The Iranian Nazi at the Abguineh museum in Tehran may have been Wagnerian, who knows — what a surprise when that round, mustachioed guy in his thirties approached us as we were standing between two magnificent vases in that almost deserted room, arm raised, bellowing “Heil Hitler!” First I thought it was a joke in very bad taste, I thought the man mistook me for a German and that it was a kind of insult; then I realized that I was speaking French with Faugier. The fanatic watched us, smiling, still with his arm raised; I replied What’s come over you, what’s your problem? Faugier next to me had burst out laughing. Suddenly the man looked contrite, like a beaten dog, and sighed in despair, “Ah, you’re not German, how sad.” Sad indeed, we are neither German nor Nazi-lovers, unfortunately, Faugier joked. The fellow looked particularly disappointed, he launched into a long Hitlerian diatribe, with pathetic accents; he insisted on the fact that Hitler was “Handsome, very handsome, Hitler qashang, kheyli qashang,” he bawled, gripping his fist over an invisible treasure, the treasure of the Aryans, no doubt. He explained at great length that Hitler had revealed to the world that the Germans and Iranians formed one single people, that this people was destined to preside over the fate of the planet, and according to him it was very sad, yes, very sad that these magnificent ideas have not yet been realized. There was something both terrifying and comical about this vision of Hitler as an Iranian hero, in the midst of the cups, rhytons, and decorated plates. Faugier tried to pursue the discussion, to find out what made the last Nazi of the Orient (or maybe not the last) “tick,” what he actually knew of National Socialist theories and especially of their consequences, but soon abandoned the idea, since the young lunatic’s answers were limited to wide gestures around him to signify no doubt “Look! Look! See the greatness of Iran!” as if these venerable glass trinkets were in themselves an emanation of the superiority of the Aryan race. The man was very polite; despite his disappointment at not having fallen upon two Nazi Germans, he wished us an excellent day, a magnificent stay in Iran, insisted on asking if we needed anything at all; he smoothed his Wilhelm II-style mustaches, clicked his heels and walked off, leaving us stunned and speechless. This evocation of old Adolf in the heart of the little neo-Seljuk palace of the Abguineh museum and its wonders was so incongruous that it left us with a funny taste in our mouths — between bursts of laughter and consternation. A little later, after we returned to the Institute, I related this encounter to Sarah. Like us, she began by laughing at it; then she questioned herself on the meaning of this laughter — Iran seemed to us so remote from European questions that an Iranian Nazi was only a harmless, offbeat eccentric; whereas in Europe that man would have aroused anger and indignation in us, here, we had trouble believing he grasped the profound meaning of it. And the racial theories linked to Aryan-ness seem to us today as absurd as those phrenologists measuring the skull to determine the position of the bump for languages. Pure illusion. But this encounter said a lot, Sarah added, about the power of the Third Reich’s propaganda in Iran — as during the First World War, and often with the same personnel (including the ever-present Max von Oppenheim), Nazi Germany had sought to attract the favor of Muslims to get them to attack the English and Russians from the rear, in Central Soviet Asia, India, and the Middle East, and had again called for jihad. Scholarly societies (universities including the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft) had been so Nazified since the 1930s that they’d entered into the spirit of the game: Islamologist Orientalists were even consulted to find out if the Koran somehow predicted the Führer’s rise to power; despite all their good will, the scholars were unable to give a positive response. Still, they offered to write texts in Arabic hinting at it. There was even a plan to spread throughout the lands of Islam a delightful Portrait of the Führer as Commander of the Faithful, with turban and decorations inspired by the great Ottoman epoch, suitable for edifying the Muslim masses. Goebbels, shocked at this horrible image, put an end to the operation. Nazi hypocrisy was ready to use “sub-humans” for justified military ends, but not to the point of placing a turban or a tarboosh on the head of its supreme leader. SS Orientalism, spearheaded by Obersturmbannführer Viktor Christian, eminent director of its Viennese branch, had to content itself with trying to “de-Semitize” ancient history and demonstrate, at the cost of inventing a hoax, the historic superiority of Aryans over the Semites in Mesopotamia and opening a “school for mullahs” in Dresden, where the SS imams in charge of the education of Soviet Muslims were supposed to be trained: in their theoretical approximations, the Nazis had a hard time of it deciding if that institution would train imams or mullahs, and what name was suitable to give the strange enterprise.
