I am, of course, particularly curious to find out how these summaries express the plight of Ausländer in Germany. I discover that the students either avoided the topic ‘foreigner’ altogether and described the story as a story of discrimina- tion against a child from‘anethnic minority’, or they tried to coin words impossi- ble in German like ‘first generation German’ or ‘Turco-German’ that reflect their American understanding of the situation. I am starting to see that the silence I experienced in class was more than a linguistic problem; it was a cultural problem.