Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl

Leni Riefenstahl: A Life

by Barton Byg

One might have thought that after her 101 years of life, nothing more remained to be said or known about Leni Riefenstahl. But it is possible that her era could be forgotten or simply become material for historical narrative: Since German reunification, a new phase in the "normalized" depiction of Nazi Germany has begun, accompanied by the Hitler film Downfall (2004) and other costume dramas. While I disagree with Jürgen Trimborn's assertion that Riefenstahl's films themselves enlighten us about Nazi Germany, these biographies provide essential and comprehensive insights into the perpetually troubling issues raised by Leni Riefenstahl's career. In addition to these two recent books, Rainer Rother's Leni Riefenstahl: The Seduction of Genius (Continuum, 2002) and Ray Müller's 1993 film The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl round out an essential shortlist of material on the director. The salutary effect of having Riefenstahl around, denying to the end any connection between her art and violence, is that she reminded us of the bad conscience of mass art in the twentieth century.

Steven Bach's highly readable yet comprehensive Leni stands out among recent material on Riefenstahl, and is also being greeted in Germany as the "definitive biography" (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2 July 2007). I believe this is partly due to Bach's skill of portraying Riefenstahl as a celebrity—a producer, entrepreneur, and public personality as well as an artist. Bach's biography is also "definitive" because, despite its breezy tone, it draws on an impressive array of scholarly and archival sources and makes use of much previously unpublished material. Foremost here is the long-unpublished research of Peggy Wallace (primarily interviews conducted for her 1975 dissertation at USC), which features conversations with a wide range of figures who knew or worked with Riefenstahl. Beyond this, Bach draws on his own interviews (such as with officers of the U.S. military occupation in Germany who dealt with Riefenstahl, or her Hollywood intermediary Kurt Kreuger).

One of the Bach biography's main virtues lies in its delineation of all Riefenstahl's projects, from her first successes as a dancer to the final film and unfinished projects, as collaborative, industrial enterprises fully embedded in the modern media and entertainment industry. He also reveals in detail how Riefenstahl used other people's talents, organized them effectively and, for her own benefit, marshaled resources with phenomenal success—and even took credit for other people's work (and still does, after her death). That Bach is close to the film industry, both as a producer and author, enables him to look at Riefenstahl with the necessary combination of objectivity, skepticism, sympathy and cynicism—even exasperated affection. He is also a biographer of Marlene Dietrich, Riefenstahl's lifelong rival for the affections of the public, the forgiveness of the Germans (for opposing malefactions), and for the vindication of history. For this reason, he can also draw on this career motivation, as a tool for "explaining" the phenomenon of Riefenstahl. It thus makes sense that he refers to her in his book consistently as "Leni."

Although it appears in the U.S. after her death, Jürgen Trimborn's biography, like Lutz Kinkel's Die Scheinwerferein: Leni Riefenstahl und das "Dritte Reich" (Europa Verlag, 2002), was published in Germany around her 100th birthday. It thus would be interesting to study it in that context—Germany's ambivalence about one of its most celebrated film figures, whose behavior consistently led to controversy and legal action, and whose films are still partly banned there as Nazi propaganda.

Because of this ambivalence, Trimborn's is a far more cautious and circumspect work than Bach's—which limits its originality and readability. Trimborn also does not cite as much new material as Bach, and the sources are less comprehensively and clearly noted. Trimborn's narrative follows that of Riefenstahl's memoirs rather closely, while Bach presents her autobiographical ventures as career moves and as calculated commodities within the media industry.

Since Rainer Rother's Leni Riefenstahl: The Seduction of Genius clearly describes the dilemma of separating Riefenstahl's life from her films, and the inevitable link of both to Nazi Germany, it is cited frequently by both Trimborn and Bach. Given that Rother emphasizes Riefenstahl's works rather than her life, he provides more satisfying material for film studies than the two biographers. While Trimborn's chronological structure and chapter headings seem random at times, Rother's structure makes an analytical progression while Bach's provides a gripping narrative. "The Trouble with Riefenstahl," as Rother opens his book, is the question of whether her talent is the reason for the films' "greatness," or whether the historical circumstances that led her films to be celebrated, arbitrarily qualifies them as "great." From his work, as well as from Bach's, I conclude that it is not the influence or importance of Riefenstahl's work that is most crucial to understand, but its employment as an emblem of or stand-in for Nazism as such—as a kind of shorthand.

Rother draws two major conclusions that are subscribed to, or elaborated on, by the two biographers. First is his assessment that Riefenstahl's talent as an artist and filmmaker was principally in style and technique, not in creative originality: "As a stylist, Leni Riefenstahl demonstrated her creativity in the way she realized her aims, but her originality depended on having a predetermined task." Bach fleshes out the phrase "realizing her aims" by showing just how crucial it is to an understanding of Leni to see her as a self-invented personality, with not only an artist's vision but also a producer's prodigious acumen in marshaling resources, steering collaborators, and promoting, organizing, and defending her projects. Bach's book demonstrates that Leni Riefenstahl's perhaps greatest artistic creation was Leni Riefenstahl.

Rother's second important conclusion regards Riefenstahl's symbolic guilt in the eyes of ordinary Germans, since she claims to have been an "innocent bystander" rather than a person of power and privilege in Nazi Germany. Rother quotes Margarethe Mitscherlich's review of Riefenstahl's memoirs, "She has managed to remain, right up to the present, in blissful ignorance of everything she wanted to know nothing about." "This sentence," Rother concludes, "(unintentionally) sums up what it was that Riefenstahl had in common with her fellow Germans. Riefenstahl's guilt offered an escape valve for the more general guilt that her compatriots were intent on suppressing. Her attempts to justify herself seemed unacceptable on principle—not because of the evidence available in each of the two cases [her behavior at Konskie and her use of Romani "extras" for Tiefland—B.B.], but rather because her excuses were identical to those whom Rother terms the "'small fry'—the passive onlookers in Nazi Germany."