Faugier joined the conversation; we had made tea; the samovar was shuddering gently. Sarah picked out a piece of rock candy, which she let melt in her mouth; she had taken off her shoes and tucked her calves under her thighs in the leather armchair. A setar recording was filling the silence — it was autumn, or winter, it was dark already. Faugier was going round in circles, as he did every day at sunset. He would manage to hold it together for another hour, then the anguish would become overbearing and he’d be forced to go smoke his pipe or joint of opium, before he surrendered and yielded himself to the night. I remembered his own expert advice, earlier in Istanbul — apparently he hadn’t followed it. Eight years later, he had become an opium addict; he was terribly worried about the idea of going back to Europe, where his drug would be much harder to find. He knew what was going to happen; he’d end up taking heroin (which he already smoked a little, though rarely, in Tehran) and would experience the pain of addiction or the agony of detox. The idea of going back, aside from the material difficulties it entailed (end of research funding, absence of any immediate prospects of employment in that secret society that is the French University, that secular monastery where the novitiate can last an entire lifetime), was coupled with a terrifying lucidity about his state, his panicked fear of taking leave of opium — which he compensated for by excessive activity: he increased the number of walks he took (like that day to the Abguineh museum where he’d brought me), meetings, weird expeditions, sleepless nights, to try to stretch time out and forget in pleasure and drugs that his stay was reaching its end, thereby increasing his anxiety from day to day. Gilbert de Morgan, the director, was not unhappy about getting rid of him — it should be said that the aging Orientalist’s old-fashioned solemnity didn’t marry well with Faugier’s liveliness, free-and-easy ways, and strange research topics. Morgan was convinced that it was “the contemporary” that caused all his trouble, not just with the Iranians, but also with the French embassy. Literature (classical, if possible), philosophy, and ancient history, that’s what found favor in his eyes. Can you believe it, he would say, they’re sending me another politician. (That’s what he called students of contemporary history, geography, or sociology.) They’re crazy in Paris. We’re fighting to try to get visas for researchers, and we find ourselves presenting dossiers we know very well the Iranians won’t like at all. So we have to lie. What madness.
Madness was in fact a key element of European research in Iran. Hatred, hiding one’s feelings, jealousy, fear, manipulation were the only bonds the community of scholars managed to develop — in their relationships to institutions in any case. Collective madness, downward spiraling — Sarah had to be strong not to suffer too much from this ambiance. Morgan had found a simple name for his management policy: the knout. Old-style. Wasn’t the Iranian administration thousands of years old? One had to go back to healthy principles of organization: silence and the whip. Of course this infallible method had the inconvenience of slowing down projects quite a bit (as with the pyramids, or the palace of Persepolis). It also increased the pressure on Morgan, who spent all his time complaining; he had no time to do anything else, he said, except supervise his administrative underlings. The researchers were spared a little. Sarah was spared. Faugier much less so. The foreigners passing through — the Pole, the Italian, and I — count
ed for nothing, or as the French say, nous comptions pour du beurre. Gilbert de Morgan respectfully scorned us, considerately ignored us, let us take advantage of all the facilities at his institute, especially the big apartment above the offices, where Sarah sipped her tea, where Faugier couldn’t stand still, where we discussed our theories on the madman of the Abguineh museum (we finally decided he was mad) — we talked about Adolf Hitler posing with a tarboosh or a turban on his head and about the man from the previous century who had inspired him, the Comte de Gobineau, inventor of Aryan-ness: the author of An Essay on the Inequality of Human Races, he too was an Orientalist, first secretary to the French legation in Persia, then ambassador, who spent time in Iran twice in the middle of the nineteenth century — his works are given the privilege of three handsome volumes in the famous Pléiade collection that had so unfairly, according to Morgan and Sarah, ejected poor Germain Nouveau. The first racist in France, the inspirer of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, great theoretician of hate-filled