STUTTGART.TEHERAN

A young woman enjoys her memories of her childhood in paradise, and of how the world around her looked, smelled and tasted. In those days she knew nothing of the dangers threatening her parents and herself, for political opponents of the regime in Iran were being persecuted. Then came the first Gulf War. But in her grandparents' steam bath the world seemed in perfect harmony. That came to an end in the air-raid shelter.
When her father seeks asylum in Stuttgart, he promises to give her a child's sewing machine, but all she gets is a welcoming gift from the city: a 50-piece jigsaw puzzle, with a view of the city in grey. The food tastes bad, the language is foreign, and the three of them live together in one small room.
The child learns German, however, and finds her way around this strange new world. When she is old enough, she retraces her steps and goes back to the Iran of the present in order to search for her past. She meets her cousins, whose father forbids them to use the internet. At every street corner she is terrified of bumping into the Iranian moral police. The family want to marry her off and she finds herself trapped. Her father has to come to rescue her.
The woman telling us her story treads this narrow path with great skill and self-confidence. Her judgement is always based on personal experience, and although she never generalizes, her tale takes on a general relevance. In Germany the "cultural peculiarities and differences" appear to be inviolable and impervious to criticism, but she avoids using such collective terms. In criticizing the two forms of culture she has experienced, she does not need any fixed criteria of identity or of culture. She has no 'home'. Only a place to live.