of the war are foreign plots.

Political scientist Grigore Pop-Eleches, who has conducted daily online surveys of Russian public opinion since May 2022, describes a landscape that has barely budged since the invasion began. “About 65% are in favour of the war… between 40 and 45% are strongly pro-war,” he said. Supporters stay supporters; opponents withdraw from public view. Even major disruptions such as high casualties and criticism of the Ministry of Defense barely penetrate. “Putin is Teflon,” he added.

Underlying this is a media diet that, for many Russians, has not changed in decades. “Between 80 and 90% of supporters watched state TV daily,” Pop-Eleches explained. Opponents consumed a mix of TV and online sources, but remained a minority.

For exiled journalists, this means a fundamental rupture. Their professional identity depends on an audience that no longer sees them as legitimate. Many Russians are either unable or unwilling to access their work. Others view them through the lens the Kremlin engineered years ago, as agents of sabotage. Independent reporting is still accessible through VPNs that bypass censorship, but demand is thin.

“Only those who before the war had political thinking still continue receiving news,” Fomina said. “The majority of the population are actually suffering from the lack of technical education… people are very limited in receiving alternative information.”

The legal case against her reflects this distance. She described the file as sloppy, almost doughy, filled with errors and misattributions. Bucha was misspelled, and a male voice was attributed to her. “They simply did not care,” she said. Guilt simply functioned as a reaffirmation of the state’s narrative rather than a refutation of her reporting.

For journalists like her, the audience that matters most has been structurally deregistered from reality. To them, she is now just a threat.

If Russians distrust exiled journalists for being too distant from the state, others distrust them for being too close to it.

This tension shadows the lives of nearly all Russian reporters in Europe. In Prague, where Fomina lived for two years before moving to Berlin, the hostility was open. “We are representatives of a country who is the aggressor,” she recalled. “They don’t care about our work, they simply generalize.” 

The difficulty is not only political but social. Everyday interactions become tests of perception. At a house party in Berlin, Fomina noticed people avoiding her once they learned where she was from. The first question in all interactions is always “Where are you from?” A question loaded with consequences. “You don’t know what will be the reaction,” she said. “People could not understand the depth of your experience.”

Anastasia Korotkova, another young journalist now based in Berlin, experiences a parallel form of invisibility. At only twenty-six, she writes under a pseudonym for security reasons. She works as a researcher for The New York Times, but they don’t allow pseudonyms, leaving her uncredited. “You either put your name, or you’re not putting your name,” she said. “At least they let me work.”

To be visible enough to matter, she must expose herself to danger. To be safe, she must disappear. European media institutions often demand transparency and documentation in ways that Russian journalists, whose families remain inside the country, cannot provide. 

The social fabric of exile reflects the same tension. Berlin is full of Russian journalists, but the community is fractured. Competitive, anxious, wary of infiltration. “Any Russian independent media is still Russian,” Korotkova said. “If they want to ditch you, they will ditch you.” Rumours circulate quickly,  and reputations stick. “There is no union. Nobody is fighting for our rights.”

And around them, a broader European public that often cannot distinguish between the Russian state and its opponents. “Locals could not understand me,” Fomina said. “Because of informational wars, I’m also kind of a very problematic person.”

The result is a peculiar dislocation. Exiled journalists are neither trusted by the society they fled, nor fully welcomed by the one they entered. Their work is doubted from all sides.

If ordinary Europeans struggle to understand who these journalists are, state institutions often seem even more confused. Russians fleeing the regime arrive in systems with few tools to recognise them as dissidents or protect them as such. The result is a kind of bureaucratic violence: not overt persecution, but rules and omissions that make their lives precarious while never fully acknowledging what they risked to leave.

In Berlin, this begins with paperwork. Unlike Ukrainians, who received a clear temporary protection regime, anti-war Russians often arrive into what Danila Bedyaev, a former regional journalist from Yaroslavl, described as a system that “didn’t know what to do with us.”

Many staff in refugee agencies were themselves Ukrainian, carrying their own grief. For them, helping Russians, however opposed to the war, was emotionally fraught.

