Generations of students have formative memories of the final trip, which marks the approaching end of school.

This week away from home gives adolescents a foretaste of what many expect from the next phase of their lives: more freedom, more independence, more big city.

Eva sleeper

Editor in the "Life" department of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

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Berlin has been high on the wish lists of tenth to twelveth graders for many years.

Most of them return home happy, or at least impressed.

On the other hand, 24 students from northern Hesse will now have to deal with the fact that they saw their teacher die on their final trip to Berlin.

Perhaps they will also have to mourn their teacher, who at the time of going to press was still in mortal danger.

Seven students were injured so badly that they were still in various Berlin hospitals on Friday.

The act in Berlin is not the first to hit a class

The day after the rampage that took the life of the 51-year-old teacher from Hesse, another teacher received an email.

In Charlottenburg, just a few kilometers from the scene of the accident, Brigitte Kather runs the Paula Fürst School.

The email comes from the School Psychology Service of the City of Berlin, asking if support is needed.

Presumably only the Paula Fürst School received this e-mail on Thursday.

Because the depressing news of the attack on a class not only triggers horror and sadness in her colleagues.

But also painful memories.

On July 14, 2016, 28 12th graders from the comprehensive school were on a course in Nice.

The WDR documentary "Class Trip to Terror" from 2017, which is well worth seeing, tells their story and names them.

On their final evening, they wanted to watch the traditional fireworks for the French National Day on the beach promenade.

With them on the ten-day journey were their teachers, Fouad Zaim and Saskia Schnabel.

On the way to the center, the group got separated.

The larger part had pushed into a bus towards the city center with Zaim.

Schnabel was walking with six students on the Promenade des Anglais in the same direction.

An Islamist terrorist drove a truck onto the broad embankment, hitting hundreds of people.

More than 400 were injured and 84 died.

Among the fatalities were Saskia Schnabel and the two schoolgirls Salma and Silan.

Another student, Amal, was taken to hospital with serious injuries.

He packed the suitcase of the dead

At the same time that an apparently mentally disturbed man drove his small car onto the sidewalk near the Memorial Church on Wednesday, Brigitte Kather was taking oral Abitur exams at the Paula Fürst School.

She explains that among the examinees are the students from Saskia Schnabel's eighth grade at the time.

You have already announced that you want to commemorate your deceased teacher at the graduation ceremony.

Since the 2016/17 school year, Kather has been the director of the comprehensive school with more than 1000 students.

In July 2016, she was actually not even active in her current role.

On July 15, however, she had an appointment there and was there when it became clear that the school had to report dead and injured people.

"My first duty was

to convene a staff meeting and report on what is happening.

It was really awful," she says.

That same day, the school psychological service made two psychologists available for all-round care of the returnees.

In the WDR documentary, numerous students report how Fouad Zaim caught them from the moment chaos broke out in southern France.

It was he who packed the suitcases of the dead for the return journey.

In the film he says that this action was very distressing for him at the moment and also afterwards.

Holding the belongings of the colleague with whom he had spent so much time in the previous days was getting to him.

On the evening of July 15, the returnees landed in Berlin, shielded from the public.