Abitur NRW Englisch 2022 · LK · Haupttermin

Klausurteil A

Bernardine Evaristo

Girl, Woman, Other

The scene takes place in the UK today. Carole has just come to the university where she is going to begin her degree.

Please note: The text presented is in the form of the original print version.

her mother couldn’t get the day off work and anyway, it was just as well because she’d

wear her most outlandish Nigerian outfit consisting of thousands of yards of bright material,

and a headscarf ten storeys high, and she’d start bawling when she had to leave her only

child for the first time

5 Carole would forever be known as the student with the mad African mother

that first week she counted on one hand the number of brown-skinned people in her

college, and none as dark as her

in the baronial dining hall she could barely look up from her plate of revolting Stone Age

food, let alone converse with anyone

10 she overheard loud reminiscences about the dorms and drugs of boarding school, Christmas

holidays in Goa, the Bahamas, gap years spent climbing Machu Picchu, or building a school

for the poor in Kenya, about haring down the M4 for weekends in London, house parties in

the countryside, long weekenders in Paris, Copenhagen, Prague, Dublin or Vilnius (where

was that, even?)

15 most students weren’t like that but the really posh ones were the loudest and the most

confident and they were the only voices she heard

they made her feel crushed, worthless and a nobody

without saying a word to her

without even noticing her

20 nobody talked loudly about growing up in a council flat on a skyscraper estate with a

single mother who worked as a cleaner

nobody talked loudly about never having gone on a single holiday, like ever

nobody talked loudly about never having been on a plane, seen a play or the sea, or eaten

in a restaurant, with waiters

25 nobody talked loudly about feeling too uglystupidfatpoor or just plain out of place, out

of sorts, […]

people walked around her or looked through her, or was she imagining it? did she exist

or was she an illusion? if I strip off and streak across the quadrangle will anyone notice me

other than the porters who will not doubt call the fedz, an excuse they’ve been waiting for

30 ever since they first set eyes on her

when a student sidled up after a lecture to ask for some ecstasy, Carole almost texted her

mother to say she was on the next train home

at the end of her first term she returned to Peckham informing her mother she didn’t want

to return to university because although she liked her studies and was managing to stay on

35 top of most of it, she didn’t belong there and wasn’t going back

I’m done, Mama, I’m done

eh! eh! which kain nonsense be this? Bummi shouted, am I hearing you correctly or you

wan make I clean my ear with matches?

listen to me good, Carole Williams

40 firstly – do you think Oprah Winfrey (V I P) would have become the Queen of Television

worldwide if she had not risen above the setbacks of her early life?

secondly – do you think Diane Abbott (V I P) would have become Britain’s first black

woman M P if she did not believe it was her right to enter politics and represent her community?

thirdly – do you think Valerie Amos (V I P) would have become the first black woman

45 baroness in this country if she had burst into tears when she walked into the House of Lords

and seen it was full of elderly white gentlemen?

lastly, did me and Papa come to this country for a better life only to see our daughter

giving up on her opportunities and end up distributing paper hand towels for tips in nightclub

toilets or concert venues, as is the fate of too many of our countrywomen?

50 you must go back to this university in January and stop thinking everybody hates you

without giving them a chance, did you even ask them? did you go up to them and say, excuse

me, do you hate me?

you must find the people who will want to be your friends even if they are all white people

there is someone for everyone in this world

55 you must go back and fight the battles that are your British birthright, Carole, as a true

Nigerian

Carole returned to her college resolved to conquer the place where she would spend the

next two and half years of her life

she would fit in, she decided, she would find her people, as her mother had advised

60 not with the misfits who skulked about the place with scowls on their faces, their hair

gelled up into purple Mohicans

or those with multi-coloured dreadlock extensions, people who were going nowhere fast,

as far as Carole was concerned, as she watched them walk through town with placards and

loudspeakers, people who would horrify her mother if she brought them home

65 to have come this far? did your Papa sacrifice his health so that you could become a punky

Rasta person who smells?

nor was she interested in the boring ordinaries, as Carole began to think of them, students

who were so bland they disappeared, even to her

certainly not the cliques of the elite, now that she knew they existed, who were unreachable,

70 […]

she studied the inmates to find the best match for her, approached those with the most

friendly demeanours, was surprised when people responded warmly

once she actually started talking to them

by the end of her second term she had made friends and even got herself a boyfriend,

75 Marcus, a white Kenyan whose family owned a cattle ranch there, who unashamedly had a

thing for black girls, which she didn’t mind because she was delighted to be desired and he

treated her considerately

she knew she could never tell her mother about him, who’d made it clear she had to marry

a Nigerian, not that Carole was even thinking of marrying Marcus, they were only nineteen,

80 her mother would then ask her why she was courting someone who did not respect her enough

to marry her

it would be lose-lose

Annotations:

8 · baronial · – here: elegant, grand

12 · M4 · – motorway connecting London with Wales

29 · fedz · – slang: security officers

33 · Peckham · – part of London where many Nigerians live

37 · kain · – Nigerian English pidgin: kind of

37 · Bummi · – Carole’s mother

38 · wan · – Nigerian English pidgin: to want to

61 · Mohicans · – here: a hairstyle created by shaving the hair on each side and leaving a strip of longer hair in the middle

Klausurteil A: Leseverstehen und Schreiben integriert

1. Summarise the information the extract gives about Carole's family background and about what her mother expects of her. (Comprehension) [12 Punkte]

Klausurteil A

Bernardine Evaristo

Girl, Woman, Other

The scene takes place in the UK today. Carole has just come to the university where she is going to begin her degree.

Please note: The text presented is in the form of the original print version.

her mother couldn’t get the day off work and anyway, it was just as well because she’d

wear her most outlandish Nigerian outfit consisting of thousands of yards of bright material,

and a headscarf ten storeys high, and she’d start bawling when she had to leave her only

child for the first time

5 Carole would forever be known as the student with the mad African mother

that first week she counted on one hand the number of brown-skinned people in her

college, and none as dark as her

in the baronial dining hall she could barely look up from her plate of revolting Stone Age

food, let alone converse with anyone

10 she overheard loud reminiscences about the dorms and drugs of boarding school, Christmas

holidays in Goa, the Bahamas, gap years spent climbing Machu Picchu, or building a school

for the poor in Kenya, about haring down the M4 for weekends in London, house parties in

the countryside, long weekenders in Paris, Copenhagen, Prague, Dublin or Vilnius (where

was that, even?)

15 most students weren’t like that but the really posh ones were the loudest and the most

confident and they were the only voices she heard

they made her feel crushed, worthless and a nobody

without saying a word to her

without even noticing her

20 nobody talked loudly about growing up in a council flat on a skyscraper estate with a

single mother who worked as a cleaner

nobody talked loudly about never having gone on a single holiday, like ever

nobody talked loudly about never having been on a plane, seen a play or the sea, or eaten

in a restaurant, with waiters

25 nobody talked loudly about feeling too uglystupidfatpoor or just plain out of place, out

of sorts, […]

people walked around her or looked through her, or was she imagining it? did she exist

or was she an illusion? if I strip off and streak across the quadrangle will anyone notice me

other than the porters who will not doubt call the fedz, an excuse they’ve been waiting for

30 ever since they first set eyes on her

when a student sidled up after a lecture to ask for some ecstasy, Carole almost texted her

mother to say she was on the next train home

at the end of her first term she returned to Peckham informing her mother she didn’t want

to return to university because although she liked her studies and was managing to stay on

35 top of most of it, she didn’t belong there and wasn’t going back

I’m done, Mama, I’m done

eh! eh! which kain nonsense be this? Bummi shouted, am I hearing you correctly or you

wan make I clean my ear with matches?

listen to me good, Carole Williams

40 firstly – do you think Oprah Winfrey (V I P) would have become the Queen of Television

worldwide if she had not risen above the setbacks of her early life?

secondly – do you think Diane Abbott (V I P) would have become Britain’s first black

woman M P if she did not believe it was her right to enter politics and represent her community?

thirdly – do you think Valerie Amos (V I P) would have become the first black woman

45 baroness in this country if she had burst into tears when she walked into the House of Lords

and seen it was full of elderly white gentlemen?

lastly, did me and Papa come to this country for a better life only to see our daughter

giving up on her opportunities and end up distributing paper hand towels for tips in nightclub

toilets or concert venues, as is the fate of too many of our countrywomen?

50 you must go back to this university in January and stop thinking everybody hates you

without giving them a chance, did you even ask them? did you go up to them and say, excuse

me, do you hate me?

you must find the people who will want to be your friends even if they are all white people

there is someone for everyone in this world

55 you must go back and fight the battles that are your British birthright, Carole, as a true

Nigerian

Carole returned to her college resolved to conquer the place where she would spend the

next two and half years of her life

she would fit in, she decided, she would find her people, as her mother had advised

60 not with the misfits who skulked about the place with scowls on their faces, their hair

gelled up into purple Mohicans

or those with multi-coloured dreadlock extensions, people who were going nowhere fast,

as far as Carole was concerned, as she watched them walk through town with placards and

loudspeakers, people who would horrify her mother if she brought them home

65 to have come this far? did your Papa sacrifice his health so that you could become a punky

Rasta person who smells?

nor was she interested in the boring ordinaries, as Carole began to think of them, students

who were so bland they disappeared, even to her

certainly not the cliques of the elite, now that she knew they existed, who were unreachable,

70 […]

she studied the inmates to find the best match for her, approached those with the most

friendly demeanours, was surprised when people responded warmly

once she actually started talking to them

by the end of her second term she had made friends and even got herself a boyfriend,

75 Marcus, a white Kenyan whose family owned a cattle ranch there, who unashamedly had a

thing for black girls, which she didn’t mind because she was delighted to be desired and he

treated her considerately

she knew she could never tell her mother about him, who’d made it clear she had to marry

a Nigerian, not that Carole was even thinking of marrying Marcus, they were only nineteen,

80 her mother would then ask her why she was courting someone who did not respect her enough

to marry her

it would be lose-lose

Annotations:

8 · baronial · – here: elegant, grand

12 · M4 · – motorway connecting London with Wales

29 · fedz · – slang: security officers

33 · Peckham · – part of London where many Nigerians live

37 · kain · – Nigerian English pidgin: kind of

37 · Bummi · – Carole’s mother

38 · wan · – Nigerian English pidgin: to want to

61 · Mohicans · – here: a hairstyle created by shaving the hair on each side and leaving a strip of longer hair in the middle

Klausurteil A: Leseverstehen und Schreiben integriert

2. Analyse the way in which Carole is portrayed, paying particular attention to the narrative perspective and the language used. (Analysis) [16 Punkte]

Klausurteil A

Bernardine Evaristo

Girl, Woman, Other

The scene takes place in the UK today. Carole has just come to the university where she is going to begin her degree.

Please note: The text presented is in the form of the original print version.

her mother couldn’t get the day off work and anyway, it was just as well because she’d

wear her most outlandish Nigerian outfit consisting of thousands of yards of bright material,

and a headscarf ten storeys high, and she’d start bawling when she had to leave her only

child for the first time

5 Carole would forever be known as the student with the mad African mother

that first week she counted on one hand the number of brown-skinned people in her

college, and none as dark as her

in the baronial dining hall she could barely look up from her plate of revolting Stone Age

food, let alone converse with anyone

10 she overheard loud reminiscences about the dorms and drugs of boarding school, Christmas

holidays in Goa, the Bahamas, gap years spent climbing Machu Picchu, or building a school

for the poor in Kenya, about haring down the M4 for weekends in London, house parties in

the countryside, long weekenders in Paris, Copenhagen, Prague, Dublin or Vilnius (where

was that, even?)

