The city councilor Mirrianne Mahn (Die Grünen) used a short video from her bedside to draw attention to racist remarks that the attending doctor at a Frankfurt clinic is said to have made to her in preparation for an operation.

Her report spread on Instagram within a few hours, and by Tuesday afternoon the video had been viewed nearly 350,000 times.

Monika Ganster

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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Mahn named neither the hospital nor the doctor, but she had officially filed a complaint with the clinic, she reported a day after her discharge.

In doing so, she wanted to give the clinic the opportunity to react itself.

The doctor then stopped treating her and she never saw him again.

The rest of the staff, on the other hand, reacted very sensitively to their descriptions.

The doctor is said to have repeatedly referred to Mahn, who grew up in Germany, in front of others as “the African woman”, who could be happy to be treated in this country and not where she comes from.

She also had the impression that he had denied her painkillers, saying that "their compatriots can take it more than others".

She recorded the video shortly after the operation and initially only wanted to share the feeling of being injured.

“I wasn't in good shape for the day,” she said on Tuesday.

Hours later, thousands of comments had piled up under her post.

Draw attention to prejudice and disadvantage

It is not a matter of pillorying a person or even the clinic in which she was otherwise treated in an exemplary manner. But she wants to use her fame and resources to draw attention to problems of disadvantage and prejudice in the health care system. She was shocked by the large number of letters in which dark-skinned men and women described similar and worse experiences. Until then, she was not aware of the extent of racism in the healthcare system. The many supportive reactions to her video would also have given her hope, writes Mahn in another post on Instagram.

Mahn had become known nationwide because she had used the awarding of the peace prize to Tsitsi Dangarembga in St. Paul's Church in October to spontaneously come to the lectern to comment on the dispute over the presence of right-wing publishers at the book fair.