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Passings...

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Sorry for possibly derailing this thread, but maybe this is interesting also for non-European reader's in memory of interesting persons in Germany's worst history.

Indeed, Heinz Rühmann was a German actor legend, because he was not only a really good actor, but he managed somehow to get through all bad times in German history of the 20th century. Although he knew almost all high-ranking Nazi-party-members, the Germans and the Allied officers who were responsible for De-Nazification and culture in Germany never really identified him with the propaganda of the Nazi-regime.

I think, it is because he was also in reality a man similar to his roles in cinema: a man who was sympathetic for everyone and you could not be angry with him for a longer time.

Just imagine this: Heinz Rühmann was married in the Nazi-times with Maria Bernheim, a woman who was regarded by the Nazis as Jewish and both were in danger.
But Rühmann knew via his friend Ernst Udet the Nazi-Air-Force-minister Göring and Göring himself adviced him to divorce and marry his wife to a Scandinavian actor who was constantly living in Germany. Heinz Rühmann paid the marriage of his former wife Bernheim and all the costs of her living later in Sweden. Maria Bernheim was also guest at Rühmann's later marriage-party, when he married the actress Hertha Feiler and Maria Bernheim congratulated him for his new wife and obviously wished both luck without any irony. After 1945, Maria Bernheim defended her ex-husband against all accusations of political opportunism.


Rühmann also only wrote positive remarks during his whole life about the persons he really was a friend of, for example about Ernst Udet, who helped him to learn how to fly and for some time in the 1980's, Rühmann was really the oldest private pilot of Germany.
Rühmann wrote about Ernst Udet, that he was unable to imagine this friendly man to be a war hero and Rühmann thought, Udet was becoming this man only because he was addicted to fly and a great aviator. Rühmann mentioned an event to show why and how much he liked Udet.

After a film premiere in one of Berlin's biggest cinemas, Rühmann and Udet were together with some other pilots and officers at a party in a Berliner "Biergarten", when a young waitress stumbled and four big beer glasses were poured over the head of Ernst Udet. The young waitress was looking like an Italian or a Greek girl, in any case not German and only saying: "Oh my God, of my God!"; trembling in fear because Udet was wearing his parade uniform with all his medals as a war hero from WW I and some more Nazi decorations. Everyone was silent, waiting how he might react and he slowly turned around, looked at the girl, started to laugh and said: "Dear girl, do you really think that so much beer will help against my hair loss?"
Everyone was laughing and this evening made Udet even more famous, who later became such a tragic figure that he was later "The Devil's General" in a theatre play and in a movie with Curd Jürgens.

 
Two obituaries earlier this year : Annie Glenn (born 1920, made it to 100 years old and died 19 may 2020), widow of astronaut John Glenn (d. 2016), and Rene Carpenter (born 1928, and died 24 july 2020), former wife of astronaut Scott Carpenter (d. 2013). They were the last survivors of the Mercury 7 women, who became famous, after the selection of their husbands as astronauts for NASA.
 
When there are on the same day very good and friendly obituaries in these three most influential German medias about the same person, you know that a star known and highly esteemed by the whole world has died and the second headline is very nice: "Charm in eternity" / "Charming for all the ages"!



and for crucifixion fans of Diana Rigga1f894e848aaf425c6febba0bca5f74d.jpg. yes you guessed it.... a little before my time.
 
Doris Day
View attachment 706315
Died at 97
Not the sexiest actress, but one who gave great joy to many, including me.
Naturally it is(!) the most sexiest actress, if you don't think so, you must look at the performance in calamity Jane, all three songs (Windy City is perfect dancing) and naturally that one with Walter Keel "I can do without you!"
and in "Glass bottom boat" she is not nude but bottomless, well probably not in reality, but could be in reality, because you would not see it anyway.... Hahaha!5963g.jpg well the wet dreams of my puberty years. Do not laugh, I think we should not underestimate her, because her dancing/singing skills. And if she will shoot you laughing!B3-DZ208_dorisd_M_20190513101737.jpg
 
