Abitur Hessen Englisch 2021 · LK

Material

Chimene Suleyman: Us (short story, 2017)

The plastic handles dug into Madeeha’s fingers. A small rip appeared near the bottom of the carrier-

bag where a juice carton poked through. From the pavement the canal below looked grass-green, the

fungi a still blanket across it. Two newbuilds with metre-long balconies tucked between redbrick

warehouses that functioned as offices. Back windows watched out onto the water. Letterbox-red Royal

5 Mail vans parked in a line, the wide clock-face of St Anne’s behind them.

From beneath a black coat zipped high to his chin, his gut swelled. Bald, grey stubble appeared by his

ears, a day old. To one side of him a younger man with a long face and blue eyes the colour of cold

that set against the grey of his suit. On the other, a man with a tight navy tie let out a mean laugh. They

would teach her a lesson. That’s what they said when they stepped from the bus outside Lidl and she

10 had walked in front of them. They would teach her a lesson, this hummus-eating, camel-shagging slut.

Such behaviour seemed tolerated; a form of ‘cruel to be kind’, so Madeeha and people like her could

assimilate into a British way of life faster. It would be good for her. Why else bother arriving in a

country if it weren’t to embrace all of it? Every part of it. Did that include the suspicion too, she

wondered. No matter. She had heard it all before: your people are terrorists, you fuck Bin Laden 1, go

15 home, paki, go home. For only that week a man on the 135 2 had looked at her and in a sing-song voice

chanted, ‘Kill them all. Kill them all. I don’t give a fuck, kill them all.’

‘Are we all responsible?’ she had asked her husband. ‘All billion of us? Is it my fault there’s terror in

this world? Did Muslims introduce terror to these people, like they had never acted in it before? Is it

my fault, or is it yours?’ For once something was not her husband’s fault. And had he chosen to

20 answer her he would have pointed it out with pleasure. But he hadn’t responded. What could he say?

This man who had worked in a butcher’s for 18 years, who had missed family weddings and funerals,

unable to pay for a flight, who now remembered more of Poplar 3 than where he had once been born.

‘They want us to apologise,’ he said eventually, words mumbled between mouthfuls of bread.

‘For what? Did I orchestrate the killings? Or think they are good? Innocent until proven guilty. Unless

25 you are Muslim and they forget which order the saying goes.’

With bags of shopping in her hands, Madeeha was guilty until proven innocent: she hated British

people and cheered the deaths of western journalists and soldiers. She had information on future acts

of terror and could conceal a weapon beneath her garments. Truth was irrelevant, even proof wasn’t

required. This backwards, barbaric society she belonged to, for didn’t they treat their women

30 appallingly? And yet the man in the grey suit gripped the back of her arm.

‘Don’t,’ she said.

‘Fuck off.’

‘Please don’t.’

The man with the tie grabbed his belt buckle and she pushed the thought away. ‘Please.’

35 ‘Why you even here? Terrorist bitch,’ he shook her arm. The carrier bag split wider, a lemon fell from

it and rolled into the road, ‘fuck off back home and stop killing us.’

Us. She had heard this word so much. ‘Us’ did not come alone. ‘Us’ was paired with ‘They’. They are

uncivilised. They are brutal. They are savage. ‘They’ had accomplices: ‘Them’ and ‘Those’. What did

I tell you about those people? You know you can’t trust them. This wasn’t racism. No, it was self-

40 preservation. No one was going to die because political correctness had spiralled into madness and if

that meant hurting someone’s feelings in order to be vigilant at an airport, or train station,

supermarket, or road, then so be it.

‘Please.’

The open palm pushed into her back. She caught her breath, the bags dropped spinning into traffic. On

45 her knees she felt the grit rub against her skin. It stung. ‘Fuck jihad. Islam is a cancer.’

Brown Oxford shoes stepped past, heels clicked against pavement, hands in pockets that searched for

warmth.

Madeeha collected what she could: fruit, butter, meat that hadn’t travelled far. She walked slowly.

Yes, she was fine she insisted to passersby. She closed her front door and locked it. Spent a moment

50 longer than she was used to with her back against it. Shireen was home. Music on, her daughter’s

voice became louder as she sang along. ‘Mum? Is that you?’ Us and Them. She thought on these

words. Her daughter was both, but that wouldn’t matter to them. That word again. Us and Them.

Peace and Terror. Right and Wrong. Questions philosophers had centuries over been unable to answer

and yet now everyone seemed to be so sure they knew. ‘I am sorry.’ She said these words into the

55 house. Allowed them to find corners of cabinets to rest on; the photo frames: let them slow a moment

over the cushions and the toaster and the rug. I am sorry. I am sorry for keeping you here. I am sorry

you are not safe. ‘Mu-uuum?’ This is what it was to be afraid. ‘I’m coming, my child.’

1 Bin Laden – Saudi-Arabian Islamist who planned the terror attacks on 9/11

2 the 135 – refers to bus line 135

3 Poplar – district in East London

(901 Wörter)

Chimene Suleyman: Us, in: Sabrina Mahfouz (Hg.): The things I would tell you. British Muslim women write, London 2017, S. 44–47.

Thema und Aufgabenstellung

Prüfungsteil 1 (Sprachmittlung) – Vorschlag A

Artificial intelligence

Aufgabe

As an intern at the Society for Computer Science you have been asked to contribute a blog entry to the society’s website.

Write a blog entry in which you sum up the information on Richard Socher’s career and his assessment of Europe’s technological competitiveness in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). (Material)

(100 BE)

Material

Interview: „Die Uhr tickt“ (2019)

von Steffan Heuer

brand eins: Herr Socher, Sie arbeiten als Chefwissenschaftler für den Unternehmenssoftware-Anbieter Salesforce im Silicon Valley. Ihr Weg von Leipzig über Saarbrücken nach Kalifornien ist ein Beispiel für die Abwanderung von Talenten. Warum gab es für einen Hoffnungsträger auf dem Gebiet der künstlichen Intelligenz (KI) wie Sie keinen Platz in Deutschland?

Richard Socher: Das liegt an meinen Forschungsinteressen. Ich habe mir die besten Informatik-Studiengänge der Welt angesehen und verglichen, wo die meistzitierten Aufsätze zum Thema Sprachverarbeitung entstanden sind. Leider waren die klügsten Köpfe mit wenigen Ausnahmen in den USA, an den Universitäten Stanford, MIT, Carnegie-Mellon oder Berkeley. Ich wollte meinen Doktortitel dort erwerben, wo sich Neues und Großes tut. Nach dem Studium kontaktierten mich Risikokapitalgeber, die mir für die Vermarktung meiner Arbeit Geld geben wollten. Eine solche Gelegenheit lässt man sich nicht entgehen. […]

brand eins: Mit einem Doktortitel von der Universität Stanford in der Tasche – hätten Sie Ihre Firma nicht auch in Europa gründen können?

Richard Socher: Leider nicht. Ohne einen Business-Plan hätte mir niemand ein paar Millionen Dollar gegeben, selbst wenn ich an demselben Thema geforscht hätte. Das ist das größte Problem: Doktoranden und Professoren sind in Europa nicht eng genug verbunden mit der Start-up-Szene und Geldgebern.

brand eins: Kürzlich haben Experten unter Leitung der Universität Stanford zum zweiten Mal den „AI Index Report“ veröffentlicht, eine jährliche Bilanz zum Thema künstliche Intelligenz. Das Fazit: KI-Forschung und ihre Kommerzialisierung nehmen weltweit zu. Ist das ein echter Boom oder nur ein Hype?