15 most students weren’t like that but the really posh ones were the loudest and the most

confident and they were the only voices she heard

they made her feel crushed, worthless and a nobody

without saying a word to her

without even noticing her

20 nobody talked loudly about growing up in a council flat on a skyscraper estate with a

single mother who worked as a cleaner

nobody talked loudly about never having gone on a single holiday, like ever

nobody talked loudly about never having been on a plane, seen a play or the sea, or eaten

in a restaurant, with waiters

25 nobody talked loudly about feeling too uglystupidfatpoor or just plain out of place, out

of sorts, […]

people walked around her or looked through her, or was she imagining it? did she exist

or was she an illusion? if I strip off and streak across the quadrangle will anyone notice me

other than the porters who will not doubt call the fedz, an excuse they’ve been waiting for

30 ever since they first set eyes on her

when a student sidled up after a lecture to ask for some ecstasy, Carole almost texted her

mother to say she was on the next train home

at the end of her first term she returned to Peckham informing her mother she didn’t want

to return to university because although she liked her studies and was managing to stay on

35 top of most of it, she didn’t belong there and wasn’t going back

I’m done, Mama, I’m done

eh! eh! which kain nonsense be this? Bummi shouted, am I hearing you correctly or you

wan make I clean my ear with matches?

listen to me good, Carole Williams

40 firstly – do you think Oprah Winfrey (V I P) would have become the Queen of Television

worldwide if she had not risen above the setbacks of her early life?

secondly – do you think Diane Abbott (V I P) would have become Britain’s first black

woman M P if she did not believe it was her right to enter politics and represent her community?

thirdly – do you think Valerie Amos (V I P) would have become the first black woman

45 baroness in this country if she had burst into tears when she walked into the House of Lords

and seen it was full of elderly white gentlemen?

lastly, did me and Papa come to this country for a better life only to see our daughter

giving up on her opportunities and end up distributing paper hand towels for tips in nightclub

toilets or concert venues, as is the fate of too many of our countrywomen?

50 you must go back to this university in January and stop thinking everybody hates you

without giving them a chance, did you even ask them? did you go up to them and say, excuse

me, do you hate me?

you must find the people who will want to be your friends even if they are all white people

there is someone for everyone in this world

55 you must go back and fight the battles that are your British birthright, Carole, as a true

Nigerian

Carole returned to her college resolved to conquer the place where she would spend the

next two and half years of her life

she would fit in, she decided, she would find her people, as her mother had advised

60 not with the misfits who skulked about the place with scowls on their faces, their hair

gelled up into purple Mohicans

or those with multi-coloured dreadlock extensions, people who were going nowhere fast,

as far as Carole was concerned, as she watched them walk through town with placards and

loudspeakers, people who would horrify her mother if she brought them home

65 to have come this far? did your Papa sacrifice his health so that you could become a punky

Rasta person who smells?

nor was she interested in the boring ordinaries, as Carole began to think of them, students

who were so bland they disappeared, even to her

certainly not the cliques of the elite, now that she knew they existed, who were unreachable,

70 […]

she studied the inmates to find the best match for her, approached those with the most

friendly demeanours, was surprised when people responded warmly

once she actually started talking to them

by the end of her second term she had made friends and even got herself a boyfriend,

75 Marcus, a white Kenyan whose family owned a cattle ranch there, who unashamedly had a

thing for black girls, which she didn’t mind because she was delighted to be desired and he

treated her considerately

she knew she could never tell her mother about him, who’d made it clear she had to marry

a Nigerian, not that Carole was even thinking of marrying Marcus, they were only nineteen,

80 her mother would then ask her why she was courting someone who did not respect her enough

to marry her

it would be lose-lose

Annotations:

8 · baronial · – here: elegant, grand

12 · M4 · – motorway connecting London with Wales

29 · fedz · – slang: security officers

33 · Peckham · – part of London where many Nigerians live

37 · kain · – Nigerian English pidgin: kind of

37 · Bummi · – Carole’s mother

38 · wan · – Nigerian English pidgin: to want to

61 · Mohicans · – here: a hairstyle created by shaving the hair on each side and leaving a strip of longer hair in the middle

Klausurteil A: Leseverstehen und Schreiben integriert

3. Select one of the tasks below:

3.1 The journalist and historian David Olusoga claims that many people in Britain deny that structural racism exists and regard it as “a minor, if regrettable, fact of life – one that black people have to tolerate and learn to live with”. Assess to what extent his statement accurately describes an attitude that is widespread in British society today. (Evaluation: comment) [14 Punkte]

Klausurteil A

Bernardine Evaristo

Girl, Woman, Other

The scene takes place in the UK today. Carole has just come to the university where she is going to begin her degree.

Please note: The text presented is in the form of the original print version.

her mother couldn’t get the day off work and anyway, it was just as well because she’d

wear her most outlandish Nigerian outfit consisting of thousands of yards of bright material,

and a headscarf ten storeys high, and she’d start bawling when she had to leave her only

child for the first time

5 Carole would forever be known as the student with the mad African mother

that first week she counted on one hand the number of brown-skinned people in her

college, and none as dark as her

in the baronial dining hall she could barely look up from her plate of revolting Stone Age

food, let alone converse with anyone

10 she overheard loud reminiscences about the dorms and drugs of boarding school, Christmas

holidays in Goa, the Bahamas, gap years spent climbing Machu Picchu, or building a school

for the poor in Kenya, about haring down the M4 for weekends in London, house parties in

the countryside, long weekenders in Paris, Copenhagen, Prague, Dublin or Vilnius (where

was that, even?)

15 most students weren’t like that but the really posh ones were the loudest and the most

confident and they were the only voices she heard

they made her feel crushed, worthless and a nobody

without saying a word to her

without even noticing her

20 nobody talked loudly about growing up in a council flat on a skyscraper estate with a

single mother who worked as a cleaner

nobody talked loudly about never having gone on a single holiday, like ever

nobody talked loudly about never having been on a plane, seen a play or the sea, or eaten

in a restaurant, with waiters

25 nobody talked loudly about feeling too uglystupidfatpoor or just plain out of place, out

of sorts, […]

people walked around her or looked through her, or was she imagining it? did she exist

or was she an illusion? if I strip off and streak across the quadrangle will anyone notice me

other than the porters who will not doubt call the fedz, an excuse they’ve been waiting for

30 ever since they first set eyes on her

when a student sidled up after a lecture to ask for some ecstasy, Carole almost texted her

mother to say she was on the next train home

at the end of her first term she returned to Peckham informing her mother she didn’t want

to return to university because although she liked her studies and was managing to stay on

35 top of most of it, she didn’t belong there and wasn’t going back

I’m done, Mama, I’m done

eh! eh! which kain nonsense be this? Bummi shouted, am I hearing you correctly or you

wan make I clean my ear with matches?

listen to me good, Carole Williams

40 firstly – do you think Oprah Winfrey (V I P) would have become the Queen of Television

worldwide if she had not risen above the setbacks of her early life?

secondly – do you think Diane Abbott (V I P) would have become Britain’s first black

woman M P if she did not believe it was her right to enter politics and represent her community?

thirdly – do you think Valerie Amos (V I P) would have become the first black woman

45 baroness in this country if she had burst into tears when she walked into the House of Lords

and seen it was full of elderly white gentlemen?

lastly, did me and Papa come to this country for a better life only to see our daughter

giving up on her opportunities and end up distributing paper hand towels for tips in nightclub

toilets or concert venues, as is the fate of too many of our countrywomen?

50 you must go back to this university in January and stop thinking everybody hates you

without giving them a chance, did you even ask them? did you go up to them and say, excuse

me, do you hate me?

you must find the people who will want to be your friends even if they are all white people

there is someone for everyone in this world

55 you must go back and fight the battles that are your British birthright, Carole, as a true

Nigerian

Carole returned to her college resolved to conquer the place where she would spend the

next two and half years of her life

she would fit in, she decided, she would find her people, as her mother had advised

60 not with the misfits who skulked about the place with scowls on their faces, their hair

gelled up into purple Mohicans

or those with multi-coloured dreadlock extensions, people who were going nowhere fast,

as far as Carole was concerned, as she watched them walk through town with placards and

loudspeakers, people who would horrify her mother if she brought them home

65 to have come this far? did your Papa sacrifice his health so that you could become a punky

Rasta person who smells?

nor was she interested in the boring ordinaries, as Carole began to think of them, students

who were so bland they disappeared, even to her

certainly not the cliques of the elite, now that she knew they existed, who were unreachable,

70 […]

she studied the inmates to find the best match for her, approached those with the most

friendly demeanours, was surprised when people responded warmly

once she actually started talking to them

by the end of her second term she had made friends and even got herself a boyfriend,

75 Marcus, a white Kenyan whose family owned a cattle ranch there, who unashamedly had a

thing for black girls, which she didn’t mind because she was delighted to be desired and he

treated her considerately

she knew she could never tell her mother about him, who’d made it clear she had to marry

a Nigerian, not that Carole was even thinking of marrying Marcus, they were only nineteen,

80 her mother would then ask her why she was courting someone who did not respect her enough

to marry her

it would be lose-lose

Annotations:

8 · baronial · – here: elegant, grand

12 · M4 · – motorway connecting London with Wales

29 · fedz · – slang: security officers

33 · Peckham · – part of London where many Nigerians live

37 · kain · – Nigerian English pidgin: kind of

37 · Bummi · – Carole’s mother

38 · wan · – Nigerian English pidgin: to want to

61 · Mohicans · – here: a hairstyle created by shaving the hair on each side and leaving a strip of longer hair in the middle

Klausurteil A: Leseverstehen und Schreiben integriert

3. Select one of the following tasks:

3.2 Later that evening, after talking with her mother about whether she should go back to university, Carole retreats to her room and thinks about her mother's advice. Write an interior monologue in which she expresses her hopes and fears. (Evaluation: re-creation of text) [14 Punkte]

Klausurteil A

Bernardine Evaristo

Girl, Woman, Other

The scene takes place in the UK today. Carole has just come to the university where she is going to begin her degree.

Please note: The text presented is in the form of the original print version.

her mother couldn’t get the day off work and anyway, it was just as well because she’d

wear her most outlandish Nigerian outfit consisting of thousands of yards of bright material,

and a headscarf ten storeys high, and she’d start bawling when she had to leave her only

child for the first time

5 Carole would forever be known as the student with the mad African mother

that first week she counted on one hand the number of brown-skinned people in her

college, and none as dark as her

in the baronial dining hall she could barely look up from her plate of revolting Stone Age

food, let alone converse with anyone

10 she overheard loud reminiscences about the dorms and drugs of boarding school, Christmas

holidays in Goa, the Bahamas, gap years spent climbing Machu Picchu, or building a school

for the poor in Kenya, about haring down the M4 for weekends in London, house parties in

the countryside, long weekenders in Paris, Copenhagen, Prague, Dublin or Vilnius (where

was that, even?)

15 most students weren’t like that but the really posh ones were the loudest and the most

confident and they were the only voices she heard

they made her feel crushed, worthless and a nobody

without saying a word to her

without even noticing her

20 nobody talked loudly about growing up in a council flat on a skyscraper estate with a

single mother who worked as a cleaner

nobody talked loudly about never having gone on a single holiday, like ever

nobody talked loudly about never having been on a plane, seen a play or the sea, or eaten

in a restaurant, with waiters

25 nobody talked loudly about feeling too uglystupidfatpoor or just plain out of place, out

of sorts, […]

people walked around her or looked through her, or was she imagining it? did she exist

or was she an illusion? if I strip off and streak across the quadrangle will anyone notice me

other than the porters who will not doubt call the fedz, an excuse they’ve been waiting for

30 ever since they first set eyes on her

when a student sidled up after a lecture to ask for some ecstasy, Carole almost texted her

mother to say she was on the next train home

at the end of her first term she returned to Peckham informing her mother she didn’t want

to return to university because although she liked her studies and was managing to stay on

35 top of most of it, she didn’t belong there and wasn’t going back

I’m done, Mama, I’m done

eh! eh! which kain nonsense be this? Bummi shouted, am I hearing you correctly or you

wan make I clean my ear with matches?

listen to me good, Carole Williams

40 firstly – do you think Oprah Winfrey (V I P) would have become the Queen of Television

worldwide if she had not risen above the setbacks of her early life?

secondly – do you think Diane Abbott (V I P) would have become Britain’s first black

woman M P if she did not believe it was her right to enter politics and represent her community?

thirdly – do you think Valerie Amos (V I P) would have become the first black woman

45 baroness in this country if she had burst into tears when she walked into the House of Lords

and seen it was full of elderly white gentlemen?

lastly, did me and Papa come to this country for a better life only to see our daughter

giving up on her opportunities and end up distributing paper hand towels for tips in nightclub

toilets or concert venues, as is the fate of too many of our countrywomen?