"Der brave Soldat Schwejk" with Heinz Rühmann was one of the best movie versions of this Czech story by Jaroslav Hasek, possibly the best of all, I think. I loved this movie also for the background story-teller with his sarcastical historical explanations, e.g. that all European empires were absolutely sure to be right and all nations were so happy in the beginning of WW I to go to the battlefields as if they were going to a marriage of nations and not to a battle of nations.
Some quotations in German are simply unforgettable, e.g. when Rühmann as Schwejk / Schweik is trying to convince others in a very polite-militarical manner of his mental weakness by speaking in a Czech-German dialect: "Melde gehorsamst, dass ich bin ein beheerdlich anerkannter Idiot!" Correct would have been: "Melde gehorsamst, dass ich ein behördlich anerkannter Idiot bin." (= "Obediently I report that I am a government-approved idiot!")
Or when he is not executed in the end because in the last minute, the message arrived that the war is over. Schwejk takes down his blindfold and asks: "Weiß man auch schon beileifig / beiläufig, wer den Krieg gewonnen hat?" (= "Does one incidentally know already who has won the war?")

Movies like this one and the knowledge of Rühmann's sometimes winding path of life made him one of the most loved and most honored German actors ever. I remember his last appearance on German TV as star guest in this show in 1994:


in such a show: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wetten,_dass..?

All the international audience - mixed of Austrians, Germans and Swiss - rose up and spent the longest standing ovation I had ever seen on German TV for this little old man who was the greatest German-speaking actor of his time and a morally really good man in very bad times. He and many spectators had tears in their eyes.
 
Sorry for possibly derailing this thread, but maybe this is interesting also for non-European reader's in memory of interesting persons in Germany's worst history.

Indeed, Heinz Rühmann was a German actor legend, because he was not only a really good actor, but he managed somehow to get through all bad times in German history of the 20th century. Although he knew almost all high-ranking Nazi-party-members, the Germans and the Allied officers who were responsible for De-Nazification and culture in Germany never really identified him with the propaganda of the Nazi-regime.

I think, it is because he was also in reality a man similar to his roles in cinema: a man who was sympathetic for everyone and you could not be angry with him for a longer time.

Just imagine this: Heinz Rühmann was married in the Nazi-times with Maria Bernheim, a woman who was regarded by the Nazis as Jewish and both were in danger.
But Rühmann knew via his friend Ernst Udet the Nazi-Air-Force-minister Göring and Göring himself adviced him to divorce and marry his wife to a Scandinavian actor who was constantly living in Germany. Heinz Rühmann paid the marriage of his former wife Bernheim and all the costs of her living later in Sweden. Maria Bernheim was also guest at Rühmann's later marriage-party, when he married the actress Hertha Feiler and Maria Bernheim congratulated him for his new wife and obviously wished both luck without any irony. After 1945, Maria Bernheim defended her ex-husband against all accusations of political opportunism.


Rühmann also only wrote positive remarks during his whole life about the persons he really was a friend of, for example about Ernst Udet, who helped him to learn how to fly and for some time in the 1980's, Rühmann was really the oldest private pilot of Germany.
Rühmann wrote about Ernst Udet, that he was unable to imagine this friendly man to be a war hero and Rühmann thought, Udet was becoming this man only because he was addicted to fly and a great aviator. Rühmann mentioned an event to show why and how much he liked Udet.

After a film premiere in one of Berlin's biggest cinemas, Rühmann and Udet were together with some other pilots and officers at a party in a Berliner "Biergarten", when a young waitress stumbled and four big beer glasses were poured over the head of Ernst Udet. The young waitress was looking like an Italian or a Greek girl, in any case not German and only saying: "Oh my God, of my God!"; trembling in fear because Udet was wearing his parade uniform with all his medals as a war hero from WW I and some more Nazi decorations. Everyone was silent, waiting how he might react and he slowly turned around, looked at the girl, started to laugh and said: "Dear girl, do you really think that so much beer will help against my hair loss?"
Everyone was laughing and this evening made Udet even more famous, who later became such a tragic figure that he was later "The Devil's General" in a theatre play and in a movie with Curd Jürgens.