German-ness who discovered him thanks to the advice of Cosima Liszt and Wagner, friends of Gobineau from November 1876: Gobineau was also a Wagnerian; he wrote about fifty letters to Wagner and Cosima. The legacy of the darkest part of his work couldn’t have come at a better time, unfortunately; it was through the Bayreuth circle (mainly Chamberlain, who would marry Eva Wagner) that his Aryan theories on the evolution of the human races followed their horrible path. But as Sarah noted, Gobineau was not an anti-Semite; quite the contrary. He regarded the “Jewish race” as among the noblest, most knowledgeable and industrious, the least decadent, most preserved from the general decline. Anti-Semitism was Bayreuth, it was Wagner, Cosima, Houston Chamberlain, Eva Wagner who added it to his theories. The frightening list of the disciples of Bayreuth, the terrifying testimonials, Goebbels holding Chamberlain’s hand while he died, Hitler at his funeral, Hitler, close friend of Winifred Wagner — what injustice when you think about it, an allied aircraft dropped two fire bombs on poor Mendelssohn’s Gewandhaus in Leipzig and not a single one on the theater of the Bayreuth Festival. Even the Allies were complicit despite themselves in Aryan myths — the destruction of the Bayreuth theater would have been a great loss for music, true. But what does that matter, they’d have rebuilt an exact copy of it, but Winifred Wagner and her son would have experienced a little of that destruction they’d unleashed so furiously on the world, a little of that suffering of loss seeing the criminal legacy of their father-in-law and grandfather go up in flames. If bombs can atone for crime. It’s infuriating to think that one of the links that unite Wagner to the Orient (beyond influences received through Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, or reading Burnouf’s Introduction to the History of Indian Buddhism) is his admiration for the Comte de Gobineau’s book, his Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races — who knows, Wagner might also have read Three Years in Asia or The New Asiatics. Cosima Wagner herself translated into German, for the Bayreuther Blätter, a paper by Gobineau, “What Is Happening in Asia?”; Gobineau often visited the Wagners. He accompanied them to Berlin for the triumphant premiere of the Ring, in 1881, five years after the creation of Bayreuth, two years before the maestro’s death in Venice — he was still thinking, they say, at the end of his life, about writing a Buddhist opera, The Victors, whose title seems so un-Buddhist it made Sarah burst out laughing at least as much as at some of poor Gobineau’s remarks: she had gone to look for his complete works “in the cave,” in the Institute’s library, and I can see us now, as the second movement of Mendelssohn’s Octet is starting, reading out loud some fragments of Three Years in Asia. Even Faugier had stopped his anguished circling to pay attention to the poor Orientalist’s prose.
There was something touching about Gobineau as a person — he was a terrible poet and a somewhat pedestrian novelist; only his travel narratives and the stories he drew from his memories seemed to present any real interest. He was also a sculptor, and had even exhibited a few busts, including a Valkyrie, a Sonata Appassionata, and a Queen Mab (Wagner, Beethoven, Berlioz: the fellow had taste), marble sculptures that were quite expressive and finely wrought, according to the critics. He had been rather famous in the circles of power; he had met Napoleon III and his wife, as well as his ministers; he had a long career as a diplomat, posted to Germany, then twice to Persia, to Greece, Brazil, Sweden, and Norway; he knew Tocqueville, Renan, Liszt, and many Orientalists of his time, August Friedrich Pott the German Sanskritist and Jules Mohl the French scholar of Iran, first translator of the Shahnameh. Julius Euting himself, the great Orientalist from German Strasbourg, bought Gobineau’s entire legacy for the Reich after his death: sculptures, manuscripts, letters, rugs, all the trinkets an Orientalist leaves behind: chance and the First World War willed it so that this collection became French again in 1918 — it’s strange to think that the millions of deaths from that idiotic war had no other objective, in the last analysis, than to deprive Austria of the Adriatic beaches and to recover the Gobineau inheritance bogarted by the Teutons. Unfortunately, all those people died for nothing: there are millions of Austrians on vacation in Istria and the Veneto, and the University of Strasbourg’s little museum long ago gave up exhibiting the relics of Gobineau, victim of the theoretical racism of his century, which burned the fingers of the site’s successive curators.
