She debated Argo with the Basij, crashed a secret military base, and survived a staged interrogation. A German student’s dispatch from a surreal and unforgettable year in Tehran.
I first came to Iran in 2011 and spent four weeks backpacking through the country. I wanted to explore it because what I had heard from my Iranian friends at university was very different from what was being said about Iran in the media at the time. There was a big disconnect. It was very intriguing to come and see the place for myself.
I loved it so much that I wanted to come back and learn more. So, I decided to enroll at the University of Tehran and returned as a student.
When I first got there, I found Tehran very overwhelming. I didn’t speak the language, and couldn’t read the street signs. The city was huge. I couldn’t find my way home, and people didn’t speak English. I had no idea where I was. There was no Google Maps, or at least not such great service at the time.
I was completely lost in the city. I missed my bus stop, and I had no sense of direction—no idea where I was or where my accommodation was. I remember standing in the middle of the street, crying, when a taxi stopped. I had the address of my accommodation written on a piece of paper, so I showed it to him. He drove me home, but overcharged me by quite a lot. I was just so frustrated and felt really, really lost.
The first thing I did the next day was call a friend. He bought me a map of the city and sat me down, and we went through it—where different places were, where my university was, where I was living, and where various sites around town were—so I could orient myself.
She replied, ‘I don’t have neither. I don’t have Christian. I only have Sunni or Shia.’ So, in the system, I was registered as a Shia student.
Getting my student ID wasn’t much smoother. When I went to the university registration office, I gave them my name and birthdate. The registration lady asked me, “Are you Sunni or Shia?” I said, “Well, I’m neither. I’m Christian.” She replied, “I don’t have ‘neither.’ I don’t have Christian. I only have Sunni or Shia.”
I said, “But I’m Christian.” She was like, “Okay, I’m going to put Sunni.” I said, “No, no, no, no, no. If you put down a religion for me, I don’t want to be a minority religion. You’re going to put Shia.” So, in the system, I was registered as a Shia student because they just didn’t have the option Christian.
Two of my classmates, who were from Bulgaria, had the same issue. I think they put down Sunni for them. And Bulgaria didn’t exist in the drop-down menu for country, so they selected another random country for them.
On my first day at the university, I actually got into an argument with my professor—I don’t even remember what it was about. My cultural background is rather direct in communication, and I didn’t realize that that’s not the norm in Iran. I must have said something that offended him, and we ended up having some kind of disagreement.
I stormed out of the building and sat on the steps, chain-smoking a couple of cigarettes because I was so angry. What I hadn’t realized was that smoking—especially for women—was basically a no-go. So from day one, I became known to all the other students in my faculty as the badass student because I sat on the steps with my legs spread like a dude, smoking.
At first, I lived in student accommodation with two of my classmates. It was not a dorm—more like a shared flat. It was really cheap, but it also really sucked. The place was in a rather conservative area near Enqelab Square. We weren’t allowed to have friends of the opposite sex over. I didn’t feel very comfortable coming home alone at night, mostly because you wouldn’t see many women out by themselves after dark. On top of that, there were cockroaches—one of my biggest phobias.
As quickly as I could, I looked for my own place. I found a very lovely flat in the north of Tehran, which I shared with a Polish guy who was doing his PhD at the university. Slowly but surely, I started building my circle of friends.
I was surprised by how easy it was to make friends—how naturally I connected with Iranians, and how cultural or religious differences didn’t matter at all. That’s why I always say people everywhere are basically the same. They might think a little differently, but if you show genuine interest in their culture, they’ll be open with you.
As part of my degree, I went to Dehkhoda Institute. There were a lot of North Koreans at the institute at the time. One day, a TV show approached Dehkhoda to see if any foreign students would be willing to come on their show. I agreed to go.
Obviously, it was all in Farsi, and my Farsi was okay, but I was still a beginner at that stage. Throughout the show, the host kept making fun of my bad Farsi, which I found quite funny. I thought, okay, so I came all this way to a foreign country to learn the language, just to be on live television and be made fun of for my bad language skills.