Richard Socher: Wir machen in der Tat auf breiter Front Fortschritte. Systeme können Beachtliches beim Deep Learning leisten und damit die Handlungen von Software-Agenten steuern. Sogar bei der Verarbeitung von Bildern sind sie in den vergangenen Monaten sehr viel besser geworden. Die KI-Forschung läuft seit mehr als 50 Jahren, aber jetzt haben wir eine Schwelle überschritten, weil es nicht mehr nur spannende, aber eigentlich nutzlose Forschungsprojekte gibt, sondern immer mehr praktische Anwendungen […].

brand eins: Ist noch Zeit, um Europa für diesen Wettbewerb fit zu machen?

Richard Socher: Die Uhr tickt. Wachstum hängt davon ab, ob ich meine Volkswirtschaft effizienter machen kann. Und künstliche Intelligenz wird der entscheidende Faktor dafür sein. Ihr wirtschaftliches Potenzial ist noch viel größer als das des Internets oder von Smartphones. Die Fertigung ist traditionell eine von Deutschlands Stärken, doch auch da lässt sich mit KI viel bewerkstelligen. Insofern ist es ermutigend, dass Deutschland, Frankreich und Großbritannien strategische Visionen für künstliche Intelligenz formuliert haben.

brand eins: Wie kann man verhindern, dass weiterhin kluge Köpfe in die USA auswandern?

Richard Socher: Als Professor in Deutschland ist mein Einkommen ziemlich gedeckelt, sodass etwa die Ankündigung, 100 neue Lehrstellen für KI zu schaffen, schnell auf die Realitäten des globalen Talent-Wettbewerbs prallt. Wenn ich eine Koryphäe bin, kann ich in anderen Ländern ein Wahnsinnsgeld verdienen. Das soll nicht heißen, dass ich in Europa oder Deutschland keine gute Forschung betreiben und ein tolles Forschungslabor aufbauen kann, aber wenn ich dieselbe Arbeit woanders verrichten und das Zehn- oder Fünfzigfache verdienen kann, ist das natürlich sehr verlockend.

brand eins: Wie könnte man Gründer, die auf KI setzen, gezielt fördern?

Richard Socher: Man sollte sich einmal die Geschichte des Silicon Valley genauer ansehen. Einiges ist organisch gewachsen, und diesen Erfolg kann man schlecht durch Regulierungen herbeizaubern. Aber man sollte Gründern das Leben leichter machen – angefangen bei den Vorschriften in Sachen Personal. Wenn ich noch in der Phase bin, in der ich mein Geschäftsmodell entwickle und justiere, muss ich in der Lage sein, meine Belegschaft flexibel anzupassen.

Was man auch nicht vergessen sollte, sind die Standortvorteile, die Deutschland in Sachen KI hat. Das Land verfügt über ein sehr gutes Gesundheitswesen. Warum kann man nicht eine landesweite, anonymisierte Datenbank anlegen, in die zum Beispiel alle Gehirn-Computertomografien eingespeist werden. Das wäre ein enorm wertvoller Datensatz, um Systeme für maschinelles Lernen zu trainieren und zu verbessern. Damit wären diese Daten eine Art öffentliches Gut, mit deren Hilfe die Bundesrepublik zu einem Weltmarktführer für Medizin-KI werden könnte, weil sich anhand dieser Datensätze hervorragende Algorithmen entwickeln lassen. Das könnte die Basis für ein ganzes Ökosystem von Start-ups werden.

Steffan Heuer: „Die Uhr tickt“, in: brand eins, März 2019, URL: https://www.brandeins.de/magazine/brand-eins-wirtschaftsmagazin/2019/digitalisierung/richard-socher-interview-die-uhr-tickt (abgerufen am 26.08.2019).

Material

Chimene Suleyman: Us (short story, 2017)

The plastic handles dug into Madeeha’s fingers. A small rip appeared near the bottom of the carrier-

bag where a juice carton poked through. From the pavement the canal below looked grass-green, the

fungi a still blanket across it. Two newbuilds with metre-long balconies tucked between redbrick

warehouses that functioned as offices. Back windows watched out onto the water. Letterbox-red Royal

5 Mail vans parked in a line, the wide clock-face of St Anne’s behind them.

From beneath a black coat zipped high to his chin, his gut swelled. Bald, grey stubble appeared by his

ears, a day old. To one side of him a younger man with a long face and blue eyes the colour of cold

that set against the grey of his suit. On the other, a man with a tight navy tie let out a mean laugh. They

would teach her a lesson. That’s what they said when they stepped from the bus outside Lidl and she

10 had walked in front of them. They would teach her a lesson, this hummus-eating, camel-shagging slut.

Such behaviour seemed tolerated; a form of ‘cruel to be kind’, so Madeeha and people like her could

assimilate into a British way of life faster. It would be good for her. Why else bother arriving in a

country if it weren’t to embrace all of it? Every part of it. Did that include the suspicion too, she

wondered. No matter. She had heard it all before: your people are terrorists, you fuck Bin Laden 1, go

15 home, paki, go home. For only that week a man on the 135 2 had looked at her and in a sing-song voice

chanted, ‘Kill them all. Kill them all. I don’t give a fuck, kill them all.’

‘Are we all responsible?’ she had asked her husband. ‘All billion of us? Is it my fault there’s terror in

this world? Did Muslims introduce terror to these people, like they had never acted in it before? Is it

my fault, or is it yours?’ For once something was not her husband’s fault. And had he chosen to

20 answer her he would have pointed it out with pleasure. But he hadn’t responded. What could he say?

This man who had worked in a butcher’s for 18 years, who had missed family weddings and funerals,

unable to pay for a flight, who now remembered more of Poplar 3 than where he had once been born.

‘They want us to apologise,’ he said eventually, words mumbled between mouthfuls of bread.

‘For what? Did I orchestrate the killings? Or think they are good? Innocent until proven guilty. Unless

25 you are Muslim and they forget which order the saying goes.’

With bags of shopping in her hands, Madeeha was guilty until proven innocent: she hated British

people and cheered the deaths of western journalists and soldiers. She had information on future acts

of terror and could conceal a weapon beneath her garments. Truth was irrelevant, even proof wasn’t

required. This backwards, barbaric society she belonged to, for didn’t they treat their women

30 appallingly? And yet the man in the grey suit gripped the back of her arm.

‘Don’t,’ she said.

‘Fuck off.’

‘Please don’t.’

The man with the tie grabbed his belt buckle and she pushed the thought away. ‘Please.’

35 ‘Why you even here? Terrorist bitch,’ he shook her arm. The carrier bag split wider, a lemon fell from

it and rolled into the road, ‘fuck off back home and stop killing us.’

Us. She had heard this word so much. ‘Us’ did not come alone. ‘Us’ was paired with ‘They’. They are

uncivilised. They are brutal. They are savage. ‘They’ had accomplices: ‘Them’ and ‘Those’. What did

I tell you about those people? You know you can’t trust them. This wasn’t racism. No, it was self-

40 preservation. No one was going to die because political correctness had spiralled into madness and if

that meant hurting someone’s feelings in order to be vigilant at an airport, or train station,

supermarket, or road, then so be it.

‘Please.’

The open palm pushed into her back. She caught her breath, the bags dropped spinning into traffic. On

45 her knees she felt the grit rub against her skin. It stung. ‘Fuck jihad. Islam is a cancer.’

Brown Oxford shoes stepped past, heels clicked against pavement, hands in pockets that searched for

warmth.

