BAhram Hamidi grew up on a military base in the Persian Gulf in the 1970s. His father is a Major General in the Navy and his mother is an astrophysics lecturer. After an Iraqi attack in the first Gulf War, his father is liquidated and the boy has to watch the shooting. He then gets a bullet in the head, which he miraculously survives. His father’s non-commissioned officers help him, his mother and sister to go into hiding, because the family is also being persecuted by the Khomeini regime, which is gaining strength. The bullet is removed from Bahram Hamidi, whose real name is different, in a military hospital. You can still see a long scar on one half of his skull today.
After a few months, the boy loses his ability to speak and the sight in one eye, he gets severe epileptic seizures with anxiety attacks. Meningitis has developed at the site of the operation and, as a result, a tumor has developed; it has already spread to the spine and encases parts of the nervous system. Only about three quarters of the tumor can be removed in a further operation. The seizures are not as severe afterwards, but the tumor remains intact – nothing has changed in that regard to this day. Bahram Hamidi is chronically ill with a disability grade of 70.
At the end of the 1980s he fled to Germany with his mother and sister. The family is accommodated in a refugee camp. Bahram Hamidi is on medication for epilepsy for the first time in his life, and his condition is improving slightly. The family stays in the asylum accommodation for four years. The boy is taking a German course at the Diakonie and longs to go to school, but the asylum seeker is not allowed to go to school.
“Due to your lack of professional experience at an advanced age, we unfortunately have to turn you down.”
For three years he lived with his family in the attic of a vicarage and found a job in a Burger King store. The Hamidis received German citizenship in the mid-1990s. Bahram is promoted to rotation manager, graduates from night school at the same time and then graduates from high school. Luckily for him, the school director recognized the young man’s weakness in oral exams: in stressful situations, he suffers from small epileptic fits that block his thinking. He is therefore allowed to complete all written exams and receives compensation for disadvantages, which does not officially exist yet.
He reports all this in a high-rise apartment in a medium-sized town near Cologne. His German shows traces of his unusual language acquisition, it is very fluent in small violations of the rules.
Around the turn of the millennium, Bahram Hamidi began studying at the Rheinische Fachhochschule in Cologne, which he completed as a state-certified biological-technical assistant. He gets around oral exams in his training. He wants to become a research assistant, but no one invites him for an interview within ten years. He blames his advanced age, foreign name and chronic illness. Out of necessity, he completed internships in a laboratory and at the University of Cologne, where he met a professor who encouraged him to study medicine: “You’ve got more skills, make something of yourself,” he says.
