Abitur NRW Geschichte 2022 · GK · Nachtermin · bilingual Englisch

Abiturprüfung 2022 – Geschichte bilingual-englisch, Grundkurs

Aufgabe NT 1

Materialgrundlage

Bruno Heilig: Why the German Republic Fell. In: A. W. Madsen (Hrsg.): Why the German Republic fell and other studies of the causes and consequences of economic inequality. London 1941, S. 1 – 22. (Rechtschreibung und Hervorhebungen wie im Original)

Hinweise zum Autor/Material:

Bruno Heilig (1888 – 1968) was an Austrian journalist of Jewish descent. For five years preceding the collapse of the Weimar Republic he worked as a journalist in Berlin. He spent 13 months as a prisoner within the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald from 1938 – 39 before escaping into exile in Great Britain.

WHY THE GERMAN REPUBLIC FELL

NUMBERLESS NEWSPAPER ARTICLES and books have been published on the subject of Hitler’s career and Germany’s turning to barbarism. They describe in minute detail the comings and goings of the actors of that tragedy; they reveal secrets about political and diplomatic interviews, about intrigues and conspiracies too. They give you a more or less reliable picture of the characters of the leading persons and entertain you, perhaps, with spicy stories about their private lives. You get splendidly informed, yet you are not satisfied. The more you have learned about the events the more you are puzzled. There was a country with a fine democratic constitution built on the ideas of liberty and self-government. Its people had been glad to get rid of the Kaiser after the Great War, and had elected for the Weimar National Assembly men whose records and programmes offered the best guarantee for a radical extirpation of the hated old Prussian ideas. Then some crooks, some fools, and some weaklings appeared on the stage of history, and liberty was thrown away, and democracy became rubbish. Hitler attained power under observance of a democratic constitution, the fundamental principle of which was self-government and self-determination of the people. He became Chancellor just in the same way as any of his predecessors, by regular appointment. There was no reason why the people should submit to tyranny against their will. They followed the tyrant voluntarily, many of them jubilant. How did it happen, how could it happen?

There are, I know, a number of explanations, ranging from the failure of the Allied nations to implement their pledges in the Versailles Treaty, and their folly or guilt in thereafter pursuing illiberal policies, to the alleged innate militarism of the German people which only awaited another brand to set that spirit in flame. These ideas can be argued to Doomsday, unavailingly, if one takes no account of the social forces that were disrupting Germany from within; […]

Was there a link between the economic and the political collapse? Emphatically, yes. For as unemployment grew, and with it poverty and the fear of poverty, so grew the influence of the Nazi Party, which was making its lavish promises to the frustrated and its violent appeal to the revenges of a populace aware of its wrongs but condemned to hear only a malignant and distorted explanation of them.

[…]

No doubt in all political changes the national character also plays its part. Yet particular circumstances really provoke the reaction. I do not believe that the Germans would have followed Hitler in his hates and revenges if the people had been living under reasonably good social conditions instead of being as they were under the lash of so much unemployment and privation. True, Adolf Hitler may be the particular German specimen of what Henry George 1 calls the most blatant demagogue. But do you consent to Mussolini, the Latin-speaking tyrant? And what about Norwegian, Dutch, French, Hungarian, Roumanian and Bulgarian fascists? The German people – or a large proportion of them – were only the first to follow Hitler. Others joined in later under the lead of their most blatant demagogues.

All Europe is either Communist or Fascist, with few exceptions. It was not fear or downright political stupidity that prevented so many European countries from joining in the fight against Hitler and it was not mere incompetence that defeated France. It was the strong Fascist forces existing in those countries and the influence of the respective blatant demagogues (though not yet in official power) that paralysed the peoples; and the outcome is that the superlative of all the blatant demagogues has become the leader of the lot. Thus, national character is but of subordinate effect. The circumstances are the determining factor.

