Hints: Text K and L


     The third pair of texts offers two letters written in one historical setting for two different recipients.  They are both from soldiers caught in the disastrous siege of Stalingrad in the Second World War.  Text K, "Das mußt Du Dir aus dem Kopf schlagen, Margarete . . . ," was written to a wife by a husband who used to play the piano, but who has lost fingers in the war.  Text L,  "Liebster Vater!  Die Division ist ausgeschlackt für den Großkampf . . . ," was written by a soldier-son to a father, but that father was a member of the German General Staff, and the son wants to inform him about the true and hopeless conditions under which his army is working.

     -In terms of language difficulty, "Liebster Vater" has less generally-familiar vocabulary because it has military expressions (some colloquial -- "Die Division ist ausgeschlackt" --, some more formal -- "noch 69 Mann verwendungsfähig").  In contrast, "Margarete" is written around the experiences of a soldier from the point of view of the home front (albeit tinged with the horrible experience of the war).  It speaks of music, health, and everyday happenings.  Both texts are composed of fairly straightforward sentences (e.g., sentences in the active voice, most often organized SVO; those sentences with more than one clause are not inverted for stylistic effect).

     -In terms of educational variables, both texts require the same background knowledge:  the fact that the German army froze to death at the siege of Stalingrad, but that it was in communication with the outside world until almost the end.

     -What distinguishes these texts are two different kinds of linguistic-sociological address.  These two letters are negotiating two different kinds of communication, even though both are nominally "family" letters.  In the first case, "Margarete" is written with an implicit gender bias:  the husband is trying to both prepare his wife for and spare her from the horrors of war -- she will get the husband back, but not the pianist.  In contrast, the son in the second letter is writing less to the father than to the Generalstäbler, urging him to insist that the general staff alter the military policies that have, in his view, led to the impending defeat at Stalingrad.   These soldiers are envisioning communications with very different home-front communities, with varying psychological needs and with very different histories.

TEXT PAIRS 4-6 in Exercise 1
FOLLOW-UP BRAINSTORMING