Character: Ernst Birkholz

Here I stand before you, one of hundreds of thousands of bankrupt, whose faith and strength were destroyed by the war... Here I stand before you and feel how much more in your life, how many more ties bind you to her... Here I stand before you, your teacher and mentor. What did I teach you? To tell you that in twenty years you will become crippled with empty souls that loose all your aspirations will be ruthlessly etching until you are driven to a gray level of mediocrity? To tell you that all education, all culture, all science - not that other, as a cruel joke, while people in the name of God and humanity will destroy each other poisonous gases, iron, gunpowder and fire? What I teach you, you little creation, you who only remained pure in those terrible years?
What can I teach you? To show you how to tear the ring from a hand grenade and toss it in person? To show you how you stab a man with a bayonet, to kill butt or entrenching shovel? To show how direct the muzzle of the rifle to such an inconceivable wonder how breathable the chest, pulsating light, beating heart? To tell, what is tetanus, the exposed spinal cord, ripped off the skull? To describe you how to look like splattered brain, fractured bones, crawl out the insides? Depict as groan when the bullet hits the belly like a rattle when shot through the lungs, and which the whistle comes out of the throat of the wounded in the head? Other than that I know nothing! In addition, I learned nothing!
Or I bring you to green-gray geographical map, hold it with a finger and say that here was killed love? To explain to you that the books you hold in your hands is a network that catch your unsuspecting soul into the dense thicket of phrases in barbed wire false concepts?
Here I stand before you, stained, guilty, and not to teach, and to beg you would like me: stay as you are and don't let to fan the warm glow of your childhood in the sharp flames of hatred! Still your brow is fanned by the breath of purity - if I teach you! Me still chasing bloody shadows of the past - dare I even approach you? Shouldn't I myself first becoming human again?