[rollei_list] Re: Rollei TLR - The History by Ian Parker
- From: Daniel Muchinsky <dmuchinsky@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 07 Sep 2006 21:54:29 -0400
>
> On Sep 6, 2006, at 4:57 PM, Marc James Small wrote:
>
>> At 10:21 AM 9/6/2006, Allen Zak wrote:
>>
>>> On Sep 6, 2006, at 12:26 AM, Marc James Small wrote:
>>>
>>>> B&H, and all of the other German optical firms, were under severe
>>>> strictures after 1933 as to what they were permitted to print. I
>>>> have a LOT of Prewar Zeiss and F&H and Leitz literatrure minus any
>>>> national flags and the like, but these are the English-language
>>>> editions. The German-language editions are a bit different by more
>>>> then ein bischen.
>>>
>>> The books and brochures to which I referred were all English language
>>> versions.
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Go figuree: businessmen attempt to survive in a hostile environment
>>>> and you immediately damn them as fellow-travellers. You really
>>>> ought to re-read your copy of Lenin: he spoke at length on this
>>>> point.
>>>
>>> Which writings by Lenin do you have in mind?
>>>
>>> Allen Zak
>>
>> A;;em
>>
>> You are REALLY starting to annoy me. ALL Franke & Heidecke
>> publications were subject to censorship. Publications put out by
>> their US agency were subject to censorship. Why do you not LEARN how
>> dictatorships work before tossing out futile comments about
>> culpabilities? The company had NO CHOICE. They published these
>> pictures or they were out of business and the families were in
>> concentration camps. What more do you want? You and I have never
>> experienced this but I have interviewed hundreds of folks who were
>> there, and the answer is that you did what was necessary to survive.
>
> As clearly stated, all the publications I examined were published
> around the same time. Surely, all would have been subject to the same
> laws and strictures, yet only the F & H book contained positive or any
> at all references to the Nazi regime. I did not present this
> observation as definitive, but simply as reinforcing my impression that
> the company was in cahoots.
>
> Although my investigations were not comprehensive, I have interviewed
> scores of people who were there, possibly over 100, in many walks of
> life from middle class housewives to professional military. My
> impression was that the extent of repression had much to do with class
> and status. The more privileged each, the fewer strictures they
> suffered. But on the whole, except for Jews and politicals, life went
> on for most people in Germany, at least for those not drafted to fight
> on the Eastern front Most hardships related were from consequences
> of the war rather than a fascist civil order.
>
> Although having not experienced a fascistic dictatorship, I did spend
> some time in mid-1960s Alabama, where, in addition to the never absent
> threat of white terrorist violence, racial segregation was maintained
> by civil authority up to the state level. The population was expected
> to conform, and deviations were severely punished. For simply
> attempting to vote, African Americans could expect to lose their jobs,
> homes, and sometimes their lives. Police were charged with enforcing
> the system by means including deadly force.
>
> During a 1965 voter registration campaign, an Alabama trooper shot to
> death voting rights worker Jimmy Lee Jackson, no legal action taken.
> In Selma. several white businessmen beat to death civil rights activist
> James Reeb and were later acquitted of the freely admitted act. Viola
> Liuzzo, another civil rights volunteer, was ambushed and gunned down by
> Klansmen and it took federal intervention to convict them. When
> Jonathon Daniels, my Selma roommate, was murdered in Loundes County
> before several witnesses, his killer was turned loose by the jury. All
> this for nothing more than the right to vote.
>
> While far short of life in Nazi Germany, my experiences in the
> pre-civil rights South at least gave me an appreciation for what it is
> like to live with repression, the fear it generates and the attitudes
> it fosters among all parties. Or, at least I think enough so that I am
> moved to express an opinion.
> .
>>
>> As to Lenin, read his writings: he wrote repetitively about his
>> perception that the Middle Class was the true enemy of the Proletariat
>> and that the factory owner was the worst of that lot. And he warned,
>> in many points, that factory owners and managers would do their best
>> to seem to adapt themselves to the New Regime, once the Revolution had
>> come (In the end, most Russian Imperial factory managers kept their
>> jobs under the Soviets, proving yet again the dishonesty in Lenin's
>> rants.)
>>
>> Marc
>
> Although it has been decades since my last reading of Lenin, I was not
> sure what applies here. Communist and Nazi agendas were entirely
> different. While both used repression, the Soviets were bent on
> eventually eliminating its capitalist class while the Nazis wanted
> theirs harnessed to the state. This made a significant difference in
> the way these populations were treated. In the USSR, suppression was
> wholesale, brutal, often lethal, while in Nazi Germany, where
> industrialists were both menaced and coddled, the latter was applied
> far more often than the former. Fritz Thyssen and (very) few others
> did prison time , but were relatively well treated and survived the
> war. OTOH, owners and stockholders in general were not much molested
> and dividends were delivered more or less on time, tending to undercut
> any uneasiness with less agreeable Nazi policies.
>
> Apart from those enabling the rise of fascism (Fritz Thyssen again; Oh
> the irony!), I don't hold mainstream German businessmen of that time
> as criminal for not confronting the regime. But when it came to the
> more odious directives, such as those violating human rights, more
> should have resisted. What they faced was possibly prison, loss of
> property, but very unlikely their lives, a small price to pay for one's
> soul.
>
> Businessmen like Oskar Schindler and John Rabe are rare in any society,
> but represent a higher standard than those who accommodate. In that
> context, Francke and Heidecke were not criminals and they made a great
> product. It could have been worse. That it wasn't better; oh, well.
>
> Allen Zak
>
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Why don't you take your personal controversy somewhere else. None of this
has anything to do with photography. It is just cluttering up the website.
Daniel Muchinsky
---
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