50 you must go back to this university in January and stop thinking everybody hates you

without giving them a chance, did you even ask them? did you go up to them and say, excuse

me, do you hate me?

you must find the people who will want to be your friends even if they are all white people

there is someone for everyone in this world

55 you must go back and fight the battles that are your British birthright, Carole, as a true

Nigerian

Carole returned to her college resolved to conquer the place where she would spend the

next two and half years of her life

she would fit in, she decided, she would find her people, as her mother had advised

60 not with the misfits who skulked about the place with scowls on their faces, their hair

gelled up into purple Mohicans

or those with multi-coloured dreadlock extensions, people who were going nowhere fast,

as far as Carole was concerned, as she watched them walk through town with placards and

loudspeakers, people who would horrify her mother if she brought them home

65 to have come this far? did your Papa sacrifice his health so that you could become a punky

Rasta person who smells?

nor was she interested in the boring ordinaries, as Carole began to think of them, students

who were so bland they disappeared, even to her

certainly not the cliques of the elite, now that she knew they existed, who were unreachable,

70 […]

she studied the inmates to find the best match for her, approached those with the most

friendly demeanours, was surprised when people responded warmly

once she actually started talking to them

by the end of her second term she had made friends and even got herself a boyfriend,

75 Marcus, a white Kenyan whose family owned a cattle ranch there, who unashamedly had a

thing for black girls, which she didn’t mind because she was delighted to be desired and he

treated her considerately

she knew she could never tell her mother about him, who’d made it clear she had to marry

a Nigerian, not that Carole was even thinking of marrying Marcus, they were only nineteen,

80 her mother would then ask her why she was courting someone who did not respect her enough

to marry her

it would be lose-lose

Annotations:

8 · baronial · – here: elegant, grand

12 · M4 · – motorway connecting London with Wales

29 · fedz · – slang: security officers

33 · Peckham · – part of London where many Nigerians live

37 · kain · – Nigerian English pidgin: kind of

37 · Bummi · – Carole’s mother

38 · wan · – Nigerian English pidgin: to want to

61 · Mohicans · – here: a hairstyle created by shaving the hair on each side and leaving a strip of longer hair in the middle

Klausurteil B: Sprachmittlung isoliert

Your school takes part in a virtual exchange on European Youth Culture. In your group, you want to find out about young people's lifestyles across Europe. You have come across Sharma's article and have decided to present it to your fellow group members. Based on the article write them an email in which you outline a current trend in Germany. (Mediation) [18 Punkte]

Read the German newspaper article by Mayank Sharma below:

Warum wir zu unserem Neo-Spießertum stehen sollten

Während eines gemeinsamen Urlaubs in einer Selbstversorgerhütte im Schwarzwald stellte sich der Autorin und ihrem Freundeskreis die Frage nach der Spießigkeit ihres Lebensstils.

„Wie spießig bin ich eigentlich!?“ Als ich die Frage auch meinen Freunden stellte, während wir versammelt in der braun getäfelten Stube am Kachelofen saßen, fühlten sie sich ertappt. Spießig!? Auf keinen Fall. Diesen Vorwurf lässt sich wohl kaum ein junger Mensch widerstandslos gefallen lassen. Spießig sind immer nur die anderen. Doch seit diesem Hüttenurlaub bezeichnen wir uns im Freundeskreis immer wieder spaßeshalber als „Neo-Spießer“ – und wenn wir ehrlich sind, fühlen wir uns auch so.

Der Begriff des Neo-Spießertums kursierte zuletzt vor ein paar Jahren in den Medien. Bereits damals hatte man insbesondere bei Studierenden eine neue Bürgerlichkeit entdeckt. Und bis heute hat er nicht an Aktualität verloren – denn er steht nicht für eine kurze Modeerscheinung, sondern für die Werte und Einstellung einer Generation. Meiner Generation.

Unter „Spießern“ stellen sich die meisten engstirnige, kleinkarierte und konformistische Personen mit Bausparverträgen vor, die in Reihenhäusern mit gepflegten Vorgärten wohnen. Werte wie Sicherheit, Familie und Tradition gelten als spießig. Ist nicht genau das die Antithese zu all dem, wofür wir zu stehen glauben, wovon wir uns immer abgrenzen wollten?

Machen wir nicht alles anders als unsere Eltern und Großeltern? Oder machen wir uns nur etwas vor und das „Neo“, das wir dem „Spießer“ voranstellen, gaukelt eine Pseudo-Emanzipation vor, die es gar nicht gibt?

Dass für meine Freunde und mich, genauso wie für viele andere junge Menschen, Dinge zu unserem Lifestyle gehören, die wir selbst mit Spießigkeit verbinden, lässt sich nicht verleugnen. In der Selbstbeobachtung kann das schizophren wirken. Selbstanspruch und Wirklichkeit klaffen auseinander, wenn das eigene Kleingärtner- und Heimwerkertum der Forderung des gesellschaftlichen Wandels gegenüberstehen. Aber ist diese Selbstkritik wirklich berechtigt? Übernehmen wir mit Omas und Opas Vorlieben auch ihren Wertekanon?

Teilweise. Das hat zumindest die Shell-Jugendstudie von 2019 ergeben, für die zwölf- bis 25-Jährige befragt wurden. Die Ergebnisse zeigen eine klare Tendenz: Soziale Eingebundenheit gehört zu den wichtigsten Wertorientierungen. Den meisten sind Familie und soziale Beziehungen sogar wichtiger als Eigenverantwortlichkeit und Unabhängigkeit. Großen Wert legten die Befragten auch auf traditionelle Tugenden, wie den Respekt gegenüber Gesetz und Ordnung, der Orientierung an der Leistungsnorm und dem Streben nach Sicherheit insgesamt. Dieses Bild bestätigt die SINUS-Jugendstudie, die im Juli dieses Jahres veröffentlicht wurde. Untersucht wurden 14- bis 17-Jährige. Die Autoren stellten fest, dass die bürgerliche Normalbiographie das Leitmotiv vieler Teenager ist. In der Mitte der Gesellschaft ankommen. Das scheint den meisten Jugendlichen erstrebenswerter zu sein als ein hoher Lebensstandard oder die eigenen Wünsche und Bedürfnisse durchzusetzen. [...]

Bleibt die Frage, ob wir der althergebrachten Spießigkeit tatsächlich zumindest einen neuen Dreh geben. Ich finde: Das tun wir sehr wohl.

Und damit kommen wir zur anderen Seite der Medaille der Spießigkeit, auf der groß „Neo“ geschrieben steht. Die Forscher der Shell-Studie haben herausgefunden, dass vier von fünf Befragten ein hedonistisches Streben aufweisen, das Leben also in vollen Zügen genießen wollen. Dabei betonen die meisten weder den Beruf noch die Freizeit übermäßig. Sicherheit und Genuss schließen sich für die junge Generation also nicht gegenseitig aus, sondern scheinen sich eher gegenseitig zu bedingen. Gut in dieses Bild passt, dass wir großen Wert auf eine insgesamt bewusste Lebensgestaltung legen. Wir verhalten uns deutlich achtsamer gegenüber der Umwelt, dem Klima und letztlich uns selbst, als es noch unsere Eltern und Großeltern taten. Das läuft auf einen Kompromiss hinaus. [...]

So kommt auch die Jugendstudie zu dem Schluss, dass für die meisten jungen Menschen eine idealistische, sinnstiftende Wertorientierung an Bedeutung gewonnen hat. Mit engstirniger Spießigkeit hat das wenig zu tun. Auch nichts mit Kleinkariertheit.

Es ist eher so, dass wir alte Formen mit neuen Inhalten füllen. Wir lehnen das Alte nicht kategorisch ab, sondern geben ihm einen neuen Anstrich.

Anmerkung: Die Sprachrichtigkeit betreffende Fehler wurden korrigiert.

Compara tu email con los criterios de corrección oficiales.

Klausurteil A

Keri Leigh Merritt

Jackson water crisis shows Nina Simone is still right about Mississippi

Summoned to the South by Marian Wright of the NAACP, Senators Robert F. Kennedy and

Joseph Clark traveled to the Mississippi Delta in the Spring of 1967 to assess the effectiveness

of the federal War on Poverty programs. Wright had testified before Congress that the people

of her state were starving and in agony. Although forewarned, the White senators were stunned

5 to witness the extremities of Mississippi’s soul-crushing poverty, right in the middle of one

of the wealthiest nations on earth.

After repeated attempts to engage one young, seemingly non-verbal African American boy

– his stomach swollen from malnourishment – picking through dried rice and beans on the

dirt floor of a shack, Bobby Kennedy, the father of 11 children, quickly turned and walked

10 outside. He did not want the photographers who accompanied him to catch the tears welling

up in his eyes.

The depth of Mississippi’s poverty was almost too much for Kennedy to bear. Speaking

mournfully about “children with distended stomachs,” Kennedy urged the federal government

to do something to alleviate the state’s widespread “suffering”. Deeming “housing inadequate”

15 and commenting on the “insufficient clothing” of the state’s impoverished children, he

rightfully concluded that Mississippi was a “terrible reflection on our society”.

Now, 54 years later, it is necessary to ask the federal government to intervene in the state

again. Many of the primarily Black residents of Mississippi’s capital, Jackson, spent weeks

without running water after a cold spell burst a huge number of the city’s pipes. According

20 to Mississippi Today, over 40,000 people, the equivalent of a sold-out game at Wrigley Field,

were not able to drink, bathe or wash clothes, dishes, hands or even flush toilets – all during

a pandemic. [...]

Jackson’s problems, like those of so many other US towns and cities, are a blight on the

political ideals White Americans traditionally claim.

25 Jackson, Mississippi, is a microcosm of our nation’s massive failures to make amends for

centuries of colonialism, slavery and racism. [...]

Our problem, our shame, is that American poverty springs not from lack of funds, but instead

from White supremacy. Due to the ravages of history – from slavery and the failures of

Reconstruction to more modern tactics of redlining, White flight and the crisis of mass

30 incarceration – poverty in America is almost always dependent on racism, even when the

impoverished are White. From pitting laborers of different races against each other to stoking

racist and xenophobic fears through a sensationalistic and profit-driven media, America’s

White elite have always used the specter of racism to prevent the formation of a broad coalition

of people with similar class interests, regardless of race.

35 And poor and working-class Whites historically have been all-too-willing to join in this

Faustian bargain.

We are one of the richest nations in the world, but among those nations, we are one of the

most unequal. Nearly all other developed nations offer a better standard of living to their

citizens, regardless of income or wealth.

40 Currently, White Republicans control Mississippi’s state legislature. As Mississippi Free Press

reported, Governor Tate Reeves and other White lawmakers are essentially holding the

Black-led, Black-populated city hostage, refusing to fund repairs. While the citizens of his

state are literally going on a month without the very basics of survival, Reeves instead focused

his attention to passing the nation’s first anti-transgender law of 2021.

45 The few repairs that have been made have mostly been in affluent, largely White north

Jackson, clearly delineating not just the privileges, but the power of Whiteness. [...]

Although reparate is no longer a common word, it is the key to successfully addressing

reparations. To reparate means to restore something to a state of good repair; it means

returning something to working order. Reparative justice means to right the wrongs of the

50 past – not only by acknowledging the harms of certain groups of people both in the past and

the present, but also addressing those harms and working to ameliorate them.

As Nina Simone so brilliantly wrote about reparative justice in her iconic song “Mississippi

Goddam”, time is always of the essence:

But that’s just the trouble

55 “do it slow“

Desegregation

“do it slow“

Mass participation

“do it slow“

60 Reunification

“do it slow“

Do things gradually

“do it slow“

But bring more tragedy.

65 While many White Mississippians in power like Tate Reeves and other GOP leaders – wittingly

or not – extend the legacies of racism and the slaveholders’ Confederacy and fail to act as

White supremacy keeps state’s people ensnared in extreme poverty, the time for federal

intervention is now. If the leaders of the state will not repair and restore Jackson’s water

system, then the leaders of the country must step in to help right the wrongs of the past.

70 From immediately sending FEMA in to deal with Jackson’s short-term problems to passing

a Federal Jobs Guarantee that focuses, first and foremost, on reparative justice, the Biden

administration and the Democratic Congress – if they truly espouse the values they

campaigned upon – should act swiftly and thoroughly.

In 1968, less than a year after Senator Kennedy’s Mississippi trip, Martin Luther King, Jr.