Madeeha collected what she could: fruit, butter, meat that hadn’t travelled far. She walked slowly.

Yes, she was fine she insisted to passersby. She closed her front door and locked it. Spent a moment

50 longer than she was used to with her back against it. Shireen was home. Music on, her daughter’s

voice became louder as she sang along. ‘Mum? Is that you?’ Us and Them. She thought on these

words. Her daughter was both, but that wouldn’t matter to them. That word again. Us and Them.

Peace and Terror. Right and Wrong. Questions philosophers had centuries over been unable to answer

and yet now everyone seemed to be so sure they knew. ‘I am sorry.’ She said these words into the

55 house. Allowed them to find corners of cabinets to rest on; the photo frames: let them slow a moment

over the cushions and the toaster and the rug. I am sorry. I am sorry for keeping you here. I am sorry

you are not safe. ‘Mu-uuum?’ This is what it was to be afraid. ‘I’m coming, my child.’

1 Bin Laden – Saudi-Arabian Islamist who planned the terror attacks on 9/11

2 the 135 – refers to bus line 135

3 Poplar – district in East London

(901 Wörter)

Chimene Suleyman: Us, in: Sabrina Mahfouz (Hg.): The things I would tell you. British Muslim women write, London 2017, S. 44–47.

1 Describe the way Madeeha is treated. (Material) (25 BE)

Material

Chimene Suleyman: Us (short story, 2017)

The plastic handles dug into Madeeha’s fingers. A small rip appeared near the bottom of the carrier-

bag where a juice carton poked through. From the pavement the canal below looked grass-green, the

fungi a still blanket across it. Two newbuilds with metre-long balconies tucked between redbrick

warehouses that functioned as offices. Back windows watched out onto the water. Letterbox-red Royal

5 Mail vans parked in a line, the wide clock-face of St Anne’s behind them.

From beneath a black coat zipped high to his chin, his gut swelled. Bald, grey stubble appeared by his

ears, a day old. To one side of him a younger man with a long face and blue eyes the colour of cold

that set against the grey of his suit. On the other, a man with a tight navy tie let out a mean laugh. They

would teach her a lesson. That’s what they said when they stepped from the bus outside Lidl and she

10 had walked in front of them. They would teach her a lesson, this hummus-eating, camel-shagging slut.

Such behaviour seemed tolerated; a form of ‘cruel to be kind’, so Madeeha and people like her could

assimilate into a British way of life faster. It would be good for her. Why else bother arriving in a

country if it weren’t to embrace all of it? Every part of it. Did that include the suspicion too, she

wondered. No matter. She had heard it all before: your people are terrorists, you fuck Bin Laden 1, go

15 home, paki, go home. For only that week a man on the 135 2 had looked at her and in a sing-song voice

chanted, ‘Kill them all. Kill them all. I don’t give a fuck, kill them all.’

‘Are we all responsible?’ she had asked her husband. ‘All billion of us? Is it my fault there’s terror in

this world? Did Muslims introduce terror to these people, like they had never acted in it before? Is it

my fault, or is it yours?’ For once something was not her husband’s fault. And had he chosen to

20 answer her he would have pointed it out with pleasure. But he hadn’t responded. What could he say?

This man who had worked in a butcher’s for 18 years, who had missed family weddings and funerals,

unable to pay for a flight, who now remembered more of Poplar 3 than where he had once been born.

‘They want us to apologise,’ he said eventually, words mumbled between mouthfuls of bread.

‘For what? Did I orchestrate the killings? Or think they are good? Innocent until proven guilty. Unless

25 you are Muslim and they forget which order the saying goes.’

With bags of shopping in her hands, Madeeha was guilty until proven innocent: she hated British

people and cheered the deaths of western journalists and soldiers. She had information on future acts

of terror and could conceal a weapon beneath her garments. Truth was irrelevant, even proof wasn’t

required. This backwards, barbaric society she belonged to, for didn’t they treat their women

30 appallingly? And yet the man in the grey suit gripped the back of her arm.

‘Don’t,’ she said.

‘Fuck off.’

‘Please don’t.’

The man with the tie grabbed his belt buckle and she pushed the thought away. ‘Please.’

35 ‘Why you even here? Terrorist bitch,’ he shook her arm. The carrier bag split wider, a lemon fell from

it and rolled into the road, ‘fuck off back home and stop killing us.’

Us. She had heard this word so much. ‘Us’ did not come alone. ‘Us’ was paired with ‘They’. They are

uncivilised. They are brutal. They are savage. ‘They’ had accomplices: ‘Them’ and ‘Those’. What did

I tell you about those people? You know you can’t trust them. This wasn’t racism. No, it was self-

40 preservation. No one was going to die because political correctness had spiralled into madness and if

that meant hurting someone’s feelings in order to be vigilant at an airport, or train station,

supermarket, or road, then so be it.

‘Please.’

The open palm pushed into her back. She caught her breath, the bags dropped spinning into traffic. On

45 her knees she felt the grit rub against her skin. It stung. ‘Fuck jihad. Islam is a cancer.’

Brown Oxford shoes stepped past, heels clicked against pavement, hands in pockets that searched for

warmth.

Madeeha collected what she could: fruit, butter, meat that hadn’t travelled far. She walked slowly.

Yes, she was fine she insisted to passersby. She closed her front door and locked it. Spent a moment

50 longer than she was used to with her back against it. Shireen was home. Music on, her daughter’s

voice became louder as she sang along. ‘Mum? Is that you?’ Us and Them. She thought on these

words. Her daughter was both, but that wouldn’t matter to them. That word again. Us and Them.

Peace and Terror. Right and Wrong. Questions philosophers had centuries over been unable to answer

and yet now everyone seemed to be so sure they knew. ‘I am sorry.’ She said these words into the

55 house. Allowed them to find corners of cabinets to rest on; the photo frames: let them slow a moment

over the cushions and the toaster and the rug. I am sorry. I am sorry for keeping you here. I am sorry

you are not safe. ‘Mu-uuum?’ This is what it was to be afraid. ‘I’m coming, my child.’

1 Bin Laden – Saudi-Arabian Islamist who planned the terror attacks on 9/11

2 the 135 – refers to bus line 135

3 Poplar – district in East London

(901 Wörter)

Chimene Suleyman: Us, in: Sabrina Mahfouz (Hg.): The things I would tell you. British Muslim women write, London 2017, S. 44–47.

2 Compare what Madeeha describes as the problem of 'them' versus 'us' (Material) to the situation of Asian immigrants in the USA. (40 BE)

Material

Chimene Suleyman: Us (short story, 2017)

The plastic handles dug into Madeeha’s fingers. A small rip appeared near the bottom of the carrier-

bag where a juice carton poked through. From the pavement the canal below looked grass-green, the

fungi a still blanket across it. Two newbuilds with metre-long balconies tucked between redbrick

warehouses that functioned as offices. Back windows watched out onto the water. Letterbox-red Royal

5 Mail vans parked in a line, the wide clock-face of St Anne’s behind them.

From beneath a black coat zipped high to his chin, his gut swelled. Bald, grey stubble appeared by his

ears, a day old. To one side of him a younger man with a long face and blue eyes the colour of cold

that set against the grey of his suit. On the other, a man with a tight navy tie let out a mean laugh. They

would teach her a lesson. That’s what they said when they stepped from the bus outside Lidl and she

10 had walked in front of them. They would teach her a lesson, this hummus-eating, camel-shagging slut.