I was in Tehran during an election year. It was Ahmadinejad’s last year. The president who replaced him, Rouhani, was labeled a progressive, and people were very excited. In the months before the election, many people were like, “We’re not going to vote, what’s the point?” But a couple of weeks before the vote, there was a real spark in the city, and people were quite hopeful for change and for this new candidate. You could really feel it on the streets of Tehran.
I had to go to class the day the results were being counted. I was constantly on my phone, checking for updates. My teacher told me to get off the phone and pay attention to the class. And I said, “But these are the elections! How can I not be on my phone? How can you not be interested in the outcome?”
He replied, ‘Okay, fine, we hung them in the trees, but we didn’t keep them hanging there. In the movie, it looks like we just left them hanging.’
I remember when Argo came out, my university organized a screening of the movie at the former U.S. Embassy for us international students, along with the Basijis. It was part of the cultural exchange program, or whatever they called it.
As the movie neared the end, where the Americans get away, I noticed the Basiji guys in the back looking really pissed off—clearly annoyed by the ending.
We had a discussion about the movie afterward. One guy raised his hand and said, “The movie’s totally wrong. They’re portraying us like we were just hanging people in the streets, and that’s just not true.”
I raised my hand and said, “With all due respect, I do believe there’s some truth to that, based on historical accounts from that time. People were being hanged in the streets. It was a revolution—things get messy during a revolution; people die, get shot, get hanged, and so on.”
He replied, “Okay, fine, we hung them in the trees, but we didn’t keep them hanging there. In the movie, it looks like we just left them hanging.”
I thought that was kind of funny because his point was that they didn’t leave the bodies hanging for long, whereas the whole point of the movie was simply to show that people were hanged from trees in Tehran.
The former Embassy was also a museum about the hostage-taking. As I walked through it, I thought I have to bring back my friends. I knew a guy from university whose family member worked there, and through him, I organized two or three more visits to the museum.
The first time we went, the guy who welcomed us took photos as we entered, and it was pretty strict. By the third visit, he said, “German girl, I really don’t have time for this today. You know the museum—just go and show yourself around.” I remember thinking I’d really like to go down to the cellar—this would be the golden moment. But I knew I really shouldn’t. Even though I wanted to, I didn’t.
There were some funny things in that museum. The people who worked there seemed to look at everything with suspicion and paranoia. During the tour, they showed us a machine and said, “This is where they printed passports, and that’s why this was a CIA cell.” All of us visitors were thinking, “It’s an embassy—of course they printed passports.”
There was a chamber they claimed was a sealed-off space for secret operations, accessible only by iris scan and fingerprints. I looked at the guide and thought maybe he doesn’t speak English, and said, “It’s interesting that you say this is an iris scan, because the sign on the door just says something like ‘Pull lever or turn handle to open door.’” It was clearly from the 1970s. It was just so funny.
The guide said, “That’s just what they printed on there to make people believe it’s easy to get in. But you actually needed an iris scan!”
On 22 Bahman, which is the day of the revolution [anniversary], the university organized an international sports event in the north for exchange students. I just thought to myself, Why would I go there? It felt like there were going to be so many things happening throughout the city, especially around Enqelab Square.
I decided not to attend the sports event and go to the rallies that were happening that day instead. I had also planned to go to a church service with my Armenian classmate.
The rally was a bit surreal. There were lots of people who weren’t from Tehran—people from outside the city, from all over the country—who kept asking me for directions to places like Azadi Square and Enqelab Square. I remember seeing dartboards hung up with Obama’s face on them.
People were walking around with posters that said things like “We’ll resist forever” and “Death to America.” I walked up to the soldier handing them out and took a few for myself.
When I got to the church, the guy at the entrance took one look at me and said, “No, no, no—you can’t come in with that here.” So I had to leave the protest posters at the door before I could go inside.
I remember how excited I was to drink wine at church, because it’s obviously part of the Christian religion, symbolizing Jesus’ blood, and alcohol was otherwise illegal across the country. That was before I found an alcohol dealer and before my sister visited.