For Bedyaev and his family, this ambiguity became an eight-month legal limbo. They had reached Germany after a hurried escape through Egypt, following his wife’s detention for an individual anti-war protest. As their visas neared expiration, they applied for protection but insisted on remaining in Berlin rather than being sent to a refugee camp. NGOs argued they should be moved from asylum to a freelance status that would allow them to work. The immigration office’s response was a letter claiming that all of the family’s passports—Russian and even his young son’s American one—had been lost.

Pressure from lawyers and NGOs eventually forced the authorities to issue “grey passports” (travel documents for non-citizens) and a freelance residence permit. By then, they had spent months without documents or a clear category.

For younger reporters like Korotkova, the path is different but equally exposed. Ineligible for a humanitarian visa, she applied for a German freelance visa from France. Officials demanded €23,000 blocked in her bank account, money she would only receive back slowly as a pseudo-salary—a way to ensure she would “never apply for political asylum,” she explained. Lawyers later negotiated the amount down to €11,000, but the principle remained. She borrowed from friends, stacked fellowships, and convinced her part-time employer to pay a year’s salary in advance so she could briefly show the balance. “Technically, I had all the rights to go for political asylum,” she said, but feared being placed in refugee facilities and losing the ability to work.

In practice, these systems treat anti-war Russians less as people at risk than as potential burdens. To acknowledge them as political refugees would require states to accept not just the war’s victims, but its internal opponents too. Instead, they are funnelled into categories designed for workers, tourists, or generic migrants.

The sense of not being seen is compounded by another, more intimate pressure: the fear that even in exile, they are still being watched. Fomina describes a social world in which stories circulate about acquaintances later discovered to have been recruited by Russian security services. “There are so many open cases like this,” she said. “This makes you very closed and not trusting anyone.”

Friends warn her that certain familiar faces were in fact working with the FSB (Russia’s Secret Service). At a conference, she met a man who claimed to have read articles of hers that were published before she became publicly known. “Maybe he’s really a fellow,” she recalled thinking, “but I can’t trust him, because I did not know him personally in advance.”

Many exiled Russians keep separate phones, separate chats, separate layers of themselves. 

In this sense, exile reproduces some of the conditions they fled. The Kremlin’s campaign to discredit critics worked so thoroughly that even far from its physical reach, the fear of its agents continues to shape how they live. The collapse of trust that defines their relationship with audiences also permeates their own community. 

Yet their reporting does not stop.

At TV Rain, Fomina began producing documentaries, shifting from written investigations to visual storytelling. “You can’t just describe the face of a person who recently lost her child by a terrorist attack,” she explained. “I saw a huge potential in producing documentaries.” Her latest film followed mothers searching for missing sons and volunteers collecting bodies on the front lines. “From the Russian side, we talked to mothers… from the other side, we filmed volunteers collecting these bodies,” she said. The juxtapositions revealed the human cost of the war that official narratives tried to bury, and the growing realization among families that the state was hiding the truth.

Korotkova’s work follows a different route. She spends hours texting soldiers, navigating harassment and flirtation to extract fragments of reality. “Men are really lonely there,” she said. “When I ask real questions, they’re answering.” Her investigations into sexual violence in occupied Ukraine even reached UN officials, with whom she’s now collaborating.

Her method shows the new conditions of reporting on Russia. Remote, precarious, built on unstable channels of communication. She is trusted by sources who would never speak to Western institutions.

In Berlin, these methods overlap in unexpected ways. The city provides a kind of infrastructure made up of co-working spaces built by NGOs, legal advice, old colleagues who reappear. Safety comes with a different kind of constraint: distance. The very freedom that allows them to keep speaking also severs their connection to the country they are speaking about.

Danila Bedyaev, a former regional journalist from Yaroslavl, sees the community from another angle. He no longer works in media officially—his job title is now “tech management and IT”—but he staffs the spaces where exiled journalists gather managed by the NGO MiCT. He helps build recording studios, fix equipment, set up workstations. He sees the flow of people passing through: Ukrainians, Belarusians, Afghans, Syrians, Russians. “It’s a common story,” he said. His own life in Berlin is modest and rooted, but he still describes his experience as part of journalism. “I really want to make my story public one day,” he said. “There are a lot of stories of exiled people that need to be shared.”

