Abitur NRW Geschichte 2021 · GK · Nachtermin · bilingual Englisch

Abiturprüfung 2021 – Geschichte bilingual-englisch, Grundkurs

Aufgabenstellung:

1.

Analyse the source. (26 Punkte)

2.

Put the source into the broader context of imperialism (12 Punkte) and determine how the author views British rule (16 Punkte). (28 Punkte)

3.

Take a critical stand on what the author states. (26 Punkte)

Materialgrundlage:

Earl of Rosebery: Questions of Empire: A Rectorial Address Delivered before the Students of the University of Glasgow, November 16th, 1900, New York 1901, S. 9 – 35. (Rechtschreibung und Hervorhebungen wie im Original)

Hinweise zum Autor: Archibald Philip Primrose, 5 th Earl of Rosebery (1847 – 1929): prominent British Liberal politician who served a short term as Prime Minister of Great Britain (1894 – 1895). He gave the speech when he took up his post as rector of the University of Glasgow (1899 – 1902).

[...] What is this Empire?

The last calculation seems to be this: that its area is between eleven and twelve millions of square miles, and that its subjects number in round figures some four hundred millions. The details in so spacious a summary matter little. It is already beyond comprehension. [...]

5 Now, for my purpose it is not important to consider whether this Empire is greater or less than others, for it is impossible to compare states. Mere area, mere population, do not necessarily imply power; still less do they import the security and contentment of the inhabitants. But my main reason for discarding relative proportions is very different. We have to consider not others, but ourselves. It is not alien Empires which should concern us, 10 except when they menace or compete. Our first main necessary responsibility is to our own. It is so vast, so splendid, so pregnant 1, that we have to ask ourselves: Are we adequate to it? Can we discharge our responsibility to God and to man for so magnificent, so populous a proportion of the world?

Our answer, offhand, is ready and simple. We are adequate. We do discharge our 15 responsibilities. We are a conquering and imperial race. All over the world we have displayed our mettle. We have discovered and annexed and governed vast territories. We have circled the globe with our commerce. We have penetrated the pagan races with our missionaries. We have inoculated the universe with our institutions. We are apt indeed to believe that our soldiers are braver, our sailors hardier, our captains, naval and military, 20 skilfuller, our statesmen wiser than those of other nations. As for our constitution, there is no Briton at any hour of the day or night who will suffer it to be said that there is any that approaches it.

[...] Fifty years ago we had to face a world that was comparatively inert. Europe was concerned with Europe and little more. The armies of Europe were relatively small and not 25 wholly disproportionate to ours. [...] Twenty years later a national war arose between France and Germany, which produced a potent German Empire, and converted all the nations of Europe into passive armies. We remained complacent in the confidence that these storms could not pass the Channel. The Channel has indeed done much for us. It has often protected us from the broils of the Continent. It has been our bulwark, though 30 heedless speculators have sought to undermine it. But it cannot guard us from the peaceful attacks of trained and scientific rivalry in the arts of peace. It cannot protect us against the increasing subtlety and development of the arts of war.

There is a further and perhaps a mightier change in the conditions of the world during the past half-century. Fifty years ago the world looked lazily on while we discovered, 35 developed, and annexed the waste or savage territories of the world. All that is now changed. The colonial microbe has penetrated almost every empire [...]. France, in the last ten or fifteen years, has annexed perhaps a quarter of Africa, and has made a considerable irruption into Asia. Germany has shown no less a desire to become a colonizing nation. Russia pursues her secular path of unchecked absorption, constantly attracting fresh bodies 40 into her prodigious orbit. Italy has been bitten by the same desire for expansion. The United States finds itself sitting like a startled hen on a brood of unnumbered islands in the Philippine group. All this is well and fair enough, but it changes our relation to the world. Every mile of unmapped country, every naked tribe of savages, is wrangled over as if it were situated in the centre of Europe. The world has shrunk into a continent of ascertained 45 boundaries. The illimitable and the unknown, the happy field of dreams, have disappeared. That is a blow to imagination, but it is not a fact of substantial importance to us, who do not desire to increase our territories. [...]

Our Empire is not founded on the precedents associated with that name. It is not the realm of conquest which that term has been used to imply. It has often used the sword, it could 50 not exist without the sword, but it does not live by the sword. Defence and readiness to fight are vital enough in their way, but not less vital is the civil and domestic side: the commerce, the education, the intelligence, the unceasing leaven of a high and the sour decadence of a low ideal. War and conquest can fill the lives of but a part of the nation: a sane and simple duty to the Empire may well inspire the whole. And when we work in that 55 spirit we should receive grace from the idea, from that glorious vision transformed into fact – the British Empire. [...]

Growing as trees grow, while others slept; fed by the faults of others as well as by the character of our fathers; reaching with the ripple of a resistless tide over tracts 2, and islands, and continents, until our little Britain woke up to find herself the foster-mother of nations 60 and the source of united empires. Do we not hail in this less the energy and fortune of a race than the supreme direction of the Almighty? Shall we not, while we adore the blessing, acknowledge the responsibility?