She arrived not long after. I was waiting for her just past the gate by the X-ray machine. My sister walked through, her bag went into the scanner, and suddenly I saw the guy at the machine talking to her, and she was talking back.
She finally came out with her bag, and I asked, “What did he say?” She said, “He asked if I had any alcohol in my bag.” I said, “Well? What did you say?”
She goes, “I said, Yes, of course. I brought three bottles of beer, two bottles of wine, and a bottle of vodka for my sister.” I stared at her: “Are you serious?!”
She just shrugged and said, “Come on. You’ve been telling me this is an Islamic Republic and there’s no alcohol here. Obviously, I couldn’t show up empty-handed.”
Honestly, I think the officer let her go because she didn’t lie. He was probably so shocked that she didn’t try to make an excuse that he just said, “Yeah, okay… go.”
Then we went home, cooked some pork she’d also brought, and had our first round of beers on the rooftop.
There were two funny encounters I had with the religious police. During my 2011 trip, I was, of course, aware of the Islamic dress code, and I had a headscarf and something to cover my bum. But it was a very hot day, so I rolled up the sleeves of the long shirt I was wearing up beyond my elbows.
We were walking around in the bazaar—my friend and I—and all of a sudden, there were these two ladies following us, dressed in black from head to toe. They kept talking at us in Farsi, and back then, I didn’t speak any Farsi. I told my friend, “Hey, look, there are these two ladies. I think they want to tell us something.” She was like, “No, come on, they probably just want to sell us something. Let’s just keep walking.” And I said, “No, no, no, they look quite official. They have these weird green stripes on their shoulders.”
Anyway, we stopped. These ladies spoke to us, and I kept looking at them, saying, “I have no idea what you’re saying. I’m sorry, I don’t speak any Persian. I don’t speak Farsi.” Then, all of a sudden—because she realized I didn’t understand what she was trying to tell me—she reached out, rolled down my sleeves, looked at me, and said, “Welcome to Iran.” And then she walked off. That was my first encounter.
The second encounter happened while I was a student at Dehkhoda. At the time, it wasn’t uncommon for women who weren’t wearing proper Islamic clothing to be arrested. There would be a van parked somewhere, and they’d pull women off the street, put them in the van, and take them to the police station. Then, either their parents or their husbands, if they were married, had to come and collect them.
So I walked into one of those patrols. Again, I was wearing something that was somewhat acceptable—but probably my sleeves were rolled up, or my shirt was a little too short. Anyway, the lady wanted to arrest me, and kept asking, “Where are your parents?”
At that time, my Farsi was good, so I explained, “My parents aren’t here, I’m a foreign exchange student.” But I could tell she didn’t really understand what that meant. She just kept saying, “But we need to call your parents. They need to come here and collect you.”
I explained to her, “Look, my parents live in Germany. I’m not Iranian—I’m just here on exchange.” But the woman still didn’t get it. Finally, one of the arrested women inside the van told the officer, “Listen, there’s no point in arresting her—she’s a foreigner. Her parents aren’t here.”
In the end, the police obviously let me go, but I found it quite funny that the concept of a foreign exchange student was so alien to them. Because the country had been so sealed off, the officers just couldn’t understand that I was by myself in their country as a student, and that my parents weren’t there.
I have a lot of funny stories and sometimes crazy ones from Tehran. My friends and I used to go to this café in Evin, near the Prison. It was open almost 24 hours—didn’t close at 1 or 2 like most places—and they had fresh juices. We’d bring our vodka in water bottles, order juice, spike our drinks, and sit there getting drunk in this random café by Evin f*@king Prison until five in the morning.
Once, we heard about the richest man in Tehran, and we just wanted to see what he lived like. So, my two Iranian friends and I got some burgers and drove up to his house in North Tehran. His house was massive. It wasn’t even a house. It was a mansion. It was a palace with pillars in front and peacocks in the garden. We just sat there on the sidewalk, the three of us with our burgers, eating them, looking at the house, being like, “Wow, this is how people can live here too. So fancy.”