All of these reporters share the awareness that their work may reach no one who most needs to hear it.

Inside Russia, the space for dissent has constricted even further. According to Pop-Eleches, people who oppose the war are increasingly reluctant to discuss it even with friends. “They’re probably afraid even if you’re among friends,” he said. “It seems they’re starting to withdraw a little bit more from the social side of it.” Silence becomes a survival strategy, and in the repressive Russian context, it reinforces itself.

In this environment, exiled journalists lose access to their audience, but their audience also loses access to itself. Trust evaporates in both directions.

For reporters like Fomina, this dynamic extends into the personal. She remains in contact with families of Ukrainians killed in the war, building relationships that blur the lines between reporting and mourning. “Each journalist has its own cemetery,” she said. “I can’t even count how many people I buried distantly, remotely.” The images sent by sources remain on her phone, unopened on days when she cannot face them. Her work is recognized abroad, yet to many Russians, her name has become shorthand for betrayal.

Korotkova worries about the sustainability of this work. “Many media just lost a lot of financing, and now we’re just in survival mode,” she said. Good journalists are leaving the profession. Younger ones have never worked inside Russia and lack the context needed to report on it. “They don’t know how it works inside,” she explained. “And who’s gonna train them?” She fears a future where people think of the journalistic profession as activism. 

And in Berlin, the freedom that allows reporting to continue also thins the connection to its subject. “You live in one country, one agenda, but all your work is concentrated on another,” Fomina said. “It’s like you’re living in two different worlds.”

From Berlin, the work looks both small and outsized. It cannot reverse public opinion in Russia. It cannot cut through the fog of propaganda. It cannot restore trust that was deliberately dismantled. But it preserves a record. It keeps open the possibility that someone, now or later, will remember how the system actually worked.

The verdict on Fomina’s phone that morning announced one truth about her: what the Russian state believes she is. Her reporting, and that of the colleagues who share her exile, insists on another.

Russian journalists in exile are trusted by few, and distrusted by many. Still, despite all of it, they remain committed to telling a story that may not yet have an audience, but will one day need one.

A youth group in Almaz Church looks like any other gathering of young evangelicals: teenagers in flannels and hoodies lounging around a table, snacking on chips and discussing how God has touched their lives. 

 But these are not ordinary evangelicals. Almaz is a Baptist congregation in Germany, a country where the denomination accounts for only about 1 percent of the population. The congregants are Ukrainians who have fled the full-scale invasion, and in youth group, the teens and 20-somethings swap stories of this relative or that cousin had been saved from a drone or a missile strike thanks to God’s hand. 

Their devotion is especially striking because many of them did not grow up Baptist, or religious at all. But since the full-scale invasion, Almaz, and Ukrainian evangelical churches across Germany, have seen a significant influx of young refugee converts who hope the faith will help them make sense of the war.

“It was helpful for me to believe that God [could] control a situation in my country, in my city, my family, in my church, in my life,” said Martin Skopych, one of Almaz’s youth group leaders and the son of the church’s pastor.

[TK three-four character grafs from Wednesday interview with Almaz-adjacent congregant who got baptized in January]

There are other reasons for this transmission. For a refugee family, evangelical churches like Almaz are sometimes the only Ukrainian cultural centers available. This is the case in Gummersbach, an unremarkable German town of 50,000 people, where Almaz has put down roots to serve a growing refugee population (Gummersbach now has about 3,000 Ukrainians, I was told repeatedly on my visit, although it hasn’t released census data since 2022). In Almaz’s Telegram, alongside posts for prayers or church events, community members also advertise couches for sale and cheer for Ukraine’s national soccer team.

These young people also have some amount of lingering resentment with the dominant Ukrainian Orthodox Church, perceiving it to be overly staid and reliant on tradition “you must be holy,” Lisa, another Ukrainian girl I met in Gummersbach, told me. But above all else, the teachings of Baptism have legitimate resonance for young Ukrainians trying to cope with the loss of their families and homes.

