Never has the idea of human solidarity been realized so convincingly and powerfully as in the final scene of Kuhle Wampe, or: Who Owns the World? (1932), directed by Slatan Dudow from a screenplay by Bertolt Brecht. In the film, Brecht and Eisler’s famous “Solidarity Song” resounds with cinematic virtuosity—as a mighty massed chorus, carried by pulsating, rhythmic montage and the unforgettable refrain:
“Forward, and never forget what our strength consists in!
Whether hungry or eating, always forward—never forget solidarity!”
It is precisely that solidarity which Brecht and Eisler celebrated as the core of leftist strength—across hunger and struggle, internationally united against oppression—that the German Left is now denying to the Iranian people in their hour of greatest need: a silence that speaks louder than any socialist chant. Shouts for Gaza—deathly silence on Iran. The Left’s collective muteness exposes its ideological and moral bankruptcy, its final betrayal of its own historical ideals. While millions of desperate people are battling the security forces of a ruthless theocratic regime, while the number of those murdered and mutilated grows by the day, the reactions of self-proclaimed socialist humanitarians amount to little more than trivialization, embarrassing equivocation, or barely concealed hostility toward the insurgents.
It is precisely that solidarity which Brecht and Eisler celebrated as the core of leftist strength—across hunger and struggle, internationally united against oppression—that the German Left is now denying to the Iranian people in their hour of greatest need: a silence that speaks louder than any socialist chant.
Hypocrisy and sophistry have reached scarcely surpassable heights: On January 14, Sevim Dağdelen, the foreign policy spokesperson of Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht—a party that does not belong to the identity-political Left—delegitimized the cause of the Iranian protestors, using structurally antisemitic, anti-American rhetoric: “a script by the CIA and Mossad … Sow chaos. Drive people into the streets. Provoke bloodshed”. As if the greatest danger facing the oppressed at present did not emanate from the mullah regime itself, but from a hypothetical American intervention—which, for the desperate people of Iran, might in fact represent the very last realistic chance of liberation—“boots on the ground” being unlikely in any case.
The failure of the Left in the face of the Iranian uprising is, of course, not merely a national but a global phenomenon—deeply rooted in the ideological history of the New Left since the 1970s. In Germany, however, the symptom carries a particular significance, which is why I am limiting myself here—also for reasons of brevity—to the German case.
As is well known, the Islamic Revolution quickly took a baleful turn. In his 2015 article ‘Between the Shah and Khomeini’, historian Frank Bösch summed this history up as follows:
“The Islamic Republic curtailed numerous fundamental rights for which politicians and social movements around the world—especially in the 1970s—had been fighting. This applied in particular to the rights of women. As early as March [1979], women were no longer permitted to participate in the courts; morality committees monitored dress codes and behavior, which in practice amounted to compulsory wearing of the chador. Men were granted decision-making authority and the right to divorce, while the minimum age for marriage was gradually lowered to nine years”.
This did not go unnoticed on the Left. Yet, in 1979, it did not prevent the later Green Party foreign minister Joschka Fischer (b. 1948) from developing a suspicious degree of sympathy for the Islamic revolutionaries. In Pflasterstrand (then probably the most important organ of the radical Left in Frankfurt), Fischer boldly proclaimed that “the Iranian Revolution” was directed “also—and precisely—against the intrusion of the consumerist atheism of Western industrial societies”. To call this mendacious would be a euphemism. In a state of desperate romanticization, the German Left projected its longings onto a revolution that stubbornly refused to succeed at home.
Fischer boldly proclaimed that “the Iranian Revolution” was directed “also—and precisely—against the intrusion of the consumerist atheism of Western industrial societies”. To call this mendacious would be a euphemism.
In Germany, this grotesque misinterpretation— or rather, this complete political failure—has very specific historical roots that explain much and excuse nothing.
Let us rewind a little. In 1951, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi married the strikingly beautiful Soraya Esfandiary-Bakhtiary, of German descent. Born in Isfahan in 1932 and raised between Persia, Berlin, and European boarding schools, Soraya for many Western Germans embodied the very essence of fairy-tale romance: a “German” princess on the Peacock Throne of Persia, a real empress. At the same time, a virtual empress—Austrian actress Romy Schneider as Sissi—dominated the cinema screens.
The tabloid press eagerly supplied a curious public for years with lavish reports: from the splendid wedding in February 1951 at the Golestan Palace, to glamorous state visits (including to the Federal Republic), and on to the tragic details of a childless marriage. Soraya became an icon of German illustrated magazines. People even spoke at the time of the “Soraya press”. Iran appeared to many as a fairy-tale oriental, yet simultaneously cosmopolitan, monarchy, and Soraya became the Germans’ surrogate empress.
