Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
YEAR 1
DATE:
27 AUGUST 2008
Instructions to Candidates:
Answer THREE questions ONE from SEEN section A and TWO from section B
Time allowed: 3 hours
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Question:
Response:
Respondent 2:
Question:
Response:
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c) The two documents summarised below illustrate the efforts of the French
government to bolster the birthrate:
The French Decree Establishing medals for Mothers (1920)
The raising of the birthrate, which our country must undertake in order to
retain the rank in which victory has placed us and to permit us to harvest all
its fruits, is above all a moral question.
Therefore we must neglect nothing that can encourage mothers to give
maternity the place it ought to haveMothers should be honoured as they
ought to be; they should feel surrounded by the pious respectof their cocitizensThe importance and grandeur of their social role should be apparent
to everyones eyes
Under the name of medal of the French family an order of honorary
compensations for mothers who have undertaken the task of raising
numerous children in a dignified manner. For this work a testament of public
esteem is due to them and will be given to them along with a bronze medal if
they have raised at least five living children, the last of which has reached the
age of one. The medal will be silver if this number is eight, and gold if it
reaches ten.
We insist on the point that, in order to be worthy of this award, it is not
sufficient just to bear children, but it is necessary to know how to raise them
and to make a point at every occasionof inculcating in them a healthy moral
education.
Article 3: A sentence of one to six months in prison and a fine of one hundred
to five thousand francs will be levied against any person who, for the
purposes of contraceptive propaganda describes (or) divulgesthe
procedures for preventing pregnancy or facilitates the use of such
procedures.
d) In Britain the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act of 1919 stated that:
A person shall not be disqualified by sex or marriage from the exercise of any
public function, or from being appointed to or holding any civil or judicial office
or post, or from entering or assuming or holding any civil or judicial post, or
from entering or assuming or carrying on any civil profession or vocation.
Herbert Asquith, former Liberal Prime Minister, commenting on women
electors at Paisley, 1920:
There are about 15,000 women on the register a dim, impenetrable, for the
most part ungetattable element of whom all that one knows is that they are for
the most part hopelessly ignorant of politics, credulous to the last degree, and
flickering with gusts of sentiment like a candle in the wind.
2. What do the following extracts tell us about the political and social
attitudes of the Nazi Party?
a) Adolf Hitler, speech in Ingolstadt, March 1928:
The main motivating forces of life are self-preservation and the safeguarding
of future generations, and politics is none other than the struggle of peoples
for their existenceThe urge to live must lead to conflict because it is
insatiable, while the basis of life territory is limited. Thus brutality rather
than humanity is the basis of life! It is not humanity, but rather rights based on
strength and the pre-eminence of power which have prevailed. But mankind is
not a uniform and equal mass. There are differences between races. The
Earth has received its culture from elite peoples. What we see today is
ultimately the result of the activity and the achievements of the Aryans
b) Hitler in Mein Kampf (1925), on race:
Everything that we admire today on this earth, science and art, technology
and inventions, is the creative product of but a few nations and perhaps
originally of but one race. It is on them that the existence of all culture
dependsAll great cultures of the past were destroyed only because the
originally creative race died from blood poisoning
If one were to divide mankind into three species: the culture-creators, the
culture-bearers, and the culture-destroyers, only the Aryan would be likely to
fit the first definition. It is to him that we must trace the foundations and the
walls of all that human beings have created.
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The most powerful antipode to the Aryan is the JewNo, the Jew possesses
no culture-creating ability whateverHe is and remains the typical parasite,
asponger who, like a malign bacillus, spreads more and more a slong as he
will find some favourable feeding-ground. And the consequences of his
existence, too, resemble those of the parasite: where he appears, the host
nation will sooner or later die
c) Walther Darre, a leading Nazi [1937]:
Our nations only true possession is its good bloodGermanic laws on
eugenics can be understood only if they are seen for what they are: eugenic
laws. All eugenic progress can begin only by eliminating the inferior, and by
insisting on proven blood.
d) Adolf Hitler in his vision of a national community, speech at Kiel, 1930:
The NSDAP [Nazi Party] is an organisation which does not recognise
bourgeois, farmers, manual workers and so on; instead it is an organisation
based in all regions of Germany, composed of all social groups. If you ask
one of us, Young man, what are you?, he will smile: I am a German! I fight
in my brown shirt. That is indicative of our significance; we do not aspire to
be anything else, we are all fighting for the future of a people. We are all
equal in our rank.
e) Adolf Hitler, Second Book (1928), on war:
The task which falls to all great legislators and statesmen is not so much to
prepare for war in a narrow sense, but rather to educate and train thoroughly
a people so that to all reasonable intents and purposes its future appears
inherently assured. In this way even wars lose their character as isolated,
more or less violent surprises, instead becoming part of a natural, indeed selfevident pattern of thorough, well-secured, sustained national development.
SECTION B - UNSEEN
Answer TWO questions from this section
1. In what ways had women achieved greater emancipation in the decades
before 1914?
2. Why did a local war in the Balkans become a world war in July and August
1914?
3. Why did British soldiers volunteer and fight in the First World War?
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4. To what extent was the impact of the First World War crucial to the success of
the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution of October 1917?
6. What impact did Allied victory in the First World War have for Europes
colonies?
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