On February 17, 1936, Time ran a cover story about the Fourth Winter Olympics, which Adolf Hitler had inaugurated earlier that month in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, a German ski resort near the Austrian border. The summer games, Olympiad XI, were to open on August 1st in Berlin, and the Führer had given Leni Riefenstahl virtual carte blanche to film them. Her début as a director, with “The Blue Light” (1932), a fairy tale set in the Dolomites, had excited his admiration. So had her dishevelled beauty: she had cast herself in the starring role of Junta, a mountain nymph and outcast doomed by her purity. Riefenstahl had subsequently proved to be an epic propagandist with “Triumph of the Will,” a celebration of the 1934 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, and she had gone to Garmisch in part to observe an Olympic documentary being made by Carl Junghans, in preparation for her own “Olympia.” But she was also there to bask in the sunshine of celebrity.
At thirty-three, Riefenstahl was a strikingly attractive if hectic figure, with dark hair, chiselled features, and an obsidian gaze intensified by eyes set slightly too close together. Their look of adoration in the Führer’s presence, and (as her rivals saw it) his indulgence of her every whim, fuelled rumors of a Valhallan romance, which heightened curiosity about her in Germany and abroad. Time might have devoted its cover to a Winter Olympian like Sonja Henie, the Norwegian figure-skating champion, but the building controversy over the August games, which represented a windfall of legitimacy for the Reich, decided the editors on a more electric candidate: “Hitler’s Leni Riefenstahl.” The sensational portrait that they chose, a departure from the usual head shot of a statesman or grande dame, is reproduced in a first-rate new biography of Riefenstahl, by Steven Bach, “Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl” (Knopf; $30), though without mention of the photographer, Martin Munkacsi.
Munkacsi (1896-1963) was a Hungarian Jew who is widely credited with inventing modern photojournalism and with reinventing fashion photography in the same dynamic mold. (A show of his work runs through April at the International Center of Photography.) Like Riefenstahl, he was a consummate stylist obsessed with bodies in motion, particularly those of dancers and athletes, and in 1930, some thirty years before Riefenstahl “discovered” the comely and artistic Sudanese people she called “my Nuba,” Munkacsi returned from an assignment in Africa with a picture—of three naked boys running into the water—that became iconic, particularly to his disciple Henri Cartier-Bresson. The Nazi superstar and the Jewish émigré met at least once before the race laws precipitated his departure for New York, in 1934, and they had much in common, including international prestige and a penchant for self-mythologizing. But the source of rapture in Munkacsi’s pictures is freedom. In Riefenstahl’s, it is idol worship.
One of Riefenstahl’s most cherished ambitions, ironically, was a Hollywood career like that of Munkacsi’s fellow-émigrée Marlene Dietrich, and she clung to this fantasy tenaciously even after the Kristallnacht pogrom, in November, 1938, which derailed what was supposed to have been a triumphal cross-country American publicity tour with “Olympia.” Upon docking in New York and hearing the news, she refused to believe it, and dismissed the hostility that greeted her at nearly every stop as a plot fomented, she told an interviewer on her return, “by the Jewish moneymen.”
After the war, Riefenstahl was vehement that not only had she “thrown no atomic bombs”; she had never “spoken an anti-Semitic word.” She lamented the fate of her Jewish friends in the film industry while claiming, on the one hand, that she had been ignorant of the Reich’s racial policies and, on the other, that she had protested them personally to the Führer. Bach offers considerable evidence to the contrary, as does Jürgen Trimborn, the author of “Leni Riefenstahl: A Life” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $30), translated by Edna McCown. Both cite a letter first published thirty years ago in a biography of Riefenstahl by Glenn Infield in which Riefenstahl appeals to her friend and admirer Julius Streicher, the editor of Der Stürmer and the most fanatic anti-Semite in a crowded field (he was hanged for his war crimes in 1946), for help with, as she puts it, the “demands made upon me by the Jew Béla Balázs.” Balázs, Riefenstahl’s dramaturge and co-screenwriter on “The Blue Light,” was an avant-garde film critic who had also adapted Brecht’s “Threepenny Opera” as a screenplay. She expunged his name from the credits so that a judenrein (Jew-free) version of the film could be released, and Balázs, hearing of its success, wrote to her from exile in Moscow to ask for his deferred fee. It was an easy and no doubt gratifying minor task for Streicher to deprive him of it.