Such behaviour seemed tolerated; a form of ‘cruel to be kind’, so Madeeha and people like her could

assimilate into a British way of life faster. It would be good for her. Why else bother arriving in a

country if it weren’t to embrace all of it? Every part of it. Did that include the suspicion too, she

wondered. No matter. She had heard it all before: your people are terrorists, you fuck Bin Laden 1, go

15 home, paki, go home. For only that week a man on the 135 2 had looked at her and in a sing-song voice

chanted, ‘Kill them all. Kill them all. I don’t give a fuck, kill them all.’

‘Are we all responsible?’ she had asked her husband. ‘All billion of us? Is it my fault there’s terror in

this world? Did Muslims introduce terror to these people, like they had never acted in it before? Is it

my fault, or is it yours?’ For once something was not her husband’s fault. And had he chosen to

20 answer her he would have pointed it out with pleasure. But he hadn’t responded. What could he say?

This man who had worked in a butcher’s for 18 years, who had missed family weddings and funerals,

unable to pay for a flight, who now remembered more of Poplar 3 than where he had once been born.

‘They want us to apologise,’ he said eventually, words mumbled between mouthfuls of bread.

‘For what? Did I orchestrate the killings? Or think they are good? Innocent until proven guilty. Unless

25 you are Muslim and they forget which order the saying goes.’

With bags of shopping in her hands, Madeeha was guilty until proven innocent: she hated British

people and cheered the deaths of western journalists and soldiers. She had information on future acts

of terror and could conceal a weapon beneath her garments. Truth was irrelevant, even proof wasn’t

required. This backwards, barbaric society she belonged to, for didn’t they treat their women

30 appallingly? And yet the man in the grey suit gripped the back of her arm.

‘Don’t,’ she said.

‘Fuck off.’

‘Please don’t.’

The man with the tie grabbed his belt buckle and she pushed the thought away. ‘Please.’

35 ‘Why you even here? Terrorist bitch,’ he shook her arm. The carrier bag split wider, a lemon fell from

it and rolled into the road, ‘fuck off back home and stop killing us.’

Us. She had heard this word so much. ‘Us’ did not come alone. ‘Us’ was paired with ‘They’. They are

uncivilised. They are brutal. They are savage. ‘They’ had accomplices: ‘Them’ and ‘Those’. What did

I tell you about those people? You know you can’t trust them. This wasn’t racism. No, it was self-

40 preservation. No one was going to die because political correctness had spiralled into madness and if

that meant hurting someone’s feelings in order to be vigilant at an airport, or train station,

supermarket, or road, then so be it.

‘Please.’

The open palm pushed into her back. She caught her breath, the bags dropped spinning into traffic. On

45 her knees she felt the grit rub against her skin. It stung. ‘Fuck jihad. Islam is a cancer.’

Brown Oxford shoes stepped past, heels clicked against pavement, hands in pockets that searched for

warmth.

Madeeha collected what she could: fruit, butter, meat that hadn’t travelled far. She walked slowly.

Yes, she was fine she insisted to passersby. She closed her front door and locked it. Spent a moment

50 longer than she was used to with her back against it. Shireen was home. Music on, her daughter’s

voice became louder as she sang along. ‘Mum? Is that you?’ Us and Them. She thought on these

words. Her daughter was both, but that wouldn’t matter to them. That word again. Us and Them.

Peace and Terror. Right and Wrong. Questions philosophers had centuries over been unable to answer

and yet now everyone seemed to be so sure they knew. ‘I am sorry.’ She said these words into the

55 house. Allowed them to find corners of cabinets to rest on; the photo frames: let them slow a moment

over the cushions and the toaster and the rug. I am sorry. I am sorry for keeping you here. I am sorry

you are not safe. ‘Mu-uuum?’ This is what it was to be afraid. ‘I’m coming, my child.’

1 Bin Laden – Saudi-Arabian Islamist who planned the terror attacks on 9/11

2 the 135 – refers to bus line 135

3 Poplar – district in East London

(901 Wörter)

Chimene Suleyman: Us, in: Sabrina Mahfouz (Hg.): The things I would tell you. British Muslim women write, London 2017, S. 44–47.

3.1 “I want everybody who comes here and makes their lives here to be, and to feel, British – that’s the most important thing – and to learn English.”

Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson on immigration, July 2019

Referring to material dealt with in class, assess the degree to which various ways of helping immigrants “feel British” have a chance of reducing the gap between ‘them’ and ‘us’. (35 BE)

3.2

“We Need Diverse Books” is an organization that advocates changes in the publishing industry of children’s books and promotes putting more diverse characters – including LGBTQ, Native, people of color, gender diversity, people with disabilities, ethnic, cultural and religious minorities – into the hands of young people.

As a German exchange student in the US, you are asked to give a speech on World Book Day, also referring to the Hessian compulsory reading list for English. Write a speech supporting the aims of “We Need Diverse Books”.

[35 BE]

Material

Katherine Johnson died on February 24 th (obituary, 2020)

As she ran her eyes over the flight-test calculation sheets the engineer had given her, Katherine Goble

(as she then was) could see there was something wrong with them. The engineer had made an error

with a square root. And it was going to be tricky to tell him so. It was her first day on this assignment,

when she and another girl had been picked out of the computing pool 1 at the Langley aeronautical

5 laboratory, later part of NASA 2, to help the all-male Flight Research Unit. But there were other, more

significant snags than simply being new.

Most obviously, he was a man and she was a woman. In 1953 women did not question men. They

stayed in their place, in this case usually the computing pool, tapping away on their Monroe desktop

calculators 3 or filling sheets with figures, she as neatly turned out as all the rest. Men were the grand

10 designers, the engineers; the women were “computers in skirts”, who were handed a set of equations

and exhaustively, diligently checked them. Men were not interested in things as small as that.

And, most difficult of all, she was Coloured, and he was White. The lab might be recruiting black

mathematicians, but the door was not fully open; her pool was called “Coloured Computing” and was

segregated. As she sat down with the new team that morning, the men next to her had moved away.

15 She was not sure why, but the world was like that, and she refused to be bothered by it. Since the café

was segregated, she ate at her desk. There was no Coloured restroom, so she used the White one. A

few years back, when the bus taking her to her first teaching job in Marion, Virginia, had crossed the

state line from West Virginia, all the blacks had been told to get off and take taxis. She refused until

she was asked nicely. But it could be unwise to push a white man too far.

20 Nonetheless, this engineer’s calculation was wrong. If she did not ask the question, an aircraft might

not fly, or might fly and crash. So, very carefully, she asked it. Was it possible that he could have

made a mistake? He did not admit it but, by turning the colour of a cough drop 4, he ceded the point.

She asked more such questions, and they got her noticed. As the weeks passed, the men “forgot” to

return her to the pool. Her incessant “Why?” and “How?” made their work sharper. It also challenged

25 them. Why were their calculations of aerodynamic forces so often out? Because they were maths

graduates who had forgotten their geometry, whereas she had not; her high-school brilliance at maths

had led to special classes on analytic geometry in which she, at 13, had been the only pupil. Why was

she not allowed to get her name on a flight-trajectory report when she had done most of the work,

filling her data sheets with figures for days? Because women didn’t. That was no answer, so she got

30 her name on the report, the first woman to be so credited. […]

As NASA’s focus turned from supersonic flight to flights in space, she was therefore deeply involved,

though still behind the scenes. […] She ensured that Alan Shepard’s Mercury capsule 5 splashed down

where it could be found quickly in 1961, and that John Glenn 6 in 1962 could return safely from his

first orbits of the Earth. […]

35 Later she calculated the timings for the first Moon landing (with the astronauts’ return) and worked on

the Space Shuttle. She also devised a method by which astronauts, with one star observation checked

against a star chart, could tell where they were. But in the galaxy of space-programme heroes, despite

her 33 years in the Flight Research Unit, for a long time she featured nowhere.

