<![CDATA[Abstract. This study analyzes social critique in Tahsim Durgun’s (2025) memoir Mama, bitte lern Deutsch!, which recounts the experiences of a Kurdish-Turkish migrant family in Germany. Studies of German literature by Indonesian researchers have rarely examined contemporary migrant memoirs and the rhetorical strategies used to convey social critique. This study aims to identify social criticism related to bureaucracy, racism, and language pressure, and to examine how such criticism is constructed through irony, cynicism, and sarcasm. The study employed a descriptive qualitative method with a content analysis approach. The researcher served as the primary instrument, while the data were collected through reading and note-taking techniques. The data comprised 12 textual segments from four subchapters of the memoir, analyzed using the concept of monolingual habitus (Gogolin, 1994, 2021) and Keraf’s (2009) categories of figurative language. The findings show that bureaucracy, racism, and language pressure are manifestations of monolingual habitus, which positions German as the sole legitimate norm within state institutions, schools, society, and family life. The critique is constructed through irony, cynicism, and sarcasm, both at the level of individual utterances and through narrative juxtaposition. These findings suggest that migrant memoirs can complement understandings derived from administrative indicators of integration by revealing migrants’ linguistic and emotional experiences that remain unrecorded in official statistics. Keywords: Monolingual Habitus, Rhetorical Strategies, Social Critique, Migrant Literature, Memoir]]>
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