Exercise B, Grade 8:
Reading the Text
to Guess at the Meanings of Words
Remember that, in his short
conversation with Frau Kramer, Beckmann learned that his
parents have committed suicide. In a typical
pre-reading phase focusing on this particular segment, the
teacher introduces the unfamiliar concepts "Stalingrad" and
"entnazifiziert," using maps to show where Stalingrad
was. She indicated that this was the place where the
Germans lost the most decisive battle of the war and over
800,000 thousand soldiers (250,000 of whom were ethnic
Germans and Hungarians; 1,100,000 Soviet soldiers fell, and
an almost equal number of civilians).
Similarly, students could see a
map or a blackboard sketch illustrating that Germany was
occupied by French, British, Russian, and (in Hamburg!)
American soldiers after the war. The photos
accompanying the text of Draußen vor der Tür
document civil
destruction. The teacher could then ask students
to speculate about how these occupiers felt about former
Nazis -- what it might have been like to be a former Nazi
after WW II. Those speculations could culminate with
the teacher making brief comments about the fact that
American occupation forces made efforts to identify former
Nazis and "denazify" them.
Once the pre-reading above is
completed, then students can move into the initial reading
of Scene 5. Students are told to find the five or six
most important words in the first twenty lines of Beckmann's
conversation with Frau Kramer. Typical answers might
be:
After these words are written
correctly on the board (or corrected), students restate the
who, what, where, and when of the play, to orient
themselves.