Just before I left Tehran, a friend asked if there was anything I still wanted to do before leaving Iran. I said, “I’d love to shoot a gun.” He called a friend, who said his uncle—or someone in his family—had connections to a shooting range. We decided to go there, buy a couple of rounds, and shoot.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that it wasn’t a public shooting range—it was more like a military training ground. I can’t say for sure, but I think it might have belonged to the Quds Brigades. It was definitely military.
When we got there, it was the two guys up front, and me in the back, wearing my red headscarf and red lipstick. We pulled up to the gate, and the guy in the guard hut stared at us with his mouth slightly open, stunned. He opened the gate and let us in.
We parked, and I said, “Great— let’s find the guns.” I walked over to this box where you rent the weapons and was just about to ask for one when I suddenly heard a voice behind me, “Who the hell are you?”
I turned around and saw a very tall Iranian man in military uniform with many, many stars on his shoulders. They later told me he was the managing general of the base. He asked again, “Who the hell are you?” I said, “I’m a foreign exchange student from Germany… and I just wanted to shoot a gun.”
He goes, “No, no, no, no, no—you cannot shoot a gun here.”
I said, “Well, if I can’t shoot, maybe my two Iranian friends can, and I’ll just sit on the side and watch.” He replied, “No, no, no—you don’t understand. Not a single bullet will be fired while you’re here, because if you get hurt, it’ll cause an international crisis.”
I had no idea what kind of place I’d walked into, but it was definitely some kind of military training site. The fact that I got that close to getting a gun as a foreigner still baffles me.
I had no idea who he was, but he was definitely very senior—multiple stars on his shoulders. Because he was Iranian, he said, “You cannot shoot a gun, but since it’s Ramadan and close to iftar, stay and be our guest.” He was probably doing tarof, but I said we’d love to stay for dinner!
We stayed and had some really good food. After about half an hour, the general burst in, looked at us, and said, “Get the hell out. Now.” That was tarof—he didn’t want us to stay, but we still did. Eventually, the general kicked us out.
By the end of my time in Iran, I had a really great life—I had lots of friends, traveled around the country, visited Isfahan and fell in love with Naqsh-e Jahan Square, and even went to Qeshm Island, where I saw dolphins. On weekends, I’d get invited to various embassy events. I felt very proud of having built a life in a country so different from my own cultural background. I think the biggest takeaway from that year was making lifelong friends. I hadn’t expected that.
My least favorite experience was actually being interrogated. What happened was, I had already left Iran to study in London, but I returned about a year later in 2014 as part of my master’s thesis research. When I arrived at the airport, my passport was confiscated. The officers were very friendly—they said there was “an issue” and that I needed to go to a specific office to sort it out. Once that was done, they said, I could get my passport back.
I was meant to stay with a friend from university. When I arrived at her house—she lived with her parents—they obviously got stressed because I was a random friend of their daughter. My passport had been confiscated, so potentially, there was an issue with me, maybe something I’d done, and I was staying at their house. I think they were a bit worried that this might have negative consequences for them.
Since my passport had been confiscated, I couldn’t go anywhere else—not even to a hotel—so I was basically stuck. They were not happy with me being there.
At that stage, I didn’t think it was going to be a problem. I went to the office they told me to go to. I got there around 8 a.m. and said I was here to sort things out.
They said, “No, no, no, you’re totally wrong here. You have to go to this other office.” So they sent me across town—Tehran is a very big city—so it took quite a while to get there. But when I arrived, they told me I was in the wrong place and sent me somewhere else—again, across town. And when I finally got there, they said, “This isn’t right. You need to go back,” which, of course, was the original office I had started from.
By the time I returned, it was already 4 p.m. I explained, “Everyone kept sending me away, and they sent me back here.” That’s when I was told to go see the head of—whatever it was, I don’t remember exactly—that building or organization.
When I asked him what was wrong, he said, “Well, there’s clearly an issue we need to sort—but not now, because it’s 4 p.m. We’ll make an appointment for you. There are a few questions you’ll need to answer, and we’ll call you.”
