Shida Bazyar, born in Hermeskeil in 1988, knows how to write about the Iranian revolution as well as right-wing terrorist violence in contemporary Germany. Her second novel, “Three Comrades”, was longlisted for the German Book Prize in 2021.
SZ: What are you reading right now?
Shida Bazyar: I read non-fiction “Somebody had to punish the perpetrators” by Achim Doerfer about Jewish resistance and Jewish revenge during and after the National Socialist era. As you read, you keep wishing that the perpetrators had really all been punished, and you are once again horrified at how much certain historical narratives depend on the interests of a majority society. That means: I knew far too little about the revenge that took place, and that most people feel that way is probably no coincidence.
What was the last really good book you read?
Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s “A Space Bounded by Shadows”. I feel like I got on my knees reading this. And there I am still. Literaryizing the brutalities and continuities of (state) terror and violence within Europe in such a clever way, without falling into the usual traps and comparisons, is a great art. I adore the language, the wit, the honesty in it, I don’t know anything comparable.
What book do you hate but love the author?
Max Frisch’s “Homo Faber”, although I have loved the author since my teenage years. I remember reading other of his novels and wanting to underline each sentence because it was deep and poetic and yet understandable. Maybe Frisch was something like a bridge to get from youth literature to “adult literature”. We read “Homo Faber” in school and I hated it. This whole, never-ending struggle for one’s own masculinity, this annoying stomach ache, the incest story, I sat in disgust at school for weeks and didn’t find the institutionally interpreted “difference between technology and nature” either. And when I did find them, I didn’t find them interesting enough to forgive Frisch for the rest. This was the first time I got a lower than A (even a F, to be honest) on a German coursework.
A children’s book from which you can still memorize a sentence today?
“There are things you have to do, otherwise you’re not human, you’re just a heap of dirt,” says Jonathan to Krümel in Astrid Lindgren’s “The Lionheart Brothers”. Honestly, when I was a kid, what I really liked about it was the dirt metaphor. I like using them in my life.
Her novel “Three Comrades” is based on the title of Erich Maria Remarque’s classic “Three Comrades”. What does the literary canon mean to you?
Nothing at all. You only buy yourself the credibility of an educated audience if you say that you refer to this one classic. At some point I started asking after my readings how many people in the audience actually read Remarque’s “Three Comrades”. The average is usually zero to one. The fact that books that no one has read are nevertheless an invisible key to certain rooms is a really superfluous phenomenon. I heartily recommend “Three Comrades” anyway – because it’s a stunning book.
It was once said about your book that it was a great public insult. Was that a correct description?
If you like to read superficially and don’t worry about the literary implementation of power and dominance relations: sure! And a very conscious one at that. I once had a reading in Hanau on the second anniversary of the attack. Then a woman came up to me and said that she had never found herself in a novel like she did in “Three Comrades”. Then she cried. Then I cried. Then we stood there and cried together, two total strangers. I don’t know if the audience abuse thing is such an important aspect of the book, I don’t think so.
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