Re: Riefenstahl

["Patrick G. Sobalvarro" <pgs@sobalvarro.org>]

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