75 wrote that “There is nothing new about poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques

and the resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we have the will.”

It is nothing short of a moral and ethical tragedy – an indictment of the entire country – that

our citizens are being deprived of clean running water in one of the richest nations on earth.

It is well past time for immediate federal action. We must have the will.

80 Mississippi Goddam.

Annotations:

Language mistakes in the original text have been corrected.

Nina Simone · African American singer, songwriter and civil rights activist (1933 – 2003)

1 Marian Wright · African American civil rights activist of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

20 Mississippi Today · digital news service

20 – 21 Wrigley Field · large baseball stadium in Chicago

23 blight · here: something that spoils plans or destroys hopes

29 Reconstruction · period in American history following the American Civil War (1861 – 1865)

29 redlining · process of systematically denying various services to residents of predominantly non-white areas

29 White Flight · migration of white people from areas becoming more ethnoculturally diverse

29 – 30 mass incarceration · reference to the disproportionately large rate of imprisonment for African Americans in the U.S.

33 specter · here: something unpleasant that people are afraid might happen

36 Faustian bargain · exchanging something of the highest moral or spiritual importance for a worldly or material benefit (reference to Faust, a character in German folklore and literature)

65 GOP · (Grand Old Party) – the Republican Party in the United States

70 FEMA · (Federal Emergency Management Agency) – federal agency coordinating the response to disasters occurring in the United States

1. Sum up Keri Leigh Merritt's account of the situation in the state of Mississippi in the past and present. (Comprehension) [12 Punkte]

Klausurteil A

Keri Leigh Merritt

Jackson water crisis shows Nina Simone is still right about Mississippi

Summoned to the South by Marian Wright of the NAACP, Senators Robert F. Kennedy and

Joseph Clark traveled to the Mississippi Delta in the Spring of 1967 to assess the effectiveness

of the federal War on Poverty programs. Wright had testified before Congress that the people

of her state were starving and in agony. Although forewarned, the White senators were stunned

5 to witness the extremities of Mississippi’s soul-crushing poverty, right in the middle of one

of the wealthiest nations on earth.

After repeated attempts to engage one young, seemingly non-verbal African American boy

– his stomach swollen from malnourishment – picking through dried rice and beans on the

dirt floor of a shack, Bobby Kennedy, the father of 11 children, quickly turned and walked

10 outside. He did not want the photographers who accompanied him to catch the tears welling

up in his eyes.

The depth of Mississippi’s poverty was almost too much for Kennedy to bear. Speaking

mournfully about “children with distended stomachs,” Kennedy urged the federal government

to do something to alleviate the state’s widespread “suffering”. Deeming “housing inadequate”

15 and commenting on the “insufficient clothing” of the state’s impoverished children, he

rightfully concluded that Mississippi was a “terrible reflection on our society”.

Now, 54 years later, it is necessary to ask the federal government to intervene in the state

again. Many of the primarily Black residents of Mississippi’s capital, Jackson, spent weeks

without running water after a cold spell burst a huge number of the city’s pipes. According

20 to Mississippi Today, over 40,000 people, the equivalent of a sold-out game at Wrigley Field,

were not able to drink, bathe or wash clothes, dishes, hands or even flush toilets – all during

a pandemic. [...]

Jackson’s problems, like those of so many other US towns and cities, are a blight on the

political ideals White Americans traditionally claim.

25 Jackson, Mississippi, is a microcosm of our nation’s massive failures to make amends for

centuries of colonialism, slavery and racism. [...]

Our problem, our shame, is that American poverty springs not from lack of funds, but instead

from White supremacy. Due to the ravages of history – from slavery and the failures of

Reconstruction to more modern tactics of redlining, White flight and the crisis of mass

30 incarceration – poverty in America is almost always dependent on racism, even when the

impoverished are White. From pitting laborers of different races against each other to stoking

racist and xenophobic fears through a sensationalistic and profit-driven media, America’s

White elite have always used the specter of racism to prevent the formation of a broad coalition

of people with similar class interests, regardless of race.

35 And poor and working-class Whites historically have been all-too-willing to join in this

Faustian bargain.

We are one of the richest nations in the world, but among those nations, we are one of the

most unequal. Nearly all other developed nations offer a better standard of living to their

citizens, regardless of income or wealth.

40 Currently, White Republicans control Mississippi’s state legislature. As Mississippi Free Press

reported, Governor Tate Reeves and other White lawmakers are essentially holding the

Black-led, Black-populated city hostage, refusing to fund repairs. While the citizens of his

state are literally going on a month without the very basics of survival, Reeves instead focused

his attention to passing the nation’s first anti-transgender law of 2021.

45 The few repairs that have been made have mostly been in affluent, largely White north

Jackson, clearly delineating not just the privileges, but the power of Whiteness. [...]

Although reparate is no longer a common word, it is the key to successfully addressing

reparations. To reparate means to restore something to a state of good repair; it means

returning something to working order. Reparative justice means to right the wrongs of the

50 past – not only by acknowledging the harms of certain groups of people both in the past and

the present, but also addressing those harms and working to ameliorate them.

As Nina Simone so brilliantly wrote about reparative justice in her iconic song “Mississippi

Goddam”, time is always of the essence:

But that’s just the trouble

55 “do it slow“

Desegregation

“do it slow“

Mass participation

“do it slow“

60 Reunification

“do it slow“

Do things gradually

“do it slow“

But bring more tragedy.

65 While many White Mississippians in power like Tate Reeves and other GOP leaders – wittingly

or not – extend the legacies of racism and the slaveholders’ Confederacy and fail to act as

White supremacy keeps state’s people ensnared in extreme poverty, the time for federal

intervention is now. If the leaders of the state will not repair and restore Jackson’s water

system, then the leaders of the country must step in to help right the wrongs of the past.

70 From immediately sending FEMA in to deal with Jackson’s short-term problems to passing

a Federal Jobs Guarantee that focuses, first and foremost, on reparative justice, the Biden

administration and the Democratic Congress – if they truly espouse the values they

campaigned upon – should act swiftly and thoroughly.

In 1968, less than a year after Senator Kennedy’s Mississippi trip, Martin Luther King, Jr.

75 wrote that “There is nothing new about poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques

and the resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we have the will.”

It is nothing short of a moral and ethical tragedy – an indictment of the entire country – that

our citizens are being deprived of clean running water in one of the richest nations on earth.

It is well past time for immediate federal action. We must have the will.

80 Mississippi Goddam.

Annotations:

Language mistakes in the original text have been corrected.

Nina Simone · African American singer, songwriter and civil rights activist (1933 – 2003)

1 Marian Wright · African American civil rights activist of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

20 Mississippi Today · digital news service

20 – 21 Wrigley Field · large baseball stadium in Chicago

23 blight · here: something that spoils plans or destroys hopes

29 Reconstruction · period in American history following the American Civil War (1861 – 1865)

29 redlining · process of systematically denying various services to residents of predominantly non-white areas

29 White Flight · migration of white people from areas becoming more ethnoculturally diverse

29 – 30 mass incarceration · reference to the disproportionately large rate of imprisonment for African Americans in the U.S.

33 specter · here: something unpleasant that people are afraid might happen

36 Faustian bargain · exchanging something of the highest moral or spiritual importance for a worldly or material benefit (reference to Faust, a character in German folklore and literature)

65 GOP · (Grand Old Party) – the Republican Party in the United States

70 FEMA · (Federal Emergency Management Agency) – federal agency coordinating the response to disasters occurring in the United States

2. Analyse the way Merritt makes her point, concentrating on her communicative strategies and her use of language. (Analysis) [16 Punkte]

Klausurteil A

Keri Leigh Merritt

Jackson water crisis shows Nina Simone is still right about Mississippi

Summoned to the South by Marian Wright of the NAACP, Senators Robert F. Kennedy and

Joseph Clark traveled to the Mississippi Delta in the Spring of 1967 to assess the effectiveness

of the federal War on Poverty programs. Wright had testified before Congress that the people

of her state were starving and in agony. Although forewarned, the White senators were stunned

5 to witness the extremities of Mississippi’s soul-crushing poverty, right in the middle of one

of the wealthiest nations on earth.

After repeated attempts to engage one young, seemingly non-verbal African American boy

– his stomach swollen from malnourishment – picking through dried rice and beans on the

dirt floor of a shack, Bobby Kennedy, the father of 11 children, quickly turned and walked

10 outside. He did not want the photographers who accompanied him to catch the tears welling

up in his eyes.

The depth of Mississippi’s poverty was almost too much for Kennedy to bear. Speaking

mournfully about “children with distended stomachs,” Kennedy urged the federal government

to do something to alleviate the state’s widespread “suffering”. Deeming “housing inadequate”

15 and commenting on the “insufficient clothing” of the state’s impoverished children, he

rightfully concluded that Mississippi was a “terrible reflection on our society”.

Now, 54 years later, it is necessary to ask the federal government to intervene in the state

again. Many of the primarily Black residents of Mississippi’s capital, Jackson, spent weeks

without running water after a cold spell burst a huge number of the city’s pipes. According

20 to Mississippi Today, over 40,000 people, the equivalent of a sold-out game at Wrigley Field,

were not able to drink, bathe or wash clothes, dishes, hands or even flush toilets – all during

a pandemic. [...]

Jackson’s problems, like those of so many other US towns and cities, are a blight on the

political ideals White Americans traditionally claim.

25 Jackson, Mississippi, is a microcosm of our nation’s massive failures to make amends for

centuries of colonialism, slavery and racism. [...]

Our problem, our shame, is that American poverty springs not from lack of funds, but instead

from White supremacy. Due to the ravages of history – from slavery and the failures of

Reconstruction to more modern tactics of redlining, White flight and the crisis of mass

30 incarceration – poverty in America is almost always dependent on racism, even when the

impoverished are White. From pitting laborers of different races against each other to stoking

racist and xenophobic fears through a sensationalistic and profit-driven media, America’s

White elite have always used the specter of racism to prevent the formation of a broad coalition

of people with similar class interests, regardless of race.

35 And poor and working-class Whites historically have been all-too-willing to join in this

Faustian bargain.

We are one of the richest nations in the world, but among those nations, we are one of the

most unequal. Nearly all other developed nations offer a better standard of living to their

citizens, regardless of income or wealth.

40 Currently, White Republicans control Mississippi’s state legislature. As Mississippi Free Press

reported, Governor Tate Reeves and other White lawmakers are essentially holding the

Black-led, Black-populated city hostage, refusing to fund repairs. While the citizens of his

state are literally going on a month without the very basics of survival, Reeves instead focused

his attention to passing the nation’s first anti-transgender law of 2021.

45 The few repairs that have been made have mostly been in affluent, largely White north

Jackson, clearly delineating not just the privileges, but the power of Whiteness. [...]

Although reparate is no longer a common word, it is the key to successfully addressing

reparations. To reparate means to restore something to a state of good repair; it means

returning something to working order. Reparative justice means to right the wrongs of the

50 past – not only by acknowledging the harms of certain groups of people both in the past and

the present, but also addressing those harms and working to ameliorate them.

As Nina Simone so brilliantly wrote about reparative justice in her iconic song “Mississippi

Goddam”, time is always of the essence:

But that’s just the trouble

55 “do it slow“

Desegregation

“do it slow“

Mass participation

“do it slow“

60 Reunification

“do it slow“

Do things gradually

“do it slow“

But bring more tragedy.

65 While many White Mississippians in power like Tate Reeves and other GOP leaders – wittingly

or not – extend the legacies of racism and the slaveholders’ Confederacy and fail to act as

White supremacy keeps state’s people ensnared in extreme poverty, the time for federal

intervention is now. If the leaders of the state will not repair and restore Jackson’s water

system, then the leaders of the country must step in to help right the wrongs of the past.

70 From immediately sending FEMA in to deal with Jackson’s short-term problems to passing

a Federal Jobs Guarantee that focuses, first and foremost, on reparative justice, the Biden

administration and the Democratic Congress – if they truly espouse the values they

campaigned upon – should act swiftly and thoroughly.

In 1968, less than a year after Senator Kennedy’s Mississippi trip, Martin Luther King, Jr.

75 wrote that “There is nothing new about poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques

and the resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we have the will.”

