War & Peace

Hello again,

What does help us to survive when everything else seems to fall apart? What can we hold on to when we are totally on our own?

In this 3rd part of my story, I will tell you how music saved my life at a very special time.

It was the mid-80s, and I seized the chance to escape the Iraq/Iran war as a teenager. I'll spare you the challenges of how it all worked, but finally, I landed in Frankfurt in West Germany. My first impression of Germany was the giant-sized posters of two naked, sun-baked Beate Uhse models smiling at me with their fake whitened smiles and boobs as big as their heads hanging at the exit of the arrival!

My sister Noshin was the only family member I had here. She had left Iran a few months earlier because life as a young woman was already, in that short period after the revolution, not giving her the opportunity to thrive. She couldn't go to university as a woman because the Ayatollahs had closed it. She found a job but had problems with the company, as they didn't like her style. It was obviously not Islamic enough for that company. After she got arrested a few times because of her clothing style, she knew it was time to leave.

A few weeks after my arrival, we had a shared flat, and a new cycle of life started for me. While I was amazed by all the green in Germany – we lived close to a little forest – everything else was kind of grey, and I felt really disconnected throughout the first year.

I didn’t speak the language, I didn’t have friends, and the school they put us refugees in was the lowest form of education (they call it “Hauptschule” in Germany), so finding new German friends seemed kind of impossible to me.

Yet, one really great thing in Germany was all the music coming out of the speakers at every radio station you chose!

Imagine, even though I grew up with a lot of music at home, finding new music after the revolution became soon an act of criminal activity in Iran! You either had some “connection” giving you some nameless, plain cassette mixtapes with some random new music. Or you had to go to some underground shops and had to act as if you are buying illegal substances. You needed a code-word or somebody who introduced you to the dealer, and he then gave you some tapes wrapped in papers! And now, in Germany, you turned the radio on, and the only annoying thing was the guy talking into the end of the song you hoped to record on your tape deck completely.

Anyway, the first peer group I met here was a circle of medical professionals befriended with my 10 years older sister. They invited us once to their barbecue, and I joined, but I knew they sat around a table talking about grown-up stuff, which I didn't understand anyway because I barely spoke German.

One of them picked us up, and we drove for a while. It was autumn, and I had this kind of blue feeling about how life was going on at this point…yet there was this music playing on the stereo of his car. It was music I had never heard before. Something magical was vibrating through this song; I could just feel it, like a sunbeam shining through on one of the last grey days of an endless winter!

“If everything falls apart, it is still worth it to stay alive just to listen to music” - I thought, watching the leaves flying by the car.

I gathered all my courage and the little German I could muster and dared to ask: “Was ist diese Musik?”

He looked back through his rear-view mirror, smiled, and said: “Das ist Elvis Presley!”

This was the first time I had heard this name. But I really liked that voice and that groove. A pity i never found that song again. It was not the typical Rock`N´Roll stuff you usually know from him,
Next, I will share with you how another tip-off from the universe made it possible for me to become a musician myself!

Thank you for following my story so far. Feel free to share it with whoever could be touched by it.
And please let me know how you deal with stuff when everything falls apart.

PS: The image from this post is one of the first coverarts i ever created with 10 years for one of that anoynmous mix-tapes i got my hands on!

Love, music, and creativity,
Om

Hello again,

In recent weeks, there have been hundreds of thousands of people on the streets in Germany, standing for a multicultural, colorful society. The background is leaked plans of right-wing parties and their justice-confirmed “fascistoid” leaders to deport millions of people in case they take over power.

If we ever wondered how Nazis could take over in the 1930s, now we can find out!

The difference today is that we are much more connected worldwide, even if media and demagogues try to instrumentalize the fears of people about this topic.

Though, there is one part I don't see being talked about at all: WHY do people leave everything they have behind, risking their lives and those of their children to get to Europe on an inflatable boat?

Today, I want to share with you why I left my home at the age of 15 to dare a new start without my parents in Germany. It was the end of the summer holidays, and my school friend Majid and I met again after weeks. We were 12 or 13 years old, and the typical question “how did you spend your holidays?” was the topic of our conversation.

“I was at a military camp the last few weeks!” He opened up to me. “That was so exciting! We learned how to crawl below barbed wire, how to clean a machine gun, and in the end, we were even allowed to shoot with a real Heckler & Koch G3!”

Wow, that was truly amazing!

In the middle of the Iraq-Iran war and after the recent revolution, I had been obsessed with guns and curious to know more about the camp. As he continued that the camp had been organized by the local mosque, I had an idea where this was going…

In the following weeks, he always told me about how celestial the singing in the mosque was, how beautiful the prayer, and how good the food.
A few weeks later, he shared with me one day that he decided to go to the front as a volunteer! I asked him, what he intended to do there? Was he really thinking he would become the hero of the war without military training after a little summer camp?

But his decision was made. He said we had the obligation to defend our fatherland, and there was nothing to discuss.
I remember how we took him to the bus on that Thursday afternoon. As a circle of school friends, we wished him well and were really excited about which stories from the front he would bring back and what a MAN he would become when he returned…

The reality was different: his body came back in a bag after just three days.

He died on the minefields just after arriving there; carrying a little plastic “key to paradise” as a necklace and being ripped by a mine.
Seeing how a part of him was missing while they put him into the ground was a real wake-up call for me.
I knew this was a game of the powers. The ones telling you stories about going to paradise, being surrounded by 72 virgins, dying as a martyr. While the others -be it US, Soviets, or Europe- sold both sides of the war weapons and counter-weapons trying to make the most possible profits.

A while after my parents offered me making it possible to escape before I fell under a general exit ban for young men from 15. I appreciated the honesty, that they led me decide as they wouldn't go with me. And I said YES.

It was tragic to die for something my friend Majid was manipulated to believe in as a child soldier. But possibly to die for something you don't believe in at all was just stupid.

My hands have not been made to kill but to give life, was what I thought.

And today the situation is no different. If we talk about refugees coming here at any price, we also have to ask who benefits from the conflicts they suffer from.

I am convinced that if wars become unprofitable, world peace will arrive the very next day!

And then, nobody needs to leave their homes if they have the chance to live in peace. Clear as the sky after the smoke from the war has blown away.

Now I want to know from you: how can we achieve this?

Love, peace, and unity,
Om