Abitur NRW Geschichte 2022 · GK · Haupttermin · bilingual Englisch

Aufgabenstellung:

1.

Analyse the source. (26 Punkte)

2.

Put the source into the context of the peace process (14 Punkte) and examine how the speaker backs up his position on Germany (14 Punkte). (28 Punkte)

3.

Take a critical stand on the statements made by the author. (26 Punkte)

Materialgrundlage:

Henry Cabot Lodge: America’s War Aims. What the United States Will Demand as a Just and Righteous Peace. An address delivered in the United States Senate, Aug 23, 1918, by the Republican leader of the Senate, in: Current History 9, 1 (Oct 1, 1918), S. 141 – 143.

(Rechtschreibung und Hervorhebungen wie im Original)

Hinweise zum Autor/Material:

Henry Cabot Lodge (1850 – 1924): highly influential American politician in the United States Senate (1893 – 1924), supporting American entry into World War I, but opposing Woodrow Wilson’s suggestions for the Treaty of Versailles.

Current History: an American periodical founded in 1914, focusing on contemporary international affairs.

[...] It must be, it is commonly said – we have all said it – a just and righteous peace. But what is a just and righteous peace? What are the conditions that would make it so? What is the irreducible minimum? We intend to make the world safe for democracy. [...]

We are fighting and our allies are fighting with us for security; for independence; for the right 5 of nations, great and small, to govern themselves in their own way; for organized races and peoples to have the opportunity to govern themselves in independent States; for the sanctity and observance of treaties; for the general disarmament of nations. How are these things to be secured? The details are really far more important than the general propositions, in which we all agree. Broadly speaking, there is only one way to obtain this security of the nations, 10 this safety of democracy, this preservation of freedom and civilization, and that is by reducing Germany to a condition where by no possibility can she precipitate another war for universal conquest, with all its attendant horrors, upon an unoffending world. [...]

It is idle to talk about our not annihilating the German people. Nobody, of course, has any such idea. It could not be done even if we wished to do it. We are not engaged in this war to 15 try to arrange a government for Germany. The German people must do that themselves, and they will get precisely the government that they desire and deserve – just as they now have the government they prefer, whose purposes and ambitions and barbarism they share and sustain. Our part and our business is to put Germany in a position where she can do no more harm in the future to the rest of the world. Unless we achieve this we shall have fought in vain. 20 Congress and the President had no right to declare war unless they meant to do precisely this thing. Nothing less would justify our action.

We are pouring out the best blood of the country, the blood of our chosen youth, upon the altar of patriotism. We are making every sort of pecuniary sacrifice. We are bearing an immense burden of taxation. We are mortgaging with our loans the future of coming generations. We 25 have set aside for the time being the Constitution under which individual liberty has been preserved and the country has grown and prospered. We have adopted measures which lead, if unchecked, to the building up on the one hand of a great bureaucracy such as that which crushed and ruined Russia and which on the other are stimulating the development of State socialism. It is our intention to return, as our laws show, to the old restrictions, protections, 30 and rights of the ordered freedom of the Constitution.

[...] The results which we must have, and which I have ventured to outline, can never be obtained by a negotiated peace. Lord Lansdowne 1 – and he is not alone – appears to think that this war can be ended by a peace formulated by eminent representatives of the nations in the old way. He does not seem to have gone beyond the methods of 1815 and the Congress 35 of Vienna.

As this war is utterly different from any war that the world has ever known, so must the peace which concludes it be utterly different from any peace which the world has ever known. It cannot be a peace of bargain, of give and take, and of arrangement. No peace that satisfies Germany in any degree can ever satisfy us. It cannot be a negotiated peace. It must be a dictated 40 peace, and we and our allies must dictate it. The victory bringing such a peace must be won inside, not outside, the German frontier. It must be won finally and thoroughly in German territory, and can be so won nowhere else.