[...]

1 pregnant: here: full, teeming, rich (e.g. in natural resources).

2 reaching with the ripple of a resistless tide: touching an extended area of land flooded by a large wave too strong to withstand.

Abiturprüfung 2021 – Geschichte bilingual-englisch, Grundkurs

Aufgabenstellung: Aufgabe 2

Materialgrundlage

Anonymous: The Seizing Of Germany. In: The Times, 2. März 1933.

(Rechtschreibung und Hervorhebungen wie im Original)

Hinweise zum Material: The (London) Times (founded in 1785): a widely influential British daily national newspaper published in London, reaching a circulation of 187,000 copies in 1930.

THE SEIZING OF GERMANY

FORCE AS A CULT

A “CAUSE” WITHOUT A POLICY

(From Our Berlin Correspondent)

1 Quite a number of Germans are either indignant or puzzled, or both, that the bloodshed and oppression attendant upon what they regard as an inevitable transitional stage in German affairs should be taken so seriously abroad, or by foreign observers in Germany. To these Germans, who either are passionate supporters of the new “national” régime of Herren 5 Hitler and von Papen, or are daily more inclined to accept it and its claims, the issue is already decided. They have jumped ahead in their minds and are already looking back, from an imaginary peak of German greatness and prosperity, over a historical stretch in which the victims of 1932 and 1933 are barely specks in the distance.

When Nazis or Nationalists, of high or low degree, speak their minds, no doubt is left that 10 they think they are making another German Revolution; this has also been said in print. A revolution, it is argued, is bound to be accompanied by bloodshed and in some stages by terrorism. What, it is asked, do 20, or 200, or even 2,000 lives matter, so long as the cause prevails?

Herr Hitler, the Chancellor, it may be said with some confidence, preserves a simple belief 15 in this cause, though he never seems to get much nearer to defining it than “cleaning up” a “heap of ruins”, which had not been noticeable in Germany when the “national” forces assumed power. Some of the more intelligent of the subordinate Nazi leaders have hypnotized themselves into believing in it by their own eloquence; others are more cynical but none the less determined. The rank and file, including much excellent young material, 20 mystical and idealistic, together, as the notorious Potempa murder 1 showed, with less cultivated elements, have had belief graven upon their minds and emotions by an incessant hammering of words and stirring appeals. Newly created opportunities of action override any remaining inclination towards analysis.

[...]

TO WHAT END?

25 This is a very broad outline of the background of present conditions in Germany, of which every paragraph would need to be a book for adequate explanation or, it must be admitted with regret, complete fairness. Granted, however, that the instinct or conviction of the Nazis and Nationalists, however thinly supported by facts, is right and that it is in the interests of 30 Germany and Europe that they should prevail by force and quibble over what has hitherto proved to be more than half the electorate, where is even a convincing prospect held out of an end justifying, in a great country of Western civilization, the dismissal as historically negligible of the means now being used?

This new Revolution was not even heralded by the enthusiastic equivalent of a march on 35 Rome; it entered by the backstairs of the Wilhelmstrasse 2. The last few weeks have looked very much like a cold-blooded, long-drawn-out, diluted St. Bartholomew's Eve 3. There have not been riots in Germany; there has not been civil war; nor has it been sought to give that impression. But it is hard to accept the theory that the local murders and outrages are spontaneous when Nazis frankly say that there are only two parties capable of exercising a 40 terror in Germany, the Communists and themselves, and they, having the power, can and mean to do it better. “Brutality” has even received semi-official approbation. In more cultured Nationalist quarters it is merely suggested that the methods are surely “appropriate to the circumstances.” Even from cautious official reports – until, quite recently, their sources were unmistakably warned against “tactlessness” – it has not been easy to find 45 convincing support for the theory of widespread Communist, still less Socialist or Centre, provocation, or to avoid seeing evidence of provocation on the other side. There is reason enough for believing scattered incidents to be more systematic than they might appear; more is known than is perhaps realized about methods long planned for an eventual “consolidation of power.”

50 [...]

It may quite well be that President von Hindenburg and his advisers will keep the immediate situation in hand; it may be that the nationalistic partners will somehow manage to blend their divergent interests and ideologies into a common form of constructive Fascism; it may be that ambitious or irresponsible elements will hold their hand, or be held 55 in check, at any rate for a time. Responsible authorities are now all awake to possible dangers. But it should be realized that, to quote a phrase current throughout the country, even in the Wilhelmstrasse, “anything can happen in Germany now”.

1 Potempa murder: a brutal murder of a communist miner in the Upper Silesian village of Potempa committed by five uniformed Nazi Stormtroopers on 9 th August 1932, often regarded as an early precurser for the acts of violence and the operating mechanisms of the Nazi regime.

2 Wilhelmstrasse: a major street in Berlin and the centre of the government, housing e.g. the Chancellery.

3 St. Bartholomew's Eve: a massacre of wealthy and prominent French Huguenots gathered in largely Catholic Paris in 1572.

1.

Analyse the source. [26 Punkte]

2.