It is nothing short of a moral and ethical tragedy – an indictment of the entire country – that

our citizens are being deprived of clean running water in one of the richest nations on earth.

It is well past time for immediate federal action. We must have the will.

80 Mississippi Goddam.

Annotations:

Language mistakes in the original text have been corrected.

Nina Simone · African American singer, songwriter and civil rights activist (1933 – 2003)

1 Marian Wright · African American civil rights activist of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

20 Mississippi Today · digital news service

20 – 21 Wrigley Field · large baseball stadium in Chicago

23 blight · here: something that spoils plans or destroys hopes

29 Reconstruction · period in American history following the American Civil War (1861 – 1865)

29 redlining · process of systematically denying various services to residents of predominantly non-white areas

29 White Flight · migration of white people from areas becoming more ethnoculturally diverse

29 – 30 mass incarceration · reference to the disproportionately large rate of imprisonment for African Americans in the U.S.

33 specter · here: something unpleasant that people are afraid might happen

36 Faustian bargain · exchanging something of the highest moral or spiritual importance for a worldly or material benefit (reference to Faust, a character in German folklore and literature)

65 GOP · (Grand Old Party) – the Republican Party in the United States

70 FEMA · (Federal Emergency Management Agency) – federal agency coordinating the response to disasters occurring in the United States

3.1 Assess the claim made by Merritt that "Jackson's problems, like those of so many other US towns and cities, are a blight on the political ideals White Americans traditionally claim" (ll. 23–24). Draw on the text as well as on what you have studied in class about American myths and realities. (Evaluation: comment) [14 Punkte]

Klausurteil A

Keri Leigh Merritt

Jackson water crisis shows Nina Simone is still right about Mississippi

Summoned to the South by Marian Wright of the NAACP, Senators Robert F. Kennedy and

Joseph Clark traveled to the Mississippi Delta in the Spring of 1967 to assess the effectiveness

of the federal War on Poverty programs. Wright had testified before Congress that the people

of her state were starving and in agony. Although forewarned, the White senators were stunned

5 to witness the extremities of Mississippi’s soul-crushing poverty, right in the middle of one

of the wealthiest nations on earth.

After repeated attempts to engage one young, seemingly non-verbal African American boy

– his stomach swollen from malnourishment – picking through dried rice and beans on the

dirt floor of a shack, Bobby Kennedy, the father of 11 children, quickly turned and walked

10 outside. He did not want the photographers who accompanied him to catch the tears welling

up in his eyes.

The depth of Mississippi’s poverty was almost too much for Kennedy to bear. Speaking

mournfully about “children with distended stomachs,” Kennedy urged the federal government

to do something to alleviate the state’s widespread “suffering”. Deeming “housing inadequate”

15 and commenting on the “insufficient clothing” of the state’s impoverished children, he

rightfully concluded that Mississippi was a “terrible reflection on our society”.

Now, 54 years later, it is necessary to ask the federal government to intervene in the state

again. Many of the primarily Black residents of Mississippi’s capital, Jackson, spent weeks

without running water after a cold spell burst a huge number of the city’s pipes. According

20 to Mississippi Today, over 40,000 people, the equivalent of a sold-out game at Wrigley Field,

were not able to drink, bathe or wash clothes, dishes, hands or even flush toilets – all during

a pandemic. [...]

Jackson’s problems, like those of so many other US towns and cities, are a blight on the

political ideals White Americans traditionally claim.

25 Jackson, Mississippi, is a microcosm of our nation’s massive failures to make amends for

centuries of colonialism, slavery and racism. [...]

Our problem, our shame, is that American poverty springs not from lack of funds, but instead

from White supremacy. Due to the ravages of history – from slavery and the failures of

Reconstruction to more modern tactics of redlining, White flight and the crisis of mass

30 incarceration – poverty in America is almost always dependent on racism, even when the

impoverished are White. From pitting laborers of different races against each other to stoking

racist and xenophobic fears through a sensationalistic and profit-driven media, America’s

White elite have always used the specter of racism to prevent the formation of a broad coalition

of people with similar class interests, regardless of race.

35 And poor and working-class Whites historically have been all-too-willing to join in this

Faustian bargain.

We are one of the richest nations in the world, but among those nations, we are one of the

most unequal. Nearly all other developed nations offer a better standard of living to their

citizens, regardless of income or wealth.

40 Currently, White Republicans control Mississippi’s state legislature. As Mississippi Free Press

reported, Governor Tate Reeves and other White lawmakers are essentially holding the

Black-led, Black-populated city hostage, refusing to fund repairs. While the citizens of his

state are literally going on a month without the very basics of survival, Reeves instead focused

his attention to passing the nation’s first anti-transgender law of 2021.

45 The few repairs that have been made have mostly been in affluent, largely White north

Jackson, clearly delineating not just the privileges, but the power of Whiteness. [...]

Although reparate is no longer a common word, it is the key to successfully addressing

reparations. To reparate means to restore something to a state of good repair; it means

returning something to working order. Reparative justice means to right the wrongs of the

50 past – not only by acknowledging the harms of certain groups of people both in the past and

the present, but also addressing those harms and working to ameliorate them.

As Nina Simone so brilliantly wrote about reparative justice in her iconic song “Mississippi

Goddam”, time is always of the essence:

But that’s just the trouble

55 “do it slow“

Desegregation

“do it slow“

Mass participation

“do it slow“

60 Reunification

“do it slow“

Do things gradually

“do it slow“

But bring more tragedy.

65 While many White Mississippians in power like Tate Reeves and other GOP leaders – wittingly

or not – extend the legacies of racism and the slaveholders’ Confederacy and fail to act as

White supremacy keeps state’s people ensnared in extreme poverty, the time for federal

intervention is now. If the leaders of the state will not repair and restore Jackson’s water

system, then the leaders of the country must step in to help right the wrongs of the past.

70 From immediately sending FEMA in to deal with Jackson’s short-term problems to passing

a Federal Jobs Guarantee that focuses, first and foremost, on reparative justice, the Biden

administration and the Democratic Congress – if they truly espouse the values they

campaigned upon – should act swiftly and thoroughly.

In 1968, less than a year after Senator Kennedy’s Mississippi trip, Martin Luther King, Jr.

75 wrote that “There is nothing new about poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques

and the resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we have the will.”

It is nothing short of a moral and ethical tragedy – an indictment of the entire country – that

our citizens are being deprived of clean running water in one of the richest nations on earth.

It is well past time for immediate federal action. We must have the will.

80 Mississippi Goddam.

Annotations:

Language mistakes in the original text have been corrected.

Nina Simone · African American singer, songwriter and civil rights activist (1933 – 2003)

1 Marian Wright · African American civil rights activist of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

20 Mississippi Today · digital news service

20 – 21 Wrigley Field · large baseball stadium in Chicago

23 blight · here: something that spoils plans or destroys hopes

29 Reconstruction · period in American history following the American Civil War (1861 – 1865)

29 redlining · process of systematically denying various services to residents of predominantly non-white areas

29 White Flight · migration of white people from areas becoming more ethnoculturally diverse

29 – 30 mass incarceration · reference to the disproportionately large rate of imprisonment for African Americans in the U.S.

33 specter · here: something unpleasant that people are afraid might happen

36 Faustian bargain · exchanging something of the highest moral or spiritual importance for a worldly or material benefit (reference to Faust, a character in German folklore and literature)

65 GOP · (Grand Old Party) – the Republican Party in the United States

70 FEMA · (Federal Emergency Management Agency) – federal agency coordinating the response to disasters occurring in the United States

3.2 You have been asked to give the opening speech at the international youth conference Towards a More Inclusive and Sustainable Planet. In your research, you have come across UNESCO's director general Audrey Azoulay's claim that water is "a 'blue gold' to which more than 2 billion people do not have direct access" and decided to use it as a starting point. Write the speech script, referring to work done in class on ecological, political and economic issues of globalisation. (Evaluation: re-creation of text) [14 Punkte]

Klausurteil A

Keri Leigh Merritt

Jackson water crisis shows Nina Simone is still right about Mississippi

Summoned to the South by Marian Wright of the NAACP, Senators Robert F. Kennedy and

Joseph Clark traveled to the Mississippi Delta in the Spring of 1967 to assess the effectiveness

of the federal War on Poverty programs. Wright had testified before Congress that the people

of her state were starving and in agony. Although forewarned, the White senators were stunned

5 to witness the extremities of Mississippi’s soul-crushing poverty, right in the middle of one

of the wealthiest nations on earth.

After repeated attempts to engage one young, seemingly non-verbal African American boy

– his stomach swollen from malnourishment – picking through dried rice and beans on the

dirt floor of a shack, Bobby Kennedy, the father of 11 children, quickly turned and walked

10 outside. He did not want the photographers who accompanied him to catch the tears welling

up in his eyes.

The depth of Mississippi’s poverty was almost too much for Kennedy to bear. Speaking

mournfully about “children with distended stomachs,” Kennedy urged the federal government

to do something to alleviate the state’s widespread “suffering”. Deeming “housing inadequate”

15 and commenting on the “insufficient clothing” of the state’s impoverished children, he

rightfully concluded that Mississippi was a “terrible reflection on our society”.

Now, 54 years later, it is necessary to ask the federal government to intervene in the state

again. Many of the primarily Black residents of Mississippi’s capital, Jackson, spent weeks

without running water after a cold spell burst a huge number of the city’s pipes. According

20 to Mississippi Today, over 40,000 people, the equivalent of a sold-out game at Wrigley Field,

were not able to drink, bathe or wash clothes, dishes, hands or even flush toilets – all during

a pandemic. [...]

Jackson’s problems, like those of so many other US towns and cities, are a blight on the

political ideals White Americans traditionally claim.

25 Jackson, Mississippi, is a microcosm of our nation’s massive failures to make amends for

centuries of colonialism, slavery and racism. [...]

Our problem, our shame, is that American poverty springs not from lack of funds, but instead

from White supremacy. Due to the ravages of history – from slavery and the failures of

Reconstruction to more modern tactics of redlining, White flight and the crisis of mass

30 incarceration – poverty in America is almost always dependent on racism, even when the

impoverished are White. From pitting laborers of different races against each other to stoking

racist and xenophobic fears through a sensationalistic and profit-driven media, America’s

White elite have always used the specter of racism to prevent the formation of a broad coalition

of people with similar class interests, regardless of race.

35 And poor and working-class Whites historically have been all-too-willing to join in this

Faustian bargain.

We are one of the richest nations in the world, but among those nations, we are one of the

most unequal. Nearly all other developed nations offer a better standard of living to their

citizens, regardless of income or wealth.

40 Currently, White Republicans control Mississippi’s state legislature. As Mississippi Free Press

reported, Governor Tate Reeves and other White lawmakers are essentially holding the

Black-led, Black-populated city hostage, refusing to fund repairs. While the citizens of his

state are literally going on a month without the very basics of survival, Reeves instead focused

his attention to passing the nation’s first anti-transgender law of 2021.

45 The few repairs that have been made have mostly been in affluent, largely White north

Jackson, clearly delineating not just the privileges, but the power of Whiteness. [...]

Although reparate is no longer a common word, it is the key to successfully addressing

reparations. To reparate means to restore something to a state of good repair; it means

returning something to working order. Reparative justice means to right the wrongs of the

50 past – not only by acknowledging the harms of certain groups of people both in the past and

the present, but also addressing those harms and working to ameliorate them.

As Nina Simone so brilliantly wrote about reparative justice in her iconic song “Mississippi

Goddam”, time is always of the essence:

But that’s just the trouble

55 “do it slow“

Desegregation

“do it slow“

Mass participation

“do it slow“

60 Reunification

“do it slow“

Do things gradually

“do it slow“

But bring more tragedy.

65 While many White Mississippians in power like Tate Reeves and other GOP leaders – wittingly

or not – extend the legacies of racism and the slaveholders’ Confederacy and fail to act as

White supremacy keeps state’s people ensnared in extreme poverty, the time for federal

intervention is now. If the leaders of the state will not repair and restore Jackson’s water

system, then the leaders of the country must step in to help right the wrongs of the past.

70 From immediately sending FEMA in to deal with Jackson’s short-term problems to passing

a Federal Jobs Guarantee that focuses, first and foremost, on reparative justice, the Biden

administration and the Democratic Congress – if they truly espouse the values they

campaigned upon – should act swiftly and thoroughly.