And that’s how he sent me away. Later, I received a call and an address, and I went there with my friend’s mom—the one I was staying with. It looked like a normal little house with a waiting area. But there was a soldier who made sure I didn’t have any electronics on me—no cables, no phone, nothing.
He asked me to sit in a room—an office. And at first, I just waited. Half an hour went by, and I started looking around. I got a bit stressed because I realized that this wasn’t a normal office. It was made to look like one. There was a desk and a chair, but the surface was covered in dust. It was supposed to look like someone works there, but no one actually did. The telephone on the desk wasn’t connected; the cable had been cut and was just lying on the floor. There was a weird outline of a door in the wall.
I could tell it wasn’t an actual office—just made to look like one. Then three people entered and said they had questions. By that time, I think I’d already waited two hours. They interrogated me for about three hours.
The problem was my former flatmate. To this day, I’m not sure what her exact role was. She was working for an embassy. I think they had grown suspicious of her and her activities, or what she was up to. Her Farsi wasn’t good, and whenever she needed something done, or needed to call someone, or figure something out where English wasn’t enough, she always asked me to do it for her. I was happy to help her out.
During one of her interrogations—or maybe it wasn’t really an interrogation; more like an interview, since she was working for an embassy and treated with diplomatic protocol—she told them, “I don’t speak any Farsi, but whenever I need anything done or need help with something, my flatmate does that for me, because she speaks Persian really well.”
They asked me about her and what she was up to, and there was a bit of a back-and-forth. It was quite intense because they accused me of things I obviously hadn’t done—espionage, collaborating with her, spying on the country—claims that were totally untrue.
They asked at some point, “Do you want to call the embassy? We’re going to take you to prison now. And if you’re taken to prison, you’re never going home. We are going to arrest you.” I said, “There’s no point in me calling my embassy because I’ve done nothing wrong. I haven’t violated the laws of this country. If you want to bring me in front of the judge, then yeah, let’s do that now.”
After three to four hours, it ended with me having to give a handwritten confession-apology. Because I think they were still very much focused on that woman, I wrote a formal apology to the Islamic Republic, apologizing for not having selected my flatmate more carefully.
They wanted me to write other things, but I refused. I said this is the only thing I would do because everything else was not true.
The interrogation was entirely in Farsi, but at some point, I asked for an interpreter. They asked why I needed one when I spoke so well. I said, “Well, because this is very important to me, and I want to understand your questions 100 percent. I want to make sure that I give you the precise answers you’re looking for. So it’s very important that I have a translator who can at least pick up nuances that I might not be able to convey in a language other than English.”
They initially wanted me to write my statement in Farsi too, but I was very happy in the end that I could write it in English, as that really allowed me to be very specific about certain details.
After I left, I had a bit of a nervous breakdown in front of the station. It was Ramadan, it was extremely hot, and I hadn’t eaten or had anything to drink. They’d offered me water, but I got the sense they were testing me—they wanted to see if I was smart enough to turn it down. So I said, “No, I’m sorry, I won’t drink water because it’s Ramadan. I respect the laws of this country.”
By the time I got out, I was really dehydrated, exhausted, and overwhelmed. I hadn’t expected any of this. As soon as I stepped outside, I started crying. We got a taxi to the metro with my friend’s mom, and while we waited for the train, I just kept quietly crying.
All of a sudden, this person shows up and says, “Hey, I’m an international human rights lawyer. Here’s my card. If you need help, call me.” I was really freaked out and asked my friend’s mom, “Why is this person coming up to me? Why did they assume I have a problem?” She asked them, and the person—who claimed to be a lawyer—just said, “Well, it’s a foreign woman crying on the street, so clearly something must be wrong.”
I ripped up the card as soon as I got on the train—not in front of him, obviously—and never contacted him. The whole thing really freaked me out.