It did not trouble her. First, she also had other things to do: raise her three daughters, cook, sew their

40 clothes, care for her sick first husband. Second, she knew in her own mind how good she was – as

good as anybody. She could hardly be unaware of it, when she had graduated from high school at 14

and college at 18, expert at all the maths anyone knew how to teach her. But she typically credited the

help of other people, especially her father, […] who had sold the farm and moved the family so that

she and her siblings could all get a fine schooling and go to college. And last, at NASA, she had not

45 worked alone. She had been one of around a dozen black women mathematicians who were equally

unknown. But when their story emerged in the 21st century, most notably in a book and a film called

“Hidden Figures”, she had a NASA building named after her, a shower of honorary doctorates and –

the greatest thrill – a kiss from Barack Obama as he presented her, at 96, with the Presidential Medal

of Freedom.

50 This attention was all the more surprising because, for her, the work had been its own reward. She just

did her job, enjoying every minute. The struggles of being both black and a woman were shrugged

away. Do your best, she always said. Love what you do. Be constantly curious. And learn that it is not

dumb to ask a question; it is dumb not to ask it. Not least, because it might lead to the small but

significant victory of making a self-proclaimed superior realise he can make a mistake.

(924 Wörter)

Katherine Johnson died on February 24 th, 27.02.2020, in: The Economist, URL: https://www.economist.com/obituary/2020/02/27/katherine-johnson-died-on-february-24th (abgerufen am 05.05.2020).

Annotations

1 pool – here: a group of employees

2 NASA – the American governmental agency that plans and carries out the space programme

3 Monroe desktop calculators – Monroe is the name of a company that produces small calculators.

4 cough drop – a candy-like medicine for coughing, usually in a bright red color

5 Alan Shepard’s Mercury-capsule – Alan Shepard was the first American astronaut to go into space. After completing his mission, he landed inside a small part of the rocket in the ocean.

6 John Glenn was the first American astronaut to orbit the earth.

1

Outline important stages in Katherine Johnson's life. (Material)

(30 BE)

Material

Katherine Johnson died on February 24 th (obituary, 2020)

As she ran her eyes over the flight-test calculation sheets the engineer had given her, Katherine Goble

(as she then was) could see there was something wrong with them. The engineer had made an error

with a square root. And it was going to be tricky to tell him so. It was her first day on this assignment,

when she and another girl had been picked out of the computing pool 1 at the Langley aeronautical

5 laboratory, later part of NASA 2, to help the all-male Flight Research Unit. But there were other, more

significant snags than simply being new.

Most obviously, he was a man and she was a woman. In 1953 women did not question men. They

stayed in their place, in this case usually the computing pool, tapping away on their Monroe desktop

calculators 3 or filling sheets with figures, she as neatly turned out as all the rest. Men were the grand

10 designers, the engineers; the women were “computers in skirts”, who were handed a set of equations

and exhaustively, diligently checked them. Men were not interested in things as small as that.

And, most difficult of all, she was Coloured, and he was White. The lab might be recruiting black

mathematicians, but the door was not fully open; her pool was called “Coloured Computing” and was

segregated. As she sat down with the new team that morning, the men next to her had moved away.

15 She was not sure why, but the world was like that, and she refused to be bothered by it. Since the café

was segregated, she ate at her desk. There was no Coloured restroom, so she used the White one. A

few years back, when the bus taking her to her first teaching job in Marion, Virginia, had crossed the

state line from West Virginia, all the blacks had been told to get off and take taxis. She refused until

she was asked nicely. But it could be unwise to push a white man too far.

20 Nonetheless, this engineer’s calculation was wrong. If she did not ask the question, an aircraft might

not fly, or might fly and crash. So, very carefully, she asked it. Was it possible that he could have

made a mistake? He did not admit it but, by turning the colour of a cough drop 4, he ceded the point.

She asked more such questions, and they got her noticed. As the weeks passed, the men “forgot” to

return her to the pool. Her incessant “Why?” and “How?” made their work sharper. It also challenged

25 them. Why were their calculations of aerodynamic forces so often out? Because they were maths

graduates who had forgotten their geometry, whereas she had not; her high-school brilliance at maths

had led to special classes on analytic geometry in which she, at 13, had been the only pupil. Why was

she not allowed to get her name on a flight-trajectory report when she had done most of the work,

filling her data sheets with figures for days? Because women didn’t. That was no answer, so she got

30 her name on the report, the first woman to be so credited. […]

As NASA’s focus turned from supersonic flight to flights in space, she was therefore deeply involved,

though still behind the scenes. […] She ensured that Alan Shepard’s Mercury capsule 5 splashed down

where it could be found quickly in 1961, and that John Glenn 6 in 1962 could return safely from his

first orbits of the Earth. […]

35 Later she calculated the timings for the first Moon landing (with the astronauts’ return) and worked on

the Space Shuttle. She also devised a method by which astronauts, with one star observation checked

against a star chart, could tell where they were. But in the galaxy of space-programme heroes, despite

her 33 years in the Flight Research Unit, for a long time she featured nowhere.

It did not trouble her. First, she also had other things to do: raise her three daughters, cook, sew their

40 clothes, care for her sick first husband. Second, she knew in her own mind how good she was – as

good as anybody. She could hardly be unaware of it, when she had graduated from high school at 14

and college at 18, expert at all the maths anyone knew how to teach her. But she typically credited the

help of other people, especially her father, […] who had sold the farm and moved the family so that

she and her siblings could all get a fine schooling and go to college. And last, at NASA, she had not

45 worked alone. She had been one of around a dozen black women mathematicians who were equally

unknown. But when their story emerged in the 21st century, most notably in a book and a film called

“Hidden Figures”, she had a NASA building named after her, a shower of honorary doctorates and –

the greatest thrill – a kiss from Barack Obama as he presented her, at 96, with the Presidential Medal

of Freedom.

50 This attention was all the more surprising because, for her, the work had been its own reward. She just

did her job, enjoying every minute. The struggles of being both black and a woman were shrugged

away. Do your best, she always said. Love what you do. Be constantly curious. And learn that it is not

dumb to ask a question; it is dumb not to ask it. Not least, because it might lead to the small but

significant victory of making a self-proclaimed superior realise he can make a mistake.

(924 Wörter)

Katherine Johnson died on February 24 th, 27.02.2020, in: The Economist, URL: https://www.economist.com/obituary/2020/02/27/katherine-johnson-died-on-february-24th (abgerufen am 05.05.2020).

Annotations

1 pool – here: a group of employees

2 NASA – the American governmental agency that plans and carries out the space programme

3 Monroe desktop calculators – Monroe is the name of a company that produces small calculators.

4 cough drop – a candy-like medicine for coughing, usually in a bright red color

5 Alan Shepard’s Mercury-capsule – Alan Shepard was the first American astronaut to go into space. After completing his mission, he landed inside a small part of the rocket in the ocean.

6 John Glenn was the first American astronaut to orbit the earth.

2

Compare Katherine Johnson's experiences as a woman (Material) to those of Desdemona and Emilia.

