The Longest Phone Call: Iran's Diaspora in Germany and the War They Cannot Escape

She has not called her mother in eleven days. Not because the lines are down, though the lines are often down, and not because she has nothing to say. She has not called because of what she posted on Instagram three weeks ago: a black square with three words in Farsi, a memorial for a university student killed in a strike on Isfahan. The post reached 340 people, most of them in Berlin and Hamburg and Cologne. It also, she is certain, reached someone in Tehran who keeps a list.

The calculus is simple and impossible. Every public act of mourning in Germany becomes a private act of danger in Iran. A shared post, a protest photo, a signature on a petition: each one travels back along the invisible thread that connects a flat in Berlin-Neukölln to an apartment in eastern Tehran where her mother lives alone and takes blood pressure medication that the pharmacy may or may not have this week.

She stares at her phone the way her mother stares at the sky. Both are waiting for something to fall.

Three Hundred Thousand Threads

Germany is home to approximately 300,000 people of Iranian descent, the largest Iranian diaspora community in Europe. They came in waves: after the 1979 revolution, during the Iran-Iraq War, following the 2009 Green Movement, and in the steady trickle of professionals, students, and asylum seekers that has continued for decades. They live in Berlin's Charlottenburg and Neukölln, in Hamburg's Altona and St. Georg, in Cologne, Frankfurt, Munich. They run restaurants and research labs and taxi companies. Their children attend German schools and speak German as their first language and know Tehran only from their parents' stories and from the videos that arrive, unbidden, on their screens.

The war has changed the quality of these connections. Before the airstrikes began, the diaspora's relationship to Iran was mediated by distance: a phone call on Nowruz, a money transfer through informal hawala networks, the slow anxiety of watching a country decline. Now the mediation has collapsed. The war arrives in real time through shaky phone footage, through panicked voice messages, through the sudden silence when a call drops during what sounds like an explosion and does not reconnect for hours.

But the war is only one of the two threats that travel along those threads. The other is the regime's security apparatus, which has never respected the border between Iran and its diaspora.

The Hamburg File

In July 2024, Germany's Interior Ministry banned the Islamic Centre Hamburg, the Imam Ali Mosque on the Schöne Aussicht overlooking the Alster. The ban was the culmination of years of intelligence work by the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, Germany's domestic intelligence agency, which had classified the centre as a direct instrument of Iran's Supreme Leader and a propaganda and recruitment outpost for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on European soil.

The centre was not merely a place of worship. Intelligence assessments described it as a node in a network that extended across German cities, connecting cultural associations, student groups, and community organizations to the IRGC's ideological infrastructure. Its closure did not dismantle the network. It exposed it, and in doing so confirmed what many in the Iranian diaspora had long said in private: the regime watches us here.

The BfV's annual reports have documented Iranian intelligence operations in Germany for years. Surveillance of opposition activists. Monitoring of protest organizers. Attempts to recruit informants within diaspora communities. The methods are not subtle: phone calls from unknown numbers asking pointed questions, visits to family members in Iran timed suspiciously close to diaspora events in German cities, social media accounts that follow and catalog and occasionally threaten.

Since the war began, these operations have not decreased. By multiple accounts from diaspora organizations, they have intensified.

The Phone That Rings in Tehran

Transnational repression does not require an agent on German soil, though agents are present. Its most effective instrument is the family telephone. The mechanism works like this: an Iranian living in Germany attends a protest, signs a petition, posts on social media, or speaks to a journalist. Within days or weeks, a family member in Iran receives a visit or a phone call. Sometimes from the local Basij office. Sometimes from someone who identifies themselves as being from the intelligence ministry. The message is consistent: your relative abroad is causing problems. You should tell them to stop.

The family member is not arrested. Not always. The pressure is calibrated to be deniable: a friendly conversation, a reminder of obligations, an observation that the relative's employer in Iran seems to have some irregularities in their file. The threat is legible without being explicit. And it works, because the person in Germany knows that their mother or brother or cousin cannot refuse to answer the door, cannot hire a lawyer, cannot leave the country. The relative in Iran is not a hostage in any legal sense. They are a hostage in every practical sense.

Human rights organizations including Amnesty International and Iran Human Rights have documented hundreds of such cases. The pattern has accelerated since the 2022 Jina movement, when the Iranian diaspora mobilized on a scale that genuinely alarmed the regime. Protests in Berlin drew tens of thousands. German politicians attended. German media covered. The regime took note, and the phone calls to Tehran multiplied.

Now, with the war providing both a justification for heightened security and a genuine crisis that makes families in Iran more vulnerable, the leverage has grown. A social media post in Berlin carries more weight when the person's mother is queueing for insulin in a city under bombardment and the pharmacy queue passes through a Basij checkpoint.

