Sachsen-Anhalt Abitur History cheat sheet
Sachsen-Anhalt Abitur History · Keep the key ideas within reach.
Historical evidence, chronology and justified interpretation
Identify provenance, audience, genre and transmission before judging evidentiary value.
A normative text does not by itself establish actual compliance.
Chronological sequence alone does not prove a causal mechanism.
Periodization is an interpretation with explicit criteria.
Different perspectives remain subject to evidence and contextual evaluation.
Revolutions, industrialization and nineteenth-century German society
Dual revolution: French politics and British industry interact; neither explains 1789–1914 alone.
Key German dates: Zollverein 1834, railway 1835, Paulskirche constitution 1849, Gründerkrach 1873.
Bismarck's 1883–89 insurance laws were both welfare and anti-socialist strategy.
The Sonderweg is a contested thesis (Blackbourn/Eley), not a datum.
Compare sovereignty claims (Sieyès 1789 vs. Paulskirche 1849) rather than just listing events.
Weimar democracy, postwar reckoning and public memory
Distinguish Weimar crises, stabilization and later collapse.
Versailles is part of a multicausal explanation, not an automatic outcome.
Legal proceedings, historical scholarship and commemoration serve different functions.
Public memory reflects later institutions and audiences as well as the past represented.
Interpretations remain accountable to evidence and explicit criteria.
Nazi dictatorship, war, persecution and the Holocaust
Key distinctions: Fire Decree 28 February 1933; Enabling Act adopted 23 March and promulgated 24 March 1933; Nuremberg Laws 1935; November pogrom 1938.
Wannsee, 20 Jan 1942, coordinates an ongoing genocide; it is not its starting point.
The invasion of the Soviet Union inJune 1941 was followed by a major expansion of systematic mass shootings; shooting was itself a method of murder.
Intentionalism vs. functionalism and Goldhagen vs. Browning must be named as positions.
Always link provenance, euphemistic language and context when analysing perpetrator documents.
German division, Cold War, détente and European integration
Bloc dates: Marshall Plan 1947, NATO 1949, Warsaw Pact 1955, Wall 1961.
Ostpolitik chain: Moscow and Warsaw Treaties 1970, Basic Treaty 1972, Helsinki 1975.
Integration chain: ECSC 1951, Rome 1957, SEA 1986, Maastricht 1992.
Wandel durch Annäherung describes change through rapprochement; assess its aims and effects without attributing 1989 to a single policy.
Unification on 3 October 1990 follows Article 23 GG and the Two-Plus-Four Treaty.
Russia1917 and the development of Stalinist dictatorship
Distinguish the February Revolution from the Bolshevik seizure of power inOctober 1917.
State calendar conventions when exact dates matter.
Civil-war coalitions and later economic policies were not uniform.
Forced collectivization, rapid industrialization and repression require institutional explanation.
Propaganda claims and output targets need independent evidence.
The United States as an industrial society in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
Industrialization combines technology, markets, finance, labor and institutions.
The 1869 railway milestone does not establish equal access or uniform experience.
Output, profit, wages and employment are different measures.
Migration and labor conflict require disaggregated social perspectives.
Cross-national industrial comparisons need common questions and historical differences.
Imperial rivalry, World War I and the interwar order
Compete the theories: Hobson/Lenin, Schumpeter, Cain and Hopkins; don't blend them.
Versailles detail: Article 231, 100,000-man army, 132 bn gold marks under the 1921 London Schedule.
Weimar stabilisation (1924–29) and collapse (after 1929) must be explained separately.
Fischer's war-guilt thesis and the centenary July-crisis debate are positions, not settled facts.
Separate the material from the symbolic effects of the peace treaty in any judgement.