Steve Spencer wrote:
Let's leave politics out of the discussion, please. I for one do not believe that the question of what responsibility we bear because of what are ancestors have done is an easy or simple question.
Xenophobia and extremism are not confined to one or two countries in the 1930s unfortunately. Most countries have periods of their history which they are not (or shouldn't be) proud of. And plenty of it going on as we 'speak'. But surely this is not a place for discussion of it in detail, outside of photographic issues.
Steve Spencer wrote:
Let's leave politics out of the discussion, please. I for one do not believe that the question of what responsibility we bear because of what are ancestors have done is an easy or simple question.
I agree with both your statements, but the politics started with the very topic and were emphasized by the comment I reacted to. As a Dutchman, I grew up in a country where Germans were hated, which is understandable, but it’s also those lingering emotions that provide fodder for the next conflict.
Jul 16, 2021 at 05:55 AM
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johnvanr wrote:
I agree with both your statements, but the politics started with the very topic and were emphasized by the comment I reacted to. As a Dutchman, I grew up in a country where Germans were hated, which is understandable, but it’s also those lingering emotions that provide fodder for the next conflict.
I would like to think that the topic isn't really about politics. I would hope that it is apolitical to commend Leica for helping their Jewish employees escape from Nazi Germany and avoid being killed by that regime. To support Leica for doing that isn't a political statement, but rather noting the help they provided in a time of great need.
Steve Spencer wrote:
I would like to think that the topic isn't really about politics. I would hope that it is apolitical to commend Leica for helping their Jewish employees escape from Nazi Germany and avoid being killed by that regime. To support Leica for doing that isn't a political statement, but rather noting the help they provided in a time of great need.
Nice read. Thanks for the link. Not knowing the history of camera making, always wondered why most cameras come from Japan and Germany. Not sure if it was singing to do with WWII.
RexGig0 wrote:
I remember that my Polish father-in-law, who was born in 1919, and therefore experienced the horrors of war as a young man, in Warsaw, often emphasized the goodness of individual Germans, as opposed to those individual Germans who did the evil things.
I am German. So this topic obviously resonates with me. It has been that way since I escaped childhood and learnt about all the atrocities my ancestors had committed. Lots of German companies were deeply involved in those crimes. That‘s why sometimes I‘m really astonished that those brands today are respected/loved again world wide.
Is it political or not? Yes and no.
In 1954, the American professor Milton Maier wrote: "Now I see a little better how Nazism overcame Germany – not by attack from without or by subversion from within, but with a whoop and a holler. It was what most Germans wanted – or, under pressure of combined reality and illusion, came to want. They wanted it; they got it; and they liked it.
I came back home a little afraid for my country [America], afraid of what it might want, and get, and like, under pressure of combined reality and illusion. I felt – and feel – that it was not German Man that I had met, but Man. He happened to be in Germany under certain conditions. He might be here, under certain conditions. He might, under certain conditions, be I.
If I – and my countrymen – ever succumbed to that concatenation of conditions, no Constitution, no laws, no police, and certainly no army would be able to protect us from harm. For there is no harm that anyone else can do to a man that he cannot do to himself, no good that he cannot do if he will. And what was said long ago is true: Nations are made not of oak and rock but of men, and, as the men are, so will the nations be."
(Milton Mayer – They Thought They Were Free. The Germans. 1933-1945)
I was at work one Saturday years ago. NPR broadcast a recording of Edward R Murrow entering the concentration camp. In the middle of a machine shop I had tears rolling down my face. NOBODY said a word when I told them what I had heard to make me cry.
