Salam-O-Aleikum
Aleikum-O-Salam
Welcome to Montazer.Net. While terms like welcome, welcome culture, migration, immigration and emigration, borders, overcoming borders, home, language, culture and all kinds of other words and images buzz through my head for the first blog post, certain associations break through and push themselves to the fore. It is the extremes, the positive as well as the negative extremes, that are burned into the memory. Stories that touch you, stories that you have experienced, dreamed, or that were told by others, orally as well as in writing, or filmed stories. And suddenly I remember a fairy tale like from One Thousand and One Nights, which is told in the most entertaining way in the really worth seeing feature film Salami Aleikum by the German-Iranian film director Ali Samadi Ahadi.
The multicultural film comedy with the popular cabaret artist, actor and author Michael Niavarani, tells the story of a Persian migrant family who give up their economic existence based on a butcher’s store in Cologne, only to end up in a provincial village in East Germany as a result of a coincidental and quietly developing love story. Of course, the expected culture shock on both sides is not absent, nor are the stereotypical prejudices. And as in every beautiful fairy tale, it is once again love that determines the fate of each as well as the entire village and in the end turns everything around for the better.
And already images of two other stories run before my inner eye. The first story, “Life is Beautiful” takes place in occupied Italy in the 1940s. The second story is also set in the time of World War II and is called “Train of Life”.
The story behind the stories
The reason why I choose these films as the hook for my first blog post – actually, I didn’t select them at all, rather they occurred to me spontaneously, that is, they fell to me – is quickly explained. n my youth, I used to direct the focus of a conversation to the as yet unsolved problems of this world at every possible opportunity, in the naive hope that this would finally open the eyes of my supposedly uninformed or even ignorant counterpart, but I was always stunned to discover anew that the more serious the stories became, the more dismissively my interlocutors reacted.
I finally had to accept that war, arms trade, corruption, white-collar crime</a, Homicide, nepotism, slave-owning society, sexual abuse, bending of the law, abuse of power, etc., etc., and all the other crimes could be sold very well in crime novels, doctor novels, adventure movies, comedy shows or any other entertainment format, but failed completely as a serious enlightenment pill.
Humor seems to be then probably the last solution for the survival of mankind. And also this thought is probably rather from the hope, humans may dedicate themselves sometime, in a distant future, first to the important questions of the life and run only then after the “last cry“.
„The Scream“ by Edvard Munch, 1893, Tempera on cardboard, 91 × 73.5 cm, Norwegian National Gallery Oslo, License: Public domain
Although …? The more likely future scenario will be a nuclear inferno. So I thought to myself, „Why didn’t I become a comedian?“ But, considering such grandees as Georg Schramm, Josef Hader, Roland Düringer, Robert Palfrader, Volker Pispers, Max Uthoff, Wilfried Schmickler, Arnulf Rating, Claus von Wagner, Serdar Somuncu, Marek Fis, Fatih Cevikkollu, Christoph Siebers, Sigi Zimmerschied, Sebastian Pufpaff, Mathias Tretter, Timo Wopp, Florian Schroeder, Frank-Markus Barwasser alias Erwin Pelzig, Martin Puntigam, with Werner Gruber & Heinz Oberhummer from Science Busters, Vince Ebert, Michael Hatzius, Jilet Ayse and Hans-Werner Sinn and millions of other comedians and their success with the public, that’s okay. But I believe in the butterfly effect.