The small foothold of evangelical conversions among Germany’s Ukrainian refugees is notable for a country — indeed, a continent — where religiosity has been sharply declining for decades. Baptists are a significant minority in Ukraine; the official association of Ukrainian Baptist churches claims only about 120,000 members, while more than three in five Ukrainians identify with the Eastern Orthodox church.

TRANSITION?

In the United States, however, Ukrainian Baptist churches are still waiting for this wave of evangelism to hit. In the past year, the Ukrainian Baptist Convention of America has recorded only 100 new baptisms — up from previous years, said Vlad Shanava, the president of the convention’s youth ministry, but still “unimpressive.”

[TK quote from another youth leader — Vlad himself was not very worried about this lack of growth but I’d imagine others are]

The Ukrainian Baptist coalition in the United States is and has always been fragile. The convention only has 24 registered churches, half of which are clustered in southern New Jersey and the Philadelphia suburbs, totaling to about 3,500 adult members. The convention’s website is littered with churches that have closed their doors across the country: Brooklyn, Milwaukee, Kansas City, Fresno, Calif.

The churches that have survived have been kept together by successive waves of migration — missionaries from South America in the 1960s and 1970s, priests fleeing Soviet persecution in the 1990s, and now refugees from Russia’s full-scale invasion — that have required shifts in services and tactics. 

“Four years ago before the war, I feel like  … we were moving into the direction of potentially more American-centered services,” said Shanava. “But the war definitely brought us back a little bit because of the influx of refugees.”

But unlike at Almaz, where the vast majority of services and materials are in Ukrainian and German is rarely spoken, the churches in Shanava’s circles are still not wholly focused on supporting refugees. They would like to — emphasis on like — also be open to Americans Americans of any stripe, even if they’re not Ukrainian.

“The UBC’s goal is not only to be available for Ukrainian Christians,” Shanava said. “Obviously we were in America, and we’re available to all cultures, all ethnicities, and the gospel is to be preached there until, as he says in the Bible, till the end of the world.”

Despite their varying audiences, on doctrine, the German and American versions of Ukrainian Baptism are fairly similar.

“It’s clearly said that you’re not perfect. You cannot be perfect. Nobody can be perfect. But Jesus still loves you, Jesus still died for you and died for your sins,” said Viktoriia Hluschenko, who lives in Düsseldorf but often attends services at Almaz. “It’s not so easy to explain.”

“The thing that Baptist teaching specifically offers is that there’s no gimmicks,” said Shanava. “God loves you because of you, because of the value that you have as a human being.”

Threads to pursue:

• The frosty relationship with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church
• Two more conversion stories
• May look to restructure around the theme of “tale of two Baptist movements.” Almaz and other German churches have built really vibrant communities in a very secular country. Evangelism is alive and well in the United States, but the Baptist churches here are hanging on for dear life. 

It was an early Wednesday morning, and seventy people were already in line at a Wohnungsbesichtigung, a public house viewing in Berlin. Sam Albaid, who had been looking for a stable apartment for months, clutched his folder of documents as he approached the representative: credit report, ID, references, everything he had been told he needed. The man skimmed the papers until he reached one detail.

“You’re with the job center?” he asked, referring to the government office that dispenses social benefits.

Sam nodded.

“Don’t even try it,” the representative said. “They will not even read it.”

“Why? Is this legal?” Sam asked.

“No,” the man said, “but that’s what’s gonna happen.”

Sam never had a chance, not because of missing documents, but because he received social benefits. Like thousands of other refugees in Berlin, he found himself trapped in a contradiction at the very center of Germany’s integration system. When Sam arrived from Syria via Istanbul in 2017, he entered the long pre-work phase required of most asylum seekers: months, sometimes years, of German-language classes, cultural orientation sessions, and vocational integration courses. Only after clearing these hurdles could he even begin applying for real jobs. At the same time, he had to navigate the slow asylum process, which could take months or years.

In this early stage, refugees cannot work full-time, and many cannot work at all. Without income, they rely on benefits to survive. Yet, once they do, landlords often shut them out, rendering them unable to secure permanent housing at precisely the moment they need it most.

