Leni Riefenstahl: not just a pretty face!

Leni Riefenstahl lived to the grand old age of 101 (1902 – 2003). This means that she spent 58 years (from 1945 to 2003) - over half her life – dogmatically asserting that her close association with the Nazi regime was down to youthful naïveté, that she did not know, could not have known, that her conscience was clear!

Riefenstahl’s claims of innocence, however, are implausible to the extreme when we hold them up against her life both in the period before and after the Nazis came to power in 1933.

Nothing else in her life could ever have been characterised as naive. She was a man-eater, regularly using men as a means to an end, which is noteworthy only for its excellent illustration that this was not a typical naive woman.

She was an auteur decades before the term was forged, always ready to fight for her artistic vision as a film maker, and to work the corridors of power. This is not the portrait of a gullible girl.

Riefenstahl’s iron will and highly developed leadership skills shine through The Triumph of the Will (1934), which is simultaneously her greatest work, her claim to fame and the one shameful act that would forever tarnish her image, the main evidence of her Nazi complicity.

She was just 32 years old when she deftly turned the 1934 Nuremberg Rally into a propaganda masterpiece that has, arguably more than any other picture, influenced how we envision Nazi iconography today, with its endless columns of marching troops, torch parades, Nazi banners, close-ups of dedicated Hitlerjugend, and revolving swastikas formations of soldiers. It is all there, and it is highly embellished.

The emphasis on her relatively young age at the time should not imply that she should somehow be excused, or that her talents were perhaps taken advantage of. In fact the very opposite is true: it was her tremendous drive, maturity and ability to operate in higher circles that earned her the job. Nor did she merely show up with camera in hand and point it at the action: much of the filming was staged outside of the actual rally and Riefenstahl herself personally instructed entire columns of marching soldiers.

If some official or high-ranking Nazi stood in her way during filming, she went to plead her case directly to her protector, Adolf Hitler, who along with Goebbels was of course personally involved in the planning process.

An integral part of Nazi high society and a celebrity in her own right, Riefenstahl would schmooze with the Nazi elite, pulling strings here and beguiling men there. At no point in her career did she shy away from associating with the Nazi elite.

For all her claims of naïveté she should have known better, if for no other reason than that many of her Jewish colleagues had fled the country, having been barred from the film industry (which had been nationalised by Goebbels).

Jewish athletes were also barred from the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, an event that Riefenstahl was able to manipulate to craft remarkable pro-Nazi footage, her famous shots of US black athlete Jesse Owens notwithstanding.

Steven Bach doesn’t need to build up a grand case against Riefenstahl’s claim to youthful naïveté. He merely – and this is why the book is so good – has to provide a detailed account of Riefenstahl’s life. The events speak for themselves, most chillingly when she used Gypsy children as extras for her film Tiefland in 1940, children she personally handpicked from the camp Salzburg-Maxglan and who were later to die in Auschwitz.

Riefenstahl could not have known of the gruesome death that awaited the Gypsy children, but the horrid living conditions in the camp ought to have elicited some kind of protest at the very least. But they didn’t. Once again her dedication to her work, her tunnel vision, clouded her moral judgement.

In a sense, Riefenstahl’s life is representative of many in the upper echelons of German society, who weren’t exactly active Nazis or part of the Nazi governing structures, but who nevertheless thrived during the Nazi regime and whose silent acquiescence effectively helped further the Nazi cause.

We do not feel sorry for Riefenstahl for losing the rights to her work after the war. Nor do we pity her many legal attempts to clear her name in courtrooms.

Had it not been for Riefenstahl’s association with the Nazi elite we would have placed her in the pantheon of great film makers. There is no doubt that she was a remarkable and fascinating woman. Regrettably, she sold her soul.