No Photos Allowed

 Long time readers of my real estate blog know how much I value photos to help add meaning to my posts. I confess I watch repeat episodes of The Three Stooges. I watched the shows as a kid and as an adult. Some are funny. Some are hysterical. And the short entitled Dutiful But Dumb (1941) are prophetic so much so that I stopped eating dinner on Saturday to pen this piece.

The episode was described this way in The Three Stooges Online Filmography:

Three dimwitted photographers are sent to Vulgaria to take pictures of a new death ray machine. Unknown to the stooges, the penalty for snapping pictures in this country is death. The stooges manage to escape a firing squad and the chase begins as they hide from the Vulgarian army.

As I watched the stooges get into trouble with the police for simply taking photos of them, my mind snapped back to 1963 when I was riding a train through East Germany. I was on a school trip with 18 high school students and two sponsors. We spent two or three days in West Berlin. We toured East Berlin which I blogged about a few years ago. I got to see President Kennedy on his way from the Free University of Berlin where he also spoke that day. 

We left Berlin and took the train south to Italy. Berlin was actually located inside East Germany at that time. We got to experience East German law just like The Three Stooges Vularian law. Our train stopped in a small East German village. East German troops guarded the station. They had machine guns on their shoulders. I never saw anything like that in America. (That happens a lot now. But not then.)

Nina M. was one of my classmates. I could write a book about Nina. But I won't. I will say she was a sweet and very innocent girl who never did a bad thing in her life until she went to Europe. I don't think she had ever cut her hair. It reached to her behind. She wore the dullest clothes that hid her femininity. The other girls got her to cut her hair to the length of the early 1960s. She was still helpless but she had shorter hair. And she was still the simple girl from Colorado. 

Nina had a 35mm camera which she raised to photograph the soldiers. There were signs posted stating NO PHOTOS. Within a minute or so the soldiers had boarded our train car and moved right to Nina where one soldier grabbed her camera and took out the film which he exposed to all of us. She shrieked. We all gasped. The soldier shouted something out about not taking photos of them as if what they did was beyond reproach.

The Three Stooges and my recollection of Nina's encounter with the East German soldiers reminded me of so many news clips on television and videos on Twitter where the police have been photographed doing things that on first instance look bad or in actuality were very bad. Of course the Vulgarians and the East Germans did not want photos of their soldiers, their police, their conduct. Nobody wants proof of misdeeds. Such photos only confuse the public order.