Triumph of Willful Blindness to the Horror of History
Leni Riefenstahl, center, on a dolly filming her documentary “Olympia,” on the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.
Leni Riefenstahl liked to say that her art and life were devoted to the pursuit of Beauty. But her career, as Hitler’s favorite and highly gifted filmmaker, stands as an enduring rebuke to Keats’s assertion that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” and that is “all ye need to know.”
Steven Bach
She arguably remains the most controversial filmmaker in history. The critic John Simon hailed her as “one of the supreme artists of the cinema, the greatest woman filmmaker ever.” And she is the sole woman director on a Time magazine list of the all-time 100 best films.
Susan Sontag, in contrast, went from arguing, in the mid-’60s, that Riefenstahl’s films “Triumph of the Will” and “Olympia” transcended “the categories of propaganda or even reportage” to concluding, a decade later, that the very conception of “Triumph of the Will” “negates the possibility of the filmmaker’s having an aesthetic conception independent of propaganda.”
Sontag also observed that “the purification of Leni Riefenstahl’s reputation of its Nazi dross has been gathering momentum for some time,” with her defenders, including many in the avant-garde film establishment, suggesting that she was first and foremost an “indomitable priestess of the beautiful,” fascinated by the ideal and the monumental, “a beauty freak rather than a horrid propagandist.”
This of course is what Riefenstahl — who died in 2003 at 101 — has maintained since the end of World War II, and it’s what she argued at length in her 600-plus page memoir (1993) which attempted to create a portrait of the author as a political naïf and victim of slander, even as it promoted an image of her as a visionary artist.
The chief value of two new biographies of Riefenstahl — one by Jürgen Trimborn, a professor of film, theater and art history at the University of Cologne; the other by Steven Bach, the author of biographies of Marlene Dietrich and Moss Hart — is that they both serve as much needed correctives to all the spin, evasions and distortions of the record purveyed by Riefenstahl, and that they both re-situate her work (and recent efforts to divorce her work and her aesthetic from the context in which they were created) in a historical perspective.
In “Leni” Mr. Bach notes that in the 1970s the feminist movement “sought to claim her as forerunner or exemplar,” while proponents of the auteur theory encouraged “viewing her work for its style, for its formal qualities and technical innovations, as if her art were independent of subject and technique were irrelevant to content.”
In “Leni Riefenstahl” Mr. Trimborn points out that critical praise for the formal qualities of this filmmaker’s work, along with growing historical distance from the Third Reich and respect for her advanced age, led “to an increasingly unbiased acceptance of Riefenstahl” on her own terms in the last years of her life. The dangers of this development, he astutely points out, is that it reflects a willful determination to deny or ignore her role in promoting Hitler and the Reich, and points, in Germany especially, to “a questionable comprehension of history, which desires to attain ‘normality’ at any price.”
It is Mr. Trimborn’s conclusion that Riefenstahl was “primarily a careerist:” “through her friendship with Hitler, Leni Riefenstahl made her career, the peaks and valleys, the breaches and contradictions of which are not atypical of many Germans of the 20th century.” As for Mr. Bach, he writes that “the ‘horror of history’ in which her apologists thought her ‘imprisoned’ was a narrative of her own making about which she remained nostalgic and unrepentant. It was richly rewarded and free of any compulsion save ambition. She did not suffer from it but profited and to suggest otherwise — as she often did — is an insult to the millions who died at the hands of a regime she took pride in glorifying, using and enabling.”
Both books do an energetic job of trying to ferret out the facts of Riefenstahl’s life, facts obscured by her own lies, boasts and denials, and a job made all the more difficult, as Mr. Trimborn writes, by the lack of dependable evidence from other sources relating to many of the early chapters of her life. Both books trace her early ambition and dogged determination — which were transferred from dance to the cinema, after a knee injury — and both note her reliance on powerful male mentors and collaborators, despite her assertions of independence.
Riefenstahl’s stint as the star of a series of mountain movies made by Arnold Fanck — whom she’d sought out and impressed, after seeing his picture “Mountain of Destiny” — would pave the way for her work for the Reich. Fanck, as Mr. Bach points out, “gave her a foundation in filmmaking that would prove indispensable for everything that followed,” including an appreciation of striking visuals, strong angles and monumental vistas.
In addition the mountain film genre, with its echoes of German Romanticism and emphasis on heroic striving, would dovetail, in many ways, with a developing fascist aesthetic. Hitler himself was a fan of Fanck’s movies and responded quickly when Riefenstahl wrote him in 1932, requesting an audience. “Once we come to power,” he told her, “you must make my films.”
It would be a useful collaboration for both parties. The Reich’s lavish financial backing gave Riefenstahl unusual logistical and creative freedom along with a luxurious life among the elite, and she and the architect Albert Speer, Mr. Trimborn writes, “quickly rose to international prominence as figureheads of the Nazi regime,” while helping “to erect the facade that diverted the rest of the world from Hitler’s true plans and goals.”
Although Riefenstahl would later claim that “Triumph of the Will” was “a pure historical film” without “a single reconstructed scene,” Mr. Bach suggests that it was actually a carefully orchestrated, stage-managed work (which included rehearsed scenes and fragments of speeches delivered at various times); moreover its virtuosic manipulation of formal elements were put in the service of exalting Hitler and his movement.
As for Riefenstahl’s film about the 1936 Berlin Olympics, “Olympia,” it was secretly financed and sponsored by the Reich, and it played a key role in Goebbels’s broader propaganda campaign, Mr. Bach notes, “to present the New Germany to the world in a positive light, deflecting attention from repressive racial policies by emphasizing Strength through Joy.”
Riefenstahl would repeatedly ignore or deny news reports of anti-
Semitic atrocities in Germany. Mr. Bach reports that she claimed not to believe reports about Kristallnacht, shrugging it off as slander on her homeland, and that during a 1938-39 trip to the United States, she told a reporter that as an artist she could not be expected to know about events, even if the rest of the world did. “There are four walls about me” when she was at work, she said, and “it is not possible for me to know what is true” or what is a story.
In 1940, with the fall of Paris, Riefenstahl wrote Hitler an ecstatic telegram: “With indescribable joy, deeply moved and filled with burning gratitude, we share with you, my Führer, your and Germany’s greatest victory, the entry of German troops into Paris. You exceed anything human imagination has the power to conceive, achieving deeds without parallel in the history of mankind.”
This from a woman who wanted history to see her simply as an artist, who falsely denied ever making anti-Semitic statements, who implausibly claimed she knew next to nothing about Hitler’s persecution of the Jews, a woman who never acknowledged moral accountability for the role her movies played in promoting Hitler and his cause, a woman who in recent decades would win acclaim from cineastes on her own terms as a great artist and who, in 1974, received a tribute from the Telluride film festival for her “exemplary contributions to the art of the film.”