The royal couple’s divorce in 1958, forced by the lack of a male heir to the throne, only rendered the story more poignant. The “Empress of Tears”, the “Princess with the Sad Eyes”, remained etched in the German imagination as a symbol of romantic tragedy—and bound the image of a modern, Western-oriented Iran even more tightly, on an emotional level, to the young Federal Republic.
When I came into the world in Tehran in the 1960s, this idyllic image was still intact. I can still vividly recall the portraits of the Shah that one could hardly avoid at the time, even as a child: a stern-looking man with an eagle-like bearing and fantastical attire, who struck me as alien and unlikable, and who also inspired a certain fear. He did not smile. These fairy-tale impressions were complemented by my mother’s imaginative stories—she harbored a certain admiration for the Shah (“a handsome man”)—and by the large-format illustrated magazines that lay scattered all over the house.
In distant Germany, however, a state visit was to change everything: early summer 1967 turned a glamorous fairy tale into a political trauma. The press celebrated the imperial couple as a Western-oriented dream team leading Persia into modernity. But critical voices were now being heard as well. In 1967, the book Persia, Model of a Developing Country was published by Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag. Its author was the Iranian opposition figure and publicist Bahman Nirumand (b. 1936). The book appeared just before the Shah’s 1967 visit to Western Germany.
Nirumand exposed Iran as an ostensibly modern, model “developing country” that was, in reality, a brutal dictatorship marked by massive repression by the SAVAK secret police, social inequality, torture, and the suppression of the opposition—financed and supported by the West.
The book played a major role in shifting public sentiment. The mood tipped decisively on June 2, 1967: outside the Deutsche Oper in Berlin, as the Shah was planning to attend Mozart’s The Magic Flute, tentative protests by the German left-wing opposition, among them many students, took place. Countering them were some Iranian students and exiles who loudly applauded and cheered the Shah, the co-called “Jubelperser” (literally “cheering Persians”, a derogatory term used by the Left beyond this context to smear what they consider “uncritical” people). Amidst the clash, German police and brutal thugs from the Iranian secret police SAVAK began to beat down the young protesters.
In the ensuing chaos, the police officer Karl-Heinz Kurras shot the unarmed student Benno Ohnesorg at point-blank range, killing him with a bullet to the head. The shot—and above all the fact that Kurras was acquitted—became the spark that ignited a fire. For the 1968 movement, June 2, 1967, marked the beginning of a lasting radicalization. What had begun as unease about authoritarian structures turned into deep mistrust and naked rage against a German state that, as it was perceived, protected despots like the Shah while beating down its own citizens.
The death of Benno Ohnesorg on June 2, 1967 became a founding myth of the New Left in the Federal Republic: what had seemed like a distant, fairy-tale world in Tehran was now painfully close—and bloodily real. The Shah’s visit not only shattered the idyllic image of the early 1960s, it laid the foundation for a generation that thereafter viewed all authority with suspicion—whether in Persia or in their own country.
The death of Benno Ohnesorg on June 2, 1967, became a founding myth of the New Left in the Federal Republic: what had seemedlike a distant, fairy-tale world in Tehran was now painfully close—and bloodily real.
When the so-called Islamic Revolution took place in Iran in 1979 and the mullahs took over, the Left saw it as a belated vindication, which they celebrated with relish. Finally, a revolution! Human rights violations could, if necessary, be generously overlooked. The Left loves revolution—so long as it fits into their “anti-imperialist” narrative and is directed against “Western imperialism”. Revolutionaries who brazenly demand freedom, human rights, and secular life—and can even get excited about a secular monarchy with free elections—can only be aparticipating in a pseudo-revolution or even a “counter-revolution”, or, as some leftist headlines and commentaries have hinted, “Western-engineered chaos”.
Anything aimed against the USA, Israel, or “Western imperialism” is, from this distorted perspective, by definition progressive—even if it comes from a misogynistic, murderous mullah regime.
Throughout its history, the German Left has had a totalitarianism problem: Hannah Arendt was either ignored or received reluctantly and at a critical distance; it was only with great effort and incompletely that the Left managed to extricate itself from its Stalinist entanglements. Still, during the period of the “New Left” around 1968, it succeeded in generating an anti-Stalinist, non-dogmatic current that left the authoritarian socialism of the old KPD/SED far behind.
That period is now definitively over: failing to offer assistance is considered contemptible worldwide and across all cultural boundaries. It remains uncertain whether the Left will survive this bottomless fall from grace. What is more likely is that Iran will be its final coffin nail. If so, what it will deserve least of all is solidarity.