[…]

Similar conditions will be of the same effect everywhere. What happened in Germany will inevitably happen anywhere that similar conditions prevail. In some Continental countries it has happened already. The Nazi regime is not Hitler’s, the man’s, achievement. Nazidom has grown organically out of a rotten democracy, and the rottenness of that democracy is the natural consequence of unequal economic conditions […].

1 Henry George: influential US economist (1839 – 1897)

1.

Analyse the source. [26 Punkte]

2.

Using the text as your starting point, explain why the Nazi dictatorship was established in Germany (14 Punkte) and how Bruno Heilig presents the causes of the Nazis' success (14 Punkte). [28 Punkte]

3.

Take a critical stand on the views put forward by Heilig. [26 Punkte]

Abiturprüfung 2022 – Geschichte bilingual-englisch, Grundkurs

Aufgabe NT 2

Materialgrundlage & Hinweise zum Autor:

Henry R. Luce: The American Century. In: Life, 17. Februar 1941, S. 61 – 65.

(Rechtschreibung und Hervorhebungen wie im Original)

Henry Luce (1898 – 1967): American magazine publisher who built a publishing empire on Time, Fortune, and Life magazines, becoming one of the most powerful figures in the history of American journalism. He founded his publications as a means of educating what he considered a poorly informed American public.

Life: American, wide-ranging general-interest magazine, being especially popular in the 1930s and 40s, it circulated 4 million copies a week.

[...]

1 Where are we? We are in the war. All this talk about whether this or that might or might

not get us into the war is wasted effort. We are, for a fact, in the war.

If there’s one place we Americans did not want to be, it was in the war. We didn’t want

much to be in any kind of war but, if there was one kind of war we most of all didn’t want

5 to be in, it was a European war. Yet, we’re in a war, as vicious and bad a war as ever struck

this planet, and, along with being worldwide, a European war.

Of course, we are not technically at war, we are not painfully at war, and we may never

have to experience the full hell that war can be. Nevertheless the simple statement stands:

we are in the war. The irony is that Hitler knows it – and most Americans don’t. It may or

10 may not be an advantage to continue diplomatic relations with Germany. But the fact that a

German embassy still flourishes in Washington beautifully illustrates the whole mass of

deceits and self-deceits in which we have been living.

[...]

Now that we are in this war, how did we get in? We got in on the basis of defense. Even

15 that very word, defense, has been full of deceit and self-deceit.

To the average American the plain meaning of the word defense is defense of American

territory. Is our national policy today limited to the defense of the American homeland by

whatever means may seem wise? It is not. We are not in a war to defend American territory.

We are in a war to defend and even to promote, encourage and incite so-called democratic

20 principles throughout the world. The average American begins to realize now that that’s the

kind of war he’s in. And he’s halfway for it. But he wonders how he ever got there, since a

year ago he had not the slightest intention of getting into any such thing. Well, he can see

now how he got there. He got there via “defense.”

[...]

25 Almost every expert will agree that Britain cannot win complete victory – cannot even, in

the common saying, “stop Hitler” – without American help. Therefore, even if Britain should

from time to time announce war aims, the American people are continually in the position

of effectively approving or not approving those aims. On the contrary, if America were to

announce war aims, Great Britain would almost certainly accept them. And the entire world

30 including Adolf Hitler would accept them as the gauge of this battle.

Americans have a feeling that in any collaboration with Great Britain we are somehow

playing Britain’s game and not our own. Whatever sense there may have been in this notion

in the past, today it is an ignorant and foolish conception of the situation. In any sort of

partnership with the British Empire, Great Britain is perfectly willing that the United States

35 of America should assume the role of senior partner. This has been true for a long time.

Among serious Englishmen, the chief complaint against America (and incidentally their best

alibi for themselves) has really amounted to this – that America has refused to rise to the

opportunities of leadership in the world.

[...]

40 The big, important point to be made here is simply that the complete opportunity of

leadership is ours. Like most great creative opportunities, it is an opportunity enveloped in

stupendous difficulties and dangers. If we don’t want it, if we refuse to take it, the responsibility

of refusal is also ours, and ours alone.

