Ehsanullah Attiq from Afghanistan came to Germany as a student in 2021. He completed the Welcome Course held in the 2023/2024 winter semester and now studies at Freie Universität Berlin. He spoke to campus.leben about his long road to getting back into the classroom, and how a German course at Freie Universität Berlin has changed his life.

Ehsanullah Attiq has a crystal clear memory of the very first day he ever heard German being spoken. It was August 2021, shortly after the Taliban’s takeover of his home country, Afghanistan. He was in a crowded refugee camp in Qatar, standing in front of two German NGO employees, who were flicking through his documents and speaking to each other in their native tongue. “I couldn’t understand a word of what they were saying and ended up asking them what language they were speaking,” he says. “The longer I listened, the more complicated German seemed to me as a language.” 

The fact that he would one day end up telling this story in fluent German would have been unbelievable to him back then.

Just a few weeks before that, Attiq had been living a normal life. He was in his early twenties and in his final semester of studying communication and journalism at Kabul University. He worked for a radio station on the side and dreamed of becoming a reporter. “When I was little, I thought that journalists were heroes,” he remembers. “They gave people who otherwise went unheard a voice, and I wanted to do that too.” Unfortunately for Attiq, life had other plans.

Communication in Fits and Starts

Attiq was forced to leave his university without completing his degree when he was evacuated from Kabul along with thousands of other people. While he was transported out of Afghanistan by the US military, his journey landed him in Germany. “We ended up in Trier at first. I spent ten days there surrounded by nothing but German, before I was able to continue on to Berlin,” he says, smiling. “Back then I thought to myself, ‘It will be difficult to live in this country.’” At home in Afghanistan he spoke Pashto and Persian, but learned English from a young age and to such a high standard that he went on to teach English classes in Kabul for a while. His professional goals all revolved around speaking, sharing knowledge, and engaging with people, but now he was suddenly in a foreign country, in a city where he could not understand what was being said, and where he barely got by even with his excellent English.

“In Berlin it’s much easier to make connections, even if you don’t really speak any German,” says Attiq. “The city is very open and lots of people speak good English, which helps to break the ice.” Despite all this, it was clear to him from the very beginning that he would only ever get ahead in Germany if he learned the language properly. All the employees he interacted with at the Jobcenter, for example, only spoke to him in German – even when he was not able to understand a word of the language. “People I knew were able to interpret for me, but when they weren’t available to come with me it was almost impossible to communicate,” he recalls. Since then he has started interpreting for newly arrived refugees himself. With a hint of pride in his voice, he says, “It was clear to me from the get-go that it would be hard to learn such a difficult language. What I didn’t expect was that it would take so long.”

Moving Up

Attiq attended integration courses offered by the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees to achieve the A1 to B1 language levels in German, while he completed the B2 level by participating in an intensive course at a private language school. What motivated him throughout this period was his desire to get back to studying at a university. “The fact that I was so close to finishing my bachelor’s degree in Afghanistan and had now spent years just learning German was difficult for me to make peace with,” says Attiq, who usually speaks softly, carefully considering his words, but whose drive to achieve his goals is suddenly palpable when he talks about language classes. 

In summer 2023, two years after his arrival in Germany and with B2 language skills in his back pocket, Attiq reached out to the Institute for Media and Communication Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. He wanted to get back into the classroom, finish his degree, and finally jump-start his career. “I always kept my eyes on the prize – now I wanted to make my dreams a reality.” At Freie Universität Berlin he found out about Welcome Courses where students and prospective students who are refugees from any country have the opportunity to attend German language classes ranging from B1 to C1 level of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), the latter being the level needed to pursue a degree program in German.

A Bright Future Ahead

As soon as Attiq signed up for classes, he was virtually unstoppable. He completed his C1 language course in just three months so that he was able to begin studying again in summer semester 2024. Now he has just three semesters to go before he gets his long-awaited degree. He adds, “If I had known about the Welcome Courses earlier I would be further ahead now in terms of both my language skills and my career.”

That is why Attiq, who is now twenty-four, would like to assist other students so that they can begin or continue their studies as soon as possible by helping them to overcome the challenges that he had to face alone. He has also joined the international weStudents team 2024 as a student ambassador – a testament to his eagerness to offer others guidance and support. Unfortunately, he recognizes that becoming a journalist in a country where he is not a native speaker of the languages poses some issues, but he still wants to find ways of standing up for human rights and gender equity in particular. He has founded an NGO dedicated to these values with some friends and has even carried out a few projects already. While his hands will be full as he works toward his bachelor’s degree, it is already obvious that Ehsanullah Attiq will achieve great things in the not-too-distant future.

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The original German version appeared in campus.leben, the online magazine published by Freie Universität Berlin.