From that point on, I felt I was under surveillance. They would call my friend’s house and speak to the mom, asking things like, “What’s she up to? What is she doing? Is she stressed?” And my friend’s mom would just say, “No, she’s just going to the university, just doing her things, meeting friends for coffee. She’s not stressed. No, she’s not going to her embassy.”
That went on for maybe a week. I was still waiting. The friend I was staying with was supposed to leave for the U.S. to study, and her parents really didn’t want me to stay with them any longer. I remember feeling incredibly stressed. I spoke to another Iranian friend and told her what was going on, and she said, “Come stay with me.”
I didn’t want to cause her any trouble. I told her, “I know I’m your friend, but you’ve only known me a year. They’re accusing me of something serious—espionage. You don’t really know me, and I wouldn’t hold it against you if you kept your distance. Let’s just meet again after this is over—maybe in another country or another time.”
I was so touched when she said, “f*@k that. I know you. You’re my friend, and I’m taking you home.” I had nowhere else to go, and the fact that she trusted me after such a short time meant a lot.
Later, we drove by that building—the one where I’d been interrogated—with another Iranian friend. It was a random building—I didn’t know what it was—so I wanted him to take a look and tell me what it actually was, or who it belonged to. And he said, “Yeah. That’s them.” It wasn’t just a random police thing. It was them.
At some point, I got a phone call from a number that showed up on my phone as just zeros. They told me I could come and collect my passport at the same place where I’d first been summoned. I went in to see the head of that organization.
I’ll never forget that moment. I reached out to take my passport—he was still holding it, I was touching it, wanting to take it— I said, “Well, I hope this means things are sorted now.” He just kept holding on to my passport, and then looked me in the eyes and said, “If you’re a friend of Iran, then yes.” And then I just took my passport and left.
I’m not sure whether I had changed my flight or I had one booked, but I stayed in Tehran for another three or four days after getting my passport. I had no reason to run—and I didn’t want to. My friend told me, “You’ve done nothing wrong, so act like nothing’s wrong. Because nothing is wrong. Well, apart from the fact that they are clearly trying to pressure you. To see if you’ll crack, if you’ll make a wrong move. So it is important to behave as normally as possible.”
So I went to the university, met friends for coffee. I always told people beforehand, “This is what’s happening with me right now—if you’d rather not meet, I completely understand.” But none of my friends declined a meeting.
I even watched the World Cup—football—at the German Embassy in Tehran. And then, a few days later, I flew home.
About a year after everything had happened, that former flatmate called me. I completely lost it—I was screaming at her. I was furious. Because it hadn’t just been about me or my safety. I had Iranian friends. This could’ve put them in real danger.
I was angry she’d given up my name. During my own interrogation, they kept asking me to name people—friends, people I spent time with. And I refused. I told them, “My friends are the people I study with. You’re the intelligence unit—go to the university, look at the records, find my classmates.” I didn’t give them a single name.
It wasn’t easy. But it’s not like they were waterboarding me or putting electric wires on my hands. It just took a bit of backbone to say, I won’t name anyone.
The fact that she gave them my name—then didn’t even tell me afterward—made me furious. I told her, “I can’t believe you did this.” And she had the audacity to say, “Well, maybe you actually were doing something. Maybe you were up to no good.” Hinting at espionage.
Afterwards, I heard she kept on trying to go back to Iran, and for different reasons, it wouldn’t work out.
But I actually did go back when I was working for the UN. I had to return to Iran for a project, so I did. Would I go back now? Yes, of course I would. I mean, there’s no reason for me not to. Why wouldn’t I?
Iran is a fantastic country, rich in history, culture, and natural beauty. Its heritage spans thousands of years, and there’s so much to see and experience. The people are incredibly welcoming and hospitable. Despite the ups and downs—the rollercoaster of it all—I truly mean it when I say it was one of the best years of my life.
I want people to know about Iran. And when I think of Tehran, there’s a quote I once read that captures it perfectly: “Isfahan and Shiraz are Iran’s soul, but Tehran is its beating heart.” That’s exactly what the city feels like—beautiful, overwhelming at times, but utterly fascinating.