No support, no explanations, daily psychological harassment. Favouritism and nepotism, including for the children and friends of the permanent staff. Permanent employees, including my supervisor, were permitted to speak rudely, mistakenly taking rudeness as building up resilience in the intern, meaning “in me”.
Sometimes this fellow staff were even yelling, with the witnessing tacit agreement of the manager. They were NEVER yelling and were never rude publicly at their own interns and working students. Speaking directly with the manager did not help.
There was a lot of enmeshment between personal life and work, as the manager and supervisor were willing to know ABSOLUTELY everything about me, going down to personal life dates and places. The attempts of establishing normal limits were met with micromanagement, sarcasm, and passive-aggressive behaviour. It was really exhausting to work in such an environment, besides the workload that required more people. I had to do over hours often, otherwise I was risking missing deadlines and being given never ending observation the entire day or many days consecutively for the same subject.
The manager gives the disrespectful tone. The attitude was a typical toxic one from a staff in a position of power. There is only one way respect. Many times the supervisor and manager engaged in public mockery in front of the entire division, once even passive-aggressive threats to my tacit reaction (!) to disrespect from a colleague for a food item i brought to work. She was the personal friend of the manager, (the actual threat in German: "…is going to be even worse (for this person)...", meaning me). The manager was not capable to speak like a mature individual and tell if something is wrong and give constructive feedback. Passive-aggressive attitude and mockery were a normality to her.
Gas-lighting and gossiping: a daily thing. Senior employees, Germans, had an ostracizing attitude from the very beginning of my internship, made inappropriate comments about age, cultures of other countries, culinary habits and foods, including mine, and other nationalities.
Air of superiority. You had to show never ending gratitude for being hired as a foreign intern in a German company. The German colleagues were telling in my face that they would have not taken a foreign student because foreigners are not good specialists or do not have German university degrees comparing to the Germans. I can definitely see that there was a huge difference how the Western employees were treated compared to us Eastern Europeans, Asians, Indian subcontinent and Africans. There was a constant feeling of "you are not one of us". Westerners were treated with respect.
Unfortunately, the equitable treatment and non-discrimination principles did not align with the ethical working standards from the paper by this company, at least not in the department where I worked. I can definitely say that I have never been treated with so much disrespect, not before and not after this internship.
