The motivation for this paper is twofold. One is using the vehicle of biography against the backdrop of the political, geopolitical, cultural and intellectual climate of the period to shed light on aspects of Iranian history that tend to hinder a lucid understanding of the past -- the modus operandi of Pahlavi during its founding and formative phase, which had a marked impact in forging the mantra of statecraft adopted to the end of that dynasty, obscurities such as Pahlavi's purported rupture with the past (Qajar era) and the motivation of its rapprochement with the Third Reich despite its intimate relationship with the British. Thus, historical inquiry through the lens of an interdisciplinary biography is one motivation. This has required tapping into primary sources — archival materials (Pahlavi, Weimar, Comintern), interviews with personalities who had collaborated with the protagonist, collected works of the protagonist (2000 pages scattered in private collections and libraries in several countries), family archives (made available by the offspring of his sisters), and interdisciplinary history within a transnational context (Iran and Germany).   The second motivation is to develop a deeper understanding of the protagonist’s principal political conception — existential modernization as opposed to autocratic modernization attributed to the founder of Pahlavi (Reza Shah), a collision of conceptions that led to the demise of the protagonist in Reza Shah’s prison — a refreshing concept which as it turns out has not only the ability to provide a versatile rendering of what it means to uphold an agenda of the left (pacifism in the interwar context as a pillar of foreign policy while domestically focusing on equitable distribution of wealth and intensification of means for long-term production of wealth, as in appropriation of knowhow in fundamental science and technologies linked to mercantilism), but can also provide a framework for interpreting the long-cycle behavior of Iranian history (its civilizational seesaw corresponding in its apogee to periods when the existential mantra was most assiduously pursued by ruling orders and dynasties, notably in terms of maritime strategy, such as during peak phases of Achaemenid, Sassanid, and Safavid rule).