In 1968, less than a year after Senator Kennedy’s Mississippi trip, Martin Luther King, Jr.

75 wrote that “There is nothing new about poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques

and the resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we have the will.”

It is nothing short of a moral and ethical tragedy – an indictment of the entire country – that

our citizens are being deprived of clean running water in one of the richest nations on earth.

It is well past time for immediate federal action. We must have the will.

80 Mississippi Goddam.

Annotations:

Language mistakes in the original text have been corrected.

Nina Simone · African American singer, songwriter and civil rights activist (1933 – 2003)

1 Marian Wright · African American civil rights activist of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

20 Mississippi Today · digital news service

20 – 21 Wrigley Field · large baseball stadium in Chicago

23 blight · here: something that spoils plans or destroys hopes

29 Reconstruction · period in American history following the American Civil War (1861 – 1865)

29 redlining · process of systematically denying various services to residents of predominantly non-white areas

29 White Flight · migration of white people from areas becoming more ethnoculturally diverse

29 – 30 mass incarceration · reference to the disproportionately large rate of imprisonment for African Americans in the U.S.

33 specter · here: something unpleasant that people are afraid might happen

36 Faustian bargain · exchanging something of the highest moral or spiritual importance for a worldly or material benefit (reference to Faust, a character in German folklore and literature)

65 GOP · (Grand Old Party) – the Republican Party in the United States

70 FEMA · (Federal Emergency Management Agency) – federal agency coordinating the response to disasters occurring in the United States

Klausurteil B: Sprachmittlung isoliert

4. Task (Mediation)

While you are on an exchange programme in the United States, you attend an Environmental Science class that is presently dealing with water crises around the globe. The class website needs an article on Germany, and you have been asked to write it.

Using the information given by Thomas Hummel, write this article and outline the situation in Germany as well as possible ways of coping with it.

Thomas Hummel: Wasser aus der Ferne

1 Es wird gebuddelt westlich von Bitburg. Die Kreisstadt in Rheinland-Pfalz ist gerade Zeuge eines Projekts, das auf die Folgen des Klimawandels vorbereiten soll. Acht Wasserversorger verlegen in der Westeifel gemeinsam eine 83 Kilometer lange Leitung. Sie wird die Riveristalsperre bei Trier im Süden mit der Oleftalsperre in Nordrhein-Westfalen im Norden verbinden.

5 Auf dem Weg werden einige Grundwasserbrunnen angeschlossen. „Damit stellen wir die Trinkwasserversorgung unserer Bevölkerung für die kommenden Jahrzehnte sicher“, sagt Arndt Müller, Vorstand der Stadtwerke Trier.

7 Grund für das Projekt: Auch über den Hügeln der Eifel fällt seit vielen Jahren regelmäßig zu wenig Regen. „In der Riveristalsperre ging der Wasserstand zeitweise erheblich zurück, wir mussten im Sommer vermehrt Tiefenbrunnen zuschalten“, berichtet Müller. Dabei sei das aktuell heiße und trockene Wetter noch kein Problem, weil es zuvor im Jahr ausreichend geregnet habe, die Talsperren voll waren. Doch der langfristige Trend zeige in eine eindeutige Richtung: Wassermangel. [...]

14 Sich an die neuen Bedingungen durch die Erderwärmung anpassen: Was in der Westeifel gelingt, haben viele Regionen in Deutschland noch vor sich. Nach einer Umfrage des Deutschen Vereins des Gas- und Wasserfaches (DVGW) unter bundesweit 180 Wasserversorgern sank bei mehr als der Hälfte der Grundwasserspiegel über die vergangenen Jahre deutlich ab. Demnach bereitet sich die Mehrzahl der Unternehmen bereits auf künftige Trockenperioden vor, die meisten davon halten aber weitere Maßnahmen und Analysen für notwendig. Einige geben indes zu, dass bei ihnen Einschränkungen in der Wasserversorgung absehbar seien, sie aber noch keine Vorkehrungen getroffen haben. „Auch wenn aktuell kein Wassernotstand zu befürchten ist, so lässt sich die zunehmend angespannte Situation klar und deutlich ablesen“, urteilt Wolf Merkel, DVGW-Vorstand für den Bereich Wasser.

24 An diesem Montag legte der Verein zusammen mit dem Bundesverband der Energie- und Wasserwirtschaft (BDEW) sowie dem Verband kommunaler Unternehmen (VKU) ein Maßnahmenpaket vor, denn „der Klimawandel ist eine enorme Herausforderung für die Wasserwirtschaft“. Die Folgen der Erderwärmung seien in einigen Regionen bereits heute spürbar, heißt es in dem Papier. „Um den Herausforderungen zu begegnen und für zukünftige Extremereignisse besser gewappnet zu sein, ist unmittelbares und entschlossenes Handeln unumgänglich.“

31 Besonders dringlich sei demnach, dass die Bundesregierung der öffentlichen Versorgung von Privathaushalten, Schulen oder Krankenhäusern gesetzlich Vorrang einräume. Gerade in längeren Trockenphasen kamen manche Wasserversorger in den vergangenen Jahren an ihre Grenzen. Hausbesitzer lassen Pools volllaufen, Sportvereine bewässern Spielfelder, Gärtner und Hausmeister werfen die Sprenger an. Wenn zudem die Landwirtschaft künftig größeren Bedarf anmeldet, befürchten die Verbände einen Kampf ums Wasser. [...]

38 Zusätzlich fordern die Wasserversorger, an besonders heißen und trockenen Tagen zehn bis 20 Prozent mehr Wasser aus Talsperren oder Brunnen entnehmen zu dürfen als bisher. Sie nennen es „Klimawandelzuschlag“. Die derzeitige Rechtslage sieht vor, nicht mehr Wasser zu nutzen, als sich anschließend wieder neu bilden kann.

42 Sorge bereitet den Verbänden die Verunreinigung. Auch hier steht vor allem die Landwirtschaft in der Kritik, hohe Nitratwerte durch Gülleeinträge und Rückstände von Pflanzenschutzmittel fallen laut Wasserversorgern desto stärker ins Gewicht, je niedriger die Pegelstände sind. Aber auch Arzneimittel oder Mikroplastik verursachen Probleme. Die Wasserverbände drängen deshalb auf ein Verursacherprinzip. Wer für die Schadstoffe verantwortlich ist, soll hinterher auch für die Reinigung des Trinkwassers bezahlen. Damit sollen finanzielle Anreize für mehr Gewässerschutz gesetzt werden.

49 Einig ist sich die Wasserindustrie darin, dass sie künftig wesentlich mehr Geld braucht. In der Umfrage des DVGW erwarten die Unternehmen in den kommenden zehn Jahren einen drei Mal höheren Finanzbedarf als bislang, um ihre Infrastruktur umzubauen. Das Projekt in der Eifel etwa kostet 120 Millionen Euro, ein Viertel davon übernimmt das Land Rheinland-Pfalz, der Rest kommt über die Gebührenzahler herein. [...]

54 Eine nationale Wasserstrategie soll helfen, das Land auf mehr Hitze und Trockenheit, aber auch auf Starkregen und Hochwasser vorzubereiten.

Klausurteil A

Jennifer Senior

Teen Fiction and the Perils of Cancel Culture

Late last month, a young man named Kosoko Jackson became the second young adult author

in five weeks to pull a debut work just before it hit the shelves. His book, “A Place for Wolves,”

ran afoul of the sensibilities of the Twitter gatekeeping class, which deemed it insensitive to

Muslims and unduly focused on people of privilege.

5 There was an obvious irony to his story, a karmic boomerang: Jackson, who is black and gay,

often worked as a “sensitivity reader” for major publishing houses, which meant his job was to

flag just the sort of problem content for which he was now being run out of town. He was

Robespierre with his own neck in the cradle of the guillotine. One of the captains of “cancel

culture” – which urges people to shun the insensitive, the oppressive, the morally questionable –

10 got canceled himself.

As often happens with these things, the online pile-on was mainly led by people who hadn’t

read Jackson’s book. It did start with someone who had – a reader who’d written an

intemperate, if highly impassioned, review of an advance copy for the community website

Goodreads. But it most likely would have remained just that, a pan from a citizen critic, had

15 the review not been noticed by that corner of Twitter that’s obsessed with Y.A. fiction. Even

by Twitter standards, it’s a hothouse subculture – self-conscious, emotional, quick to injure.

Not unlike teenagers themselves.

I have read Jackson’s book. Before I get to the actual contents, let’s get this out of the way:

What happened to Jackson is frightening. Purity tests are the tools of fanatics, and the quest

20 for purity ultimately becomes indistinguishable from the quest for power. In the Twitterverse,

ideologues have far more power than moderates. They have more followers; their tweets

get more traction (studies have shown that emotional tweets pretty much always have more

traction); they set the terms of their neighborhood’s culture and tone.

But this does not mean they have better judgment.

25 This episode is proof of nothing if not of Twitter’s asymmetrical power: A semi-anonymous

mob (the leader of the charge was someone with the handle @flightofstaz) can sufficiently

scare an author into withdrawing his book, even though it received a starred review from

Booklist and was a Kids’ Indie Next pick. (Not a small deal, that.) The die-hards in this army

of crusaders will argue they’re doing it in the name of diversity, but it’s really just the opposite:

30 If Twitter controls publishing, we’ll soon enter a dreary monoculture that admits no book

unless it has been prejudged and meets the standards of the censors.

What Jackson’s case really demonstrates is just how narrow and untenable the rules for

writing Y.A. literature are. In a tweet last May, Jackson himself more or less articulated them:

“Stories about the civil rights movement should be written by black people. Stories of suffrage

35 should be written by women. Ergo, stories about boys during life-changing times, like the

AIDS epidemic, should be written by gay men. Why is this so hard to get?”

In a live Q. and A. for an online children’s literature conference in January, Jackson explained

that he was at one point tempted to write tangentially about immigration, but his Latino friends

talked him out of it: He’d be encroaching on their turf, poaching their spot on the shelves.

40 So he didn’t. But his first novel, “A Place for Wolves,” is not exclusively populated by gay

African-Americans. His two protagonists are gay teenagers, yes, and one of them is black.

But his secondary characters are … Serbs and Albanians. The book takes place in Kosovo,

during the early days of its civil war in the late ’90s.

Let’s stop to contemplate this for a moment. When Jackson was left to his own devices to

45 create and dream – rather than to simply read books for possible cultural violations – his

natural, irrepressible reflex was to write about something that went beyond his own experience.

Because that’s what novelists do: conjure other worlds, imagine their way into other realities,

guess at the texture of other people’s consciousness. It’s part of the pleasure of inventing

stuff for a living. […]

50 What raised people’s hackles was that an Albanian Muslim is one of the book’s villains, when

it was the Albanian Muslims who suffered disproportionately during the Kosovo war. That,

and the idea that two comparatively privileged American teenagers could be the focus of the

book.

Did Jackson do this out of malice? No. It was his explicit intention, according to an author’s

55 note, to complicate the reader’s picture of a tragic ethnic war. There’s nothing wrong, per se,

with making a victim a villain, or a hero a jerk: Art is filled with antiheroes with redeeming

qualities, whether they’re Humbert Humbert or Tony Soprano. Nor are two American teenagers

in a war-torn country, on the face of it, a bad premise for a Y.A. book.

The book’s real sin is that Jackson didn’t do what he set out to do. Though he can write with

60 charm and the authentic sass of an American adolescent, much of the book is painfully clumsy

and poorly paced – which makes it a fairly typical debut novel, by the way. His job as a

sensitivity reader also shows: “Sounded a little Eurocentric to me,” is a not unrepresentative

observation by the narrator.

If the book-buying public had found “A Place for Wolves” as criminally distasteful and

65 insensitive as Twitter did, it would have sunk the novel in slower, more deliberate ways.

Librarians would have read it and taken a pass. Bookstore owners would have decided it

wasn’t worth the space. Book critics would have savaged it – or worse, ignored it.

It should have failed or succeeded in the marketplace of ideas. But it was never given the

chance. The mob got to it first.