(40 BE)

Material

Katherine Johnson died on February 24 th (obituary, 2020)

As she ran her eyes over the flight-test calculation sheets the engineer had given her, Katherine Goble

(as she then was) could see there was something wrong with them. The engineer had made an error

with a square root. And it was going to be tricky to tell him so. It was her first day on this assignment,

when she and another girl had been picked out of the computing pool 1 at the Langley aeronautical

5 laboratory, later part of NASA 2, to help the all-male Flight Research Unit. But there were other, more

significant snags than simply being new.

Most obviously, he was a man and she was a woman. In 1953 women did not question men. They

stayed in their place, in this case usually the computing pool, tapping away on their Monroe desktop

calculators 3 or filling sheets with figures, she as neatly turned out as all the rest. Men were the grand

10 designers, the engineers; the women were “computers in skirts”, who were handed a set of equations

and exhaustively, diligently checked them. Men were not interested in things as small as that.

And, most difficult of all, she was Coloured, and he was White. The lab might be recruiting black

mathematicians, but the door was not fully open; her pool was called “Coloured Computing” and was

segregated. As she sat down with the new team that morning, the men next to her had moved away.

15 She was not sure why, but the world was like that, and she refused to be bothered by it. Since the café

was segregated, she ate at her desk. There was no Coloured restroom, so she used the White one. A

few years back, when the bus taking her to her first teaching job in Marion, Virginia, had crossed the

state line from West Virginia, all the blacks had been told to get off and take taxis. She refused until

she was asked nicely. But it could be unwise to push a white man too far.

20 Nonetheless, this engineer’s calculation was wrong. If she did not ask the question, an aircraft might

not fly, or might fly and crash. So, very carefully, she asked it. Was it possible that he could have

made a mistake? He did not admit it but, by turning the colour of a cough drop 4, he ceded the point.

She asked more such questions, and they got her noticed. As the weeks passed, the men “forgot” to

return her to the pool. Her incessant “Why?” and “How?” made their work sharper. It also challenged

25 them. Why were their calculations of aerodynamic forces so often out? Because they were maths

graduates who had forgotten their geometry, whereas she had not; her high-school brilliance at maths

had led to special classes on analytic geometry in which she, at 13, had been the only pupil. Why was

she not allowed to get her name on a flight-trajectory report when she had done most of the work,

filling her data sheets with figures for days? Because women didn’t. That was no answer, so she got

30 her name on the report, the first woman to be so credited. […]

As NASA’s focus turned from supersonic flight to flights in space, she was therefore deeply involved,

though still behind the scenes. […] She ensured that Alan Shepard’s Mercury capsule 5 splashed down

where it could be found quickly in 1961, and that John Glenn 6 in 1962 could return safely from his

first orbits of the Earth. […]

35 Later she calculated the timings for the first Moon landing (with the astronauts’ return) and worked on

the Space Shuttle. She also devised a method by which astronauts, with one star observation checked

against a star chart, could tell where they were. But in the galaxy of space-programme heroes, despite

her 33 years in the Flight Research Unit, for a long time she featured nowhere.

It did not trouble her. First, she also had other things to do: raise her three daughters, cook, sew their

40 clothes, care for her sick first husband. Second, she knew in her own mind how good she was – as

good as anybody. She could hardly be unaware of it, when she had graduated from high school at 14

and college at 18, expert at all the maths anyone knew how to teach her. But she typically credited the

help of other people, especially her father, […] who had sold the farm and moved the family so that

she and her siblings could all get a fine schooling and go to college. And last, at NASA, she had not

45 worked alone. She had been one of around a dozen black women mathematicians who were equally

unknown. But when their story emerged in the 21st century, most notably in a book and a film called

“Hidden Figures”, she had a NASA building named after her, a shower of honorary doctorates and –

the greatest thrill – a kiss from Barack Obama as he presented her, at 96, with the Presidential Medal

of Freedom.

50 This attention was all the more surprising because, for her, the work had been its own reward. She just

did her job, enjoying every minute. The struggles of being both black and a woman were shrugged

away. Do your best, she always said. Love what you do. Be constantly curious. And learn that it is not

dumb to ask a question; it is dumb not to ask it. Not least, because it might lead to the small but

significant victory of making a self-proclaimed superior realise he can make a mistake.

(924 Wörter)

Katherine Johnson died on February 24 th, 27.02.2020, in: The Economist, URL: https://www.economist.com/obituary/2020/02/27/katherine-johnson-died-on-february-24th (abgerufen am 05.05.2020).

Annotations

1 pool – here: a group of employees

2 NASA – the American governmental agency that plans and carries out the space programme

3 Monroe desktop calculators – Monroe is the name of a company that produces small calculators.

4 cough drop – a candy-like medicine for coughing, usually in a bright red color

5 Alan Shepard’s Mercury-capsule – Alan Shepard was the first American astronaut to go into space. After completing his mission, he landed inside a small part of the rocket in the ocean.

6 John Glenn was the first American astronaut to orbit the earth.

3.1

Taking the example of Katherine Johnson as a starting point (Material), write an article for a magazine aimed at graduates of an American women's college commenting on the status of women in contemporary American society.

(30 BE)

“We needed to be assertive as women in those days – assertive and aggressive – and the degree to which we had to be that way depended on where you were. I had to be.”

Katherine Johnson, 1980

Katherine Johnson was referring to the struggle to overcome gender discrimination in the 1950s. Referring to material dealt with in class, assess the relevance of the quote today for other groups in the USA and/or the UK who have faced discrimination. [30 BE]

Material 1

Kushanava Choudhury: The New World (2017)

This is an excerpt from the introductory chapter of The Epic City, Choudhury’s literary portrait of Calcutta, the city of his birth, from where his family moved to the United States of America.

Of all the people who came to Ellis Island in the first decades of the twentieth century, more than half went back. They never told us that on our seventh-grade class trip.

The American immigrant myth says that migration is a reset button. The New World offers deliverance from the past, liberation from the Old World’s limited horizons. The myth states: ‘The past is gone. The future awaits. Start over.’

It never really works like that. That was the story no one ever told about America. The past is never left behind. It haunts every world you live in. Sometimes it drags you back.

By the time I visited Ellis Island on that class trip, I had already migrated halfway around the world four times, flipping back and forth between continents like a dual-voltage appliance. My parents were Indian scientists, torn between nation and vocation. Twice they moved to America, twice they moved back. They were unwilling to leave their country and they were unable to stay. When he was around forty, my father quit his cushy job at a government research institute in Calcutta. He wanted one more chance, he said […].

So, when I was almost twelve, my parents and I moved to Highland Park, New Jersey.

Our move carried no Emma Lazarus 1 cadences. We certainly had not arrived tempest-tossed, beating at the golden door. Our coming was equivocal, always tied to return. Living in New Jersey, we hardly saw ourselves as immigrants. My parents expected to go back to India, like many of their Bengali friends, someday, eventually. On Saturday nights, they gathered at each other’s homes, ate fourteen-course meals brimming with various types of fish and meat, and derailed each other’s sentences in locomotive Bengali, their conversations full of memories of Calcutta. Return, the duty of return and the dream of return, were spoken of endlessly while eating platefuls of goat curry and hilsa fish. Few, of course, actually went back. There were too many good reasons not to. Nationalism and nostalgia did not pay the bills, raise children or advance careers. And yet that dream of a return to the great metropolis cocooned them like a protective blanket from the alien world all around.

As for me – my friends, my neighbourhood, my Calcutta life was gone. In New Jersey, I was in seventh grade in a public school that had almost no Indian students. Cocooning was not an option. I had to fit in fast. I wasn’t assimilating as much as passing. So much of what went on inside my head was from another place. I had happy childhood memories of mid-morning cricket matches during summer vacations, of games played in gullies, rooftops, courtyards and streets. When I moved, it was the streets of the city as much as my childhood that I left behind.

