Have you ever wondered what it must of been like fighting against the allies, well today, my class got a little taste of that experience. Recently my class was luckily enough to have a guest speaker come present for us, his name was Helmut Lemke.

(Helmut as a child)

Helmut fought for Germany against the Allies in World War II and with that experience came quite the intense campfire story. Throughout Helmut’s presentation, he provided a different perspective on the war which most Allies would not of know. Learning about the world wars always had me questioning, what are the enemies experiences and whether they want to be in the war? Helmut answered my question and any of my further questions with ease.

During his talk, many concepts arose and that’s where this assignment comes into place. Our task was to think of a concept, use an example of that concept from Helmut’s stories, turn it into a question, and finally answer that question.

(The process of this assignment)

What I found challenging was to find a concept that applied to most of his story, and in my opinion that concept is, fear.

What sprung out at me from Helmut’s visit was his concept of fear. Fear seemed very prominent in all his stories and how it managed to keep him alive by forcing him to make the right decisions. In his stories multiple life or death situations emerged but fear kept him alive. One of my favourite stories he was telling was, he was laying on the ground with his comrades while taking fire. As he looked ahead he saw a soldier role over and rolled straight into the line of fire, out of fear he rolled the other way a to this day is still alive.

Now this got me interested in my question, does fear help you survive by making the right conscious decisions or does it cause you to make irrational decisions that get you killed?

Now, how I answered my question was a multiple step process. I first started off by finding out the definition of fear and that is

(Click on image to enlarge)

So what I learned from this is that fear is an emotion that makes you believe that someone or something might hurt you. Here comes some science, the emotion, fear, is a product of cognitive systems in the neocortex that operates in parallel with the amygdala circuit.

 

(The neocortex is the top part of your brain that controls functions such as sensory perception, cognition, generation of motor commands, spatial reasoning and language.)

 

 

The amygdala also conveniently controls all of our senses, muscles and hormones. When ever felt threatened the amygdala springs into actions which enables your body to quickly react to what ever the threat by sight or sound, which is way you “jump” when scared because your muscles are tensing up as told to do by the amygdala. Fear is a cognitive function that is designed to keep the body alert by controlling the senses and muscles keeping us alive. To answer my question, the emotion fear is designed to help you stay alive but in theory your body could become overwhelmed with senses and cause you to freeze standing still which will get you killed in a life or death situation.

In a small group of four, Cashel, Jackson, Teva ,and me, put together a conversational type podcast where we talk about all our concepts and tried to answer everyone’s questions as best we could. I really liked the idea of the podcast because hearing everyone’s different opinions on a topic is always interesting to see where I stand on the matter. I would enjoy completing another podcast activity in the future.

Thank you so much for coming to share your stories with us Helmut, I had an excellent time listening to all you experiences you had during the war!