In no other way can we secure the safety for which we are fighting. In no other way can we justify the sacrifices we are making. To this supreme end our efforts must be addressed. I do 45 not underrate the difficulties. I do not underestimate the obstacles to be overcome. But the difficulties and the obstacles must alike be crushed, set aside, be overridden. The United States occupies, fortunately, a position in which she will be able to speak with a powerful voice. We seek no territory, no material gain for our own country. We seek only the safety of civilization and freedom and the assurance of our own absolute independence and our right to live our 50 own lives and settle our own problems in our own way. There is no territory by which we could be bribed or influenced, no trade advantage by which we could be tempted. There is no personal profit which can turn us from the one great object. Our sole purpose is to put Germany finally and completely in a position where she can never again attempt to conquer and ruin the world as she has done in the last four years. This purpose can be accomplished. 55 We shall do it, but we must be above all propositions of a bargained peace, all suggestions of negotiations; deaf to every voice which would divert us from the path; deaf alike to the whimper of the pacifist and to the wheedling or truculent appeal of the helpers of Germany. When Germany is beaten to her knees and the world is made safe by the arrangements which I have suggested, then, and not before, we shall have the just and righteous peace for which 60 we fight. In this way and in no other shall we obtain it. We shall obtain it because we are going to win. Let us but be true to ourselves, and we shall not then be false to any man. 2

1 Henry Charles Keith Petty-Fitzmaurice, 5th Marquess of Lansdowne (1845 – 1927): renowned British statesman, Secretary of State for War, and Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. In 1917, he wrote the so-called “Lansdowne Letter” advocating a compromise peace for WWI.

2 allusion to William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act I, Scene III (“This above all:/ to thine own self be true, /and it must follow, as the night the day,/Thou canst not then be false to any man.”)

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Abiturprüfung 2022 – Geschichte bilingual-englisch, Grundkurs

Aufgabe 2

Materialgrundlage

Rudolf Schöpper: „Und nun vereint an die Arbeit!“. Westfälische Nachrichten, Münster, 04. Oktober 1990.

Hinweise zum Autor/Material: Rudolf Schöpper (1922 – 2009): cartoonist, especially popular in Westphalia, who has covered the political events in Germany for several decades.

Westfälische Nachrichten: a widely read daily newspaper in the Münsterland region.

Lothar de Maizière (CDU, *1940): the last prime minister of the GDR from 14 April to 2 October, 1990, and a minister in Kohl’s first cabinet after the unification of the two German states (Oct. 3 to Dec. 12, 1990).

Oskar Lafontaine (*1943) was the SPD’s candidate for chancellor in 1990. He warned of economically, socially, and politically negative consequences of what he considered a hasty unification of the two German states.

The little raven on the curtain rod is an identifying feature in almost all of Schöpper’s cartoons. It has no direct relation to the content of the cartoon.

Zugelassene Hilfsmittel

Ein- und zweisprachiges Wörterbuch

1.

Analyse the source. [26 Punkte]

2.

Put the source into the historical context of the years 1989 to 1990 (14 Punkte) and explain its central elements (14 Punkte). [28 Punkte]

3.

Take a critical stand on the position the cartoon conveys. [26 Punkte]

Hinweis: Für die Darstellungsleistung können zusätzlich bis zu 20 Punkte erreicht werden (Gesamtpunktzahl: 100 Punkte).

Abiturprüfung 2022 – Geschichte bilingual-englisch, Grundkurs

Materialgrundlage

Erik Grimmer-Solem: Learning Empire. Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875 – 1919, Cambridge 2019, S. 173 – 176.

(Rechtschreibung und Hervorhebungen wie im Original)

Hinweise zum Autor/Material:

Erik Grimmer-Solem (*1964) is a professor in the departments of History and German Studies at Wesleyan University, Connecticut. His field of expertise is modern German history with specializations in economic history, economic thought, social reform, and imperialism.

Zugelassene Hilfsmittel: Ein- und zweisprachiges Wörterbuch

From Weltwirtschaft to Weltpolitik

[...] The aims of Weltpolitik were nebulous yet demanded action, something described by the left liberal Reichstag deputy Eugen Richter (1838 – 1906) sardonically if fittingly as an “Überall-dabei-sein-Wollens” [sic] – an urge to be involved everywhere. This lack of clear-cut goals made Weltpolitik appear impossible to satisfy and allowed it to be inflated abroad into an all-pervasive menace, especially in Britain, where hysterical invasion scares and navy panics had been rooted in the political culture since the Napoleonic era.

