Bahman Nirumand

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Bahman Nirumand (2006)

Bahman Nirumand (born September 18, 1936 in Tehran ) is an Iranian- German Germanist, Iranist and author.

Life

Bahman Nirumand was born into a wealthy civil servant family in Tehran. At the age of fourteen he was sent to school by his parents in Germany. Among other things, he attended a Waldorf school in Stuttgart . After graduating from high school, Nirumand studied German , philosophy and Iranian studies in Munich , Tübingen and Berlin . In 1960 he received his doctorate in Tübingen on the problems of transplanting European drama into neo-Persian literature . In that year he was also a founding member of the Confederation of Iranian Students (CISNU), an influential oppositional student organization that initially brought together Iranian students in Great Britain, France and the Federal Republic of Germany, and later also in the USA and Canada.

After completing his studies, Nirumand returned to Iran in 1960, where he worked as a lecturer in comparative literature at the University of Tehran , as well as a writer and journalist. He then had to do military service for one and a half years and then took up a position at the Goethe Institute in Tehran . There he met Hans Magnus Enzensberger , who encouraged him to write and later supported him with his attempts to establish himself in Germany. Since Nirumand was considered a member of the opposition and threatened with arrest, he went to Germany again in 1965.

Nirumand during his lecture on the occasion of the Shah's visit

Nirumand received a grant from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for a habilitation thesis on Goethe and Hafis. In the spring of 1967, his book Persia, a model of a developing country , which was inspired by Enzensberger , appeared, which in the course of the year had a circulation of over 150,000 and had a strong influence on the West German student movement. Immediately before the Shah's state visit on June 1, 1967, Nirumand gave a highly acclaimed lecture as a guest speaker at the Free University of Berlin on the Shah's regime, which contributed to the mobilization for the June 2, 1967 demonstration in West Berlin .

In 1979, a few weeks before the outbreak of the Islamic Revolution , he returned to Iran . After a three-year stay, he went into exile to avoid arrest. He stayed in Paris for a year, then in Berlin, where he continued his work as a freelance writer and journalist. From 1990 to 2001 he headed the office of the local foreign representation in Frankfurt am Main. Since 2001 he has been living in Berlin again.

Nirumand is married to the Iranian doctor Sonia Seddighi and is the father of the journalist Mariam Lau .

politics

According to a Persian blog, Nirumand founded the Goruhe Kadreh (cadre group) together with Mehdi Khanbaba Tehrani and Majid Zarbakhsh , which saw itself as a Marxist-Leninist organization and wanted to train revolutionary cadres, who acted as revolutionary cells in the anti-imperialist struggle in the cities of Iran as urban guerrillas should act against the Shah's regime . In 1965 he returned to the Federal Republic. In 1968, together with his friend Rudi Dutschke, he intended to blow up an AFN broadcast mast, which failed due to the refusal of support by Franz Josef Degenhardt .

At a demonstration in December 1978, according to a report by Jungle World , Nirumand is said to have said:

"If the veil symbolizes the rejection of the imported illusory world and the reflection on our own history [...], then not we, but only the imperialists and other enemies of our people can scream about it."

- Bahman Nirumand

Nirumand has been active for Bündnis90 / Die Grünen for a long time and writes the monthly Iran Report. In 2013, after the election of Rouhani , Nirumand demanded concessions from the West instead of new sanctions that were “a declaration of war”. According to a post by Per Hinrichs on the Axis des Guten blog , he is said to have argued that the West is “only interested in regime change in Iran”. Iranian opposition members such as Nasrin Amirsedghi and other regime critics accuse Nirumand of playing down and defending the Iranian regime and of uncritically meeting the Islamic revolution of 1979 - like many leftists at the time.

Fonts (selection)

His 1967 book Persia, Model of a Developing Country or The Dictatorship of the Free World had a major impact on the internationalism of the student movement . In October 1967, a critical article appeared in Der Spiegel in which information that Nirumand had published in his book about Iran was classified as doubtful or incorrect. The editor Rudolf Augstein later apologized personally for this criticism.

Bahman Nirumand is the author of numerous books and writes articles for Die Zeit , the Spiegel , the daily newspaper and the Frankfurter Rundschau ; he has also written numerous radio and television reports. He published a Khomeini biography, Mit Gott für die Macht , as well as texts such as Fire under the Peacock Throne. Forbidden stories from the Persian resistance , Iran - behind the bars flowers and storms wither in the Gulf. The Iraq crisis and the Middle East powder keg .

Nirumand has also translated literary works from Persian into German.

Since 2001 he has been the author of the monthly Iran report of the Heinrich Böll Foundation . He is a member of the PEN Center Germany .

