Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/01/04
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]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!