While the Kaiser sought to deploy Weltpolitik to gain favor with the educated middle classes and thus burnish the tarnished prestige of the crown with the aspiration of creating a “personal regime,” he was reacting to criticisms leveled at himself and the German government that German foreign policy was weak, adrift, and had been far too accommodating to Britain, as much as acting on his own long-standing interest in the navy. Indeed, bourgeois opinion on the matter was far ahead of both the Kaiser and Foreign Office. Not surprisingly, the Kaiser’s understanding of Weltpolitik was largely derivative of the ideas of the German educated bourgeoisie and similarly vague. Just how vague and unoriginal his notions were is revealed by a famous dinner speech the Kaiser gave in the royal palace in Berlin to a group of prominent merchants and industrialists on January 18, 1896, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of German unification, normally taken as his first public utterance on the topic of Weltpolitik:

The German Empire has become a world empire. Everywhere in the distant parts of the earth thousands of our compatriots reside. German goods, German knowledge, German industriousness travel over the ocean. In thousands of millions is estimated the value of goods Germany has going by sea. To you, dear gentlemen, is given the serious duty to help me integrate this greater German Reich firmly to the homeland.

Tellingly, the Kaiser’s speech was greeted by bourgeois publicists and writers as reflective of hopes and aspirations they had long been pressing for.

There is a diplomatic and strategic side to the emergence of Weltpolitik that too often gets short shrift: it must also be seen as a response to a disintegrating Bismarckian system. Reflecting Germany’s inherently vulnerable geostrategic position and the difficulties this posed to defending the Reich, Bismarck’s alliance system had already fallen apart by the mid-1880s and become a fragile policy of expedients by the time of his departure as chancellor in 1890. [...] And while it is tempting to see in Weltpolitik a major departure from Bismarckian tenets, it was in many ways the unintended outcome of policies pursued under the Iron Chancellor since the late 1870s of rapid industrial development, the expansion of overseas trade, greater commercial engagement in East Asia, the Caribbean, and South America, the acquisition of protectorates in Africa and the South Pacific, and closer ties to Austria, which in turn drew Germany into the Balkans and especially to Turkey.

[...]

There is no doubt that the inconsistencies observed in Germany’s Weltpolitik after 1896 were reflections of the many different (and sometimes conflicting) views of how Germany would achieve its “world standing” between the Foreign Office, the navy, and the Kaiser, complicated by the lack of accountability of German governments to the Reichstag, the lack of civilian control over the military, and the lack of strategic coordination between the services. The erratic tendencies of Kaiser Wilhelm II and his frequent meddling in foreign policy did not help matters. But [...] any political system would have been challenged by the geopolitics of Weltpolitik. And as the violent outward expansion of Great Britain after 1832 and the United States following the Civil War make clear, a more accountable, democratic polity would likely have made German Weltpolitik more aggressive, expansive, and uncompromising, not less. 1

By announcing Weltpolitik in 1896 with its unclear complex of soaring end goals, domestic expectations were awakened that were bound to be disappointed given that much of the earth had by that point already been divvied up. Such a forceful outward stance given Germany’s weight in Europe was also by its very nature likely to generate frictions with neighbors that would serve to highlight Germany’s latent continental European hegemony and thus accelerate a process of European counterbalancing. In this sense Weltpolitik was over time more likely to constrain the political room for maneuver than enhance it given Germany’s unfavorable geostrategic position and ultimately unleash forces that would lead to greater German diplomatic isolation regardless of who was at the helm of German foreign policy. [...]

1 In Britain, the 1832 “Representation of the People Act” made the parliamentary system more democratic - especially by extending the franchise to urban middle class voters, thus being more susceptible to the influence of public opinion, e. g. middle class voters’ interest in colonial policy.

1.

Analyse the text. [26 Punkte]

2.

Drawing on the text, explain how the German Empire developed after Bismarck’s dismissal (14 Punkte) and examine the author’s line of argument concerning German Weltpolitik (14 Punkte). [28 Punkte]

3.

Assess the position the author takes on German Weltpolitik. [26 Punkte]

Abiturprüfung 2022 – Geschichte bilingual-englisch, Grundkurs

Aufgabenstellung:

1.

Analyse the text. (26 Punkte)

2.

Determine how the author views Hitler (14 Punkte) and examine the way he builds his argument (14 Punkte). (28 Punkte)

3.