Despite Walter Winchell’s memorable epithet for Riefenstahl—“pretty as a swastika”—she lacked the smolder of a putative rival like Dietrich, who, she might also have noted, could speak English. In her own country, however, Riefenstahl had become an important movie star in an indigenous Teutonic genre, the “Alpine film.” Arnold Fanck, its leading proponent, scorned the decadent fictions that cosmopolites like Josef von Sternberg produced in the luxury of a big studio. He pioneered location shooting in extreme conditions and prided himself on authenticity, at least where daredevil feats of skiing and mountaineering were concerned. His actors were an élite fraternity of athletes who performed their own harrowing stunts, and Riefenstahl was the only woman among them. The six films, three silent ones and three talkies, that she made with Fanck between 1926 and 1933 were a showcase for her courage—if courage can be imputed to a nature that denies fear—in scaling glaciers without safety ropes and schussing down them. They were also the shop in which she served her apprenticeship for “The Blue Light,” a film with the unique distinction of having impressed not only Hitler but Chaplin.
Riefenstahl’s acting roles, however, like her impetuous sexual adventures of the period, tend to blur. Beginning with Fanck, her fellow cast and crew members constituted a virile harem irresistible to an emancipated sultana inclined to take her pleasure where and with whom she chose (even if she later boasted of “my well-known, almost virginal sexual history”). The bruised egos that she left behind earned her an unsporting epithet, “the nation’s glacial crevasse.” And jealousy, perhaps, encouraged Fanck’s habit of subjecting his star and muse, in repeated takes, to immersion in freezing water, near-suffocation by avalanches, and the barefoot ascent of a sheer rock face. At least he respected her prowess. On the Nazi films, Bach writes, the supremely organized and imperious Riefenstahl “was competing with men she had displaced through a relationship with the Führer that invited speculation she actively encouraged,” and who were “disposed to view her presence behind a camera as illegitimate no matter how she got there.”
Considering that Munkacsi’s Time portrait was taken before he left Germany, it encrypts a prescient reading of Riefenstahl’s art and persona. She is posed in cross-country skis, appearing to ascend a slope dressed in nothing but a clingy bathing suit that flaunts the physique of a cartoon action heroine—all curves and muscle. This was the outfit, Time’s reporter wrote, that she liked to train in. Munkacsi photographed her from a low angle, so that her steely thighs and booted feet dominate the lower half of the frame, and its vertical composition draws the eye upward past the dark V of the crotch and the swell of the breasts to a determined chin. Fanck used the same aggrandizing camera angle in his signature panning shots of men on mountaintops, and Riefenstahl echoed him in her heroic iconography of the Führer. Had she been fully clothed, the picture might have made a travel poster for the pure and fit New Germany that Goebbels was promoting as Minister of Propaganda. But Riefenstahl’s grandiosity is laid bare for the world to snicker at, all the more so as she doesn’t seem to notice that Munkacsi has seduced her into modelling for the subtle parody of an aesthetic—her own—that he, like Susan Sontag, perceived to be “both prurient and idealizing,” as Sontag wrote forty-five years later in her essay “Fascinating Fascism.”
In 1936, Riefenstahl had two-thirds of her life yet to live. “I am the marathon,” she declared, more prophetically than she knew, in the course of filming “Olympia,” and any writer who embarks on the gruelling course of her biography deserves admiration simply for crossing the finish line. Trimborn, who set out long before Bach, is a university professor and film historian in Cologne. He interviewed Riefenstahl in 1997, when he was twenty-five, having already spent six years of “intensive labor” on the project, and he briefly entertained the quixotic hope of writing a definitive book with her blessing and collaboration. Unwilling to misrepresent himself as a hagiographer, he was doomed to fail, though his disappointment does not seem to have warped his fair-mindedness. But I also suspect that the seeming absence of a talent for seduction—he writes in the patient, tongue-biting monotone that one adopts sensibly with a hysteric—turned Riefenstahl off.
Trimborn’s aim was to correct the murky published record and the “attitudes” of his compatriots. One has to admire the sniperlike precision with which he takes out fugitive falsehoods that have lived under cover for a century. His primary audience, however, was more familiar with, and thus perhaps less likely to miss, the kind of richly fleshed-out portraiture and social history that Bach—an experienced biographer, a former movie executive, and the author of a superior best-seller on filmmaking, “Final Cut”—is able to supply.
