Barracks for volunteer soldiers

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The Bundeswehr is in the process of selecting a new design for a one-man Stube (single room apartment).

(link, hat tip to Augengeradeaus). It's belated, but they finally appear to intend to make life more attractive in the barracks. They didn't need to for decades because they used forced labour (conscripts) for most jobs.

Single man rooms such as the ones shown in the video are the equivalent of the cheap rooms rented by university students, and thus probably appropriate for a few years for men and women in their early 20's. It's surely better than even the best-equipped 2-, 4- and 6-bed rooms that I remember from the 90's.

I doubt the barracks modernisations will really yield such rooms because the buildings have different and not really standardised internal layouts.

The social aspect of this is interesting: It's quite a challenge to build and maintain cohesion in a (small) unit, and everyone living in his own mini apartment is probably not going to help. It's my experience that the large 6-bed rooms turned out to be the de facto social rooms where the soldiers of several rooms met, played consoles or watched TV. That's where the real bonding happened, and if the Bundeswehr bureaucracy is still as I remember it, it will try to squeeze as many one-man apartments into barracks buildings as possible for otherwise they'd need many more new buildings. This would leave hardly any space left for dedicated social rooms (with TV, couch, pool table and the like) - and social rooms that aren't inhabited may be left largely unused anyway. All it takes is a broken TV set or other damage that's not getting repaired ASAP could render such a room unattractive and unused. This would leave the inns (segregated enlisted personnel / NCOs / officers), which are frequented by soldiers from the entire garrison, not only one company. Not a good place for bonding.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

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