Talk:Johanna Langefeld

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Political neutrality[edit]

I've been doing my best to add to the article using If This Is a Woman. I'm a bit concerned about it being overly romantic of the subject with the focus on her apology. I've been trying to just make it about the dry facts. She felt guilty; she treated prisoners with more respect than her contemporaries; they were sympathetic to her enough to help her escape, and she apologized. It's not what I would call a good apology--it's not teshuva--but she did give what counts as an apology, and this is relevant to her biography. If nothing else, it is notable for providing background historians can make use of.

I also attempted to pull back on some of the informality of the article as I found it, when it was primarily sourced from the Polish texts, which might make the article less of an outright condemnation. I feel there is a fine line to walk where Wikipedia should keep the humanity to acknowledge Nazism is bad without describing everything a given member of the Nazi Party does as a stepping stone on the road to evil like a comic book villain. I don't know. I'll leave it for future Wikipedians to determine. -- OGoncho (talk) 06:23, 10 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Langefeld's namesake[edit]

In Buber-Neumann's account of Langefeld's life story (represented in both If This Is a Woman and Under Two Dictators), she wrote that Langefeld was named after a Johanna Prochaska, a German woman who dressed as a man to fight against Napoleon in 1812, and Langefeld hero-worshiped her in her youth. This is indicated to be a main influence in her desire to attain work traditionally gendered masculine. However, I think either Langefeld got confused during her emotional outpouring to Buber-Neumann or the latter screwed up her notes. I haven't been able to identify a Johanna Prochaska who dressed as a man to fight against Napolean, and I think that this is a combination of two women and two different anecdotes: Johanna Stegen, who provided aid to men while dressed as a woman traditionally would during fight against Napolean in 1813, and Eleonore Prochaska, who dressed as a man to fight against Napoleon in 1813. I think Johanna Stegen was the namesake and Eleonore Prochaska was the woman who Langefeld hero-worshiped, and I represented such in the article. It might not be perfectly kosher by Wikipedia standards, but I think it's more accurate than just quoting Buber-Neumann verbatim. Rationale detailed here for the judgment of future editors. -- OGoncho (talk) 20:59, 10 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Image[edit]

There is only one known photograph of Johanna Langefeld. It's this one (first one; she's on the far-right, no pun intended). Blog writer Sheldon Kirshner posted that. He probably got it from the promotional materials of the documentary The Case of Johanna Langefeld, which he summarizes in the blog post (the photo is unsourced). This had to have been taken by Nazis documenting Himmler's visit to Ravensbrück, but I don't believe it's one of the images released by the Bundesarchiv, so I'm unclear of its legal status for inclusion in the article. Knowing that Wikipedia can post portions of movie screenshots, I screenshotted part of the frame on the trailer for the documentary that features the photograph. That should be fine for the article, but future editors may want to ascertain the legal status of the photograph itself. To confuse matters, I found a portion of the photograph without Langefeld in frame posted on the Jewish Virtual Library, citing the U.S. Holocaust Museum but have as of yet been unable to track it down on the latter site. --OGoncho (talk) 02:32, 19 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]