In the recent past, the Weimar Republic has become a prominent subject in both scholarly debates and popular culture (as exemplified by TV serials like Babylon Berlin), and this popularity may have impelled the author and publishers to bring out the study under review under a title referring to one of the most turbulent and well-studied periods of modern German history. The title may be somewhat deceptive, as the book is primarily the first attempt to present a comprehensive intellectual biography of Taqi Erani (1902–40), who, as a temporal deputy minister of economics, most prominent member of the group known as Fifty-Three and reputed founder of Iran’s Tudeh party, has been a personality well known to the historiography of modern Iran. Based on a broad range of published and unpublished sources and documents, interviews with witnesses and companions (such as Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh and Bozorg Alavi), and supporting documents from the Erani family archive, Younes Jalali undertakes to present an intellectual and political biography of his main protagonist, for which he sees Erani’s time in Berlin (1921–29) as the formative phase—in this sense, the book’s title holds true to the author’s intention. Jalali’s book is in some sense a classical biography, and it could have had the subtitle “His Life and Times” had it been published a hundred years earlier. As a result, the fifteen chapters of the book follow partly a traditional biographic narrative covering the stages of Erani’s life, and in part seek to describe the political and intellectual setting that would shape his hero’s thinking and acting. While making a dramatic beginning in the first chapter with Erani’s arrest in 1937, the following narrative can be divided into three thematic blocks of which the chapters two and three cover Erani’s family background and childhood in Tabriz and the course of his education in Tehran (where he attended the Dar al-Fonun). The following five chapters, dedicated to his studies in Berlin, pay much more attention to Erani’s intellectual development. Striving to explain his development as a scientist, in these chapters the narrative often neglects the biography and instead digresses in the description of the scientific culture of the Weimar Republic, in particular the history of those scholarly disciplines with which Erani had engaged, namely Oriental philology, natural sciences and psychology. The last six chapters return to Erani’s biography, with two chapters dedicated to the beginnings of his journalistic and political activities in Germany and the last part to his activities back in Iran and finally, picking up the threads from the start, ending with his detention, conviction in a Soviet-style show trial and his death in custody, attributed to harsh prison conditions (here again, the penultimate chapter once more tries to explain Erani’s arrest and subsequent fate by a lengthy discussion of the respective politics of Britain, the Soviet Union, and Germany in Iran). The final chapter also includes, in place of a separate conclusion, a short summary of Erani’s basic thoughts.

Without doubt, his prominent status alone, and the fact that his biography shows many parallels to those of many politically committed compatriots of the same age, have made it a worthwhile enterprise to analyze Taqi Erani’s life in closer detail. In addition, being a capable scholar in various fields, Erani was not necessarily destined to become a political functionary, and it is an alluring challenge to explain why a capable scholar would in the end dedicate his life to political activism in the service of Marxist ideology. In pursuit of this question, Jalali dedicates his study to two chief issues: first, Erani’s intellectual development, in particular the influence of the intellectual trends to which he was exposed in postwar Germany, and secondly his actual role in the emergence of the communist movement of Iran, which had its beginnings in Berlin newspaper offices and discussion rounds. In the event, the study does not entirely manage to solve this riddle, but succeeds in providing a better understanding of how the particular political and intellectual situation of Weimar Germany influenced the mentality of the Iranian generation that in its native country had to cope with the failure of the constitutional movement, the emerging dictatorship of Reza Shah and the still interfering and burdensome British hegemony. In Germany, those young Iranians (such as Erani) also found themselves confronted with the highly politicized atmosphere of the interwar period, during which a whole society (similar to Iran) was looking to find its way after the downfall of the traditional order. At the time of Erani’s arrival, Berlin was a stomping ground of various groups and factions connected with each other: German orientalists and diplomats who had been involved in the Reich’s Mideast politics during the war, veterans of the constitutional period such as Hossein Kazemzadeh and Hasan Taqizadeh as well as angry young men like Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh, Morteza and Bozorg Alavi, along with Soviet agents and communist functionaries associated with the Comintern. Along with the vibrant political atmosphere, German scientists were still holding a leading position in fields such as chemistry and physics, but also in Oriental philology and psychology, where new approaches, such as quantum physics and psychoanalysis, were about to shake up old convictions. Erani, who originally had come to Berlin to study chemistry (in which he obtained a doctorate), quickly switched his interests from one of these disciplines to the other, and at the same time from scientific and scholarly publications to journalism, whereby he gradually entered the field of politics. Reconstructing and documenting this process, and identifying the networks with which Erani became associated is in fact the main focus of Jalali’s study, and he has made a remarkable achievement not only by setting Erani’s ideas and publications into their proper intellectual context, but also by presenting a who’s who of those personalities that were in one way or the other involved in Iranian affairs in Weimar Berlin—from eminent Orientalists like Carl Heinrich Becker (founder of Middle Eastern Studies in Germany and temporary Prussian minister of education) and Friedrich Rosen (diplomat, briefly foreign minister and translator of Omar Khayyam’s Rubayyat into German), anti-imperialist activists such as the communist press baron Willy Münzenberg, and the representatives of the various factions of the Iranian community in Berlin. In spite of the fact that Jalali has gathered a vast amount of information (sometimes very elaborated), and has endeavored to pick out every available detail on Erani’s contacts and writings, it still is not completely clear how Erani turned into a convinced and committed Marxist and staunch opponent of Reza Shah’s dictatorship, and the factors that led him to the founding of the Circle of Revolutionary Republicans of Persia (CRRP) in 1926, as the extant sources and memoirs can only give hints. Jalali, in his summary, reckons that it was the experience of shaken traditional values and moral certainties caused by World War I, and the conviction based on his studies in psychology that man was able to shape his personal agency, that led Erani to adopt Marxism as a remedy to overcome this moral dilemma.

