Aufgabe 3 · Abitur NRW Geschichte GK · Nachtermin · bilingual Englisch 2023

Abiturprüfung 2023 – Geschichte bilingual-englisch, Grundkurs

Aufgabenstellung:

1.

Analyse the source.

(26 Punkte)

2.

Using the text as your starting point, explain the historical references made to the Cold War and to German Unification (14 Punkte), and characterize how the self and the other are portrayed in this excerpt from Pompeo’s speech (14 Punkte).

(28 Punkte)

3.

Take a stance on what the author claims in the text.

(26 Punkte)

Materialgrundlage:

Michael R. Pompeo: The Lessons of 1989. Freedom and Our Future, Körber-Stiftung, Berlin, 8. November 2019.

(Rechtschreibung und Hervorhebungen wie im Original)

Hinweise zum Autor und zum Material:

Michael R. Pompeo (*1963): Secretary of State in the Trump Administration (2018 – 2021).

The Körber Foundation (German: Körber-Stiftung): a non-profit organization providing a platform to develop projects on social and political issues, e. g. in key areas of European foreign policy. In November 2019 the foundation hosted a congress (“Global Leaders Dialogue”) in Berlin, which was attended by high-ranking German and international officials. Pompeo’s speech was live-streamed and is available on online video sharing platforms.

1 [...] Together, we won the Cold War: Germany, Germany and the United States, and all of

2 our Allies and partners. And so it’s why I am really thrilled and happy to be here. It’s why

3 I’m so proud – speaking mere feet from where the Wall once stood – to celebrate its demise

4 now three decades ago. Sometimes we need to take a victory lap. We get caught up in the

5 challenge of the day and we forget the greatness that we have achieved to lift billions of

6 people out of horrific conditions, and that we did so together.

[...]

8 Now, I know, too, that many of you in the audience today – no matter what side of the Wall

9 you grew up on – won’t forget the horrors of the German Democratic Republic.

10 In 1961, the Vopos first jackhammered this city’s pavement and laid the cornerstones of

11 cruelty.

12 Those stones became 27 miles of wall snaking through the German capital, dividing a people.

13 The Wall wasn’t there to keep the West out. It was there to keep the East German people in.

14 That’s how authoritarian regimes operate then. It’s how they operate today. They force people

15 against their own will to not have the capacity to sustain themselves and be dependent on

16 that regime.

17 President Reagan thought that communism was a “disease” and he called it an “insanity.”

18 How right he was. We should never forget how many millions of people suffered and died

19 from the communist cause in the 20th century.

20 Indeed, the bleakness of East Germany was clear to me too, when I was stationed here. I

21 could see it, although only from a distance, and only a short distance across that border. But

22 I knew – I was young, I was in my early 20s – but what kind of country needed bricks and

23 barbed wire and machine guns just to keep its people from fleeing, and they needed a Stasi

24 to keep people from talking? Yesterday, I had a chance to go revisit some of the same ground

25 I walked when I was in my early 20s. I saw the tools of terror from the perspective of the

26 other side. I’d never been across that piece of terrain before. I’d seen Modlareuth¹, but only

27 from one side. Yesterday, I got to see it from the other side.

28 And yet for all of that, for all of that governmental power, all of that authoritarianism, the

29 GDR couldn’t crush the human spirit. The Germans maintained their imperishable hope of

30 freedom and a better future even under that authoritarian regime.

31 Countless East Germans – so many of them Berliners, and maybe some of them related to

32 you that are sitting right here today – made the daring flight against the – across the “kill

33 zone” and the Wall. And a number of them, of course, died trying. Our Embassy here in

34 Berlin, where the American flag flies proudly today, sits on the land that was once in that

35 “kill zone.”

[...]

37 We knew that deep down, deep down, a system that was afraid of its own people could never

38 be sustained. I believe that wholeheartedly today. (Applause.) We just didn’t – thank you.

39 We just didn’t know when it would end. Neither the lieutenant in the field nor the president

40 of the United States nor the chancellor of Germany knew the moment that it would come,

41 but we knew it was absolutely imperative that we fight for it. And I think there is a real lesson

42 there. There’s a lesson there for those of us who think that authoritarian regimes are destined

43 to live forever. They are not.

44 In 1989, on the day before George H.W. Bush’s inauguration, Erich Honecker predicted the

45 Wall would stand in, quote, “fifty and even one hundred years,” end of quote. I had just left.

46 I left in the beginning of October of 1989 to return to my next duty assignment. I had no idea

47 that I left just a couple weeks early. German courage – German courage brought it down

48 294 days later. It’s made my visit to St. Nicholas Church last night in Leipzig particularly

49 poignant for me.

50 The German triumph inspired others to throw off the chains of the Soviet empire, too, and

51 secure their own freedom, their own future, their own dignity.

52 So here we are on this three-decade anniversary celebrating a monumental victory for

53 mankind’s natural longing for freedom, for this great city of Berlin, for Germany, for the

54 German people, but also for the West – all of us. [...]

¹ Mödlareuth: Between 1949 and 1990, the northern part of this German village on the Bavarian-Thuringian border was in East Germany and the southern part in West Germany. It was called “Little Berlin” because a wall divided it. It became a symbol of separation between the West and East, later also a symbol of reunification.