The casting of Dominique Sanda and Helmut Berger as the blond and blue-eyed Jews of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis requires an initial suspension of disbelief – particularly if one has just seen Berger as the decadent Nazi in The Damned (made the same year). In Les Violons du Bal and Lacombe, Lucien as well, the Jewish characters are gorgeous, assimilated, and wealthy. These three European films of the seventies are unquestionably beautiful, but there is a sense in which they evade the specifically Jewish identity of the Holocaust victims by defining them primarily in terms of class. While this type of characterization is partly a strategy for attracting a mass audience, and is in fact faithful to a certain segment of Europe's Jewish population, it is questionable because the reason they're being hounded in the first place is qualified or neutralized by their upper-class status. This is also the case with Visconti's Sandra, as will be developed in Chapter 8, and with the two Jewish characters of Cabaret. Natalia's aristocratic family is described as “stinking rich” and Marisa Berenson's delicate features are the exact opposite of the gorilla with which a cabaret number counterpoints her; and, as far as Fritz is concerned, he has been passing himself off as a Protestant: he confesses that he is Jewish only minutes before the film's end. Once again, Judaism is secondary to status and social acceptability. Apart from potentially reinforcing the cliché that fuels anti-Semitism – that all Jews are rich – this narrative strategy renders the characters' loss painful not because they are Jews but because they are dispossessed, stripped of class.