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.