“That’s hilarious!” When my maternal grandmother said that – and she had, after all, survived two world wars – what she actually meant was: “That’s really funny!” People have the most varied associations with shooting, that much is clear – even if this idiom is somewhat more complex to understand than we are making it here.

When I was told that Korbinian Kohler had expanded his Bachmair Weissach world of magnificent hotels, elegant spas, restaurants, a mountain lodge, an avant-garde climbing and play hall and a beautiful riding stable with a new acquisition – a shooting range – I was pleased. Only in the second moment did it shoot through my mind that, in times when not so very far away from us enemy bullets are striking people down, this is a tricky subject.

Who wants to shoot, and why? Who wants to learn to shoot or practise at a shooting range, and why? My father went hunting, but rather rarely – forgive me for the honesty, Papa, up there on your cloud – actually hit anything. Or wanted to hit anything. In my view, he was more conservationist than hunter, but even when I was a child he made his maxim unmistakably clear to me: anyone who wanted to eat meat also had to be prepared, in the extreme case, to go all the way and shoot their roast themselves if necessary. Everyone else would be better and more decently advised to be: vegetarian.

But I do know one person who actually goes to shooting ranges regularly: my dear friend Elisabeth Bronfen. She may not be an outspoken pacifist, and yet she is beyond any suspicion of trigger-happiness, bloodlust or gun-crazed enthusiasm.

Elisabeth Bronfen is a scholar and has even appeared on Time Magazine lists of the world’s most influential intellectuals. And she is certainly not one of those deranged members of the National Rifle Association, which for years has aimed at keeping gun laws as lax as possible in a society trained for revenge. Nevertheless, she can shoot like hardly anyone else I know.

Elisabeth Bronfen, who lives in Switzerland, is not a sport shooter in the strict sense either. She never takes part in competitions. Elisabeth sees shooting firearms “as a kind of Zen Buddhist exercise,” as she says. “Because one does not shoot with the eyes. One shoots with the breath. From a moment of relaxation.” Anyone who tenses up never hits the target.

Elisabeth Bronfen, who has written many scholarly bestsellers – on the true nature of divas and the fate of artists’ muses, for example – insists: “When shooting, you cannot think of anything else, you cannot speak, and you cannot doubt. But once the shot has been fired, there is something incredibly cathartic about it.”

Back to the starting point, my grandmother’s phrase. It would be a mistake to infer too easily from the no less cathartic act of laughter to shooting. If one proceeds scientifically and looks up the idiom in books, one obtains different results. In the Lexikon der sprichwörtlichen Redensarten, it says that the expression derives “from schießen in the sense of growing forth, as when we say that ‘the lettuce is shooting.’” For in someone laughing, “who bends over, a hump, as it were, grows forth; compare: ‘to laugh oneself crooked.’”

Incidentally, I also find it incredibly liberating that our daughter, ever since she was a little girl, has put the boys to shame at every shooting gallery at the fair. She would rather shoot roses for them than the other way around. And every shot is always a hit. Away from the shooting range, however, she is an avowed pacifist and rejects weapons as a means of exercising violence. The idea of drawing a connection there? Now that really is hilarious.

SUSANNE HERMANSKI