Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/01/04
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Marc James Small wrote: > > At 02:05 PM 1999-01-04 -0700, Mark Rabiner wrote: > > > >My first camera was a Voightlander in the Mid Fifties. There was a > >rationale that the company was or is though German, Jewish owned. (Did > >the Voightlander family survive the war?) My relatives, all Doctors > >discussed comparative microscopes over a few Scotches (for real, no tie > >in intended) and the subject of lampshades came up. I later found this > >ironic because one of them had spent the war in a Japanese Concentration > >Camp. By the mid sixty's it was all a moot point. > > <sigh> First, it is VOIGTLANDER, with or without an umlauted "A", NEVER > "Voightlander". There is a factory press-release on this on the occasion > of their 200th birthday in 1956. Second, the Voigtlander family were not > Jewish or, if they were, successfully concealed this from the clerics of > the Catholic Church in Vienna for more than a century. Third, the family > survives to this day, though they sold the factory in 1926 to Schering, who > then sold it to Zeiss in 1951, who then sold it to Rollei in 1973, who then > passed on a gutted brand-name to their bankruptcy estate in '80. Only the > name survives, alas!, as my first camera was, and still is, a Prewar Bessa, > a fine camera even today. > > Marc > > msmall@roanoke.infi.net FAX: +540/343-7315 > Cha robh bas fir gun ghras fir! thank you I stand corrected Mark Rabiner