The head of the federal gov't school business has come up in recent days to say....maybe bringing Bundeswehr soldiers to explain war...in the classroom....is wise.
I sat and pondered over this.
As a kid (rural America), we had a teacher or two who were vets out of WW II/Vietnam. War was rarely brought up and on the rare occasions....it was pretty strongly emphasized....you just don't want to be in the middle of some jungle or French field with war going on.
At some event....probably around age 16, some Vietnam vet got into a long descriptive piece about his year, and went into graphic detail. He had about a dozen attacks 'etched' into his mind and it was obvious that the stress of things bothered him.
In this case of the German soldiers? The majority of them (I would guess 90-percent) would not be the kind of folks you'd want to come into a class and give a one-hour 'talk' over the war and the looming impact on Germany. I might go and say that fewer than 200 soldiers have the mindset to lay out the 'talk' and answer the stupid questions at the end.
The fact that we are at the beginning of year three of the war? Yeah, this is probably getting the point across that year four, and year five will come.
Those 90-year old German soldiers from WW II? Well....you could bring them in, but then you've got to talk over Nazis.
Some students unable to handle this talk? Oh, I would imagine more than a quarter would be disturbed by the war talk and the potential that it might one day come to Germany.
All of this being something unusual for German society? Yeah, that's the weird part. A lot of Germans born after WW II....don't have the thought process to handle this, and half the nation thought that when the 'Cold War' ended.....peace was evident.
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