It's actually fairly astute. The reason "expanding Germany into the territory of neighboring countries we don't like" was so popular to Germans was because Germany (then and probably now) is fairly dense. One of my friends studied in Germany. One of his professors said something like, "Germany has never had enough land. We tried expanding once but it didn't work out so well."
It's easy to imagine the Netherlands having the same problem. Of course, emigrating to a less dense country is an easier solution.
Modern Germany is dense, yes. But guess what: People are migrating en masse from states like Saxony-Anhalt (118 inhabitants/km²) to Baden-Württemberg (301 inhabitants/km²).
[1] In quotation marks, because there was no state called Germany back then.
In modern German, Lebensraum is still a perfectly normal word when used as "the place where animals live". But we are very cautious about our history and the history of words.
Sometimes bordering on (self-) censorship. So that caution is not necessarily a good thing.
Habitat might have been the word I was looking for.
I agree that one should be careful when using emotionally charged words, but I also think that playful usage might be a way out of the self-censorship that surrounds a great many dreadful historical events. Not just in Germany.