Helene Amalie Bertha Riefenstahl, a native of Berlin, was born in 1902. Her father, Alfred, a plumber who prospered in the sanitation business, was an autocratic paterfamilias in the classic mold. Leni, rather than her younger brother, Heinz, inherited his temperament. It gave her a lifelong aversion to bullying, though not when she was the one doing it. Alfred’s wife, Bertha, a lovely seamstress much tried by her husband’s tantrums, had once dreamed of an acting career and was vicariously invested in her daughter’s. Bach offers fresh evidence for a rumor circulated by the intriguing Goebbels, among others, that Bertha’s Polish-born mother was half Jewish. She died young, and Bertha’s father married his children’s nanny, whose name seems to have appeared on, and falsified, Riefenstahl’s certificate of Aryan descent. The family owned a weekend cottage on the outskirts of Berlin, where young Leni swam and hiked and exercised a body that always gave her supreme delight. “I do not like civilization,” she later told a journalist. “I like nature, pure and unspoiled.”
No one could ever persuade Leni Riefenstahl that there was something she couldn’t do, and she made her mind up, in her late teens, to become a dancer. Her father tried everything he could to keep her off the stage, but, through an obstinacy like his own, she admits in her memoirs, she wore him down to the point that he rented a hall for her début. Riefenstahl’s dance teachers had warned her that, with a scant two years’ training, she wasn’t prepared to perform as a soloist, but she defied them, too. By then, she had done a little modelling, entered a beauty contest, and was shortly to pay her dues as a silent-movie starlet in a bare-breasted cameo. She had also decided to lose her virginity to a thirty-nine-year-old tennis star and police chief whom she didn’t yet know, Otto Froitzheim. Riefenstahl recalled the tryst, which took place on his sofa, as “repugnant” and “traumatic” (though the affair lasted for years), and when it was over Froitzheim tossed her a twenty-dollar bill—in case she needed an abortion—which, Bach writes, was within a few months worth eighty-four trillion Deutsche marks.
In the meantime, Riefenstahl had found a rich admirer—a young Jewish financier, Harry Sokol—to bankroll a road show. With an arty program of her own device, she played some seventy engagements in seven months. It isn’t fair to judge her talents on the basis of the stiff-necked Spanish dancing, leaden with vanity, that she does in “Tiefland”—her last feature, a melodrama based on the opera by Eugen d’Albert—because by then she was over forty and, by her own admission, too old for the part. One also can’t say whether she could have achieved the international renown that she believed was just on the horizon, because a serious knee injury ended her tour. And the scrapbook of reviews that she collected did not include any of the critical passages that Trimborn supplies. Instead, she exulted in her memoirs, “Everywhere I went I experienced the same success—which transcends words.”
Without her beauty, Riefenstahl might yet have accomplished something notable, although the career she forged is inconceivable without it. She had neither scruples nor—in the absence of an intellect, an education, or social connections—much of a choice about using her looks as a calling card. Fanck and Hitler were both prepared to be smitten before she took the initiative to arrange the meetings that would change her life. Though Fanck was originally skeptical of her inexperience, Hitler’s enthusiasm, at least according to Riefenstahl, was unreserved from the beginning. In May of 1932, two months after “The Blue Light” was released, he summoned her to a village on the North Sea and, in the course of a long walk on the beach, effused about her grace. He also, she claimed, made an awkward sexual advance and announced impulsively that, if he came to power, “you must make my films.”
Though the pass was, almost surely, a fantasy (even in 1936, Time’s reporter discreetly describes the Führer as “a confirmed celibate”), the job offer wasn’t, and no director in history was more lavishly subsidized or indulged by her producers than Riefenstahl was by Hitler. His first commission was for the Nazi Party rally film “Victory of Faith” (1933), a clunky practice run for “Triumph of the Will” that was conveniently made to disappear, along with the porcine co-regent on the dais with Hitler—the leader of the brownshirts, Ernst Röhm, whom Hitler had had assassinated seven months after the première. “Day of Freedom,” which Riefenstahl denied having directed until 1971, when a copy surfaced, was a twenty-eight-minute afterthought to “Triumph of the Will” that was intended to placate the Wehrmacht. (Footage of the resurgent German Army was conspicuously missing from both rally films, in part because they were finished before Hitler formally renounced the Treaty of Versailles.) “Olympia” is a hybrid: servile to Fascist ideals in some respects, defiant of them in others—particularly in the radiant closeups of Jesse Owens, America’s black gold medallist. It was marketed as an independent production, though it was financed by a shell company and paid for entirely by the Reich. Rainer Rother, the author of an authoritative filmography published five years ago, points out that the closing sequence of Carl Junghans’s documentary on the Winter Games—a slow-motion montage of ski jumpers—was shot by the same inventive cinematographer, Hans Ertl (one of Riefenstahl’s former flames), who shot the slow-motion montage of divers that ends “Olympia.” But even if Riefenstahl cavalierly appropriated imagery and techniques, and profited from the priceless gift that Hitler and history had given her—of a duel between the designated champions of good and evil—her use of multiple stationary and moving cameras, and her inspired placement of them (underwater; in trenches and dirigibles; on towers and saddles; or worn by the marathon runners in their pre-race trials), brought a revolutionary, if not strictly documentary, sense of immediacy to the coverage of sporting events.
