This talk was presented as part of The Sharmin & Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center's 2025 Seminar Series at Princeton University. The talk took place on February 19, 2025.

Title: Ferdowsi in the Third Reich
Speaker: Professor Annie Pfeifer

Abstract

On September 27, 1934, the Nazi Ministry of Science, Education and Culture held a thousand-year celebration of the Persian poet Ferdowsi’s birthday in cooperation with the government of Iran. Not only did German Orientalists and Nazi officials express “immense gratitude,” “esteem,” and “indebtedness” to Iran’s rich literary legacy, they seized the opportunity to correct the misconception that Nazism was against foreign cultures, especially the Middle East. The Ferdowsi millennial celebration in Berlin highlights the symbolic importance that Iran played in the cultural and political life of the Third Reich. Drawing on various speeches and reports, this talk focuses on the way that the Shahnameh is mobilized and reframed by various speakers for specific geopolitical and racial ends. Nazi officials create an imagined literary and cultural heritage between Germany and Iran infused with Nazi ideology.

Bio

Annie Pfeifer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages at Columbia University. She is currently developing a project on the literary and philosophical exchanges between Iran and Germany. Her first monograph To the Collector Belong the Spoils: Modernism and the Art of Appropriation was published by Cornell University Press in 2023 and is currently being translated into Russian. As part of her new project, she has written a book chapter for the anthology Iran and the West as well as a forthcoming article on Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s travels to Iran in the 1930s. Other articles have appeared in various publications including MLN, The New German Critique, German Quarterly, the Los Angeles Review of Books and The New York Times.