The Comte de Gobineau loathed democracy — “I have a deadly hatred of popular power,” he said. He knew he harbored bitter resentment against the supposed stupidity of the times, a world populated by insects armed with instruments of ruin, “bent on crushing all that I have respected, all that I have loved; a world that burns cities, destroys cathedrals, wants no more books or music or paintings, and substitutes the potato, bloody beef, and unripe wine for everything,” he writes in his novel Les Pléiades, which opens with this long diatribe against imbeciles — one somewhat reminiscent of the discourse of the intellectuals of the extreme Right today. The foundation of Gobineau’s racist theories was lamentation: his sense of the long decadence of the West, his resentment of the vulgar. Where is the empire of Darius, where the grandeur of Rome? But unlike his later disciples, he did not regard “the Jewish element” as being responsible for the fall of the Aryan race. For him (and this obviously is an element that must not have been to the taste of Wagner or Chamberlain), the best example of the purity of the Aryan race is the French nobility — a rather comical notion. The work of his youth, Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, owes as much to linguistic approximations as to the early stages of the human sciences — but Gobineau would see the reality of Iran, in Persia, during his two missions as representative of Imperial France; he would be convinced, discovering Persepolis and Ispahan, of having been right about the greatness of the Aryans. The narrative of his stay is brilliant, often funny, never racist in the modern sense of the word, at least where the Iranians are concerned. Sarah read passages to us that made even the anguished Faugier laugh. I remember this phrase: “I confess that, among the dangers that await a traveler in Asia, I count as foremost, without any doubt, and without concerning myself with wounding the feelings of tigers, snakes, and banditry, the British dinners one is forced to undergo.” An absolutely delightful judgment. Gobineau waxed eloquent on the “downright Satanic” dishes served by the English at whose homes, he said, one leaves the table ill or starving, “martyred or dead of hunger.” His impressions of Asia combine the most knowledgeable descriptions with the most comical observations.
This herbal tea has the acidic, artificial taste of candy, an English taste, Gobineau would have said. Far from the flowers of Egypt or Iran. I’ll have to revise my opinion of Mendelssohn’s Octet, it’s even more interesting than I thought. Ö1 Klassiknacht, my life when it comes down to it is rather sinister, I could be reading instead of going over old Iranian memories in my head while listening to the radio. The madman of the Abguineh museum. God, how sad Tehran was. Eternal mourning, the grayness, the pollution. Tehran, or the capital of pain. This sadness was reinforced, framed, by the slightest sign of l
ight; the bewildering parties of the golden youth in the northern part of the city, while they distracted us for a little while, hurled us afterward, by their stark contrast with the death of the public space, into that profound depression the French call spleen. Those magnificent young women who danced, in very erotic outfits and poses, drinking Turkish beer or vodka, to forbidden music from Los Angeles, and then put on their head scarves and coats and were lost in the mass of Islamic propriety. This so-Iranian difference between biroun and andaroun, inside and outside the house, private and public, which Gobineau already noticed, was pushed to its extreme by the Islamic Republic. You entered an apartment or a villa in northern Tehran and you suddenly found yourself in the midst of a group of youths in swimsuits having fun, drinks in hand, around a pool, speaking perfect English, French, or German, and they forgot, in the contraband alcohol and amusements, the grayness of the outside, the absence of future within Iranian society. There was something desperate about these parties; a despair you sensed could be transformed, for the more courageous or less well-off, into the violent energy required for revolutionaries. Raids by the morality police were, depending on the time and government, more or less frequent; you heard rumors saying so-and-so had been arrested, someone else beaten, some girl humiliated by a gynaecological exam to prove she hadn’t had sexual relations outside of marriage. These stories, which always reminded me of the atrocious proctology probe undergone by Verlaine in Belgium after his