More instructive is Jalali’s description of the organization and activities of the CRRP, in particular on the personalities and political connections of its founding members, which again ranged from the Comintern to the German Social Democrats, i.e. two organizations that were, at that time, connected by irreconcilable enmity. Here, the author has made good use of the information scattered in numerous archives and publications in order to present a balanced analysis, in which he can corroborate that this organization in fact won the attention of the Comintern, but that (unlike the German Communist Party) it still followed its own agenda, and that Erani, as a scientist, was critical of Lenin’s concepts (in particular of the latter’s “Materialism and Empirio-criticism”). As the study points out, Erani saw himself in his public activities not as much as a party functionary or even as a revolutionary, but much more as a scientist, who after his return to Tehran above all dedicated himself to the dissemination of the current state of research in physics, biology, and materialist philosophy. In this regard, Erani was to continue his life as a wanderer between worlds, in which he acted simultaneously as a government employee and underground agent. This became evident, for instance, when he made use of official journeys to Berlin and Paris in the service of Reza Shah’s police state to maintain or revive contacts to German and Iranian companions who were now organizing the resistance against the Nazi regime, while on the other hand he was still striving to maintain an independent political agenda. Thus, it appears to be a grim irony that Erani’s arrest was based on the assumption of Reza Shah’s security apparatus (itself bearing on information given by Soviet defectors and arrested fellow communists) that he was the head of a vast pro-Soviet network within Iran. Finally, his tragic end was not very different to the fate of other prominent representatives/victims of Reza Shah’s regime, such as Sardar Asad Bakhtiyari or Abdol-Hossein Teymurtash.

With his study, Jalali has presented a remarkable contribution to our understanding of the political and intellectual history of Iran during the interwar period. This book is not only a helpful synthesis of the extant knowledge on Taqi Erani and the beginnings of Iran’s encounter with communism, it also presents some fresh approaches to the subject, pointing out that the emergence of the Tudeh Party in the 1920s and 1930s was in some sense the result of Soviet foreign policy, in particular the interest in creating a willing forefront organization in Iran. However, while admiring the author’s skillful use of primary sources, one may regret the fact that he has not made use of the possibility to embed Erani’s intellectual biography more firmly into its context, and to amend his sources using the abundant file records in the British and German national archives, or the collection of the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. Even more surprising is the fact that in his analysis of Erani’s Berlin years the author has abstained from consulting the pertinent literature on Weimar Germany and the history of the Global Left; he has overlooked recent publications on the Persian-language press in Berlin (such as the recent reprint of the communist newspaper Peykar),Footnote ¹ and missed Yair Hirschfeld’s older but still indispensable study on the topic of Irano-German relations between the world warsFootnote ² relying rather on L. P. Elwell-Sutton’s dated account from 1941. These lapses are all the more regrettable as Jalali lacks evidence for some of his claims, in particular that the trial against the Fifty-Three was both a Soviet intrigue to eliminate the independent Left in Iran, but also an attempt by the Iranian government to win the favor of Nazi Germany by a crackdown on its local communists. Last but not least, the study would have substantially benefited from closer editing, which would have enhanced the book’s readability by correcting misspellings, minor factual errors and improving streamlining between the narrative and its chronology and events.

A more in-depth investigation of the entanglement of young Iranians with intellectual tendencies in interwar Germany also could have helped to a better understanding of Iranian politics during that period. Given that Jalali notes the despair and resignation of the constitutionalist veterans in Berlin (which even induced the father of Morteza and Bozorg Alavi to commit suicide) when faced with Reza Shah’s dictatorship, one may ask whether the younger generations just followed the example of their German contemporaries and embraced totalitarianism by joining the “generation of unconditionality” (or Generation des Unbedingten, as a more recent studyFootnote ³ has characterized the protagonists of Nazi politics) in order to find some intellectual orientation. In view of such inspiring moments, the critical comments above cannot diminish the author’s merit in presenting a readable, informative, and thought-provoking study on an important and hitherto neglected aspect of the history of modern Iran, which is also a worthwhile read for scholars of the history of twentieth century Europe and the history of science and political ideas. In that sense, Jalali has made a welcome contribution and pointed to a path on which, hopefully, other researchers will follow.