Short Answer
German employment law grants you a strict statutory right to be actively occupied and provided with regular work duties.
A deliberate corporate strategy to isolate you and starve you of professional tasks is an actionable breach of your employment contract.
What Most Expats Don't Realize
You assumed your sudden exclusion from team meetings and the complete lack of assigned tasks was a temporary corporate restructuring phase. You quietly sat at your empty desk for months, until management used your lack of recent project outputs to justify a low performance rating and deny your contract extension. You suffered an immediate loss of your primary income stream and were locked out of severance negotiations because you failed to legally document that the work shortage was forced upon you.
What To Do
- Open your email client every single Monday morning to log a written summary of your empty schedule to your direct supervisor.
- Ask for a formal meeting with HR to demand a written clarification of your current operational responsibilities.
- "Ich biete hiermit ausdrücklich meine Arbeitskraft an und bitte um die Zuweisung vertragsgemäßer Aufgaben." (I herewith explicitly offer my labor power and request the assignment of tasks in accordance with my contract.) — send this precise sentence via email to create a permanent paper trail.
The Truth
Because it is so hard to fire people in Germany, companies sometimes try to "bore" employees into resigning so they don't have to pay severance or deal with labor courts.