Fereydoon had a special relationship with a distant land that began in the 1960s, first with his academic interest as a political science student, then with Anja, who was Polish, and later — with his pen pal crush, Anja's cousin Marek. Fereydoon and Marek corresponded in 1965–1967. It is unknown if they ever met, but in 1972 Fereydoon performed at the Polish Sopot Song Festival.

During his Munich years he met Anja in London — and it was this encounter that first drew poetry out of him. She became his wife, and together they had a son, Rostam. Their relationship was the spark that turned a student into a poet. Without London, without Anja, the voice that would eventually make him dangerous enough to assassinate might never have found itself.

Three times during the Iran-Iraq war, Fereydoon flew into active conflict to reach POW camps holding Iranian child soldiers. He negotiated their release as a member of a diplomatic mission and brought approximately 100 children back to their families in Europe. It is one of the least known and most remarkable things he did.

Born here in 1938, Fereydoon spent his childhood and youth in Tehran before leaving for Germany. After nearly a decade in Munich he returned — and became one of Iran's most celebrated entertainers, a famous singer and a television host whose charisma and wit made him a household name. He was also openly, unapologetically queer in a country where that carried mortal risk. The revolution of 1979 made his continued presence impossible, and in 1982 he left — this time not by choice.

He arrived as a student and left as a poet. In Munich he wrote his PhD in political science, became a father, and in 1964 won the Berlin Poetry Prize. He joined the Munich Academy of Poetry and hosted programs on local television — an experience that will kickstart his whole career back at home. Germany didn't just shelter him — it shaped him as a poet and thinker. When he returned to Iran in 1967 he carried this literary formation with him, beneath the entertainer's surface that the public would come to adore.

He arrived with nothing, uncertain of everything. For a time he was homeless. Then a kind Turkish stranger helped him find footing — one of those acts of quiet human decency that go unrecorded by history but without which there is no history. Istanbul was not a destination; it was a threshold. He passed through it carrying everything he had lost.

A pause between elsewhere and somewhere. Paris was the city of Iranian exile for many artists and intellectuals fleeing the revolution, but for Fereydoon it didn't hold. He was between countries in every sense — no longer Iranian in the eyes of the regime, not yet anything else. The depression of those months was real and heavy.

Los Angeles had a large Iranian diaspora and he worked as a TV host there — continuing in the medium that had made him famous, but in exile, for an audience of the displaced. He stayed awhile. He hated it. The city that swallowed so many exiles couldn't hold him. He left for Germany, the country that had named him a poet thirty years earlier.

He settled, performed, recorded, and continued — an unsilenced voice against the Islamic Republic, broadcasting to Iranians wherever they were. On August 8, 1992, he was assassinated in his Bonn apartment, almost certainly by agents of the Iranian state. He was 54. The murder was meant to silence him. It didn't.