The Protest You Cannot Un-Attend

Berlin's Washingtonplatz, outside the Hauptbahnhof, has become an informal gathering point for Iranian diaspora protests. The demonstrations are legal, permitted by German law, protected by a constitutional order that guarantees freedom of assembly. They are also filmed. Not only by German media and police, but by individuals whose footage travels to Tehran.

The diaspora's protest culture has evolved in response. Experienced organizers advise new participants: wear a hat, wear sunglasses, do not hold your phone where the camera can read the screen, do not stand next to anyone whose face you recognize from social media. These are the habits of people exercising a constitutional right in a democratic country while behaving as though they are being surveilled by a foreign intelligence service, because they are.

Germany's legal framework for addressing transnational repression is still developing. The BfV monitors. The federal police investigate when threats cross into criminal territory. But the gray zone of surveillance, the watching and cataloging and implicit threatening, occupies a space that German law does not easily reach. An Iranian intelligence operative who photographs a protest in Berlin has not committed a crime that German prosecutors can straightforwardly charge, even when the photograph leads to a family member's interrogation in Tehran.

This gap is not lost on the diaspora. Many describe a sense of legal abandonment: protected on paper, exposed in practice. Germany guarantees their right to protest. It cannot guarantee that the protest will not cost their family in Iran.

What Silence Costs

The alternative to protest is silence, and silence has its own price. Iranians in Germany who choose not to speak out, who delete their social media, who avoid protests, who answer questions about Iran with careful generalities, describe a different kind of damage. They watch Tehran burn on their screens and say nothing, not because they feel nothing but because they feel too much and the cost of expression has been made clear.

This silence is not apathy. It is a form of protection that corrodes from the inside. Psychologists working with the Iranian community in Germany report elevated rates of anxiety, depression, and symptoms consistent with what researchers call moral injury: the distress of knowing the right thing to do and being unable to do it without causing harm to others. The community's therapists, many of them Iranian-born and carrying their own dual burdens, describe patients who cannot sleep because they cannot call home and cannot explain why they cannot call home.

The war has sharpened every edge of this dilemma. When the bombs fall, the instinct is to reach out, to check on family, to say I am here. But reaching out means reactivating the connection that the regime monitors. A phone call to comfort a mother becomes, in the security apparatus's filing system, evidence of ongoing contact between a diaspora dissident and a domestic target. Comfort and surveillance travel the same wire.

Between Two Constitutions

The Iranian in Germany lives under two constitutional orders simultaneously. The German Grundgesetz guarantees freedom of expression, assembly, and communication. The Iranian constitution, as interpreted by the Guardian Council and enforced by the IRGC, claims jurisdiction over all Iranians regardless of where they live. The regime does not recognize emigration as a severance of obligation. An Iranian citizen in Berlin is, in Tehran's legal framework, still subject to Iranian law, still accountable for crimes against the Islamic Republic, still reachable through the family that remains.

These two orders do not merely coexist. They collide, in the daily decisions of 300,000 people who must calculate, each morning, how to be Iranian in Germany without making it dangerous to be their relative in Iran. The calculation changes when the bombs fall, because the bombs make the family more vulnerable and the silence more unbearable and the regime more paranoid, all at once.

Germany has taken steps. The Hamburg Islamic Centre ban signaled a willingness to confront IRGC infrastructure on German soil. The BfV continues to classify Iranian intelligence as a significant threat. Individual politicians have spoken clearly. But the structural question remains open: what does it mean for a democracy to protect a diaspora community from a foreign authoritarian state that uses family bonds as instruments of control?

There is no policy answer to this question that does not first require seeing it clearly. And seeing it clearly means understanding that for an Iranian in Berlin, the war in Tehran is not on the other side of a screen. It is on the other end of a phone call she cannot make.

The Message She Types and Deletes

She has drafted the message four times this morning. It says: Maman, are you okay? Four words in Farsi, the simplest possible sentence, the one every child sends when the news is bad. She types it and reads it and deletes it and types it again.

The message is not dangerous. Its content is banal. But its timing is not, because the last thing she posted was that black square, and she does not know if the connection between her Instagram and her mother's doorbell has already been made, and she does not know if a phone call right now will read as concern or as contact, and she does not know, she does not know, she does not know.

She puts the phone down. She picks it up. She types the message a fifth time. She sends it.

The read receipt appears six hours later. No reply. The read receipt is the reply. It means: I am alive. It means: do not call. It means something that cannot be translated from one constitution to another, from one city to another, from one fear to another.

The phone sits on the kitchen table in Berlin. In Tehran, the pharmacy opens in the morning. Between these two facts, 300,000 people hold their breath.