I read "Der Teufels General" years ago.

World War I was easier to put into movies than World War II. World War I was a surprise--no one knew going in what industrialized war would be like and the tragedy was palpable as a result. I read "Im Westen Nichts Neues" (in English, All's Quiet on the Western Front) as well. Here is a brilliant quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Tender is the Night".

“This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first
Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The
Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could
remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in
Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.”
 
In my humble opinion, World War I was the last war with a little rest of "civilized warfare" like in the Napoleonic Wars. The war was really declared to other nations and commanders and especially the pilots still had sometimes some imaginations of "honour" or "knighthood" and in spite of all cruelties, the normal people were usually not driven away from their properties, when the frontiers and borders changed, but the new weapons produced in an industrial manner were terrible and the invention and use of war gas was almost madness because you could never really control it in storage.
World War II was then absolute madness because of its racism against Jews and/ or Slavian nations which made this war a relapse to barbarism and a reversion of history. The war in Eastern Europe towards nations which were regarded as "subhumans" - especially by German Nazi troops like the "Totenkopfverbände der SS" / "Skull-Units of the SS" - was very different from the war in the West of Europe. In the West, the enemy nations of Germany were regarded as "almost equal" but declining because of not caring for their own races, so this was a war there for pure power and controlling them. But in the East and in the long run, the war was a war of total extermination of all enemy nations like the Slavs or everyone who spoke a Slavic language. Other nations which had a history of warriors like the Hungarians or a history of descendants from former empires like the Romanians were regarded as natural allies against the "barbarian Slavs", which was again absolute madness.
Hitler's and Stalin's troops were using almost the same measures of mass extermination as long as they were allies during the validity of the Hitler-Stalin-Pact (= secret treaty protocol of the Ribbentrop-Molotov-negotiations). Polish people were regarded as enemies by Hitler and Stalin for different reasons and both tried to kill as many members of the Polish national elite as possible. Both, Hitler and Stalin, were herding around whole nations from their places of residence like cattle is driven from one pasture to another and you could find the elite of many nations in concentration camps in Germany until 1945 and in Gulag camps in Siberia until ca. 1960.
This World War II was the worst war ever in human history and the only good thing about it is the invention of film and movies in the same century so that you can watch the horror of this war at any time as a deterrent and chilling example for (in-)human madness and cruelty.
But even these terrible examples seem to be not enough because there are still everywhere in this world enough people who simply do not want to learn anything from history and so, they are still regarding Hitler or Stalin as "great" politicians. Madness without ending!
 
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In my humble opinion, World War I was the last war with a little rest of "civilized warfare" like in the Napoleonic Wars. The war was really declared to other nations and commanders and especially the pilots still had sometimes some imaginations of "honour" or "knighthood" and in spite of all cruelties, the normal people were usually not driven away from their properties, when the frontiers and borders changed, but the new weapons produced in an industrial manner were terrible and the invention and use of war gas was almost madness because you could never really control it in storage.
World War II was then absolute madness because of its racism against Jews and/ or Slavian nations which made this war a relapse to barbarism and a reversion of history. The war in Eastern Europe towards nations which were regarded as "subhumans" - especially by German Nazi troops like the "Totenkopfverbände der SS" / "Skull-Units of the SS" - was very different from the war in the West of Europe. In the West, the enemy nations of Germany were regarded as "almost equal" but declining because of not caring for their own races, so this was a war there for pure power and controlling them. But in the East and in the long run, the war was a war of total extermination of all enemy nations like the Slavs or everyone who spoke a Slavic language. Other nations which had a history of warriors like the Hungarians or a history of descendants from former empires like the Romanians were regarded as natural allies against the "barbarian Slavs", which was again absolute madness.
Hitler's and Stalin's troops were using almost the same measures of mass extermination as long as they were allies during the validity of the Hitler-Stalin-Pact (= secret treaty protocol of the Ribbentrop-Molotov-negotiations). Polish people were regarded as enemies by Hitler and Stalin for different reasons and both tried to kill as many members of the Polish national elite as possible. Both, Hitler and Stalin, were herding around whole nations from their places of residence like cattle is driven from one pasture to another and you could find the elite of many nations in concentration camps in Germany until 1945 and in Gulag camps in Siberia until ca. 1960.
This World War II was the worst war ever in human history and the only good thing about it is the invention of film and movies in the same century so that you can watch the horror of this war at any time as a deterrent and chilling example for (in-)human madness and cruelty.
But even these terrible examples seem to be not enough because there are still everywhere in this world enough people who simply do not want to learn anything from history and so, they are still regarding Hitler or Stalin as "great" politicians. Madness without ending!
And you didn't even mention the Japanese and 20 million dead in china, let alone the rest of the eastern war!
 
