RIEFENSTAHL
The complicated legacy of Hitler's favourite director
It was a bright, unseasonably warm spring day as I walked through Soho, trying to locate one of its private members’ clubs. These places always appear determined to make it difficult for non-members to find them — presumably, that’s all part of their ‘if you know, you know’ charme. Once I had found the right door and stepped inside, the receptionist pointed to a narrow staircase and told me to ‘ignore the signs that say you shouldn’t go down there and just go down there.’
It was one of those rare moments when I questioned my life choices. Outside, people were drinking midday cocktails in the sun while I was descending into a London basement to preview a new film about a prominent Nazi artist. But I was instantly reminded why I do what I do when I sunk into my leather armchair in the small cinema, the lights went out, and the face of one of the most prominent women of the Nazi era appeared on the screen in front of me: Leni Riefenstahl.
Riefenstahl is often described as Hitler’s favourite filmmaker. Ambitious, perfectionist and immensely talented, she was allowed to defy the Nazi’s vision of women as mothers and housewives and embark on a steep artistic career funded and furthered by the regime. The post-war world was left with films that were reviled for the way they glorified Hitler’s racist ideology and revered for their cinematic vision and beauty.
Her two most prominent films Triumph of the Will, shot at the Nuremberg Nazi Party rally of 1934, and Olympia, a chronicle of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, have had a massive impact on 20th-century movie-making – from the symmetry of marching stormtroopers in Star Wars to Quentin Tarantino, who calls Riefenstahl ‘the best director who ever lived. To see that, you just have to watch her Olympia films.’
It is this spilling over into the post-war world that makes many Germans extremely uneasy about Leni Riefenstahl. Most Nazi ideas were discredited after the Second World War. Most leaders and prominent faces were dead or in prison. Not Riefenstahl. Her work continues to be openly admired. She herself was tried but found merely to have been a Mitläufer or ‘fellow traveller’, deemed naive enough to fall for the Nazis but not intrinsically a political creature.
This left her free to haunt post-war West Germany as a walking, talking reminder that the world hadn’t ended in 1945 and a new one begun with the state’s foundation in 1949. Riefenstahl simply refused to go away, keen to relaunch her career while explaining to the world that she thought she had been misunderstood. She insisted that she was never a committed Nazi, just an artist who had been laser-focused on her work. She appeared on talk shows, gave many public interviews, and continued to have admirers in Germany and abroad. This has always disturbed German intellectuals. Dead Nazis were easier to deal with.
Part of a younger generation of journalists, Sandra Maischberger, one of Germany’s most prominent public broadcasters today, interviewed Riefenstahl around the time of her 100th birthday in 2002. The encounter didn’t let her go. ‘I came out of her house in Pöcking at Starnberger Lake and felt entirely dissatisfied with the interview,’ Maischberger later recalled. She didn’t feel she’d been able to get to the real Riefenstahl. ‘She doesn’t say the truth. But I wasn’t sure: does she lie to my face, or has she lied to herself for so long that she can’t see the difference between truth and lie anymore?’
The film I watched was produced by Maischberger who wanted to get to the bottom of who Leni Riefenstahl really was. Directed by the celebrated filmmaker Andres Veiel, RIEFENSTAHL is the first documentary made with full access to the late director’s estate – 700 boxes of letters, tapes, videos and photographs. It’s an overwhelming amount of material to piece together an image of a person, but there are many pitfalls, too. Riefenstahl was nothing if not conscious of her own legacy. Throughout her long life, she continued to alter and edit the record she kept in an effort to shape how she would one day be remembered.
As I sat down in my chair in the Soho basement, I was instantly captivated by the images Veiel had unearthed and collated. There is no denying that there is an intensity about Riefenstahl that is hard to escape to this day. Time and again, the documentary overlaid images of the young woman who had been an actress and a director during both the Weimar Republic and the Nazi era with pictures of an older version justifying herself to post-war audiences.
There is much that is the same about all versions of Riefenstahl. She was and remained ambitious, driven, abrupt and vain. She tried to hide her vulnerabilities at all times, always attempting to project a version of herself she was comfortable for others to see. That goes for the young Riefenstahl, who was often the only woman on set during filming and had been savagely beaten by her erratic father as a child, as well as the older one who was prone to abort interviews that didn’t go the way she intended.
