Cherrypicker | Literature
Searching for Home in a Cold Country

The life of a young refugee can be harrowing and brutal. Behzad Karim Khani's latest novel is set in a German prefabricated housing estate in the 1990s. He illuminates this world with haunting precision and poetic language.

In the 1990s, after the end of the Cold War, the world was reorganising itself. In Germany, the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Other things signalled stability: Helmut Kohl had held the office of Federal Chancellor since 1982. In German living rooms, Wetten, dass? is on on Saturday evenings and Tatort on Sundays. Herbert Grönemeyer, Die Toten Hosen and Die Ärzte can be heard on the radio. The “cool kids”, however, have long been listening to American hip-hop and rap on their Walkmans, and later Discmans. People dream of stability and prosperity, European integration and a future without war.

It is this era that the German-Iranian author Behzad Karim Khani takes us back to in his second novel Als wir Schwäne waren (When We Were Swans). From the very first pages, which are addressed to the first-person narrator's son, you can sense that this novel is even more personal and poetic than his award-winning debut Hund, Wolf, Schakal (2022) – because it is much closer to Khani's own biography. Khani talks about how his own past becomes a “misanthropic planet” when he writes. So what is it like on this planet? What happens there?

No welcome, no solidarity

After fleeing Iran, Reza moves into a block of flats in the Ruhr area with his parents. When his mother cooks in the evening, the flat smells of cinnamon and dates. The smell attracts the other children from the neighbourhood. They come round for dinner, give Reza's mum a Deutschmark and ask for ketchup for the rice. Reza feels humiliated, as if his mother were the employee of his cheeky schoolmates. His father looks on helplessly. One possible reason why this evening ritual is repeated without objection lies in their origins:
More and more children arrive, and dinner with Reza's family becomes a routine in the neighbourhood. Nobody says thank you. At school, the boys who hold out their plates in the evening ignore Reza. His parents, caught up in their Persian pride, don't know how to put an end to it. Reza finally realises what needs to be done. The next day, he beats up one of the particularly cheeky boys at school.
... and nobody knocks on their front door any more. Instead, Reza makes friends with the boys from the neighbourhood. They are now on an equal footing. And Reza has learnt that nothing is given to him in this prefabricated housing estate, in this Germany. For people like him, there's no kindness, no gratitude, no solidarity. If you want something, you have to take it.

Violence is no way out

Reza is trying to find his place on this “dark planet”. His mother, who studied psychology, looks pragmatically to the future and hopes for better times for her son. His father, the poet, is trapped in the past, characterised by the sight of his war-torn homeland. In the end, it is neither looking forwards nor backwards that helps Reza to navigate through the present: First it is the violence, his ruthlessness, that earns him respect in the neighbourhood. Then he realises that although he can hold his own with violence, it offers him no way out – it is not a spaceship that can take him to another, more liveable planet. This realisation sets him apart from the other boys in the neighbourhood. They serve one prison sentence after another, becoming increasingly crude and brutal – partly because they have been taught nothing but violence. Take Seda, for example, a quiet yet devious boy from the neighbourhood who is subjected to his father's domestic violence at home:
The quote is a good example of Khani's language, which is so physical that you can almost feel the belt blows on your own body. And on the other hand, there is the beauty of this language, which finds metaphors even in brutality.

More than always the same answer

At rock bottom, Reza narrowly escapes a prison sentence, learns from his mistakes and breaks the spiral of violence that he experiences both inside and outside his community.

Germany has changed since the years that Khani describes in his novel. Anti-refugee and racist attacks have multiplied every year since 2015. Nevertheless, the very existence of this beautiful, sad, brutal and harrowing novel is a reason for hope. In the last lines of the letter to his son, the first-person narrator writes: