Freedom and courage: A letter to the people of Iran as the Islamic Republic nears the abyss

The original text by Navid Kermani was published in the German daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. This translation has been authorised by him.

For days on end now my gaze has returned, with an almost compulsive insistence, to the small illuminated screen of my smartphone, lingering there in the faint, irrational hope that at last the second check mark might appear on WhatsApp – the discreet sign that my words have reached you, and that you, in turn, will soon reassure me that you are unharmed.

As was to be feared, once the internet was sealed off, the regime, after a fortnight of calculated restraint, has begun anew to crush in blood the uprising that has seized Iran. No longer was there talk merely of dozens of dead; over the weekend, suddenly and with chilling abruptness, the numbers swelled to two thousand and more.

Then, on Sunday, the images reached us: footage from the forensic institute in Kahrizak, south of Tehran, where relatives wander among hundreds of body bags scattered across the floor, weeping, lamenting, calling out names that receive no answer. The images are said to date from Friday – though it remains uncertain whose bodies they show. Experts who have examined these and other recordings speak of numerous gunshot wounds to the head: executions, carried out with intent.

That the regime itself has circulated these images is telling. It means that even the last, merely tactical scruples have been discarded. Terror, with which it assails its own people, is no longer merely naked; it is now ostentatious. Terror alone, it seems, no longer sufficed to instill fear. Now you are meant to see with your own eyes what awaits you should you persist in taking to the streets.

I write to you from the study of the German writer and Nobel laureate Thomas Mann, in Los Angeles, where he lived from 1942 until 1952. By a strange and almost cruel coincidence, it is precisely in these days – while you in Iran are risking everything for freedom – that I find myself a guest for a short time in his former house.

From this very room, where palm trees sway before a sky of radiant blue and where, from the terrace, one may glimpse the nearby ocean, Thomas Mann composed his radio addresses, “German Listeners!”, broadcast by the BBC in 59 installments and heard by millions. Early on – earlier than most – he informed the Germans of the crimes of National Socialism and summoned them, with passion and moral insistence, to resistance; or, if resistance itself was too perilous – as it was in Germany then, and is in Iran today – then at least to inner opposition: to refusal, to truthfulness, to humanity.

These radio addresses remain the most significant document of intellectual opposition to Hitler and will endure as a page of honor in German literature. Their immediate effect, however, was limited. The majority of Germans remained loyal to Hitler until the bitter end, and afterward, when the camps were liberated and the country lay in ruins, they claimed – almost unanimously – to have known nothing.

Dear friends, people of Iran: you require no speeches from abroad, neither from me nor from anyone else – and least of all does war offer you help. The liberation for which you strive, you are already striving for yourselves. Yet you should know how deeply proud I am of you. At the same time, my anxiety for your lives is so great that I find myself again and again tempted to implore you to remain at home. I trust, however, that you yourselves will best be able to judge whether it is wiser to withdraw for a time, as in 2009, 2018, 2019, and 2023 – or whether this time the hour has come to endure, to persist, until the regime either consents to a peaceful and orderly transition or collapses of its own violence.

Above all, I wish to call out to you this: that though I am at the far end of the world, I am with you unceasingly – in thought, in heart. Millions of Iranians in exile, and even those of the generations that follow – though their children may no longer speak Persian – are united with you now. Only this accursed second check mark on WhatsApp refuses to appear on our screens, and its absence drives us to distraction.

Because I cannot reach my own relatives and friends, I feel severed from the people as a whole. I cannot gauge what is happening in Iran at this very moment; without the living connection to you, I lack the instinct for where all this is tending – how many you are, how near to the abyss the rule of the Islamic Republic has come. Yet this much I know: its end approaches – if not now, then at the next uprising, or the one after that. You yourselves have told me so, repeatedly, at least since 2023, at a time when we abroad had already begun to despair. Even the rulers know it; one can read it in their faces, which strive in vain to convey resolve and confidence.

Everyone knows that the Islamic Republic is approaching its end – everyone, that is, except the leaders of China, Russia, and, alas, my own European Union. For all their ritual professions of solidarity, they continue to believe that only the regime guarantees stability. And yet it is precisely stability that is most gravely endangered by a regime which, in order to survive, plunges its own country into chaos.

In Syria, the Revolutionary Guards once already helped to drag a people who had risen up into civil war, and even then the West clung to the illusion of stability rather than heeding the red lines it had itself proclaimed. The consequences are known: 600,000 dead, 13 million refugees, the rise of the so-called Islamic State, whose terror reached even us – and, by indirect means, Brexit, the triumph of nationalist parties, the looming disintegration of the European Union.

How obtuse is so-called Realpolitik! And as during the last uprising in Iran, under the banner of “Woman, Life, Freedom”, Germany – of all countries – once again arrives late with its democratic platitudes, precisely because it is Iran’s most important trading partner in Europe. Whether Friedrich Merz, in declaring yesterday that the regime is finished, has truly altered course – or merely seeks to ingratiate himself with the Americans, whose promises to stand by you I do not believe in in any case?

In doubt, Germany would be equally content with a Venezuelan-style solution, in which the regime survives provided it accepts a deal with Donald Trump. One then calls this “complex”. And thus, seated in Thomas Mann’s study, another thought presses itself upon me: how little remains of his courage, of the courage of those other writers and philosophers who found exile here in Pacific Palisades – of Feuchtwanger, Brecht, Adorno, Horkheimer – the courage, indeed, of that better Germany which chose to oppose Hitler.

You may scarcely believe it, but there is hardly a word that I have heard – or, if not heard, then unmistakably felt – more often of late in German cultural institutions, broadcasting houses, theaters, editorial offices, and concert halls than fear. I could cite a dozen examples from my own immediate surroundings where someone, out of fear, refrained from writing, saying, showing, or staging something. And fear of what? Ultimately, of nothing more than harming one’s career or provoking a public outcry – for in a country like Germany, nothing else, fortunately, can truly befall an artist, a journalist, or a cultural official.

You may think this absurd, an exaggeration – but this is how it appears to me, and not to me alone, but to many within the cultural sphere. Fear – fear, of all things – has become a theme among us, precisely where courage ought to be at home. And so, when I look at you, shame too makes itself felt: shame at our own German, European, Western timidity. At the women who walk the streets without headscarves; the filmmakers who clandestinely create the most astonishing works; the lawyers who accept imprisonment; the musicians who sing against tyranny; the football stars who stand with their protesting supporters; the thousands and tens of thousands who, these days, take to the streets across Iran despite mortal danger – while the West so carelessly squanders freedom. International law, for instance, trampled underfoot by the American president and dismissed as irrelevant even by our own chancellor – ah, how urgently it would be needed now, since it names and punishes crimes against humanity.

In 2014, I said to the Germans in the Bundestag that it would not take another 15 years before a Christian, a Jew, a Zoroastrian, or a Bahá’í would speak in a freely elected Iranian parliament. I was met with indulgent smiles, and truth be told, there was an element of wishful thinking in it. I did not entirely believe it myself. But now I see: 2014 plus fifteen – that comes close enough. I thought I knew you well, my relatives, friends, and colleagues in Iran – and yet time and again you have surpassed me with your courage, your intelligence, your patience. My thanks to you – or, as it is said far more beautifully in Persian, and these days all too literally: Dastetan dard nakoneh – may your hands not ache.

Navid Kermani, born in 1967 in Siegen to Iranian immigrant parents, is a distinguished German-Iranian writer and scholar whose work spans literature, religious studies and cultural critique. He lives as a freelance writer in Cologne.