We had not had an easy few years in America. The man who had offered the job to my father had made promises he did not keep, and so my father was forced to find other work, work he grew to despise. From time to time, there would be talk of another move, to Georgia, to Colorado, and I would pull down the posters in my room and prepare. We stayed put, the three of us adrift in the treacherous shoals of the lower middle classes, a world of chronic car trouble and clothes from K-Mart 2. In the fall of my senior year, a piece of good news finally came to our two-bedroom apartment. I had been accepted early to Princeton University 3.

Every immigrant who has lugged worthless foreign degrees through customs knows that where you go to college […] determines your lot in life. When the acceptance letter from Princeton arrived, my parents acted as if someone had come to our door with balloons and a giant cardboard cheque. It was their happiest day in America. But it wasn’t mine.

It is probably universally true that education drives a wedge between us and our hometowns, our families, our earlier selves. But for the immigrant the gap is greater, that divergence in mentality more extreme. My trajectory 4 was taking me farther afield, to Princeton, while a part of me was elsewhere, in another country, in another city. Through all my sojourns I had carried memories on my back like Huien Tsang’s 5 chair, until at seventeen, I felt hunched over with nostalgia like a middle-aged man. When the Princeton letter arrived, I had what my friend Ben called a ‘premature midlife crisis’.

At night, I couldn’t sleep. By day I sleepwalked through classes. Each evening, while my friends assembled at Dunkin’ Donuts, complained about how there was nothing to do in our little town and roared together into the night on long aimless drives, while they enjoyed the languor of spring and that sweet American affliction called senioritis 6, I stayed home and stewed. In my mind, I hatched a plan. I would go back.

India lives in its villages, Mahatma Gandhi had said. So, even though I was a city boy who had never spent a night in an Indian village, I wrote letters back home to arrange to teach in a village school. Instead of Princeton, I would take a year off and head to rural Bengal, I told my parents. But in our two-bedroom apartment full of shared immigrant striving, such a detour was out of the question.

Instead I just drove. The black night, the shimmering yellow lines on inviting ribbons of asphalt, the radio jammed loud. Enveloped by night and noise, the mind gave way to a deeper calling. Just drive. It was the mantra of our Jersey youth, an exhortation, a command, an ideology, something hardwired in us as teenage boys. Night after night, I took out my parents’ Toyota and just drove, without destination, without purpose, to escape. […]

After graduating from college, while friends set up their apartments in New York, Boston and Los Angeles, I headed to Calcutta, to join the Statesman 7.

(997 Wörter)

Kushanava Choudhury: The Epic City. The World on the Streets of Calcutta, London 2017, S. xi–xvi.

1 Emma Lazarus – 1849–1887, author of “The New Colossus”, a poem engraved on the base of the Statue of Liberty, which ends with the following verses:

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me:

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

2 K-Mart – inexpensive department store chain in the USA

3 Princeton University – prestigious university in New Jersey, USA

4 trajectory – here: career path

5 Huien Tsang – Chinese Buddhist monk and scholar, travelled throughout India in ancient times

6 senioritis – colloquial: decreased motivation to study displayed by senior students

7 The Statesman – an influential Indian English-language daily newspaper founded in 1875

1 Outline the biographical information given on the author and his parents. (Material 1) [30 BE]

Material 1

Kushanava Choudhury: The New World (2017)

This is an excerpt from the introductory chapter of The Epic City, Choudhury’s literary portrait of Calcutta, the city of his birth, from where his family moved to the United States of America.

Of all the people who came to Ellis Island in the first decades of the twentieth century, more than half went back. They never told us that on our seventh-grade class trip.

The American immigrant myth says that migration is a reset button. The New World offers deliverance from the past, liberation from the Old World’s limited horizons. The myth states: ‘The past is gone. The future awaits. Start over.’

It never really works like that. That was the story no one ever told about America. The past is never left behind. It haunts every world you live in. Sometimes it drags you back.

By the time I visited Ellis Island on that class trip, I had already migrated halfway around the world four times, flipping back and forth between continents like a dual-voltage appliance. My parents were Indian scientists, torn between nation and vocation. Twice they moved to America, twice they moved back. They were unwilling to leave their country and they were unable to stay. When he was around forty, my father quit his cushy job at a government research institute in Calcutta. He wanted one more chance, he said […].

So, when I was almost twelve, my parents and I moved to Highland Park, New Jersey.

Our move carried no Emma Lazarus 1 cadences. We certainly had not arrived tempest-tossed, beating at the golden door. Our coming was equivocal, always tied to return. Living in New Jersey, we hardly saw ourselves as immigrants. My parents expected to go back to India, like many of their Bengali friends, someday, eventually. On Saturday nights, they gathered at each other’s homes, ate fourteen-course meals brimming with various types of fish and meat, and derailed each other’s sentences in locomotive Bengali, their conversations full of memories of Calcutta. Return, the duty of return and the dream of return, were spoken of endlessly while eating platefuls of goat curry and hilsa fish. Few, of course, actually went back. There were too many good reasons not to. Nationalism and nostalgia did not pay the bills, raise children or advance careers. And yet that dream of a return to the great metropolis cocooned them like a protective blanket from the alien world all around.

As for me – my friends, my neighbourhood, my Calcutta life was gone. In New Jersey, I was in seventh grade in a public school that had almost no Indian students. Cocooning was not an option. I had to fit in fast. I wasn’t assimilating as much as passing. So much of what went on inside my head was from another place. I had happy childhood memories of mid-morning cricket matches during summer vacations, of games played in gullies, rooftops, courtyards and streets. When I moved, it was the streets of the city as much as my childhood that I left behind.

We had not had an easy few years in America. The man who had offered the job to my father had made promises he did not keep, and so my father was forced to find other work, work he grew to despise. From time to time, there would be talk of another move, to Georgia, to Colorado, and I would pull down the posters in my room and prepare. We stayed put, the three of us adrift in the treacherous shoals of the lower middle classes, a world of chronic car trouble and clothes from K-Mart 2. In the fall of my senior year, a piece of good news finally came to our two-bedroom apartment. I had been accepted early to Princeton University 3.

Every immigrant who has lugged worthless foreign degrees through customs knows that where you go to college […] determines your lot in life. When the acceptance letter from Princeton arrived, my parents acted as if someone had come to our door with balloons and a giant cardboard cheque. It was their happiest day in America. But it wasn’t mine.

It is probably universally true that education drives a wedge between us and our hometowns, our families, our earlier selves. But for the immigrant the gap is greater, that divergence in mentality more extreme. My trajectory 4 was taking me farther afield, to Princeton, while a part of me was elsewhere, in another country, in another city. Through all my sojourns I had carried memories on my back like Huien Tsang’s 5 chair, until at seventeen, I felt hunched over with nostalgia like a middle-aged man. When the Princeton letter arrived, I had what my friend Ben called a ‘premature midlife crisis’.

At night, I couldn’t sleep. By day I sleepwalked through classes. Each evening, while my friends assembled at Dunkin’ Donuts, complained about how there was nothing to do in our little town and roared together into the night on long aimless drives, while they enjoyed the languor of spring and that sweet American affliction called senioritis 6, I stayed home and stewed. In my mind, I hatched a plan. I would go back.

