"It was a culture of fear and terror," says Syrian-Palestinian poet, journalist and curator Ramy Al-Asheq. "The police and secret services were omnipresent. No one could escape them, even in everyday life. How can there be any freedom of culture, literature, music or journalism in a nation of fear?"

Ramy Al-Asheq grew up in the Yarmouk refugee camp, on the outskirts of the capital Damascus.

He had to flee Syria in 2012 because of his reporting on the unrest in the country. He has been living in Germany for 10 years and has worked as an author and curator for the Literaturhaus Berlin. One of his poetry collections is also available in German, under the title "Gedächtnishunde" (Memory Dogs).

"I had lost all hope," he tells DW in reaction to the situation in Syria.

But "now it's returning," he added. Now that the country has been freed from dictator Bashar Assad, he feels "alive" again.

Yabbar Abdullah shares the feeling. The Cologne-based archaeologist and curator describes his excitement as he followed the news of insurgents storming the presidential palace in the capital Damascus.

When the Syrian ruler secretly boarded a plane to flee the country, the people cheered and celebrated in the streets — including in Germany.

"An indescribable feeling," says Abdullah. "No Syrian slept that night. That's how you must have felt when the Berlin Wall fell."

Freed from 'chains of fear'

It was indeed a historic turning point. The Assad clan had been ruling for more than half a century.

After the death of Hafez Assad (1930-2000), his son Bashar took power in 2000. The Assad regime ran on systemic oppression, with kidnappings, murders and torture carried out by the police, military and secret services.

During the Arab Spring in 2011, the regime brutally crushed initially peaceful protests.

As a civil war ensued, more and more international warring parties intervened. The conflict triggered a refugee crisis — according to the UN, the worst since the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Around 700,000 Syrian refugees live in Germany today.

One is Kholoud Charaf.

"The thought of all the missing people breaks my heart," says Charaf, a poet, of the mass displacement caused by the war. "I cried a lot."

The conflict showed the world how brutal the regime was. 

"They were devils on earth!" says Charaf, who was a scholarship holder of the PEN Germany program "Writers-in-Exile" from 2020 to 2023.

The association helps persecuted authors with money and accommodation and, above all, guarantees them safety. Charaf's works have received numerous awards and have been translated into 10 languages.

"Al-Assad and the Baath Party lived off the blood of Syrians to secure their luxury and power," says the 44-year-old. With the fall of the regime, the "chains of fear" were broken and the "sheer oppression" has hopefully come to an end.

During her training as a medical technician — she later studied Arabic literature — she was forced to work as a nurse.

"The regime wanted me to witness the suffering of others in order to stoke fear. I saw what was happening and had to remain silent," she said.

'Against forgetting'

Cologne-based art historian Reinhild Bopp-Grüter used to organize many trips to Syria to study the country's rich cultural history, which stretches back to the Roman-Greek Empire of Alexander the Great (356 BC - 323 BC).

The study program had to stop when the country, allied with Iran under Assad, was blacklisted in 2002 by then-US President George W. Bush as being part of the "axis of evil."  

The brutal murder of the chief archaeologist of the ancient ruins of Palmyra in 2015 by IS terrorists was a "turning point" for Bopp-Grüter.

When a large number of refugees came to Germany in 2016, she founded the German-Syrian cultural association with like-minded people and artists in Cologne. The association has since kept organizing art exhibitions, concerts, literary readings, theater, film and dance performances.

One highlight was the 2022 exhibition "Against Forgetting" in Cologne's Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum — with images of vibrant everyday life, traditional art and portrayals of the coexistence of different cultures and religions.

"We want to show a different Syria and give Syrians a positive memory of their homeland," curator Yabbar Abdullah told DW at the time.

For him, the fall of Assad also marks the liberation of culture: "Cultural diversity was a victim of Assad," he says.

The slogan "Against Forgetting" is very timely.

Although it is still unclear how rebel islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) will govern, the process of coming to terms with the past has begun.

Will it be possible to one day forgive the regime's butchers, its informants and enablers?

"It's not about personal feelings of revenge," says Kholoud Charaf. "We must not treat the guilty as they treated us. They belong in court and must receive a fair verdict."

Anything else would block the path to freedom and democracy, she adds.

'We must now be part of the change'

Ramy Al-Asheq hopes that the "cultural cleansing" under Assad has ended. 

Artists, writers and cultural activists have been driven away from their homeland, or brutally silenced. The Assad regime also systematically darkened all aspects of culture, replacing beauty with horror, perspectives of freedom with hopelessness and backward-looking attitudes.

This is a common method of totalitarian regimes, says Al-Asheq: "Anger turns into grumbling and ultimately into acceptance and submission."

Curator Jabbar Abdullah hopes to return home as soon as possible. He would like to set up a documentation center in Syria based on the model of the EL-DE Haus in Cologne, which once served the Nazis as a Gestapo office and prison but is now a research center on Nazi history.

"People need time to overcome their fear," believes Al-Asheq, who is back in Damascus for the first time in many years. "The biggest barrier between us and fantasy, between us and peace, between us and freedom, has now disappeared."

People from the cultural scene in particular need to return to Syria now, he says. "We all have concerns about who or what will come after Assad, yes. But we must now be part of the change!"

This article was originally written in German.