Hints
on Grade 8 Initial Reading
The caveat in picking scenes
from Draußen is that the teacher who has
prepared students in the pre-reading phase by introducing
psychological difficulties faced by people living a country
in which a war has been fought will probably not want to
select the prologue or the initial two scenes of Borchert's
play, because these scenes actually set up those issues
instead of discussing them directly.
Reading about conversations with
the Elbe, the "other," or the woman who invites a strange
man into her house and offers him her husband's clothes is
not immediately connected with "the war experience," and so
these scenes call for other kinds of experiential and
cognitive maturity to be comprehensible except in trivial
terms.
Scene 3 with the Oberst
(Colonel) and the initial conversation in Scene 5 with Frau
Kramer, on the other hand, portray real people discussing
past events and people they have known. Selected
exchanges from either of these scenes would, therefore,
provide students with comprehensible discourse at their
cognitive and experiential level.