Iranian Lifestyle in Hamburg
By Hossein Faraji

Adopting the grounded theory of Anselm L. Straus and Barney Glaser, Hossein Fajaji began to work on an applied explorative social research at the University of Hamburg on May 1989.

Related data were collected through different sociological methods such as; interview, participant observation an analysis of text and articles. The thesis was finished on May 1996. A summery of conclusions is as follows:

From 98.000 Iranian who lived in Germany at 1988, roughly 12.800 lived in Hamburg. Most of them applied for asylum, leaving Iran after the revolution of 1979. The immigrants, coming from a patriarchal traditional society to a western industrial country face a different social and cultural way of life. The impact of immigrations` consequences on each immigrant is according to age, sex education, previous social minority group and specially financial conditions different.

The problem of married immigrants are usually marital rows and increase of divorce rates in comparison to the similar families living in IRAN: Similarly generation conflict may be observed more frequently between parents and children. Finding an appropriate job is a real problem specially for educated immigrants with an academic degree. Last but not the least is the problem of anti-alien feeling and New- Nazis organized actions against immigrants that is a real barrier to the process of assimilation and integration.

After analysis of various detailed problem of each groups of Iranian immigrants, the readers find 14 typical interviews with the persons subject to the study as well as 5 interviews with five specialists who had vast experience and knowledge about the Iranian living milieus in Hamburg.