P.E.N. Zentrum deutschsprachiger Autoren im Ausland

Letter to Iranian President Ahmadinedschad

by Uwe Friesel

Your Excellency!

Being a poet and a writer myself, I know that humanity has many facets and values, depending on where we live and how we are brought up. Amongst them freedom of thought and expression rank highly, because they reflect our special place in the order of the one and only God.

It is a long history of common humanistic values that link our two nations cultures and literatures, namely, the iranian and the German. The wonderful Statue of the immortal Hafiz and Goethe in the city of Weimar reflect this common strive.

I see it with utter sadness that such ageless values might be irrepairably damaged, should the Iranian Supreme Court not revoke the death penalty imposed on my Kurdish-Iranian colleague Aduan Hassanpour. I do not know him personally. I only know that no writer is really able to endanger the course of events in a great nation just by his writing. But that very nation may endanger very well its own fate by condemning those who think differently on current issues.

In this respect, Germany has had a terrible history in the 20th century. The state of Iran should not repeat it in the 21st, but instead should let wisdom and mercy prevail, as is expressed in the works of our sublime twin authors Hafiz and Goethe .

With sincere respect
Uwe Friesel

(former president of the German Writers‘ Union, member of P.E.N.)