quarrel with Rimbaud, formed part of the daily life of the city. Intellectuals and academics, for the most part, no longer had the energy of the young, so were divided into several categories: those who had managed, on average, to build a more or less comfortable existence for themselves “on the margins” of public life; those who redoubled their hypocrisy to take full advantage of the sinecures of the regime; and those — and there were many — who suffered from chronic depression, intense sadness that they treated more or less successfully by taking refuge in erudition, imaginary journeys, or artificial paradises. I wonder what’s become of Parviz — the great poet with the white beard hasn’t been in touch with me for ages, I should write to him, it’s been so long since I did. What pretext could I use? I could translate one of his poems into German, but it’s a terrifying experience to translate from a language you don’t really know, you feel as if you’re swimming in the dark — a calm lake seems like a raging sea, an ornamental water feature like a deep river. In Tehran it was simpler, he was there and could explain the meaning of his texts to me, almost word by word. Maybe he isn’t even in Tehran anymore. Maybe he’s living in Europe or the United States. But I doubt it. Parviz’s sadness (like that of Sadegh Hedayat) came precisely from the double failure of his brief attempts at exile, in France and Holland: he missed Iran; he had returned after two months. Obviously, back in Tehran, it only took a few minutes for him to detest his fellow citizens all over again. With the women of the border police wearing marnay who take your passport in the Mehrabad airport, he said, you can recognize neither the killer, nor the victim; they wear the black hood of the medieval executioner; they do not smile at you; they’re flanked by brutish soldiers in khaki parkas armed with G3 assault rifles made in the Islamic Republic of Iran, you don’t know if they’re there to protect the women from the foreigners getting off these impure planes or to shoot them in case they show them too much sympathy. We still don’t know (and Parviz professed this with an ironic resignation, an entirely Iranian mixture of sadness and humor) if the women of the Iranian Revolution are the mistresses or hostages of power. The chador-wearing functionaries of the Foundation for the Poor are among the wealthiest and most powerful women in Iran. The phantoms are my country, he said, these shades, these crows of the people to whom their black veil is solidly attached when they’re executed by hanging, to avoid any indecency, because it is not death that is indecent here, death is everywhere, but the bird, the flight, the color, especially the color of the flesh of women, so white, so white — it never sees the sun and could blind martyrs with its purity. In our country, the executioners in the black hood of mourning are also the victims that are hanged at leisure to punish them for their implacable beauty, and they hang, they hang, they whip, they fight to their heart’s content against what we love and find beautiful, and beauty itself takes the whip, the rope, the axe, and gives birth to the poppy of the martyrs, flower without smell, pure color, red, red, red — all make-up is forbidden to our flowers of martyrdom, for they are pain itself and die naked, while they have the right to die red without being clothed in black, the flowers of martyrdom. Lips are always too red for the State that sees indecent competition in them — only saints and martyrs can blow the red sweetness of their blood over Iran, it’s forbidden to women who must out of decency tint their lips black, black, and show discretion when we strangle them, look! Look! Our pretty dead bodies have no cause to be envious of anyone, they sway nobly on the top of cranes, decently executed, don’t come blaming us for our lack of technology, we are a people of beauty. Our Christians, for example, are magnificent. They celebrate death on the Cross and remember their martyrs just like us. Our Zoroastrians are magnificent. They wear leather masks where the fire reflects the greatness of Iran, they give their bodies to rot and feed the birds with their dead flesh. Our butchers are magnificent. They slit animals’ throats with the greatest respect as in the time of the prophets and the light of God. We are as great as Darius, greater, Anushirvan, greater, Cyrus, greater, the prophets preached revolutionary fervor and war, in war we breathed in blood as we did the gases of battle.
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