“Why Canada?” Jürgen continues our conversation from yesterday.

Because I have relatives in Toronto and I might be better able to survive a nuclear war in the Canadian outback.

In the mid-1970s, Uncle Adolf visited my grandparents in Teutschenthal. Uncle Adolf is a brother of Grandpa Hans.

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My great-uncle stood tall in my grandparents' crooked shack, looking like a man of the world and dressed like a movie star. He spoke in an eloquent mixture of German, English and French about a completely foreign world.

At school we learned how miserable life is there, where poor old pensioners have to live from hand to mouth.

WHY does he rave about it? WHY does he want to go back there? WHY doesn't he just stay here? His "no way" really shattered my theoretical world view at the time.

Above all, there was his completely relaxed distance from the political issues we were regularly confronted with in class.

We were even allowed to feel particularly safe. Our school building in Halle-Neustadt was one of the first to have a nuclear shelter.

The rooms in the basement had large, bright window frontages with huge light wells in which metre-high concrete slabs rose diagonally upwards. The doors to the stairwells were steel colossuses weighing tonnes.

In the event of a nuclear attack, the concrete slabs would be tilted towards the windows and the airlocks would be locked like a submarine.

If a nuclear bomb exploded, don't look into the light, but hide under your desk until the school has been evacuated. Then everything would be fine.

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