The Iran that Germany wants to see

There's a certain set of expectations that many Germans bring to Iranian culture. When they go to an Iranian restaurant, they are not just ordering food. For €20, they expect a little Iranian experience: Persian music, blue tiles, waiters with accents.

If, instead, it's Iranian rock music coming from the speakers, or modern art hanging on the walls, they are greatly disappointed, because the experience doesn't conform to the image they have of Iran.

This logic has long since reached the literary world. In a novel about Iran, many readers expect not primarily a piece of literature, but some kind of "explanation": of the country, its culture and its politics. Preferably, it comes in an easily digestible form, so that after reading it, they can claim to know Iran among their circle of friends.

These expectations shape the literary market, and authors willingly cater to them. The result is novels that reveal more about Western projections than about the society in which the plot is set.

Jina Khayyer's debut novel "Im Herzen der Katze" (In the Heart of the Cat) is a prime example of this. The novel, which made it onto the longlist for the German Book Prize, begins with a coincidence: the first-person narrator not only has the same first name as the author of the book, but also as Jina Mahsa Amini, whose death in 2022 sparked the "Woman, Life, Freedom" protests. 

Neither author nor publisher are familiar with Iran

This opening scene already reveals the skewed perspective at the heart of the book: the narrator openly admits that, until that moment, she hadn't realised Jina was an actual name in Iran—she thought her family had made it up. It's a telling moment, one that makes clear how limited her understanding is of the country whose society she claims to interpret.

You would expect a story of tentative rapprochement, perhaps of self-examination, to follow. Instead, the narrator immediately adopts the tone of the "explainer". She fails within the first few pages, claiming, for example, that the Iranian calendar is lunar—in fact, it is a highly precise solar calendar closely linked to the changing seasons. 

Equally grave are the amateurish derivations of Persian terms: Āberu (آبرو)—a central concept in Iran that is inadequately translated as "honour"—is broken down into its components Āb (آب, water) and Ruh (روح, soul), becoming a poetic misconstruction. Based on this error, Khayyer then constructs several pages of cultural criticism.

The list of factual errors is long: for example, on a trip to Iran in 2000, the narrator arrives at Imam Khomeini Airport, which did not open until 2004. Persian words are repeatedly transcribed incorrectly, errors typical of people socialised in Germany, for whom Persian is a second or third language. 

Such sloppiness may seem insignificant for a novel at first glance. In the German literary world, however, "In the Heart of the Cat" is not treated as a work of personal fiction, but as a "historical-political novel about Iran."

Harmful orientalist images

More problematic than the factual errors is the broader image that Khayyer paints of Iran, which is a deeply orientalised one. She depicts Iran before the protests of 2022 as a country where all women wear black chadors, where talking between men and women is forbidden, where girls are chased through the streets and stoned for the slightest offence. 

Yes, the Islamic Republic is a repressive regime. But this image is a caricature that does not correspond to reality. At no time did the majority of women in Tehran or Isfahan wear chadors; conversation between the sexes was never a criminal offence; stoning and flogging are the exception, not the rule.

Such exaggerations are not harmless. They obscure the existence, since 1979, of a sustained and multifaceted civil society counter-movement. Women, intellectuals and activists have set limits on the Islamists and prevented Sharia law from being implemented as comprehensively as the regime desired. 

Those who portray Iran solely as a country of passive victims devalue 40 years of resistance while bolstering the regime's own arguments. Something that is so grotesquely distorted can easily be dismissed.

Khayyer dedicates detailed passages to Persian history—to Zarathustra, Sufism, or the architecture of Isfahan—while today's Iran appears only as the exotic backdrop to a horrific dictatorship. This reinforces the impression that what is being shown here is not the country in all its complexity, but a cliché of the Orient and of despotism.

Holding a mirror to the West

All of this would be problematic enough in itself. But the real question is: why has this novel received such recognition in German literary circles—and even award nominations? It is no coincidence that errors, like an incorrectly defined calendar system, false etymology and a non-existent airport, go unnoticed. 

It is symptomatic of an industry that is less interested in accuracy than in confirming its own projections: exotic, backward, repressive. This obscures the subtle, complicated mechanisms of oppression. Without them, it is impossible to understand the power of today's regime or its limitations. 

"In the Heart of the Cat" is not only a weak, cliché-laden novel. It is also a mirror: reflecting the expectations of a Western audience and the negligence of a literary establishment that not only accepts such projections but promotes them. In German literature, Iran remains a country to be consumed with ease in a newspaper's culture supplement—much like sampling the menu at an Iranian restaurant.

"Im Herzen der Katze"
Jina Khayyer
Suhrkamp Verlag, July 2025
253 Seiten