In its most recent annual report “Reporters Without Borders” designated only 12 countries as "good” when it comes to respecting freedom of the press, information and opinion. Even Germany is seeing a marked increase in attacks against media professionals. Globally, more than 400 journalists and bloggers are in prison. One of them is Pham Doan Trang of Vietnam, who stayed as a Feuchtwanger Fellow at Villa Aurora in 2014 and was arrested last year. She analyzed methods of restricting free speech, which we would like to take as a starting point for an online event with readings and a discussion with international artists and authors, as well as representatives from politics and culture in order to illuminate this question: Where does freedom of speech still apply?

This and much more will be discussed by Michelle Müntefering (Minister of State for International Cultural Policy at the Federal Foreign Office and Member of the Bundestag from Herne), Heike Catherina Mertens (Executive Director of Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House e. V.), Ralf Nestmeyer (Vice-President of PEN-Zentrum Deutschland and Writers-in-Prison Representative) and these distinguished artists and authors: Ghassan Hammash (Syrian cultural manager and producer; founder and managing director of Barzakh gGmbH), Çiğdem Akyol (German journalist and author), Nahed Al Essa (fled Syria, lives, works and writes in Germany), Enoh Meyomesse (Cameroonian author, historian, blogger and political activist, was released after four years of imprisonment on the initiative of the Writers-in-Prison program Germany and now lives in Darmstadt. Since then, Jürgen Strasser has accompanied him as a German-language translator), and Şehbal Şenyurt Arınlı (Turkish documentary filmmaker, human rights activist and journalist, was imprisoned in 2017 and had to leave Turkey, from 2017 to 2020 he was Writers-in-Exile fellow). The conversation will be moderated by Shelly Kupferberg.