Annotations:

2 · to pull work – here: to withdraw a new book

5 · karmic – resulting from one’s actions; reference to the Buddhist concept of karma

8 · Robespierre with his own neck in the cradle of the guillotine – key figure in the French Revolution responsible for killing many people and finally being killed himself by guillotine

14 · pan – here: very strong criticism

15 · Y.A. fiction – short for Young Adult Fiction

28 · Booklist – book review magazine published by the American Library Association

28 · Kids’ Indie Next pick – books for children and young adults recommended by the American Booksellers Association in corporation with independent bookstores

37 · Q. and A. – here: short for Question-and-Answer session

57 · Humbert Humbert – controversial protagonist of the novel Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

57 · Tony Soprano – main character in the TV drama series The Sopranos about a mafia family

1. Describe what experiences Kosoko Jackson has had in the world of literature. (Comprehension) [12 Punkte]

Klausurteil A

Jennifer Senior

Teen Fiction and the Perils of Cancel Culture

Late last month, a young man named Kosoko Jackson became the second young adult author

in five weeks to pull a debut work just before it hit the shelves. His book, “A Place for Wolves,”

ran afoul of the sensibilities of the Twitter gatekeeping class, which deemed it insensitive to

Muslims and unduly focused on people of privilege.

5 There was an obvious irony to his story, a karmic boomerang: Jackson, who is black and gay,

often worked as a “sensitivity reader” for major publishing houses, which meant his job was to

flag just the sort of problem content for which he was now being run out of town. He was

Robespierre with his own neck in the cradle of the guillotine. One of the captains of “cancel

culture” – which urges people to shun the insensitive, the oppressive, the morally questionable –

10 got canceled himself.

As often happens with these things, the online pile-on was mainly led by people who hadn’t

read Jackson’s book. It did start with someone who had – a reader who’d written an

intemperate, if highly impassioned, review of an advance copy for the community website

Goodreads. But it most likely would have remained just that, a pan from a citizen critic, had

15 the review not been noticed by that corner of Twitter that’s obsessed with Y.A. fiction. Even

by Twitter standards, it’s a hothouse subculture – self-conscious, emotional, quick to injure.

Not unlike teenagers themselves.

I have read Jackson’s book. Before I get to the actual contents, let’s get this out of the way:

What happened to Jackson is frightening. Purity tests are the tools of fanatics, and the quest

20 for purity ultimately becomes indistinguishable from the quest for power. In the Twitterverse,

ideologues have far more power than moderates. They have more followers; their tweets

get more traction (studies have shown that emotional tweets pretty much always have more

traction); they set the terms of their neighborhood’s culture and tone.

But this does not mean they have better judgment.

25 This episode is proof of nothing if not of Twitter’s asymmetrical power: A semi-anonymous

mob (the leader of the charge was someone with the handle @flightofstaz) can sufficiently

scare an author into withdrawing his book, even though it received a starred review from

Booklist and was a Kids’ Indie Next pick. (Not a small deal, that.) The die-hards in this army

of crusaders will argue they’re doing it in the name of diversity, but it’s really just the opposite:

30 If Twitter controls publishing, we’ll soon enter a dreary monoculture that admits no book

unless it has been prejudged and meets the standards of the censors.

What Jackson’s case really demonstrates is just how narrow and untenable the rules for

writing Y.A. literature are. In a tweet last May, Jackson himself more or less articulated them:

“Stories about the civil rights movement should be written by black people. Stories of suffrage

35 should be written by women. Ergo, stories about boys during life-changing times, like the

AIDS epidemic, should be written by gay men. Why is this so hard to get?”

In a live Q. and A. for an online children’s literature conference in January, Jackson explained

that he was at one point tempted to write tangentially about immigration, but his Latino friends

talked him out of it: He’d be encroaching on their turf, poaching their spot on the shelves.

40 So he didn’t. But his first novel, “A Place for Wolves,” is not exclusively populated by gay

African-Americans. His two protagonists are gay teenagers, yes, and one of them is black.

But his secondary characters are … Serbs and Albanians. The book takes place in Kosovo,

during the early days of its civil war in the late ’90s.

Let’s stop to contemplate this for a moment. When Jackson was left to his own devices to

45 create and dream – rather than to simply read books for possible cultural violations – his

natural, irrepressible reflex was to write about something that went beyond his own experience.

Because that’s what novelists do: conjure other worlds, imagine their way into other realities,

guess at the texture of other people’s consciousness. It’s part of the pleasure of inventing

stuff for a living. […]

50 What raised people’s hackles was that an Albanian Muslim is one of the book’s villains, when

it was the Albanian Muslims who suffered disproportionately during the Kosovo war. That,

and the idea that two comparatively privileged American teenagers could be the focus of the

book.

Did Jackson do this out of malice? No. It was his explicit intention, according to an author’s

55 note, to complicate the reader’s picture of a tragic ethnic war. There’s nothing wrong, per se,

with making a victim a villain, or a hero a jerk: Art is filled with antiheroes with redeeming

qualities, whether they’re Humbert Humbert or Tony Soprano. Nor are two American teenagers

in a war-torn country, on the face of it, a bad premise for a Y.A. book.

The book’s real sin is that Jackson didn’t do what he set out to do. Though he can write with

60 charm and the authentic sass of an American adolescent, much of the book is painfully clumsy

and poorly paced – which makes it a fairly typical debut novel, by the way. His job as a

sensitivity reader also shows: “Sounded a little Eurocentric to me,” is a not unrepresentative

observation by the narrator.

If the book-buying public had found “A Place for Wolves” as criminally distasteful and

65 insensitive as Twitter did, it would have sunk the novel in slower, more deliberate ways.

Librarians would have read it and taken a pass. Bookstore owners would have decided it

wasn’t worth the space. Book critics would have savaged it – or worse, ignored it.

It should have failed or succeeded in the marketplace of ideas. But it was never given the

chance. The mob got to it first.

Annotations:

2 · to pull work – here: to withdraw a new book

5 · karmic – resulting from one’s actions; reference to the Buddhist concept of karma

8 · Robespierre with his own neck in the cradle of the guillotine – key figure in the French Revolution responsible for killing many people and finally being killed himself by guillotine

14 · pan – here: very strong criticism

15 · Y.A. fiction – short for Young Adult Fiction

28 · Booklist – book review magazine published by the American Library Association

28 · Kids’ Indie Next pick – books for children and young adults recommended by the American Booksellers Association in corporation with independent bookstores

37 · Q. and A. – here: short for Question-and-Answer session

57 · Humbert Humbert – controversial protagonist of the novel Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

57 · Tony Soprano – main character in the TV drama series The Sopranos about a mafia family

2. Examine the way in which Jennifer Senior expresses her stance on "cancel culture" and what it means for authors. Consider both her line of argument and her language. (Analysis) [16 Punkte]

Klausurteil A

Jennifer Senior

Teen Fiction and the Perils of Cancel Culture

Late last month, a young man named Kosoko Jackson became the second young adult author

in five weeks to pull a debut work just before it hit the shelves. His book, “A Place for Wolves,”

ran afoul of the sensibilities of the Twitter gatekeeping class, which deemed it insensitive to

Muslims and unduly focused on people of privilege.

5 There was an obvious irony to his story, a karmic boomerang: Jackson, who is black and gay,

often worked as a “sensitivity reader” for major publishing houses, which meant his job was to

flag just the sort of problem content for which he was now being run out of town. He was

Robespierre with his own neck in the cradle of the guillotine. One of the captains of “cancel

culture” – which urges people to shun the insensitive, the oppressive, the morally questionable –

10 got canceled himself.

As often happens with these things, the online pile-on was mainly led by people who hadn’t

read Jackson’s book. It did start with someone who had – a reader who’d written an

intemperate, if highly impassioned, review of an advance copy for the community website

Goodreads. But it most likely would have remained just that, a pan from a citizen critic, had

15 the review not been noticed by that corner of Twitter that’s obsessed with Y.A. fiction. Even

by Twitter standards, it’s a hothouse subculture – self-conscious, emotional, quick to injure.

Not unlike teenagers themselves.

I have read Jackson’s book. Before I get to the actual contents, let’s get this out of the way:

What happened to Jackson is frightening. Purity tests are the tools of fanatics, and the quest

20 for purity ultimately becomes indistinguishable from the quest for power. In the Twitterverse,

ideologues have far more power than moderates. They have more followers; their tweets

get more traction (studies have shown that emotional tweets pretty much always have more

traction); they set the terms of their neighborhood’s culture and tone.

But this does not mean they have better judgment.

25 This episode is proof of nothing if not of Twitter’s asymmetrical power: A semi-anonymous

mob (the leader of the charge was someone with the handle @flightofstaz) can sufficiently

scare an author into withdrawing his book, even though it received a starred review from

Booklist and was a Kids’ Indie Next pick. (Not a small deal, that.) The die-hards in this army

of crusaders will argue they’re doing it in the name of diversity, but it’s really just the opposite:

30 If Twitter controls publishing, we’ll soon enter a dreary monoculture that admits no book

unless it has been prejudged and meets the standards of the censors.

What Jackson’s case really demonstrates is just how narrow and untenable the rules for

writing Y.A. literature are. In a tweet last May, Jackson himself more or less articulated them:

“Stories about the civil rights movement should be written by black people. Stories of suffrage

35 should be written by women. Ergo, stories about boys during life-changing times, like the

AIDS epidemic, should be written by gay men. Why is this so hard to get?”

In a live Q. and A. for an online children’s literature conference in January, Jackson explained

that he was at one point tempted to write tangentially about immigration, but his Latino friends

talked him out of it: He’d be encroaching on their turf, poaching their spot on the shelves.

40 So he didn’t. But his first novel, “A Place for Wolves,” is not exclusively populated by gay

African-Americans. His two protagonists are gay teenagers, yes, and one of them is black.

But his secondary characters are … Serbs and Albanians. The book takes place in Kosovo,

during the early days of its civil war in the late ’90s.

Let’s stop to contemplate this for a moment. When Jackson was left to his own devices to

45 create and dream – rather than to simply read books for possible cultural violations – his

natural, irrepressible reflex was to write about something that went beyond his own experience.

Because that’s what novelists do: conjure other worlds, imagine their way into other realities,

guess at the texture of other people’s consciousness. It’s part of the pleasure of inventing

stuff for a living. […]

50 What raised people’s hackles was that an Albanian Muslim is one of the book’s villains, when

it was the Albanian Muslims who suffered disproportionately during the Kosovo war. That,

and the idea that two comparatively privileged American teenagers could be the focus of the

book.

Did Jackson do this out of malice? No. It was his explicit intention, according to an author’s

55 note, to complicate the reader’s picture of a tragic ethnic war. There’s nothing wrong, per se,

with making a victim a villain, or a hero a jerk: Art is filled with antiheroes with redeeming

qualities, whether they’re Humbert Humbert or Tony Soprano. Nor are two American teenagers

in a war-torn country, on the face of it, a bad premise for a Y.A. book.

The book’s real sin is that Jackson didn’t do what he set out to do. Though he can write with

60 charm and the authentic sass of an American adolescent, much of the book is painfully clumsy

and poorly paced – which makes it a fairly typical debut novel, by the way. His job as a

sensitivity reader also shows: “Sounded a little Eurocentric to me,” is a not unrepresentative

observation by the narrator.

If the book-buying public had found “A Place for Wolves” as criminally distasteful and

65 insensitive as Twitter did, it would have sunk the novel in slower, more deliberate ways.

Librarians would have read it and taken a pass. Bookstore owners would have decided it

wasn’t worth the space. Book critics would have savaged it – or worse, ignored it.

It should have failed or succeeded in the marketplace of ideas. But it was never given the

chance. The mob got to it first.

Annotations:

2 · to pull work – here: to withdraw a new book

5 · karmic – resulting from one’s actions; reference to the Buddhist concept of karma

8 · Robespierre with his own neck in the cradle of the guillotine – key figure in the French Revolution responsible for killing many people and finally being killed himself by guillotine

14 · pan – here: very strong criticism

15 · Y.A. fiction – short for Young Adult Fiction

28 · Booklist – book review magazine published by the American Library Association

28 · Kids’ Indie Next pick – books for children and young adults recommended by the American Booksellers Association in corporation with independent bookstores

37 · Q. and A. – here: short for Question-and-Answer session

57 · Humbert Humbert – controversial protagonist of the novel Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

57 · Tony Soprano – main character in the TV drama series The Sopranos about a mafia family

3.1 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Christian Lous Lange remarked in 1921: “Technology is a useful servant, but a dangerous master.” Taking this remark as your point of departure, assess the extent to which technology has in fact become the master rather than the servant in today's world. Draw on what you have covered in class about global challenges and the ethical issues of scientific and technological progress. (Evaluation: comment) [14 Punkte]

Klausurteil A

Jennifer Senior

Teen Fiction and the Perils of Cancel Culture

Late last month, a young man named Kosoko Jackson became the second young adult author

in five weeks to pull a debut work just before it hit the shelves. His book, “A Place for Wolves,”

ran afoul of the sensibilities of the Twitter gatekeeping class, which deemed it insensitive to

Muslims and unduly focused on people of privilege.