India lives in its villages, Mahatma Gandhi had said. So, even though I was a city boy who had never spent a night in an Indian village, I wrote letters back home to arrange to teach in a village school. Instead of Princeton, I would take a year off and head to rural Bengal, I told my parents. But in our two-bedroom apartment full of shared immigrant striving, such a detour was out of the question.

Instead I just drove. The black night, the shimmering yellow lines on inviting ribbons of asphalt, the radio jammed loud. Enveloped by night and noise, the mind gave way to a deeper calling. Just drive. It was the mantra of our Jersey youth, an exhortation, a command, an ideology, something hardwired in us as teenage boys. Night after night, I took out my parents’ Toyota and just drove, without destination, without purpose, to escape. […]

After graduating from college, while friends set up their apartments in New York, Boston and Los Angeles, I headed to Calcutta, to join the Statesman 7.

(997 Wörter)

Kushanava Choudhury: The Epic City. The World on the Streets of Calcutta, London 2017, S. xi–xvi.

1 Emma Lazarus – 1849–1887, author of “The New Colossus”, a poem engraved on the base of the Statue of Liberty, which ends with the following verses:

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me:

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

2 K-Mart – inexpensive department store chain in the USA

3 Princeton University – prestigious university in New Jersey, USA

4 trajectory – here: career path

5 Huien Tsang – Chinese Buddhist monk and scholar, travelled throughout India in ancient times

6 senioritis – colloquial: decreased motivation to study displayed by senior students

7 The Statesman – an influential Indian English-language daily newspaper founded in 1875

2 Analyze how Choudhury's attitude (Material 1) towards the traditional view of American immigration is conveyed. [30 BE]

Material 1

Kushanava Choudhury: The New World (2017)

This is an excerpt from the introductory chapter of The Epic City, Choudhury’s literary portrait of Calcutta, the city of his birth, from where his family moved to the United States of America.

Of all the people who came to Ellis Island in the first decades of the twentieth century, more than half went back. They never told us that on our seventh-grade class trip.

The American immigrant myth says that migration is a reset button. The New World offers deliverance from the past, liberation from the Old World’s limited horizons. The myth states: ‘The past is gone. The future awaits. Start over.’

It never really works like that. That was the story no one ever told about America. The past is never left behind. It haunts every world you live in. Sometimes it drags you back.

By the time I visited Ellis Island on that class trip, I had already migrated halfway around the world four times, flipping back and forth between continents like a dual-voltage appliance. My parents were Indian scientists, torn between nation and vocation. Twice they moved to America, twice they moved back. They were unwilling to leave their country and they were unable to stay. When he was around forty, my father quit his cushy job at a government research institute in Calcutta. He wanted one more chance, he said […].

So, when I was almost twelve, my parents and I moved to Highland Park, New Jersey.

Our move carried no Emma Lazarus 1 cadences. We certainly had not arrived tempest-tossed, beating at the golden door. Our coming was equivocal, always tied to return. Living in New Jersey, we hardly saw ourselves as immigrants. My parents expected to go back to India, like many of their Bengali friends, someday, eventually. On Saturday nights, they gathered at each other’s homes, ate fourteen-course meals brimming with various types of fish and meat, and derailed each other’s sentences in locomotive Bengali, their conversations full of memories of Calcutta. Return, the duty of return and the dream of return, were spoken of endlessly while eating platefuls of goat curry and hilsa fish. Few, of course, actually went back. There were too many good reasons not to. Nationalism and nostalgia did not pay the bills, raise children or advance careers. And yet that dream of a return to the great metropolis cocooned them like a protective blanket from the alien world all around.

As for me – my friends, my neighbourhood, my Calcutta life was gone. In New Jersey, I was in seventh grade in a public school that had almost no Indian students. Cocooning was not an option. I had to fit in fast. I wasn’t assimilating as much as passing. So much of what went on inside my head was from another place. I had happy childhood memories of mid-morning cricket matches during summer vacations, of games played in gullies, rooftops, courtyards and streets. When I moved, it was the streets of the city as much as my childhood that I left behind.

We had not had an easy few years in America. The man who had offered the job to my father had made promises he did not keep, and so my father was forced to find other work, work he grew to despise. From time to time, there would be talk of another move, to Georgia, to Colorado, and I would pull down the posters in my room and prepare. We stayed put, the three of us adrift in the treacherous shoals of the lower middle classes, a world of chronic car trouble and clothes from K-Mart 2. In the fall of my senior year, a piece of good news finally came to our two-bedroom apartment. I had been accepted early to Princeton University 3.

Every immigrant who has lugged worthless foreign degrees through customs knows that where you go to college […] determines your lot in life. When the acceptance letter from Princeton arrived, my parents acted as if someone had come to our door with balloons and a giant cardboard cheque. It was their happiest day in America. But it wasn’t mine.

It is probably universally true that education drives a wedge between us and our hometowns, our families, our earlier selves. But for the immigrant the gap is greater, that divergence in mentality more extreme. My trajectory 4 was taking me farther afield, to Princeton, while a part of me was elsewhere, in another country, in another city. Through all my sojourns I had carried memories on my back like Huien Tsang’s 5 chair, until at seventeen, I felt hunched over with nostalgia like a middle-aged man. When the Princeton letter arrived, I had what my friend Ben called a ‘premature midlife crisis’.

At night, I couldn’t sleep. By day I sleepwalked through classes. Each evening, while my friends assembled at Dunkin’ Donuts, complained about how there was nothing to do in our little town and roared together into the night on long aimless drives, while they enjoyed the languor of spring and that sweet American affliction called senioritis 6, I stayed home and stewed. In my mind, I hatched a plan. I would go back.

India lives in its villages, Mahatma Gandhi had said. So, even though I was a city boy who had never spent a night in an Indian village, I wrote letters back home to arrange to teach in a village school. Instead of Princeton, I would take a year off and head to rural Bengal, I told my parents. But in our two-bedroom apartment full of shared immigrant striving, such a detour was out of the question.

Instead I just drove. The black night, the shimmering yellow lines on inviting ribbons of asphalt, the radio jammed loud. Enveloped by night and noise, the mind gave way to a deeper calling. Just drive. It was the mantra of our Jersey youth, an exhortation, a command, an ideology, something hardwired in us as teenage boys. Night after night, I took out my parents’ Toyota and just drove, without destination, without purpose, to escape. […]

After graduating from college, while friends set up their apartments in New York, Boston and Los Angeles, I headed to Calcutta, to join the Statesman 7.

(997 Wörter)

Kushanava Choudhury: The Epic City. The World on the Streets of Calcutta, London 2017, S. xi–xvi.

1 Emma Lazarus – 1849–1887, author of “The New Colossus”, a poem engraved on the base of the Statue of Liberty, which ends with the following verses:

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me:

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

2 K-Mart – inexpensive department store chain in the USA

3 Princeton University – prestigious university in New Jersey, USA

4 trajectory – here: career path

5 Huien Tsang – Chinese Buddhist monk and scholar, travelled throughout India in ancient times

6 senioritis – colloquial: decreased motivation to study displayed by senior students

7 The Statesman – an influential Indian English-language daily newspaper founded in 1875

Material 2

Dan Rosandich: The trouble with a melting pot is that somebody always gets burned, 2007, URL: https://www.cartoonstock.com/cartoonview.asp?catref=dro1276 (abgerufen am 30.10.2019).

3.1

Assess to what extent the cartoon (Material 2) reflects what Choudhury and his family (Material 1) have experienced in the US.

(40 BE)

3.2

You are participating in an international school project on identity.

Write an article for the project website in which you discuss the importance of place in shaping one's identity.

[40 BE]