I'm sitting in a coffee shop. Outside it's gray, as it always is in March, and my latte macchiato is the color of these days: dull, lukewarm, indecisive. I wanted to write. About something innocuous. About spring, perhaps, which announces itself but never arrives. But at the next table sit two people who leave me no choice.
A woman, in her early forties, wearing a wool coat and earrings that jingle when she shakes her head—and she shakes it a lot. Across from her is a bald man, his laptop bag draped over the back of his chair, exuding the energy of someone who's just been proven right and can't hide it. The two aren't strangers, I can see that. They argue like old friends, meaning: without restraint.
"Chamenei is dead," he says. It sounds like toast.
"And the school in Minab?" she says.
Silence. Brief. Then: "It's war. Things happen there."
I listen. Today, the coffeehouse is my foreign ministry.
Since February 28th, Israel and the US have been attacking Iran. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed—a man who for decades embodied a regime that veiled women, imprisoned poets, and shot demonstrators. In Berlin, 1,800 people demonstrated, in Düsseldorf 5,000 under the banner "Freedom for Iran." And at the same time: UNESCO classified the military strike as a "grave violation" of international law because an elementary school had been hit. — This is the rift through which this war runs; a rift that cuts right through the soul of every person who simultaneously desires freedom and abhors bombs; a rift that opens up in the coffeehouse just as it does in the Bundestag, only more honestly.
The bald man—I call him, for myself, the liberation optimist—speaks of history. Of 1989. Of the moment when dictatorships fall. He speaks of how freedom sometimes has to come from the outside because it has been stifled from within. He doesn't mean this cynically. He truly means it. That's what's so frightening. — Freedom by missile; a formula as old as the twentieth century and as worn out as a bad joke, yet one that everyone reinvents decade after decade.
The woman in the wool coat—I call her the witness, because I realize she has relatives in Tehran—holds out her phone to him. "My cousin hasn't texted me in three days." Pause. "Not because she's happy."
The liberation optimist looks at his phone. Then away. Then back at it. You can see the story he's been telling himself briefly waver—and how he laboriously sets it right again. "Iran will be free," he says finally. "That's important."
"For whom?" she asks.
I think. Who is right? — A question that sounds so simple and is so impossible to answer that entire universities have failed to grapple with it. There were doubts about the strategy itself within the US administration; even those who had always advocated intervention criticized the inadequate preparation and lack of strategy. Merz declared that the German government understood the United States' approach—a statement that leaves open everything that diplomacy must leave open; a statement that says: We are maintaining a high-level silence. — Germany understands. What a word. Understanding is the most elegant form of cowardice.
What I witness in the coffeehouse isn't an argument about Iran. It's an argument about the limits of compassion. Is it permissible to celebrate Khamenei's death while simultaneously mourning the children buried under rubble in Minab? Must one choose? And if so, by what standard? — Perhaps that is the real question of this war, one that no map or missile can answer: whether freedom imposed from the outside is still freedom—or merely another name for the chaos that ensues when a people's chains are broken without first asking if they are even capable of standing.
The witness and the liberation optimist don't order anything more. They sit silently, each in their own silence. No shared laughter this time. Just two people, both wanting the right thing to do, yet neither knowing what that is.
I close my notebook. My latte macchiato is cold. — Perhaps, I think, it's no coincidence that coffeehouses are the place where wars are discussed; Because the coffeehouse is the only place where you can have an opinion without facing consequences; the only place where you can be for freedom without having to die for it.
On my way out, I see the liberation optimist take out his cell phone. He types something. I can't read it. But I think he's texting someone. Maybe his cousin. Maybe he doesn't have one.
S.
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