TX001 · Footnote 12 · route entry 9 of 26
Hedayat Persian Bookstore
A Persian bookshop and café opens onto Sadegh Hedayat’s imagined Berlin and the Iranian city around Kantstraße.
The transmission at this place
Listen to this footnote
Recorded in English · 1:24
When the recording ends, the route will continue to “Charlottengrad” and begin playing automatically.
Words carried by the route
Transcript
Beside the used vinyl shop, at number 76 is the Hadayat Cafe and bookstore refuge for Berlin's Iranian community.
Please hold up here for a moment.
In 1929, the young writer Siddegh Hadayat passed through Berlin, dreaming of settling on Kantstraße and opening a Persian literature bookstore. Back in Tehran, he ran headlong into the Raisa Shah era censorship. His novella The Blind Owl couldn't be published at home, so he hand-stenciled 50 copies in Bombay with the warning 'not for sale in Iran'. This is from the Blind Owl. "Only death does not tell lies. The presence of death annihilates all that is imaginary." Hadayat kept moving... India, then Paris, translating, writing and growing more disillusioned. On April 9th, 1951, alone in a rented Paris flat, he sealed the doors and turned on the gas. He was 48.
Decades later, another exiled novelist, Abbas Maroufi, made the dream concrete: he opened Hadayat House at Kantstraße 76, a bookshop-café that keeps banned voices in circulation.
Alright, keep walking down Kantstrasse in the same direction as before.