. Maria Bernheim was also guest at Rühmann's later marriage-party, when he married the actress Hertha Feiler and Maria Bernheim congratulated him for his new wife and obviously wished both luck without any irony. After 1945, Maria Bernheim defended her ex-husband against all accusations of political opportunism.

It should be added that Herta Feiler was raped by several Russian soldiers in her house at Wannsee in Berlin in 1945, while Heinz Rühmann was unable to help her. The area of his house had been declared a "main combat zone" by the Nazis.
It was a terrible time.
 

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And you didn't even mention the Japanese and 20 million dead in china, let alone the rest of the eastern war!
Yes, but although I am not an expert for WW II in Asia, the parts which I know would really be too much for this thread, e.g. the "Nanjing Massacre" of which there were even terrible contemporary reports in German language by the shocked German businessman John Rabe, who was at that time the local Nazi party leader in Nanjing, but today very honored by the Chinese because of his attempts to save as many innocent Chinese citizens as possible from the Japanese war criminals:
 
Yes, but although I am not an expert for WW II in Asia, the parts which I know would really be too much for this thread, e.g. the "Nanjing Massacre" of which there were even terrible contemporary reports in German language by the shocked German businessman John Rabe, who was at that time the local Nazi party leader in Nanjing, but today very honored by the Chinese because of his attempts to save as many innocent Chinese citizens as possible from the Japanese war criminals:
The world is never black and white, but mostly grey.
 
Yes, this is beginning to derail what should be a thread for news of Passings.
If you want to continue the discussion, please start a new thread, and we can shift the exchanges into it.

Dame Barbara Windsor,the eponymous,blonde busty "Carry On" & "Eastenders" actress has died,aged 83,after a long battle with Alzheimer's.
06/08/1937 - 10/12/2020
R.I.P, Babs :( :(
View attachment 938149

 
Dame Barbara Windsor,the eponymous,blonde busty "Carry On" & "Eastenders" actress has died,aged 83,after a long battle with Alzheimer's.
06/08/1937 - 10/12/2020
R.I.P, Babs :( :(
View attachment 938149

Yes, this is beginning to derail what should be a thread for news of Passings.
If you want to continue the discussion, please start a new thread, and we can shift the exchanges into it.



Oh My God, Baracus & Eul!!!! You almost gave me a heart attack!!! My eye caught three words in the title, Barbara, Busty and died!!!!! After several minutes of weeping uncontrollably on the floor, I crawled back to the computer and read the whole entry! :very_hot::very_hot::very_hot:
 
On December 9th, former Italian Football player Paolo Rossi (1956-2020) has died of lung cancer.

Rossi was top scorer (6 goals) in the FIFA World Cup of 1982 (Spain), which was won by Italy, and after which he was proclaimed Player of the Tournament. Only three people have won this triple.

Rossi's best years where with Juventus Turin. In the mid-eighties, they won the italian championship twice, one Italian cup, one European cup winner's cup and subsequently the UEFA suoer cup, and the European Champions cup, the latter during the 1985 final which was preceded by the Heysel disaster.
 
Because many locations in the film adaptions of his books were in Germany, he was also known in some German articles as "the Spy Master" or "der Meister der Spione".
All his books which played partly on German territory were very well researched in every description and these books were also million sellers in Germany.
The most seen German TV news "Tagesschau" had a report about him, too:


 
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