5 There was an obvious irony to his story, a karmic boomerang: Jackson, who is black and gay,

often worked as a “sensitivity reader” for major publishing houses, which meant his job was to

flag just the sort of problem content for which he was now being run out of town. He was

Robespierre with his own neck in the cradle of the guillotine. One of the captains of “cancel

culture” – which urges people to shun the insensitive, the oppressive, the morally questionable –

10 got canceled himself.

As often happens with these things, the online pile-on was mainly led by people who hadn’t

read Jackson’s book. It did start with someone who had – a reader who’d written an

intemperate, if highly impassioned, review of an advance copy for the community website

Goodreads. But it most likely would have remained just that, a pan from a citizen critic, had

15 the review not been noticed by that corner of Twitter that’s obsessed with Y.A. fiction. Even

by Twitter standards, it’s a hothouse subculture – self-conscious, emotional, quick to injure.

Not unlike teenagers themselves.

I have read Jackson’s book. Before I get to the actual contents, let’s get this out of the way:

What happened to Jackson is frightening. Purity tests are the tools of fanatics, and the quest

20 for purity ultimately becomes indistinguishable from the quest for power. In the Twitterverse,

ideologues have far more power than moderates. They have more followers; their tweets

get more traction (studies have shown that emotional tweets pretty much always have more

traction); they set the terms of their neighborhood’s culture and tone.

But this does not mean they have better judgment.

25 This episode is proof of nothing if not of Twitter’s asymmetrical power: A semi-anonymous

mob (the leader of the charge was someone with the handle @flightofstaz) can sufficiently

scare an author into withdrawing his book, even though it received a starred review from

Booklist and was a Kids’ Indie Next pick. (Not a small deal, that.) The die-hards in this army

of crusaders will argue they’re doing it in the name of diversity, but it’s really just the opposite:

30 If Twitter controls publishing, we’ll soon enter a dreary monoculture that admits no book

unless it has been prejudged and meets the standards of the censors.

What Jackson’s case really demonstrates is just how narrow and untenable the rules for

writing Y.A. literature are. In a tweet last May, Jackson himself more or less articulated them:

“Stories about the civil rights movement should be written by black people. Stories of suffrage

35 should be written by women. Ergo, stories about boys during life-changing times, like the

AIDS epidemic, should be written by gay men. Why is this so hard to get?”

In a live Q. and A. for an online children’s literature conference in January, Jackson explained

that he was at one point tempted to write tangentially about immigration, but his Latino friends

talked him out of it: He’d be encroaching on their turf, poaching their spot on the shelves.

40 So he didn’t. But his first novel, “A Place for Wolves,” is not exclusively populated by gay

African-Americans. His two protagonists are gay teenagers, yes, and one of them is black.

But his secondary characters are … Serbs and Albanians. The book takes place in Kosovo,

during the early days of its civil war in the late ’90s.

Let’s stop to contemplate this for a moment. When Jackson was left to his own devices to

45 create and dream – rather than to simply read books for possible cultural violations – his

natural, irrepressible reflex was to write about something that went beyond his own experience.

Because that’s what novelists do: conjure other worlds, imagine their way into other realities,

guess at the texture of other people’s consciousness. It’s part of the pleasure of inventing

stuff for a living. […]

50 What raised people’s hackles was that an Albanian Muslim is one of the book’s villains, when

it was the Albanian Muslims who suffered disproportionately during the Kosovo war. That,

and the idea that two comparatively privileged American teenagers could be the focus of the

book.

Did Jackson do this out of malice? No. It was his explicit intention, according to an author’s

55 note, to complicate the reader’s picture of a tragic ethnic war. There’s nothing wrong, per se,

with making a victim a villain, or a hero a jerk: Art is filled with antiheroes with redeeming

qualities, whether they’re Humbert Humbert or Tony Soprano. Nor are two American teenagers

in a war-torn country, on the face of it, a bad premise for a Y.A. book.

The book’s real sin is that Jackson didn’t do what he set out to do. Though he can write with

60 charm and the authentic sass of an American adolescent, much of the book is painfully clumsy

and poorly paced – which makes it a fairly typical debut novel, by the way. His job as a

sensitivity reader also shows: “Sounded a little Eurocentric to me,” is a not unrepresentative

observation by the narrator.

If the book-buying public had found “A Place for Wolves” as criminally distasteful and

65 insensitive as Twitter did, it would have sunk the novel in slower, more deliberate ways.

Librarians would have read it and taken a pass. Bookstore owners would have decided it

wasn’t worth the space. Book critics would have savaged it – or worse, ignored it.

It should have failed or succeeded in the marketplace of ideas. But it was never given the

chance. The mob got to it first.

Annotations:

2 · to pull work – here: to withdraw a new book

5 · karmic – resulting from one’s actions; reference to the Buddhist concept of karma

8 · Robespierre with his own neck in the cradle of the guillotine – key figure in the French Revolution responsible for killing many people and finally being killed himself by guillotine

14 · pan – here: very strong criticism

15 · Y.A. fiction – short for Young Adult Fiction

28 · Booklist – book review magazine published by the American Library Association

28 · Kids’ Indie Next pick – books for children and young adults recommended by the American Booksellers Association in corporation with independent bookstores

37 · Q. and A. – here: short for Question-and-Answer session

57 · Humbert Humbert – controversial protagonist of the novel Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

57 · Tony Soprano – main character in the TV drama series The Sopranos about a mafia family

3.2 Your school's creative writing course runs a new website called Making Our Voices Get Heard. Having read Jennifer Senior's text on Kosoko Jackson's case, you want to contribute an article to this website that reflects on the part played by freedom of speech and creativity in society. Write the article. (Evaluation: re-creation of text) [14 Punkte]

Klausurteil B: Sprachmittlung isoliert

You are an exchange student at a high school in the USA and take part in a project called News for Youth. You have been asked to give a talk on the situation in Germany.

Using the article provided, write the script for your talk, in which you outline the results of the study and what they mean for journalism. [18 Punkte]

Klausurteil A

Jennifer Senior

Teen Fiction and the Perils of Cancel Culture

Late last month, a young man named Kosoko Jackson became the second young adult author

in five weeks to pull a debut work just before it hit the shelves. His book, “A Place for Wolves,”

ran afoul of the sensibilities of the Twitter gatekeeping class, which deemed it insensitive to

Muslims and unduly focused on people of privilege.

5 There was an obvious irony to his story, a karmic boomerang: Jackson, who is black and gay,

often worked as a “sensitivity reader” for major publishing houses, which meant his job was to

flag just the sort of problem content for which he was now being run out of town. He was

Robespierre with his own neck in the cradle of the guillotine. One of the captains of “cancel

culture” – which urges people to shun the insensitive, the oppressive, the morally questionable –

10 got canceled himself.

As often happens with these things, the online pile-on was mainly led by people who hadn’t

read Jackson’s book. It did start with someone who had – a reader who’d written an

intemperate, if highly impassioned, review of an advance copy for the community website

Goodreads. But it most likely would have remained just that, a pan from a citizen critic, had

15 the review not been noticed by that corner of Twitter that’s obsessed with Y.A. fiction. Even

by Twitter standards, it’s a hothouse subculture – self-conscious, emotional, quick to injure.

Not unlike teenagers themselves.

I have read Jackson’s book. Before I get to the actual contents, let’s get this out of the way:

What happened to Jackson is frightening. Purity tests are the tools of fanatics, and the quest

20 for purity ultimately becomes indistinguishable from the quest for power. In the Twitterverse,

ideologues have far more power than moderates. They have more followers; their tweets

get more traction (studies have shown that emotional tweets pretty much always have more

traction); they set the terms of their neighborhood’s culture and tone.

But this does not mean they have better judgment.

25 This episode is proof of nothing if not of Twitter’s asymmetrical power: A semi-anonymous

mob (the leader of the charge was someone with the handle @flightofstaz) can sufficiently

scare an author into withdrawing his book, even though it received a starred review from

Booklist and was a Kids’ Indie Next pick. (Not a small deal, that.) The die-hards in this army

of crusaders will argue they’re doing it in the name of diversity, but it’s really just the opposite:

30 If Twitter controls publishing, we’ll soon enter a dreary monoculture that admits no book

unless it has been prejudged and meets the standards of the censors.

What Jackson’s case really demonstrates is just how narrow and untenable the rules for

writing Y.A. literature are. In a tweet last May, Jackson himself more or less articulated them:

“Stories about the civil rights movement should be written by black people. Stories of suffrage

35 should be written by women. Ergo, stories about boys during life-changing times, like the

AIDS epidemic, should be written by gay men. Why is this so hard to get?”

In a live Q. and A. for an online children’s literature conference in January, Jackson explained

that he was at one point tempted to write tangentially about immigration, but his Latino friends

talked him out of it: He’d be encroaching on their turf, poaching their spot on the shelves.

40 So he didn’t. But his first novel, “A Place for Wolves,” is not exclusively populated by gay

African-Americans. His two protagonists are gay teenagers, yes, and one of them is black.

But his secondary characters are … Serbs and Albanians. The book takes place in Kosovo,

during the early days of its civil war in the late ’90s.

Let’s stop to contemplate this for a moment. When Jackson was left to his own devices to

45 create and dream – rather than to simply read books for possible cultural violations – his

natural, irrepressible reflex was to write about something that went beyond his own experience.

Because that’s what novelists do: conjure other worlds, imagine their way into other realities,

guess at the texture of other people’s consciousness. It’s part of the pleasure of inventing

stuff for a living. […]

50 What raised people’s hackles was that an Albanian Muslim is one of the book’s villains, when

it was the Albanian Muslims who suffered disproportionately during the Kosovo war. That,

and the idea that two comparatively privileged American teenagers could be the focus of the

book.

Did Jackson do this out of malice? No. It was his explicit intention, according to an author’s

55 note, to complicate the reader’s picture of a tragic ethnic war. There’s nothing wrong, per se,

with making a victim a villain, or a hero a jerk: Art is filled with antiheroes with redeeming

qualities, whether they’re Humbert Humbert or Tony Soprano. Nor are two American teenagers

in a war-torn country, on the face of it, a bad premise for a Y.A. book.

The book’s real sin is that Jackson didn’t do what he set out to do. Though he can write with

60 charm and the authentic sass of an American adolescent, much of the book is painfully clumsy

and poorly paced – which makes it a fairly typical debut novel, by the way. His job as a

sensitivity reader also shows: “Sounded a little Eurocentric to me,” is a not unrepresentative

observation by the narrator.

If the book-buying public had found “A Place for Wolves” as criminally distasteful and

65 insensitive as Twitter did, it would have sunk the novel in slower, more deliberate ways.

Librarians would have read it and taken a pass. Bookstore owners would have decided it

wasn’t worth the space. Book critics would have savaged it – or worse, ignored it.

It should have failed or succeeded in the marketplace of ideas. But it was never given the

chance. The mob got to it first.

Annotations:

2 · to pull work – here: to withdraw a new book

5 · karmic – resulting from one’s actions; reference to the Buddhist concept of karma

8 · Robespierre with his own neck in the cradle of the guillotine – key figure in the French Revolution responsible for killing many people and finally being killed himself by guillotine

14 · pan – here: very strong criticism

15 · Y.A. fiction – short for Young Adult Fiction

28 · Booklist – book review magazine published by the American Library Association

28 · Kids’ Indie Next pick – books for children and young adults recommended by the American Booksellers Association in corporation with independent bookstores

37 · Q. and A. – here: short for Question-and-Answer session

57 · Humbert Humbert – controversial protagonist of the novel Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

57 · Tony Soprano – main character in the TV drama series The Sopranos about a mafia family