I feel squeamish talking to Germans about the war. Is it a British thing? | Adrian Chiles

The D-day commemorations have made us all reflect on the second world war. But I hesitated to talk to my German neighbour about it

I was preparing to go on the radio on the morning of the D-day commemorations when I remembered I needed to talk to a neighbour of mine about something else entirely. I don't know him well but he's a nice man, a good bit younger than me, with a young family. He's German. I'd been wondering how the D-day events were being covered in Germany, and nearly asked him about it, but then stopped myself, remembering that I've never been quite sure how - or if - to talk to Germans about the war.

In 1982, when I was 15 years old, I went on a school exchange to a town called Leonberg, near Stuttgart. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't looking left and right and over my shoulder for baddies there, not at all. The teenagers and their teachers and their families were just like us, which wasn't surprising to me, but the war had been very prominent in the books and films of my cultural life, and I had questions about it. And they weren't, to be clear, along the lines of: Did your grandad bomb my nan?" Although, to be honest, I'm not quite sure what I wanted to ask, nor who to ask, or how to ask it. But I was doing a lot of wondering.