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No one could accuse the returnees of a lack of honesty: "I will hit the government in the face!" Shortly after his arrival in Tehran on February 1, 1979, Ayatollah Khomenei said so clearly what he intended: he would determine the next government he would put the previous ministers before courts that he will set up.
WELT commented unequivocally on these statements by the Shiite cleric from the first days of February 1979: “He, he, he.
And millions, who just scolded the Shah as a dictator, cheer the old man with their fists. "
Immediately after Khomenei and his radical Islamic followers came to power in Tehran, it was already foreseeable that this event would get world politics on its toes.
In the decades since then, the situation in the Near and Middle East has only become more dangerous, largely because of Iran.
Forty years ago, however, it was impossible to tell how far these changes would go.
Because with the rebuilding of the (also undemocratic, but at least western-oriented) empire of Persia into the god of Iran, Islamism began its dangerous rise.
Without Khomenei's God, there would probably be no terrorism worth mentioning in the name of Allah.
Frank Bösch has been director of the Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam since 2011
Source: picture alliance / Bernd Settnik / dpa-Zentralbild / ZB
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In fact, 1979 was a “turning point”, as the director of the Center for Research on Contemporary History in Potsdam, Frank Bösch, shows in his book “Turning Point 1979”.
Much of what shapes our present started out in this very year.
How Bösch unravels this is impressive.
In addition to the first takeover of power by Islamists in a state, i.e. the beginning of the confrontation between the secular West and radical warriors of God, the 49-year-old historian identifies nine other topics that have a major impact on our lives today.
Of course, all these developments also had a history, but Bösch explains in detail why they got their special boost in 1979.
For example, the weakening of Soviet communism and thus the beginning of the end of the bloc confrontation.
In June 1979 the new Pope John Paul II traveled to his native Poland for the first time after his election the year before.
The enthusiasm for him strengthened the opposition and thus undermined the position of the communist rulers.
Without this triumphant Pope visit, the collapse of the Eastern bloc would be difficult to imagine - and thus also the reunification of Germany.
Pope John Paul II 1979 in Poland, his homeland
Source: picture-alliance / dpa
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In the same year, China began opening up to the west.
Although the first attempts had already been made in the first half of the 1970s, it was only the successor to the long-time ruler (and responsible for millions of murders) Mao Tse-tung, Deng Xiaoping, who invented the recipe that took his country to the top in the following decades : a purely capitalist economy, but at the same time the rule of a pseudo-communist party apparatus.
It was also at this time that the first mass influx of refugees into the Federal Republic took place: from 9,627 asylum seekers in 1975 the number rose to 51,493 four years later and doubled in 1980 to 107,818.
For the most part, but not exclusively, they were boat people from Vietnam - people who fled the communist regime that had established a reign of terror after the United States withdrew from South Vietnam.
At the same time, many Turks fled the civil war-like conditions in their homeland to relatives in Germany who had been recruited as guest workers.
This influx led directly to fears of foreign infiltration among many Germans;
xenophobic slogans emerged.
The social-liberal federal government discussed possible consequences;
a protocol of the results from July 27, 1981, found by Bösch, stated: "So the door may have to be closed."
Deng Xiaoping combined communist rule with a capitalist economy
Source: picture alliance / dpa
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In 1979, two fundamental political convictions also arose: Margaret Thatcher became the first neoliberal head of government in Great Britain (from which the country lives to this day), while in Germany a radical ecological movement emerged with the Greens (which has merits, but which is increasingly becoming a risk factor) .
The second oil crisis and, at the same time, the meltdown in the US nuclear power plant Three Miles Island, better known as Harrisburg, also showed in 1979 the dependence of western societies on energy supplies and the still acceptable environmental pollution.
This question is as pressing today as the fight against Islamist terrorism and the refugee problem.
Another event that took place in 1979 was specifically important for Germany: the TV miniseries “Holocaust” triggered a new culture of remembrance, as Bösch writes.
Up until then there were only two larger memorial sites in the Federal Republic, in the former Dachau and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps, but numerous other similar projects have now been initiated.
Deportation of Jews - a scene from the US TV series "Holocaust" from 1979
Source: picture-alliance / dpa
At the same time, the murder of millions of Jews became an international topic beyond the circles of survivors and the descendants of victims.
The establishment of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC and the inclusion of the Auschwitz concentration camp on the UNESCO World Heritage List stand for this - expressly as a deterrent example.
When Frank Bösch explained his current project years ago in the Political Archives of the Federal Foreign Office, he encountered skepticism: Is 1979 really that important?
The fact that the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk and the political scientist Claus Leggewie shared the same view as Bösch encouraged the reluctance.
However, the book now presented shows how justified and advanced Frank Bösch's approach is.
The book “Zeitwende 1979” is an example of the scientific discipline of recent contemporary history that could hardly be better.
Frank Bösch: "The turning point in 1979. When the world of today began". (CH Beck, Munich. 512 pp., 28 euros).
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This article was first published in February 2019.