Niklas Harder, Co-head of the Integration Department at the German Center for Integration and Migration Research, explained the logic he hears from landlords again and again. Yes, a job center letter means rent is guaranteed by the state. But from a landlord’s perspective, Harder said, it signals something else entirely: “They get relatively little in terms of quantity,” he said. “So a lot of people want to ask higher rents, and they don’t accept tenants who are on social benefits.”

To understand this dynamic, one has to understand Germany’s social housing system and what’s gone wrong with it. In Germany, “social housing” refers to rent-controlled apartments whose rent levels are capped and legally compatible with what social benefits will cover. These units are, in theory, the solution for people like Sam: affordable, regulated, and protected from the volatility of the private market.

But Berlin simply does not have enough of them. The stock of social housing has shrunk dramatically over the past decades as units age out of regulation. Demand, meanwhile, has surged, driven by demographic change, urban growth, and successive waves of asylum seekers from Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and other conflicts.

As a result, new arrivals who could theoretically pay rent with their benefits cannot actually rent anything. And the unsubsidized private market is even more out of reach. Berlin’s private rents have risen so sharply that even refugees who do find work struggle to afford them.

The consequences are visible in shelters across the city. People remain in overcrowded temporary housing far longer than the system was designed for. The shelters were meant to serve as short-term landing pads; instead, families spend months or years waiting for a chance at something permanent.

Even those who might want to escape Berlin’s impossible housing market face another hurdle: German federalism. Refugees are assigned to a specific municipality when they receive benefits, and those benefits, including housing support, can only be used within that region.

“You’re basically assigned to an office that pays out your social benefits,” Harder explained. “And they will only pay for rent that is in their region of responsibility.”

This means that even if more affordable housing exists in a neighboring state, beneficiaries are effectively anchored in place. They cannot simply move to where housing is available. Federalism, designed for administrative order, inadvertently becomes a barrier to mobility and therefore to integration.

Together, these constraints create a vicious trap: without a job, refugees cannot rent an apartment. Without an apartment, they cannot easily get a job.

At first glance, this seems overstated. Surely someone can get a job while living in a shelter? But in practice, employers require a stable address for payroll, tax documents, and background checks. Banks require a stable address to open an account. Employers look for proof that a potential employee can reliably stay in the city. And for refugees juggling appointments with the migration office, language courses, legal processes, and shelter rules, demonstrating that stability becomes nearly impossible.

This is especially paradoxical in Germany, a country facing a major labor shortage and desperately trying to bring more workers into the economy. But integration into the workforce is not as simple as filling open positions.

“Even the positions in unskilled labor in Germany demand a minimum amount of language and literacy,” Harder said. For refugees with limited formal education, this represents a major hurdle. For those who are highly educated (doctors, engineers, teachers) another problem arises: without advanced German fluency, professional credential recognition remains unreachable. A Syrian doctor, for example, must communicate flawlessly with patients, colleagues, and medical institutions.

The focus here falls on what comes after a refugee leaves the asylum and state-run accommodation system, or tries to. During the initial phase, refugees live in shelters where they are provided food, basic furniture, and a shared room. But the transition out of shelters is exactly where most refugees become stuck.

Those who succeed face discrimination from landlords, steep deposits, guarantor requirements, and bureaucratic tangles. Those who don’t remain in limbo: unable to build a stable life, unable to advance in language learning, and unable to integrate socially or economically.

There are models that work. Programs like ARRIVO connect refugees with apprenticeships and skilled trades. Some NGOs help with bureaucratic navigation: [“registration for all,” ] These programs show what is possible when integration efforts are aligned across housing, employment, and social services.

But they remain exceptions in a system that too often leaves people behind.

Berlin’s housing market has become both a mirror and a test of Germany’s broader promise to integrate those who came seeking safety. The gap between that promise and the reality, between the job center letter and the closed doors it triggers, reveals the structural contradictions refugee communities must navigate.

When Sam described his language courses, his early hopes, and the spiraling difficulties he faced afterward, his story illuminated the heart of the issue: racism, housing discrimination, and labor-market barriers are not separate challenges. They reinforce one another.

Refugees are fighting for the basic building blocks of belonging: a stable home, a job that pays, and the dignity of agency over their futures.