This thesis examines how the press of the erstwhile German Democratic Republic represented Iran in the years from 1949 – the year of the GDR’s formation – until 1989, the last complete year before its demise on 3 October 1990. The study focuses on key events in Iranian history such as the overthrow of the Mossadegh government in 1953, the White Revolution, the Islamic Revolution of 1979, and the Iran-Iraq war. It will be shown that although news and articles were based on selected facts, they still presented a picture of Iran that was at best distorted, the distortions and misrepresentations amounting to what could be described as 'factual fiction'. Furthermore, clear evidence will be provided that economical and political relations with Iran were a primary concern of the GDR’s leadership, and thus also of the GDR’s press and have therefore dominated the reporting on Iran. Whatever ideological concerns there may have been, they were hardly ever allowed to get in the way of amicable relations with the Shah or later with the Islamic Republic. Only in periods where the two countries enjoyed less amicable or poor relations, was the press free to critically report events in Iran and to openly support the cause of the SED’s communist Iranian sister party, the Tudeh. Despite East Germany’s diametric ideological environment and despite the fundamentally different role that the GDR’s political system had assigned to the press and to journalism, East Germany’s press was as reliant on the input of the global news agencies as any Western media. The at times almost complete reliance on Western news agencies as sources for news on Iran challenged more than just the hermeneutic hegemony the SED and the GDR’s press wanted to establish. After all, which news and information were made available by the news agencies to the media in both East and West was primarily determined by the business interests of said agencies. The study makes a contribution to three fields: Modern Iranian history, (East-) German history and media studies. The most valid findings were certainly made in the latter.

This thesis delineates the transformation of Iran’s so-called post-revolutionary ‘religious intellectuals’ (rowshanfekran-e dini) from ideological legitimators within the political class of the newly-established theocratic-populist regime to internal critics whose revised vision for the politico-religious order coalesced and converged with the growing disillusionment and frustration of the ‘Islamic left’, a constellation of political forces within the governing elite of the Islamic Republic, that following the death of Ayatollah Khomeini increasingly felt itself marginalised and on the outskirts of power. The historical evolution of this complex, quasi-institutionalised and routinized network, encompassing theologians, jurists, political strategists and journalists, which rose to prominence in the course of the 1990s, and its critical engagement with the ruling political theology of the ‘guardianship of the jurist’, the supremacy of Islamic jurisprudence, political Islamism and all forms of ‘revolutionary’ and ‘utopian’ political and social transformation, are scrutinised in detail. In this vein, the thesis examines the various issues provoked by the rowshanfekran-e dini’s strategic deployment and translation of the concepts and ideas of a number of Western thinkers, several of which played a pivotal role in the assault on the ideological foundations of Soviet-style communism in the 1950s and 1960s. It then moves to show how this network of intellectuals and politicos following the election of Mohammad Khatami to the presidency in May 1997 sought to disseminate their ideas at the popular level by means of the press and numerous party and political periodicals, and thereby achieve ideological and political hegemony. The thesis proceeds to demonstrate the intimate connection between the project of ‘religious intellectualism’ and elite-defined notions of ‘democracy’, ‘electoral participation’, ‘reform’ and ‘political development’ as part of an effort to accumulate symbolic capital and assert their intellectual and moral leadership of the polity.