[...]

45 In 1919 we had a golden opportunity, an opportunity unprecedented in all history, to assume

the leadership of the world – a golden opportunity handed to us on the proverbial silver platter.

We did not understand that opportunity. Wilson mishandled it. We rejected it. The opportunity

persisted. We bungled it in the 1920’s and in the confusions of the 1930’s we killed it.

To lead the world would never have been an easy task. To revive the hope of that lost

50 opportunity makes the task now infinitely harder than it would have been before. Nevertheless,

with the help of all of us, Roosevelt must succeed where Wilson failed.

[...]

Throughout the 17th Century and the 18th Century and the 19th Century, this continent

teemed with manifold projects and magnificent purposes. Above them all and weaving them

55 all together into the most exciting flag of all the world and of all history was the triumphal

purpose of freedom.

It is in this spirit that all of us are called, each to his own measure of capacity, and each

in the widest horizon of his vision, to create the first Great American Century.

1.

Analyse the source. [26 Punkte]

2.

Put the source into the context of US foreign policy regarding Europe since World War I [14 Punkte] and examine the author's argumentation concerning the international role of the USA [14 Punkte]. [28 Punkte]

3.

Take a critical stand on the views the author holds about the USA's role in international affairs. [26 Punkte]

Abiturprüfung 2022 – Geschichte bilingual-englisch, Grundkurs

Aufgabenstellung:

Materialgrundlage:

John Darwin: Unfinished Empire. The global expansion of Britain, London 2013, S. 327 – 330.

(Rechtschreibung und Hervorhebungen wie im Original)

Hinweise zum Autor:

John Darwin (born 1948): a renowned British historian specialising in the history of the British Empire. He teaches at the universities of Reading and Oxford.

DEFENDING EMPIRE: THE ‘BRITISH PEACE’, 1815 – 1914

[...]

1 By the mid-1890s, British leaders were inclined (incorrectly) to look back to the middle years

of the century as a golden age of security. They began to suspect that the huge scale of their

empire was turning it into an albatross 1, and that they were losing the will and the means

to advance British claims with Mid-Victorian machismo 2. This mood was induced by two

5 disturbing developments. The first was what seemed the increasing aggressiveness of European

ambitions beyond Europe – a throwback to the age of mercantilism before 1815. 3 France and

Russia, their most dangerous rivals in the New East, Asia and Africa, formed a defensive

alliance. Wilhelmine Germany adopted Weltpolitik as its motto, demanded a place in the

imperial sun, and began building a navy. The chance of collision with a powerful opponent

10 loomed ever larger. The second was the growth of new epicentres of crisis in the non-European

world, where a large British interest existed. The partition of China seemed more and more

likely as its Manchu rulers’ grip slackened. 4 Russia, France, Germany and Japan (a new

regional power) all had large claims: the British might have to fight hard for their share. At

almost exactly the same time, the rise of the gold-rich Transvaal upset the local balance of

15 power in South Africa. [...]

[T]he fear of finding themselves in conflict with France and Russia in the Near East and

East Asia, while war dragged on in South Africa, galvanized opinion in Great Britain. ‘We

must have a force which is reasonably calculated to beat France and Russia,’ declared Lord

Selborne, the First Lord of the Admiralty, in January 1903, ‘and still have something in hand

20 against Germany.’ By 1905, spending on the navy was 50 percent higher than 1899. The

British embarked on the great naval race, at first to outbuild Russia and France, and after 1908,

to see off the challenge of the German High Seas fleet. To some eager imperialists this was

only a start. [...] Still others urged an alliance with Germany against the Franco-Russe. But

the diplomatic price was too high: Britain would have been committed to defending the

25 ramshackle empire of the Habsburgs with its turbulent nationalities. In fact the British were

lucky. Their often tense relations with the United States improved greatly with the new

century. Both sides saw the advantage of a tacit maritime partnership. British naval supremacy,

remarked Theodore Roosevelt, was ‘the great guaranty of the peace of the world’. An

opportunist alliance with Japan yielded an astonishing dividend when the Japanese disabled

30 Russia’s sea power at Tsushima in May 1905. By that time, the British had also persuaded

the French to settle their (mainly) African differences in the entente of 1904. A weakened

Russia followed suit with a second entente in 1907, easing the tensions in Central Asia and

Persia. That left the Germans.

