SS items I owned in the 1970s.....

[Friedrich-Berthold]

I also still own the infantry officer's cap on the hood of my Audi.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

A refreshing montage, thank you!

Thanks, since we have so many very young collectors, such images might give some context to the otherwise disembodied nature of these posts. They float in the ether, whereas experience was and is grounded in reality, the faint reflection of which shines here. The photos were primitive by today's standards, but they were cutting edge in their time. Never laugh at the past, is my motto.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

This was my first black tunic, which I sold in 1981 and then bought back in the late '90s at a price that even today is silly. I traded ten peaked caps for it in 1971 or 1972, which at the time was around USD 275 or USD 300. The man to whom I traded it was fairly repugnant, in fact, a primitive. The black tunic was originally found in the southern part of this state in a used clothing store, and I guess, was part of the flotsam and jetsam in Munich scooped up at some point by GIs there. It is an issued tunic that was made into an Ausgehanzug, as it was shortened and side hooks removed by a tailor.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

This is one of the caps I traded, a Wellhausen/Hannover army Jaeger cap that made it into one of picture books......go figure. Its owner in the 1990s offered it to me again in a kind of oily way and I refused. He irritated me greatly, and so I failed to buy back something of great sentimental value as well as a very attractive cap. The man had not taken good care of it, either....which irritated me still further.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

I know that Bob Coleman's collection was immortalized in a book by Bozich, but who else has a memorial to collecting from decades ago?

[Friedrich-Berthold]

I bought this translation of the 1938 SS price list in 1970, and its magical entries have inspired me ever since. It is primitive by today's standards, too, but it was a revolution in 1970.

[KradSpam]

Great montage FB

Also congratulations on your impending milestone of posts, quite an impressive feat considering the doubtless quality of material in each. Do you have an overview photo of your entire collection perhaps?

[Friedrich-Berthold]

Great montage FB

Also congratulations on your impending milestone of posts, quite an impressive feat considering the doubtless quality of material in each. Do you have an overview photo of your entire collection perhaps?

Dear Colleague, thanks. I am on the verge of 10,000 of these cognitive dissonant posts. Silly, no? I am sure someone should edit them all. My collection is poorly displayed, truth be told. I have no single, pleasing image of it, to my regret. Our colleague Mr. Tony Spandau is a master of the mise en scene. My house is not well organized for a collection, in fact. Thanks for the kind words. This site is the display of my collection, but 50% of it is un photographed. In the late 1970s, I worked as an apprentice at a world renowned archive of contemporary history as part of my professional training. They had things there that had been bagged in 1920, and never been opened a half century later. Similar to the final scene in Citizen Kane in the winding up of Xanadu. The treasures in this archive made one scream, I tell you. Things from the Munich of 1923 and on and on, in stacks and in their glory. I always thought the main thing is to get something, and the resource management for the display is secondary to the seizure.
You see the same thing among other hoarders and obsessive compulsive types on television.
I see no particular evil in it, really.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

But the contrast of the one with the other says something to us all, does it not?
The thing is a means to an end, not an end in itself.
The thing is to enable a leap across the gulf of time, which is otherwise impossible, and our culture and civilization require knowledge of the past, an understanding of how history forms and changes and the signal function of memory.
The celebration of Stalingrad is proof of this fact.
These things are not designer labels, and fetish consumer products transmuted into a world wide consumer madness, even though for many here that is all they are. Nor is the goal to amass a pile as in this picture, though I have done that for base psychological reasons.
Nor is this thing for me a hobby, as I never described it as such. In Germany, knowledge of things from the past is a part of historical study, and I always saw these things as Uniformkunde, as an expression of politics, society and most of all culture.
Material culture describes these things best, I think. I am interested in power, mass politics, and the symbols of power that tend to organized violence, since violence is a part of our lives, and must be understood in its social and cultural dimension.

[KradSpam]

I prefer the chaos in your two options there I think, sometimes the promise of treasure is more delicious than the treasure itself. Maybe that is why we always seek the next item.

The archive job sounds incredible, I would work for free.