He simply has a strong sense of justice, says Shahram Moghaddam: "I feel for people who are treated unfairly." The guitarist, composer and singer-songwriter, who was born in Tehran in 1969 and has lived in Germany since 1992, is currently in Frankfurt on some Iran -listen to demos.

In one of his songs he sings, preferably without amplification, of the many things that are stronger than violence.

The text comes from the Iranian writer Ali Kamrani, who lives in Frankfurt, and also applies to other current topics.

As early as primary school, Shahram Moghaddam played socially critical plays together with professional actors in the theater company “Pouya” (“The Seekers”).

For example "The Little Black Fish" or "24 Hours of Waking and Dreaming" by Samad Behrangi.

When they performed their plays in better parts of the city, the demand was so great that they had to do two performances in a row.

In poorer quarters, on the other hand, fewer people came.

“Therefore, a group of men regularly burst into the performance and berated us that what we were doing was godless.

The adult actors then got very excited and first took us children to safety.

So I never saw how the confrontation between them and the mullahs progressed.

But I was wondering

why this happened in precisely those neighborhoods where the people were as poor as those in our plays.

I think they were just religious zealots.

They didn't want to know at all what we were doing and what we wanted."

Forbidden school theater

On the other hand, his teacher and classmates were enthusiastic fans of the theater performances in which Shahram took part.

“I went to a Christian school where boys and girls were taught together.

They took me in because we lived nearby,” says Shahram Moghaddam.

But soon all the boys had to leave school, the theater group was broken up, western films and western music were banned from public life.

In this situation, Shahram Moghaddam decided to learn guitar.

Because there were hardly any instruments, he built his first guitar himself. A little later he found an opportunity to get professional lessons on a real instrument.

Expressing himself on a Western musical instrument was an important piece of freedom for him and also a kind of inner emigration, which was followed a few years later by the outer: He went to Germany to study music, first at the Wiesbaden Music Academy, then at Hoch's Conservatory in Frankfurt .

Konstantin Wecker as a role model

His role models, beyond the classical, were Konstantin Wecker and the Iranian singer-songwriter Farhad Mehrad (1944 to 2002), with whom he later became close friends.

“He made a strong impression on me by living what he sang.

And by building more and more on the power of the quiet as he matured.”

Shahram Moghaddam never studied composition directly.

His pieces are born out of improvisation.

Improvisation sees a constantly new form of communication between people, also from different cultures.

The experiences with the mullahs, the astonishment at their unwillingness to understand, reverberate in many of his projects.

For example in the film "The Translator" or in "Can You Hear Clothes?" with the dancer Jiyoung Lee: "Most of the time we only see what we think we see," he writes in the text accompanying the video clip produced by the Wiesbaden artist Birgit Reimann .

And: "To be open to the new, the unexpected seems to me to be a key human skill that is becoming increasingly important in our time, in which answers are not always easy to find."

Moghaddam lives in Wiesbaden with his wife and young daughter.

But his main place of work is Frankfurt.

Two years ago, as one of the "district historians" supported by the Polytechnic Society, he dealt with the homeless in the Neue Kräme near the Liebfrauenkirche.

The result is a touching video with photos and drawings by himself and by artist colleagues with theoretical reflections on the reasons for poverty in this rich city and compositions played by himself.

The gentle guitar sounds reflect some begging tones and some big-city obnoxiousness.

This music is not avant-garde.

She conveys in an emotionally immediately appealing way that no one likes to beg for help, that every homeless person has lived an independent life "until it faltered due to unemployment, tragedy, illness, family difficulties," writes Moghaddam in the accompanying lyrics, while his music reflects the vulnerability that everyone carries within.

And thinks he has to hide.