The calculation here was a complicated one. The German strategy was to build a large

35 enough fleet to deter the British from entering a European war or acting against them. [...]

For the British in turn, there was a double imperative in containing that threat. As Winston

Churchill 5 insisted, the best defence of the empire was to prevent the enemy’s navy from

leaving the seas around Europe. But there was a deeper side to the argument. If Britain were

unable to act as one of Europe’s great powers, to prevent a dangerous shift in its geographical

40 balance, then it had no means of averting the greatest danger of all: a Europe united against

it by force or diplomacy. So the British embarked on a huge naval programme to achieve an

unbeatable lead in the ‘all big-gun’ battleship or ‘dreadnought’. [...]

It ought to have worked, and [...] in many ways did. But it was not a sufficient deterrent

against German hopes of a triumph in Europe, founded on faith in their knock-out blow against

45 France – the Schlieffen Plan. So when an obscure Balkan quarrel plunged first Austria and

Russia, and then the Germans and France into Europe’s first general war for a century, the

British could not stay out – though their ostensible motive was Berlin’s violation of Belgian

neutrality. By the time that peace came, the task of defending their empire looked almost

startlingly different.

1 an albatross: here (metaphorically): a burden or an obstacle.

2 machismo: the strong sense of being manly and proud, an exaggerated masculinity, associated with dominance and aggression.

3 the age of mercantilism: an economic system of trade between the 16 th and 18 th centuries, based on the idea that a nation's wealth and power depended on high exports and low imports.

4 At the end of the nineteenth century, China faced the threat of being partitioned and colonized by imperial powers. This led to the Open Door Policy, which limited privileges of one towards the other imperial powers.

5 In 1905, Winston Churchill, already a highly prominent politician and member of the government at the time, became Under-Secretary for the Colonies.

1.

Analyse the text. (24 Punkte)

2.

Using the text as your starting point, explain the naval policy pursued by Germany at the turn of the century (14 Punkte) as well as how European imperialism was linked to the causes of the First World War (14 Punkte). (28 Punkte)

3.

Assess the claims made by the author. (28 Punkte)

Abiturprüfung 2022 – Geschichte bilingual-englisch, Grundkurs

Aufgabenstellung:

1. Analyse the text. [26 Punkte]

2. Put the source into the historical context of the upheavals of 1989/90 (14 Punkte) and characterize how the author sees the “German revival” (title) (14 Punkte). [28 Punkte]

3. Take a critical stand on the views the author puts forward. [26 Punkte]

Materialgrundlage:

Charles Krauthammer: The German revival. In: The New Republic, Vol 202, Nr. 13, 26 March, 1990, S. 18 – 21.

Hinweise zum Autor/Material:

Charles Krauthammer (1950 – 2018): a renowned and award-winning American journalist and avid political commentator.

The New Republic: a weekly US magazine focusing on politics, contemporary culture, and the arts, founded in 1914.

Zugelassene Hilfsmittel: Ein- und zweisprachiges Wörterbuch

THE GERMAN REVIVAL

[...]

1 What then is the real problem with German reunification? It will reverse one of the most salutary European developments of the last fifty years: the decline of sovereignty. German reunification will constitute the most dramatic rebirth of sovereignty in the postwar era. In this era, Europe has enjoyed a historically unprecedented period of peace largely because 5 the sovereignty of its warring nations was suppressed, brutally in the East and benignly in the West, by the advent of two great empires. Whatever else it did, the cold war division of Europe into a pax Sovietica and pax Americana 1 did have the virtue of suppressing internecine European conflict.