Monographs

  • Problems of transplanting European drama into neo-Persian literature . University of Tübingen. Dissertation, 1960.
  • Persia, model of a developing country or the dictatorship of the free world. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1967.
  • Iran. The New Imperialism in Action. Monthly Review Press, New York 1969.
  • with Keywan Daddjou: With God for power. A political biography of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1987, ISBN 3-498-04628-4 .
  • Fire under the peacock throne. Forbidden stories from the Persian resistance. Rotbuch Verlag, Hamburg 1985, ISBN 3-88022-124-3 .
  • with Belge Yayınlar: Iran - flowers wither behind the bars , Rowohlt, Reinbek 1985, ISBN 3-499-15735-7 . (Translation into Turkish by Kemal Kurt : İran - Soluyor Çiçekler Parmaklıklar Ardında. Istanbul 1988)
  • Living with the Germans. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1989, ISBN 3-499-12404-1 .
  • Storm in the Gulf: The Iraq Crisis and the Middle East powder keg. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1990, ISBN 3-499-12926-4 .
  • Strange to the Germans. 1991, ISBN 3-499-12924-8 .
  • The Kurdish tragedy. The Kurds - persecuted in their own country. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1991, ISBN 3-499-13075-0 .
  • Afraid of the Germans. Terror against foreigners and the disintegration of the rule of law. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1992, ISBN 3-499-13176-5 .
  • iran report. Heinrich Böll Foundation, Berlin, since 2001. (appears monthly; see web links)
  • Iran. The impending disaster. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2006, ISBN 3-462-03708-0 .
  • The unexplained world war. Booklett, 2007, ISBN 978-3-940153-01-2 .
  • Far from where I should be. Autobiography . Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-498-04693-4 .
  • Iran Israel War - The spark to the conflagration. Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-8031-2697-9 .

As editor

  • In the name of Allah. Islamic Groups and Fundamentalism in the Federal Republic of Germany. 1990, ISBN 3-89452-307-7 .
  • In the name of Allah. Dreisam Verlag, Cologne 1990, ISBN 3-89607-346-X .
  • German conditions. Dialogue on a country at risk. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1993, ISBN 3-499-13354-7 .
  • Iran after the elections. Westphalian steam boat, Münster 2001, ISBN 3-89691-506-1 .

As a translator (selection)

literature

  • Violence on campus . In: Der Spiegel . No. 44 , 1967, pp. 132 ( online ).
  • Which Persian eats pork? In: Der Spiegel . No. 47 , 1967, p. 164 ( Online - Nov. 13, 1967 ).

Web links

Commons : Bahman Nirumand  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See also Afshin Matin-Asgari: Confederation of Iranian Students, National Union. In: Encyclopædia Iranica . Online .
  2. ↑ See Bahman Nirumand in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely accessible).
  3. ↑ See Bahman Nirumand in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of the article freely accessible); see. also Christine Horz: Media - Migration - Participation. A study using the example of Iranian television production in the open channel . Transcript, Bielefeld 2014, p. 202.
  4. ↑ كالبد شكافي روشنفكران كنفدراسيون دانشجويان ايراني ( Memento from October 15, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  5. ↑ faz.net
  6. ↑ The Ayatollah's Useful Idiots. In: Jungle World . September 3, 2009.
  7. ↑ Nirumand considers new sanctions against Iran to be a "declaration of war". In: Deutschlandradio Kultur. 3rd August 2013.
  8. ↑ No war for oil, no blood for Jews! on: achgut.de , March 23, 2012.
  9. ^ Henryk M. Broder : Give Ahmadinejad the Nobel Peace Prize! on: achgut.de , 2005.
  10. ↑ The constraints of the revolution , Bahamas 58/2009.
  11. ↑ Thomas von der Osten-Sacken , Oliver M. Piecha , Alex Feuerherdt (Ed.): Freedom betrayed - the uprising in Iran and the West's answer. Verbrecher Verlag, ISBN 978-3-940426-51-2 .
  12. ↑ Quinn Slobodian : Foreign Front: Third World Politics in West Germany Sixties. ( February 5, 2013 memento on Internet Archive ) Duke University Press, pp. 106-111.
  13. ↑ Violence on campus . In: Der Spiegel . No. 44 , 1967 ( online ).
  14. ↑ Far from where I should be. Autobiography. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2011, pp. 146–147, ISBN 978-3-498-04693-4
  15. ↑ iran-report ( Memento from August 22, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
personal data
SURNAME Nirumand, Bahman
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Nirumand, Bahman
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Iranian-German Germanist, Iranist and author
DATE OF BIRTH September 18, 1936
PLACE OF BIRTH Tehran