Dead Ends: What Happens After a Complaint Leaves the Language School

After reaching a dead end with the institutions directly responsible — the publisher that produced the textbook and the language school that chose it as course material — the only remaining reference point was BAMF (the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees).

At that point, I decided to contact associations and NGOs to get informed about three things (in addition, I was also curious about their reactions):
a) whether what I identified would be considered discrimination by these organizations,
b) whether there would be any legal constraints if I decided to publish this case on a blog or another platform, and
c) whether they could recommend people, forums, or associations relevant to this issue.

Below is the email I sent, in which I attached my original message concerning the “Hamid” text (see Hamid’s Story and the Politics of Gratitude):

Given the importance of textbooks in shaping perceptions in integration and language courses, I believe these issues merit serious scrutiny. I would like to ask:

• Would you consider these cases to reflect problematic, discriminatory, or exclusionary discourse? — or am I maybe being too sensitive about this?
• Is there a legal or public communication risk if I were to publish the anonymized correspondence and my critique on a blog or in a public forum with the name of the publisher and/or the language school — considering that the language school acknowledged receipt of my message and said that they forwarded it to the relevant department, but I have received no further reply since?
• Could you recommend platforms, organizations, or journals or magazines in Germany that engage with such issues and might be interested in covering, discussing, or publishing this case?

I would be grateful for your expertise and advice on these matters.

Sorry for the long email, and thank you for your time and patience.

Best regards,

I sent this email to two organizations. One was a counselling center that supports victims of right-wing, racist, and antisemitic violence and threats, including racial profiling and racist police violence, in Berlin. It offers free, confidential, and victim-centred psychosocial support, legal orientation, and practical assistance, as well as anti-racist educational workshops and documentation of racist and right-wing attacks. To be honest, I am aware that they deal with a different kind of issue, and it is therefore somewhat understandable that I did not receive an answer from them.

The second association, on the other hand, fit my case more closely. It is an information platform and research service that provides journalists, academics, and others with up-to-date, evidence-based data and expertise on migration, integration, asylum, discrimination, and related topics in Germany. Its aim is to make public debates on immigration more factual and nuanced by preparing statistics, research overviews, expert contacts, and background materials in close cooperation with scholars and civil society, and by offering these services free of charge.

They replied:

Dear Dr. Me,

thank you for getting in touch with our project.

As a matter of fact, the issue of the representation of immigrants in German schoolbooks has quite a long history. I would recommend getting in touch with one of these experts on the subject:

Prof. Dr. Someone (their e-mail)
Name of the university
Name of the institute

---

Prof. Dr. Someone (their e-mail)
Name of the university
Name of the institute

---

Dr. Someone (their e-mail)
Name of the institute
Their job title

---

I'm very confident that they will be able to support your action against the publisher.

Best regards,

I really do not know where this confidence comes from, but it is a well-known phenomenon that many professors at German universities take around a month to reply — sometimes even to their own PhD students. When I tell my PhD candidate friends in Germany that my advisor replied to my messages very quickly, they are usually surprised and tell me that I should consider myself lucky.

Still, since it meant only a few more emails to send, I decided to take my chances and sent a (more or less) identical email to the three academics mentioned. The results were as follows:

• The first academic: no answer.
• The second academic: no answer.
• The third academic: the email address did not work. I informed the association that had provided the contact details.

What is striking is not any individual non-response, but the cumulative effect. At this stage, responsibility had already been passed from the language school to the publisher and to BAMF. The publisher did not really accept the criticism, and I did not contact BAMF, simply because it felt intimidating to do so, especially given my fragile position as a non-citizen (one might argue that this fear is exaggerated or unnecessary, and that the German state is cautious and that such a step would not affect my visa situation. That may be true — especially since my main experience with the state comes from the country I come from. Still, I would ask those who make such criticisms whether they have had to visit the Immigration Office (Ausländerbehörde) in the last five years, because the face of the state encountered there is quite different from the one seen in other bureaucratic institutions).

For this reason, I chose to contact civil society first, where my questions remained unanswered and responsibility was then shifted toward academia.

I may one day, when I feel more secure about my position, contact BAMF and the Anti-Discrimination Office about these or other issues. But until then, if social workers and/or consultants working on such issues read these lines, I would ask them to keep in mind that many of us came here because of state violence or political pressure, and that we are often more skeptical (because of prior experiences with the state) and afraid (due to our fragile status as immigrants) in this country.

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