But the imperial suppression of sovereignty must be temporary. Empire is not forever. Hence 10 the post-cold war question: How to remove the artificial suppression of sovereignty by the superpowers, without risking the national explosions that follow almost universally – in our time, in Asia and Africa – whenever the imperial power withdraws? Western Europe thought it had found the answer. Over the last forty years it has gradually built up transnational institutions, most notably the European Community. The great project accelerating toward 15 completion was the formation of the single European market by 1992 that would transform the economies of the Twelve into an economic unit almost as free of legal barriers as that of the United States. Ireland and Greece would trade as freely as Maine and Texas.

But the importance of Europe '92 is not just economic. It involves one of history’s greatest peacetime transfers of sovereignty. By giving up enormous economic, social, and regulatory 20 power to a central European authority, the countries of Western Europe are consciously giving up much of their political autonomy. [...] Talk of a United States of Europe is premature. But it is not far fetched. That is the trajectory that Western Europe is following.

Or was until November 9, the day the Berlin Wall fell. Europe '92 was to substitute the diminished sovereignty imposed by European integration for the diminished sovereignty 25 once imposed by American domination. It was to be a transition from imperially- to self- imposed community. The great hope was that an integrated Europe would begin to acquire some of the internal stability of a federal country such as the United States. By diminishing the sovereignty of each country and centralizing more and more authority in “Europe,” the national rivalries that led to centuries of European wars would become obsolete. It would be 30 as if Texas went to war with Maine.

German reunification challenges the idea and derails the process. West Germany, pledged to diminish its sovereignty by joining this single European market, is now about to swallow the East, an incorporation that will augment its population, territory, economy, military strength, political centrality, and diplomatic clout. It is about to become the new giant on the continent. 35 Leave aside potential territorial claims against its neighbors. Leave aside the possibility of Germany acquiring nuclear weapons. The simple fact of the explosive birth of a new and huge Germany in the center of the continent immediately undercuts the entire movement toward European confederation.

Such a Germany is its own confederation. Absent any malice, ill will, or “romanticism” on 40 the part of its leadership, it will necessarily begin to act in accord with its new power – independently and with the kind of assertiveness and regard for distant interests that characterizes the other great powers, notably the United States and the Soviet Union.

The real danger posed by a reunified Germany is not that a new Bismarck or Hitler will arise. It is that the birth of a new giant in the middle of the continent will arrest Europe’s 45 great confederational project and produce in its place, as The Economist 2 put it, a “revised version of a previously destructive balance-of-power system,” a recapitulation of the kind of international system of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that ended in catastrophe.

We can see the new balance-of-power system taking shape already. The shape is disturbingly 50 familiar. The Western European powers are maneuvering to re-establish pre-war links with the ex-Soviet colonies of Eastern Europe, not just in pursuit of economic opportunity, but quite consciously to prevent Germany from dominating the region. [...]

As the Europeans begin to maneuver to find partners to balance and contain Germany, each country is forced into a kind of reactive nationalism. [...] For a continent consisting of twenty- 55 nine sovereignties speaking forty-five languages, that way is not just an anachronism, it is a prescription for instability.

[...]

The Berlin Wall came down too soon. Had East Germany been the last Soviet province to fall, as we thought the Kremlin would insist, it might have been but a small piece digestible by 60 a new and stable Europe. Having come so quickly, German unification threatens to disrupt the whole by creating in the heart of Europe a greater Germany that Europe cannot contain.

[...]

1 pax Sovietica; pax Americana (Lat. Soviet resp. American peace): a term applied to the concept of octroyed, but relative peace by the two dominant superpowers in the two blocks of the world in the Cold War.

2 The Economist: a London-based international weekly newspaper focusing on current political affairs and international business.

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