Put the source into the direct historical setting of 1933 (14 Punkte) and examine how the author presents the political situation in Germany (14 Punkte). [28 Punkte]

3.

Take a critical stand on the way the author views the “seizing of Germany” (title). [26 Punkte]

Aufgabenstellung:

1.

Analyse the text.

[26 Punkte]

2.

Explain the historical references that are relevant to the text (16 Punkte) and critically examine the position the authors take on the question of war guilt (12 Punkte).

[28 Punkte]

3.

Assess the claims made by the authors.

[26 Punkte]

Materialgrundlage:

Gerry Docherty; Jim Macgregor: Hidden History. The Secret Origins of the First World War. London 2013, S. 9 – 10. (Rechtschreibung und Hervorhebungen wie im Original)

Hinweise zu den Autoren:

Gerry Docherty (*1948): a former school teacher from Scotland and author of several historic plays.

Jim Macgregor (*1947): a former medical doctor from Glasgow/Scotland, now occupied with the history of wars as an interested layman.

Introduction

1 THE HISTORY OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR is a deliberately concocted lie. Not the sacrifice,

2 the heroism, the horrendous waste of life or the misery that followed. No, these were very

3 real, but the truth of how it all began and how it was unnecessarily and deliberately prolonged

4 beyond 1915 has been successfully covered up for a century. A carefully falsified history was

5 created to conceal the fact that Britain, not Germany, was responsible for the war. Had the

6 truth become widely known after 1918, the consequences for the British Establishment would

7 have been cataclysmic.

8 At the end of the war Britain, France and the United States laid the blame squarely on

9 Germany and took steps to remove, conceal or falsify documents and reports to justify such

10 a verdict. In 1919, at Versailles near Paris, the victors decreed that Germany was solely

11 responsible for the global catastrophe. She had, they claimed, deliberately planned the war

12 and rejected all of the proposals for conciliation and mediation. Germany protested

13 vehemently that she was not responsible and that it had been, for her, a defensive war against

14 the aggression of Russia and France.

15 To the victors go the spoils, and their judgment was immediately reflected in the official

16 accounts. What became the generally accepted history of the First World War revolved

17 around German militarism, German expansionism, the kaiser’s bombastic nature and

18 ambitions, and Germany’s invasion of innocent, neutral Belgium. The system of secret

19 alliances, a ‘naval race’, economic imperialism, and the theory of an ‘inevitable war’ later

20 softened the attack on Germany, though the spurious notion that she alone had wanted war

21 remained understood in the background.

22 […] In Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War we debunk the notion

23 that Germany was to blame for this heinous crime against humanity, or that Belgium was an

24 innocent, neutral nation caught unawares by German militarism. We clearly demonstrate that

25 the German invasion of Belgium was not an act of thoughtless and indiscriminate aggression,

26 but a reaction forced upon Germany when she faced imminent annihilation. From the day of

27 its conception, the Schlieffen Plan was a defence strategy and the last desperate act open to

28 Germany to protect herself from being overrun simultaneously from east and west by the

29 huge Russian and French armies massing on her borders.

30 What this book sets out to prove is that unscrupulous men, whose roots and origins were

31 in Britain, sought a war to crush Germany and orchestrated events in order to bring this about.

32 1914 is generally considered as a starting point for the disaster that followed, but the crucial

33 decisions that lead to war had been taken many years before.

34 A secret society rich and powerful men was established in London in 1891¹ with the long-

35 term aim of taking control of the entire world. These individuals, whom we call the Secret

36 Elite, deliberately fomented the Boer War of 1899-1902 in order to grab the Transvaal’s gold

37 mines, and this became a template for their future actions. Their ambition overrode humanity,

38 and the consequences of their actions have been minimised, ignored or denied in official

39 histories. The horror of the British concentration camps in South Africa, where 20,000

40 children died, is conveniently glossed over; the devastating loss of a generation in a world

41 war for which these men were deliberately responsible has been glorified by the lie they died

42 for ‘freedom and civilization’. This book focuses on how a cabal of international bankers,

43 industrialists and their political agents successfully used war to destroy the Boer Republics

44 and then Germany, and were never called to account.

45 […]

46 The members of this Secret Elite were only too well aware that Germany was rapidly

47 beginning to overtake Britain in all areas of technology, science, industry and commerce.

48 They also considered Germany to be a cuckoo in the Empire’s African nest and were

49 concerned about its growing influence in Turkey, the Balkans and the Middle East. They

50 set out to ditch the cuckoo. […]

¹ Reference to a group of British colonialists and politicians who supposedly formed a secret society in 1891 to extend British rule worldwide. The idea was expressed by Cecil Rhodes in his second will in 1877.

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Aufgabe 4

Analyse an editorial from The New York Times dealing with the Marshall Plan and Europe's crisis after the war, and evaluate it.

1. Analyse the source.

2. Explain which economic, social and political aspects of Europe's postwar situation the source refers to (16 Punkte) and determine how the author sees the relationship of the US to Europe and to the Soviet Union (12 Punkte).

3. Assess the statements made by the author.