Assess the position taken by the author. (26 Punkte)

Materialgrundlage:

Brendan Simms: Hitler – a global biography. New York 2019, S. 551 – 555.

Hinweise zum Autor:

Brendan Peter Simms (born 1967): Professor in the History of International Relations at the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. He focuses on the history of Germany and Europe.

1 [...] The Anglo-American capitalist world order against which Hitler revolted structured

his entire political career. Sometime before he ever began to speak about the Jews, Hitler

experienced the might of the British Empire in Flanders, the demographic and industrial power

of the United States at the second Battle of the Marne and the economic stranglehold of global

5 capitalism after the imposition of the Versailles Treaty. Shortly after, he became convinced

that the Jews – whose relationship with Anglo-America was in his view essentially symbiotic –

were the driving force behind international capitalism and the coalition which had brought

down the Reich. Among the instruments used to undermine Germany from within, Hitler

believed, was the virus of Bolshevism, which he regarded as a much greater threat than the

10 Soviet Union itself. The root of his Jew-hatred, therefore, was primarily to be found in his

hostility to global high finance rather than his hatred of the radical left. Those who do not

want to speak about Hitler's anti-capitalism should remain silent on his anti-Semitism.

Hitler's solution to the perceived German predicament fell into two parts. First of all, he

called for a programme of racial transformation within Germany, which eliminated 'harmful'

15 elements, especially the Jews, and encouraged the 'elevation' of the racial 'high value' strands

in the German Volk. Secondly, Hitler demanded the acquisition of Lebensraum in the east,

which would provide the land and resources to offer a comparable living standard to the

United States, and thus end the debilitating emigration of the nation's best and brightest,

who might return as enemy soldiers at some future date. It would also make Germany

20 'blockadeproof' in the event of a renewed round of warfare with Anglo-America.

If Hitler's relationship with the British Empire and the United States was ultimately

antagonistic, it was also admiring and entangled. He long hoped for a British alliance and he

never ceased to exalt the supposed racial qualities of the 'Anglo-Saxons' on both sides of the

Atlantic, and to believe that they represented Germany's 'better' racial half 1. Anglo-America

25 was Hitler's model, much more so than Stalin's Russia or even Mussolini's Italy. The original

for the Lebensraum project was the British Empire, and especially the American colonization

of the west 2. Hitler and the Third Reich were thus a reaction not to the Russian Revolution

but to the dominance of Anglo-America and global capitalism. The Holocaust was not a

distorted copy of Stalin's Great Terror, but a pre-emptive strike against Roosevelt's America.

30 After he came to power, the British Empire and the United States remained the focal point of

Hitler's policies. His entire domestic programme was designed to match the 'living standards'

offered by the 'American Dream'. His true nemesis 3 was the British Empire and especially

the United States, against whom he battled for control of the 'trophy' of the 'world'. It was

Roosevelt's hostility which caused Hitler to speed up his programme from late 1937, British

35 resistance during the May crisis of 1938 4 which led him to bring forward the dismemberment

of Czechoslovakia. The struggle against Britain and America eventually 'forced' Hitler to go

to war against them both, and then to extend the theatre of operations ever more widely. The

quest for Lebensraum led to conflict with Britain over Poland, which in turn 'required' him

to occupy much of Scandinavia, France, the Low Countries, the Balkans and North Africa.

40 It drove the attack on Russia. Hitler had originally set out to make Germany a world power,

not to achieve global domination, but each gain seemed to require another. By 1941-2, when

he was directing operations on three continents, and across the seven seas, it seemed as if only

the world would be enough for Hitler. But the prize eluded him: the trophy was lifted once

more by the Anglo-Americans, with substantial help from their Soviet allies, of course.

[...]

1 In a heterosexual marriage, (male) partners sometimes refer to their (female) partners as their "better half".

2 American colonization of the west: the process of nineteenth-century settlement in the US of the territory between the Mississippi river and Pacific Ocean by European immigrants, completed by 1890

3 nemesis (Greek; meaning "to give what is due"): an ancient Greek goddess who pursues and takes retribution on those who are arrogant (especially towards the gods)

4 a short time of international tension in 1938 triggered by reports of German troop movements against Czechoslovakia allegedly signalling an impending outbreak of war