Hello world!

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.