HINTS



     Either of these exercises will achieve the goal of a longer writing experience, a key function of Phase 5.  One the other hand, Exercise A, with its focus on how people express their values and behaviors, stresses the culture and connections standards rather than comparison and communities.  Consequently, it will probably yield less of an interpolation of the text than will Exercise B.

     That lacuna can be addressed by altering the interviewer's role, however.  If the interviewer is, for example, a 1990s American journalist undertaking an historical retrospective, or possibly a "woman from Mars" trying to understand humanoid behavior, questions would be asked that contrast the culture of the questioner with the person being interrogated.  Questions such as "On our planet, we stop fighting as soon as we see we cannot win.  Why did you continue to fight?" fit the production appropriate to a goal set by the comparison standards.  Similarly, by designating the interviewer as a person assessing how Germans spoke, thought, and acted during this era, the task introduces a goal for the communities standards.

     Exercise B explicitly asks for a comparison between not only between two endings, but between responses to the dire circumstances depicted in Borchert's work.  The "Happy End" is traditionally associated with American ideas of entertainment and, depending on the execution of the task, the changes can either merge with the realm of fantasy (e.g., das Mädchen metamorphoses into Beckmann's wife; the Colonel self-destructs when his conscience is addressed), or they could represent "quick fixes," with plot elements based on the reinvention of self more characteristic of American than of German life styles (e.g., das Mädchen divorces her first husband and marries Beckmann; the colonel acknowledges his guilt and invites Beckmann in for dinner).

     In either framing, how the cultural messages of the text change with changes in behavior becomes the focus of analysis only if the assignment asks for such an analysis ("In conclusion, in one or more paragraphs, discuss what the differences you will introduce take away from or introduce into the picture the German postwar culture that Borchert was depicting").

 Phase 5:  Long-Genre Exercises: Grade 12