Re: Riefenstahl (wrong address?)

["Kent Smith" <unipac@teleport.com>]

Patrick,

This was sent to my e-mail address, I believe by mistake.

Kent Smith
unipac@teleport.com
LUG

- ----------
> From: Patrick G. Sobalvarro <pgs@sobalvarro.org>
> To: Marc James Small <msmall@roanoke.infi.net>
> Cc: leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us
> Subject: Re: Riefenstahl
> Date: Friday, August 22, 1997 12:02 AM
> 
> At 12:56 PM 8/21/97 -0400, Marc James Small wrote:
> >No, Leni did the best in troubled times.  I doubt if any of us would
have
> >done much differently, given the tenor of the times in which she worked.
> 
> Oh, I don't know about that.  I'm not so sure of myself as to say that I
> would have been above what Leni Riefenstahl did, but I do know that many
> people were above it.  When my wife and I visited her cousins in Germany
a
> couple of years ago, we spent a few days with her cousin Adolf, a man I
> like very much, who had been both a civilian and a soldier under the
Nazis.
>  One of the stories he told us during a long afternoon walking around
> Schramberg, where he lives, was about the people who were taken away by
the
> police in the period leading up to the war.  Schramberg is not a very big
> town, and it wasn't as big in the thirties as it is now.  Still as we
> walked in the ruins of an old castle looking over the valley he told us
> about a plaque down in the town square, a plaque with a list of names on
> it.  I don't remember exactly how many he said there were, but I think it
> was about ten.  Some of them were the names of Jewish citizens of
> Schramberg who were killed by the Nazis simply on the basis of their
> ancestry.  The others -- six or seven, if memory serves -- were killed
for
> political subversion.
> 
> Think about that.  We don't think too much about those people now.
> Probably most of them were leftists -- union organizers, teachers,
cranks,
> "intellectuals."  The likes of Fritz Lang and Marlene Dietrich left Nazi
> Germany and went away to America, where they made money and movies and
> lived long and were famous.  Leni Riefenstahl stayed in Nazi Germany and
> collaborated and still goes diving and has gallery exhibitions and some
> gigolo in a fancy car to drive her around.
> 
> Those citizens of Schramberg were killed.  No aftermath.  No huddling in
> the ruins and recovery and then economic miracle and prosperity and
growing
> old surrounded by your family.  No surviving.  They died because they saw
> something evil and they just wouldn't go along with it even though
everyone
> else was doing it.  And they never saw the far side of it.  For all they
> knew, the Nazis would win and prosper and they themselves would never be
> remembered as anything but traitors -- but they just wouldn't do it.
> 
> They have a plaque.
> 
> Cousin Adolf says they were stupid, to attempt to resist such a powerful,
> repressive and popular regime.  I wouldn't say that.  Thank goodness I
have
> never yet been in the circumstances those people were, because I wouldn't
> presume to say I'm as good as they were, but I certainly hope! that if I
> were I would have the courage and integrity to end up like them rather
than
> like Leni Riefenstahl.
> 
> -Patrick
>