From the life of a dud

What does revolution sound like, what does a demonstration smell like, and what does dictatorship taste like? Nader, a birth-blind Iranian, is prevented from leaving the country by the Revolutionary Guards at the Iranian-Turkish border in 1980. He disappears without a trace. His companion Musa makes it to Germany, and with him a briefcase full of notes and tape recordings in which Nader recounts his life: the violence in the reformatory, his love of the violin, which he must conceal from his religious father, and the turmoil of the Iranian Revolution, in which Nader took part on the side of the Communists.

Eskandar Abadi is a journalist, musician and translator. He was born in 1959 in Mahshahr, Iran, and studied constitutional law in Tehran until 1980, when all universities were closed in the wake of the Iranian Revolution. To escape the repressive measures of the new Islamic Republic, he fled to Germany and studied political science and German studies in Marburg. Today Abadi is an editor at Deutsche Welle and lives with his family in Cologne. He is birth-blind.