[Leica] German angst

[passaro.vince at gmail.com (Vince Passaro)]

Chris, To put the matter as gently as possible given the subject at hand:
you don't have a clue what you're talking about. I'd sit this one out.

Here's an interesting wrinkle on the German thing that I noticed growing up.
I was raised in a town on Long Island (geologically speaking a land mass
comprising what had once been all of New England's topsoil, residing a few
miles off the coast of Connecticut, Westchester, and the Bronx).  That town
was Great Neck. it's practically world famous as a Jewish-American
stronghold -- in those days, Asheknazi (European) jews; these days, a
majority Persian.

I was part of a largely Irish-Catholic enclave in the Old Village that had
grown up from the servant and blue collar types who'd served as
housekeepers, cooks, plumbers, butchers, etc for the movie moguls who'd
built up the town in the 'teens and 'twenties, before that crowd famously
moved out West. (Great Neck is the home of Jay Gatsby -- nee' Gatz --
America's emblematic arriviste).  We working class kids loved our WWII
movies -- everything from Audie Murphy to Kelly's Heroes and the Dirty Dozen
-- and since our fathers had all served, we were quite passionately
anti-German and anit-Japanese.

As I came into my teen years I noticed that the Jews in town LOVED German
things: Mercedes, Braun, Krups, Henckels and Wusthof -- couldn't get enough
of the stuff. No Joe D's Mr. Coffee for them (Mr. Coffee was a luxury item
for us of course.) . I came to understand it later -- Hannah Arendt, one of
the great German-Jewish intellectuals of the 20th century, went back to
germany every two years or so -- after being driven out as a Jew -- to see
her old mentor and lover Martin Heidegger, the great German philosopher
who'd (at Hitler's behest) taken over the University of Berlin and purged it
of all the Jews. Part of the grief of the Jewish intellectual community in
particular, and of many other Jews, was not just the Holocaust per se, ie
the loss of people, of loved ones, etc: there was also the loss of Germany
as a cultural idea that included them and that they could identify with. The
music, the literature, the language, the cosmopolitanism, etc. (The
engineering, the optics, the cutlery, the cars...) They missed it and many
in that generation wanted it back in one form or another.

My full understanding came when I remembered the old gourmet food shop in
town: Kuck's.  Old man Kuck was a tall, fat, pink pig-faced German with tiny
furious red-rimmed eyes right out of central casting. Here he was in Great
Neck and he hated Jews and screamed at his customers at the top of his lungs
every possible bit of invective imaginable in two languages. Nevertheless
you couldn't even get in the place on a Sunday morning it was so popular.
The Jews of Great Neck came in droves, and he screamed at them, and they
screamed back at him, and everyone, it seemed, was fulfilled, playing out
this historical farce that perhaps took some of the teeth out of the real
nightmare of the recent past.

Vince

On Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 1:14 PM, Chris Crawford <chris at 
chriscrawfordphoto.com
> wrote:

>
> Same with the Germans and Hitler. Enough people voted for him to put him in
> power, but that doesn't mean anyone in the universities voted for him.
>
>
> --
> Chris Crawford
> Fine Art Photography
> Fort Wayne, Indiana
> 260-424-0897
>
> http://www.chriscrawfordphoto.com  My portfolio
>
> http://blog.chriscrawfordphoto.com  My latest work!
>
>
>
> On 4/2/10 1:04 PM, "Steve Barbour" <steve.barbour at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >
> > On Apr 2, 2010, at 9:58 AM, Lawrence Zeitlin wrote:
> >
> >> I will be 80 this summer. In my 50s I taught graduate courses in a
> German
> >> University. But I never found anyone my own age or older who was a
> member of
> >> the Nazi party or was sympathetic to Hitler's aims. Most of my students,
> in
> >> their 20s, were totally unaware of the inhuman behavior of the Nazis
> toward
> >> Jews and other minorities. Of those older people who served in the
> military,
> >> many said that they did so under protest and claim never to have fired a
> >> shot in anger. As for the concentration camps, most denied knowing of
> their
> >> existence. This was denial at an almost psychopathic level. Hitler must
> have
> >> governed a country full of phantoms. Obviously there were no people in
> >> Germany.
> >
> >
> > funny how that works...
> >
> > in the sixties I worked at University  California  Berkeley...never met
> anyone
> > who voted for Reagan to be Governor  of California..
> >
> > in spite of that he won convincingly,
> >
> >
> >
> > Steve
> >
> >
> >> Larry Z
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Leica Users Group.
> >> See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Leica Users Group.
> > See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Leica Users Group.
> See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information
>