In the course of a dark century, Riefenstahl seems to have suffered at least one spasm of something like doubt, and the moment was captured in a photograph. When Hitler invaded Poland, on September 1, 1939, she mustered some of her most seasoned technicians into a combat-film unit. They left for the front about a week later, reporting for duty “on Hitler’s orders” to the small, predominantly Jewish town of Końskie. Waking under fire the next morning, September 12th—the day the Reich’s news bureau promised a solution to “the Jewish problem in Poland”—Riefenstahl was on hand to witness an improvised beginning to the exterminations. Claiming that Polish partisans had killed a German officer and four soldiers, the occupying troops herded a Jewish burial detail to the main square. When the soldiers guarding the gravediggers began to kick and club them into the pit, Riefenstahl tried to intervene, she said, but they turned on her with cries of “Get rid of the bitch.” Bach writes, “An amateur photographer captured her distraught expression.”
The subsequent massacre at Końskie left a toll of thirty victims. An eyewitness testified that Riefenstahl had a “sobbing fit” when she saw the Wehrmacht open fire on civilians, and she later claimed to have been “so upset” by this experience that she asked for permission to abandon her assignment and return to Berlin. In reality, however, she hitched a ride on a military plane to Danzig, where she lunched with Hitler (he expressed “shock and anger” at the story, she said) and accepted his invitation to hear the victory speech in which he blamed England for the war.
Riefenstahl never made another Nazi propaganda vehicle. She grappled for a while with a project long dear to her heart—a film version of Kleist’s “Penthesilea,” starring herself in the title role of an Amazon queen. Hitler had promised to finance this epic from his privy purse, but it foundered, Bach writes, on the absence of a coherent script, Riefenstahl’s inability to create one without the help of a collaborator like Balázs, and the outbreak of war. “Tiefland”—a sappy flop that tells the story of a Spanish village oppressed by its cruel lord—was the production she turned to. There would be little reason to recall it if the logistical challenges of filming abroad had not forced her to re-create her Iberian sets on German soil and to find some swarthy-looking peasant extras to lend her the rude eloquence of their physiognomies. Handily, the Nazis had rounded up the German Sinti and Roma and interned them in “collection camps” while they debated how to annihilate them. Riefenstahl later denied having visited the camps, but there was no denying that ninety-one selected prisoners, including children, worked without wages on the film and were returned to the camps when their scenes were done. After the war but before her de-Nazification hearings—which remarked on her lack of “moral poise” and her Nazi “sympathies” but cleared her of crimes—she sued the publisher of the German magazine Revue, which reported the story of the “Tiefland” extras, most of whom died at Auschwitz. With courtroom sympathies on the director’s side, the defendant was found guilty of libel. In the nineteen-eighties, however, Nina Gladitz, a documentary filmmaker, located a few of the extras who had made it out alive. They testified that Riefenstahl, accompanied by a police escort, had indeed chosen them herself, and had seen the living conditions to which they were condemned.
Riefenstahl survived the debacle that her idol wreaked upon humanity to be reborn, in late middle age, as an amateur (or, according to the professionals, pseudo) ethnographer, in the Sudan. In exchange for beads and oil, but also apparently with a measure of good will, the Nuba let her photograph their ceremonial dances and wrestling matches and rituals of body painting and scarification. (When they didn’t, she used a telephoto lens.) Those beautifully composed and reverential pictures, taken between 1962 and 1977, are Riefenstahl’s African “Olympia.” To explain the absence of imperfect specimens from her gallery, she later told an interviewer that old, ugly, or disabled Nuba hid themselves in shame.
“The Nuba of Kau” and “Last of the Nuba,” Riefenstahl’s lucrative coffee-table books, financed a new career. At seventy, claiming to be fifty, she was certified as a deep-sea diver, and for the next thirty years she trained her cameras on the peaceable kingdom of marine life. She still looked rather fetching in flippers and a wetsuit in her late nineties. In the course of an expedition back to the now war-torn Sudan, in 2000, she boogeyed with the Nuba maidens for a German documentary crew, and then barely survived a helicopter crash under fire from rebel troops. The pain of her physical injuries often required morphine, but the stab wounds of her persecutors, as she regarded nearly anyone who questioned her blameless version of the past, were harder to anesthetize. Yet the controversies had an upside: they were life support for her mythos.