But as the years went by, bitterness creeps into her demeanour, a feeling that her talents would never be admired the way she had hoped and a feeling of being excluded from a world that was increasingly alien to her. One of the most interesting things for me in the film was to find out that Riefenstahl sought out Hitler’s favourite architect, Albert Speer, to ask for advice on how to deal with interviews. There were few people in their position — once so close to the Nazi regime, yet still alive after the war and free to talk and write. I think Riefenstahl found the transition more difficult than Speer. As Maischberger indicated, it eventually became impossible to distinguish between deliberate manipulation and self-deception in her.
The documentary shows how Riefenstahl was confronted again and again with her Nazi past when she wanted to talk about her work, unable to see that for large parts of the post-war German audiences, the two were one and the same. At one point, a reporter asked her about the perfect bodies of athletes she portrayed so powerfully in Olympia, much to the delight of her Nazi benefactors who obsessed over racial purity and health. Riefenstahl responded with flippancy. She liked human beauty. What was she supposed to do at the Olympic Games with all these athletes and their powerful bodies, not film them? She had a job to do.
At another point, a West German talk show confronted her with a woman her age who had been a worker and part of the socialist resistance against Nazism. Riefenstahl maintained that everyone supported Nazism, so how was she supposed to be the only one who didn’t. Her fellow talk show guest explained what the Nazis’ political persecution had done to her and her family. The two women clashed live on camera, causing a flood of letters to arrive at Riefenstahl’s house afterwards. She kept many supportive ones for her record.
As a portrayal of how Riefenstahl grappled with her own legacy, the documentary is absolutely fascinating, although it leaves the question unanswered that had bugged Maischberger in the first place. To me, Riefenstahl remained an enigma. It’s impossible to know what kept her awake at night and if she was ever plagued by self-doubt. It seems Veiel didn’t find any answers to that in her records.
What I found a little frustrating was that the film gives no real room to exploring the young Leni Riefenstahl in any complexity. It’s largely set up to prove that she was a Nazi supporter. In many sequences, we see the old Leni Riefenstahl claim something, say that she was never personally close with any of the Nazis. Then this is juxtaposed with proof to the contrary, say a photograph of her laughing with Hitler.
Don’t get me wrong, this is a point worth making, given that Riefenstahl sought to convince the world she was only ever interested in art. Historians have done much the same with Speer, who painted a much rosier picture of himself after the war than history warranted. But was the point that Riefenstahl believed in Nazism really the only insight to be had from sifting through 700 boxes full of her stuff?
This also means that people who don’t know much about Riefenstahl (and I would imagine that applies to many Germans, too) are watching a film that works from the premise that everyone is familiar with both her work and the post-war image she tried to portray of herself.
It would have been fascinating to explore what drove her as a young girl and what it meant to do something highly unusual for her time and be recognised for it. It would also have been interesting to work out what society made of her, both in the 1920s and in the 1930s. We get a lot of her interaction with (West) German society after 1949 in the film but nothing on how audiences saw her when she was becoming a star.
Having said that, the film is absolutely worth watching despite its narrow focus. I found it utterly absorbing, not least because of the ton of visual material. Viewers can really get a sense of Riefenstahl’s battle with herself, with Germany and with the truth. It’s a fascinating insight into a woman that is likely to stay an enigma.
RIEFENSTAHL is set to be released in UK and Irish cinemas on 9th May. You can view the trailer here.
Have you heard of any US release? Given what's going on here, with nightmares suddenly springing to life, it would likely be seen as "problematic." The company that owns "the Apprentice," about how the monster became the monster that he is, is afraid to release it and none of the streamers wanted to even look at it after last November.
Did you ever see the 1993 film The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl. Quite a fascinating documentary as I remember it. I’d like to hear how the two documentaries compare. There was also a book Dietrich and Riefenstahl, a dual biography, that was uneven, by Karen Wieland. There were also two other books (probably more I’m sure) by Jürgen Trimborn and Steven Bach that I never read.