"In the tranquillity of the Konrad Adenauer High School, no one has to fret about the kinds of things that worry Americans on campus, like guns or drugs, because such things do not happen here, said Heinz Wilms, a history teacher.
Since January, though, he has been nudging his 10th-grade class of 16-year-olds to confront something much more momentous than school-yard discipline: the historical progression from Hitler's rise to power in 1933 to the Holocaust.
It is a course, Chapter 6 in a standard German history text, that challenges Germany's young to come to terms with the burden of a collective past far more cruel and destructive than teen-agers anywhere else in the world are obliged to contemplate.
And it is part of the attempt by a postwar generation to explain why the past must not repeat itself to those who will one day run Europe's economic and political powerhouse. The effort, some educators argue, has visibly faltered in the wave of attacks on foreigners and the rise of neo-Nazi groups since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.
Yet, in interviews with students, both in Bonn and in a comparable high school in what was once East Berlin, a clear impression emerged that while many young Germans sense no personal guilt for a past generation's crimes, they feel a responsibility to thwart any revival of their history's racism, anti-Semitism, militarism and nationalism.
At the same time, though, they share a nagging worry that their own history hampers what they say should be a justifiable sense of pride in their own nation's achievements.
"The Americans can put their flag out in their own backyard, and no one says anything, but if we did that we'd be accused of being Nazis," said Christian Kreutz, a 16-year-old student at Konrad Adenauer.
Stefan Bohm, in the former East Berlin, commented: "You can't say: 'I'm proud to be a German.' Beethoven was a German, too, but everything now is seen through the Second World War."
Some seemed uneasy with or skeptical at the Government's line that the end of the war in Europe, 50 years ago in May, offered most Germans a liberation from Hitler's tyranny because, some students say, most Germans took part in what happened, one way or another.
In the effort to escape the Nazis' centralization of power, the authorities of the various federal states took responsibility for postwar education, so there is no single standardized curriculum for teaching modern German history. But in 1991, the federal Government's educational-monitoring agency urged that the Nazis be subject to an "intensive and thorough treatment" in schools and that "the memory of the Holocaust is kept alive."
In West Germany during the first postwar decades, Mr. Wilms said, history books were written by Nazi-era teachers, and the urge to repress the past was widespread.
The new text seems to offer a fuller picture. And the chapter on the Nazi era and the Holocaust, taught to 16-year-olds, enjoins them to ask: "Who knew what? Who participated and who kept their distance and in what ways were people's dealings and convictions affected by the National Socialist system of dominance?"
The answers seem to offer a broad indictment: "Membership of the Nazi Party promised influence, professional security, a career." While those who said later that they had joined simply to protect themselves and their families, the school book tells young Germans, the reality was that by joining the party, Germans "strengthened the party and the dominance of the Nazis."
No effort is made to discount the Holocaust or the role played in it by individual Germans, the Nazi regime or German industry. Part of the chapter chronicles the chemical giant I. G. Farben's establishment of a branch called I. G. Auschwitz, near the death camp in German-occupied Poland -- a factory making artificial rubber that used camp inmates as laborers and sent them to the gas chambers when they weakened.
"Every student in Germany must tackle this theme," Mr. Wilms said. "No one can say they didn't know."
They are taught that the Nazis came to power on the wings of economic collapse and humiliation at Germany's defeat in the First World War. They are taught about Hitler's race laws. They are taught that their forebears killed six million Jews. But they also learn that this was history, with a European and a German context, not personal guilt.
"We cannot do anything about it -- it was our grandparents that did it," said Barbara Schuler, a 16-year-old student at Konrad Adenauer High School, in suburb of Bad Godesberg. "But we should not forget it."
For most Germans, education about the war begins at home, in sometimes painful encounters. "If you ask your grandparents if they supported the regime, you don't get an answer," said Matthias Fink, a scholar at the same school.
Not surprisingly, a group of 17-year-olds in the Hans und Hilde Coppi Gymnasium, named for anti-Nazi resistance fighters, in the less affluent Karlshorst district of the former East Berlin had different experiences to recount.
In the depiction of the former Communist education system, said Daniel Hadrisch, a 17-year-old, the East Germans, "were all anti-Fascists" while the Nazi mantle "was given to the West Germans."
Their teacher, Roswitha Quiram, was more forthright. "I don't have a bad conscience," she said. "I don't see myself as responsible. But I would be responsible if it happened again."
Mr. Wilms, the teacher in Bonn, said that "each year, I take a group of students to Auschwitz." On one occasion, he said, his group of young Germans was insulted by a group of young Israelis. "My group was very upset," he recounted. "They said, 'What's that got to do with us? We can't help it.' "