Riefenstahl’s more conscientious compatriots might stubbornly persist in treating her as a pariah, but, as she aged, a new and mainly American audience embraced her. It was led by celebrities from the entertainment world and by critics and artists who hailed her as a great auteur. Among her boosters were the organizers of the first Feminist Film Festival, in Telluride, who, in 1974, touted Riefenstahl as a role model for women directors, impervious to the irony that she had used her singularly privileged role to glorify a cult of violence and misogyny. L. Ron Hubbard briefly collaborated on a remake of “The Blue Light.” Mick Jagger invited her to take his picture with Bianca. Andy Warhol added her to his collection of divas. Madonna, then Jodie Foster, aspired to star in her life story, but Riefenstahl judged neither to be worthy. George Lucas praised her modernity and acknowledged the indebtedness of “Star Wars” to “Triumph of the Will,” particularly, Trimborn notes, in the Caesarean victory celebration that concludes Part IV. And, in 1998, Riefenstahl was one of the guests of honor at Time’s seventy-fifth-anniversary banquet, along with hundreds of other newsmakers from its cover. Unshackled at last from the caption of Munkacsi’s photograph, she received a standing ovation. But perhaps as it died away she heard an echo of Streicher’s paean to her in 1937: “Laugh and go your way, the way of a great calling. Here you have found your heaven and in it you will be eternal.”
Riefenstahl devoted the better part of her last two decades to fortifying her legend and to suing her detractors (though not only them: she tried to disinherit her only living relatives, a niece and a nephew, with a spurious will that laid claim to her brother’s estate). Marcel Ophuls declined her invitation to celebrate her career in a television documentary, so she awarded the job to an unknown German, Ray Müller. He released “The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl” to wide acclaim in 1993, and, seven years later, agreed to film her return visit to the Nuba. Though he himself narrowly escaped from the helicopter crash, she was furious that he hadn’t caught her being pulled from the burning wreckage. It wasn’t easy, she wrote at eighty-five, “to leave the present behind,” but she managed to write an enthrallingly disingenuous seven-hundred-page memoir, taking her epigraph from a complaint of Einstein’s: “So many things have been written about me, masses of insolent lies and inventions, that I would have perished long ago, had I paid any attention.” Finally, having joined Greenpeace and celebrated her thirty-fifth anniversary with Horst Kettner, her handsome sixty-year-old companion, she died in bed, at a hundred and one—living, working, loving, lying, and litigating with prodigious vitality until her heart gave out.
Narcissism is often a kind of trance that insulates its subject from feelings of worthlessness, and Riefenstahl suffered periodic breakdowns and bouts of colitis at moments of loss or crisis that fractured her glassy-eyed assurance. Her love for the Führer was the paradigm of her self-entrancement, and she never disavowed it, although she later expressed some mild distress at the atrocities perpetrated in his name. Her life after the war would have been much easier if she had, but to do so was to betray something more essential than loyalty to a dead master. It was to endanger the ruthless suspension of self-doubt that her identity had, from childhood, depended on. And in one respect it was logical for her to love Hitler: he had the insight to recognize what her love could give him—a perfect reflection of itself.
Riefenstahl’s “genius” has rarely been questioned, even by critics who despise the service to which she lent it. (Bach’s cool resistance to the “often slavish lenience” of her rehabilitators is an exception.) Yet one has finally to ask if a creative product counts as a work of art, much less a great one, if it excludes the overwhelming fact of human weakness. That fact is the source of soulfulness and dramatic tension in every enduring narrative that one can think of. A seductively exciting surface, such as the morbid spectacle of a mass delusion, may distract from, but cannot insure against, a slack core, and in Riefenstahl’s case a handful of sequences singled out for their formal beauty and a quality that Sontag calls “vertigo before power” have achieved an influence disproportionate to their depth or originality. They are played over and over, and many people, even film buffs, seem never to have seen—or are unaware of never having seen—Riefenstahl’s documentaries in their entirety. But “Olympia” (three and a half hours long) and “Triumph of the Will” (two) both have their longueurs: endless scenes of shotputting and pole-vaulting in the former, of ranting and marching in the latter. In both, Riefenstahl relies heavily for her transitions on portentous cutaways to clouds, mist, statuary, foliage, and rooftops. Her reaction shots have a tedious sameness: shining, ecstatic faces—nearly all young and Aryan, except for Hitler’s. If, by definition, the trailer for a so-called masterpiece can never be greater than the film itself, then Riefenstahl’s legacy fails the test. ♦
