Question about these Berlin/Nazi pictures

In the photos showing the streets decorated with Nazi flags and banners, what are those objects hanging in the middle? They look like shower curtains.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2240351/Sunshine-swastikas-Rare-colour-pictures-1930s-Berlin-carefree-life-Hitler-s-capital-war-reduced-rubble.html



• They do look like shower curtains. My guess is that it's some sort of lighting. The gadget that attaches to the wire looks as though it has wiring going through it. The stuff hanging from the ring looks reflective, so that it would look festive at night under lighting.

• Those Nazi banners are hypnotizing...no wonder the majority were Nazis.

• It's a May Day Parade, so the shower curtains are small representations of the Maypole. Scroll down, and you'll see a full sized maypole towards the bottom. (It's a big holiday in Germany)

• [quote]Those Nazi banners are hypnotizing...no wonder the majority were Nazis. Um.no.

• Horrifying.

• 25 years ago you could still see the shadows on the buildings where the Nazi eagles used to be, and many times you would seem the still there, just with the swastika chipped out. Those are fading fast, so my new game it to look on the facades of the old buildings to try to spot where the flagpole once mounted. You would be surprised how many mounting brackets are still in place.

  http://tinypic.com/view.php%3Fpic%3D1orioh%26s%3D6

• What made Germans think they were all that? Isn't it kind of like if Ohio decided they wanted to take over the world?

• Here's a building in Munich where you can still see very easily where the eagle holding a swastika had been mounted (above the entrance). This is the music conservatory in Munich now, but it had been the Führerbau, Hitler's offices.

  http://www.flickr.com/photos/heatherharwood/405704404/

• If you have the notion, R7, read the Rise and Fall of the THird Reich. It's a great historical novel.

• I will give it to them - those crazy fuckers had flair.

• Eagle on the Federal Reserve Bank in Koblenz. Swastika has been chipped out, but the eagle is still above the main entrance.

  http://tinypic.com/r/29ep0us/6

• Same bank building. Swastikas above windows:

  http://tinypic.com/r/2mrdy1h/6

• They are not shower curtains because there was no such thing as clear plastic back then. They are metal hoops with ribbon and metal foil strips tied to them to glint in the sun (Nazis weren't so stupid as to let mylar balloons float around taking out their own electrical grid as we are).

• Yeah, I'm going straight to hell for this but I couldn't help noticing how attractive, thin and well-dressed everybody in those pictures was. Quite a contrast to the trashy, fat fuck slob parade we would see in modern crowd shots.

• Thanks for the recommendation, r9.

  r7

• Americans dressed up back then too.

• The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is a poorly-written list of dates and meetings. It also has a nasty homophobic bent, all but blaming Nazism on gay men. With so much literature on the subject, don't bother with that relic.

• Frankly the Germans were just imitating this.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DyL6JS5v4ZFg

• You don't have to be fascist bastards to make a city look pretty, for fuck's sake.

• You say that and yet America's most beautiful cities are the slavery tainted cesspool of Charleston SC and Santa Fe, NM, where debt peonage was practiced for hundreds of years. Fascism seems to go hand in hand with a certain kind of aesthetic sense.

• Beauty and evil are not mutually exclusive.

  Sarah%20Palin

• Even trying to ignore the history and just look at the swastika as a graphic symbol, it just looks creepy. That should have warned the people that the Nazis were evil.

• It must have been awesome to be German in those days. They really thought they were the shit. Aryans at the top of the world, weren't they? They believed they were the greatest, most pure people who ever lived. They had great buildings, great music, great theater. They'd lost the first world war but they were roaring to a comeback. With all their swastikas and eagles and men in uniform, they must have felt like the top of the heap. And in just a few years their cities would burn just like their crematoriums did.

• They really were shower curtains. Everyone hoped they would inspire Eva Braun and Magda Goebbels to get up in a cherry picker and take a shower in them so all could see, but no such luck.

• [quote]You don't have to be fascist bastards to make a city look pretty, for fuck's sake. Maybe not, but it helps.

  Bloomberg%20and%20Giuliani

• Great music and great theater r23? Really? Have you ever read anything about Nazi Germany? They banned countless things in the arts for being "subversive" and the films and music of that period were banal and lifeless. They were the most anti-culture group who ever lived. The incredible cultural emergence of the Weimar years was stopped overnight. The loss of the creativity and expression of the Weimar era that the Nazis utterly destroyed is one of the great cultural tragedies of history.

• Before the Nazis, German culture was very progressive. The Nazis considered the culture to be "too Jewish" and decandent, so they destroyed it.

• OP, if you're talking about the middle section of the building, it looks like bunting and garlands. It was used a lot in those days for decorative purposes. You always used to see stars and stripes bunting at ball parks on opening day and holidays during baseball season. You rarely see it anymore. The same for garlands. Pine garlands still come out during Christmas season. I guess you have to be of a certain age to know these things.

  Elder Gay

• [quote]Great music and great theater Uh, ok.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3Dcbt7rcTAIvg