Both Trimborn and Bach deal with most of the same major works and controversies in Riefenstahl's career. Of the films, The Blue Light is the early milestone of the heroically romantic side of the Weimar cinema, with important collaborative roles played by Harry Sokol, Riefenstahl's lover and financial backer, and the writer Béla Balázs. With Riefenstahl's tacit support or even insistence, both men (Jews who were forced into exile by the Nazi rise to power) were denied credit or remuneration for the production. As with Riefenstahl's other major productions, Bach provides a rich account of the personal and professional relationships behind them, extending the information into the postwar era.

Bach's book also reveals more fully than most other accounts just how active Riefenstahl remained during the war, despite her well-publicized withdrawal in horror from the front after the Konskie massacre in Poland. Her considerable postwar productivity effectively refutes the claim that she was subject to a virtual "ban." As a parallel to her initial rise to fame, Bach vividly describes her dramatic success in reclaiming access to her properties, her films and even their profits after the war. Again, Bach's position as a film-industry insider makes him skeptical of Riefenstahl's self-pity; having multiple projects that don't end up as finished films doesn't mean that one doesn't have work. Regarding the "final" film of her Nazi-era career,Tiefland, which she was indeed able to complete in 1954, Bach minces no words. It was a colossal failure, despite—or perhaps because of—her having fuller creative control than most directors ever dream of.

Among the many postwar disputes and lawsuits over Riefenstahl's reputation, both books deal with the controversy arising from the film A Time of Silence and Darkness (1982), in which producer Nina Gladitz discusses Riefenstahl's use of Roma prisoners bound for Auschwitz as extras in her film Tiefland. Bach goes beyond the dispute between Gladitz and Riefenstahl to focus on the role played by the Romani survivors themselves in challenging Riefenstahl's version of events. Despite ruling against Riefenstahl on most points, a court found that the Gladitz film had overstated Riefenstahl's knowing culpability in one detail. Since reediting was prohibitive, this resulted in the film's effective removal from distribution after Riefenstahl's challenge.

Of all Riefenstahl films, Triumph of the Will and Olympia receive the most praise as esthetic achievements. The longevity and ubiquity of key images from Triumph, which most recently serve as shorthand for Nazi power in Ken Burns's The War, is not identical to esthetic influence or artistic quality. I would venture that the documentary genre, in its cultural role and its methods, has been less influenced by Riefenstahl than other media have been. Her films are often quoted, which is not the same as influence. Indeed, their "influence" on dystopian science fiction, monumental rock-concert spectacles, advertising or fashion photography could be seen as a form of adaptation or even parody.

Thus I fully disagree with Trimborn's rather pious conclusion that her pictures "are essential when attempting to explain to younger generations what National Socialist rule, at least its official, representative side, looked like." On the contrary, the film reveals little about Nazism itself, but testifies to the post-1945 fascination with Nazism.

Olympia is similarly both an esthetic achievement and a subject of mystification. Here the choreographic framing and editing of bodies in motion is clearly impressive, again supported in no small measure by Riefenstahl's vast technical resources and unparalleled license to control the circumstances of shooting. Modern sports photography and editing, as well as glamor photos and advertising, owe something to this film. But again, the Nazi aura surrounding the 1936 Olympics obscures the debt the film owed to its era, a high point of modernism in photography and film editing. Bach demonstrates that Riefenstahl's cinematographers and other contemporaries contributed much to the technical genius with which she is credited.

It was not until the 1960s and her discovery of the Nuba people of southern Sudan that Riefenstahl developed more fully as a photographer in her own right, producing books of striking color portraiture. But again, Bach details how exaggerated were her claims to have "discovered" the Nuba, and the questionable ethics of her practices. Conflicts arose both with the European ethnographers Riefenstahl had accompanied and with the Nuba themselves, since she filmed and photographed aspects of their culture that they had asked her not to.

Neither Bach nor Trimborn satisfactorily address the racism conveyed by Riefenstahl's idealized images of black people, focused on by Susan Sontag in regard to the Nuba photos. Such celebratory images, as well as the prominence of Jesse Owens in the film Olympia are seen instead as distancing her from the Nazi ideology of the "master race." Yet there are no images of Owens wearing a laurel crown on the medalists' platform with the U.S. flag fluttering behind, as there are of white athletes. Recent photo exhibitions have also included, without comment, a photo of Riefenstahl leaning over to place a laurel wreath on Owens's head. Such an image clearly does not appear in the film, nor in the commemorative portfolios she assembled from multiple photographers' work and took full credit for herself. But now it functions as an alibi.

Rather than such heroic images of Owens, however, his victory is capped by an image that seems out of place for a director so averse to images of human weakness or vulnerability. At the end of one competition, Owens is shown smiling but exhausted while a white "handler" grips him by the upper arm, as if ready to pull him forcibly from the arena. Without looking for racism and anti-Semitism in Riefenstahl's images themselves, the problem is that the work pretends these issues did not exist. From Olympia we will not learn anything about the controversial history of the 1936 Olympics, such as the attempted boycotts over the banning of Jews—even from the U.S. team. And even a film as far from documentary as the 1937 Charlie Chan at the Olympics depicts African-American Olympic team members cheering Jesse Owens on. Riefenstahl's "festival of the people" includes no such people.

My principal criticism of both Bach and Trimborn is the superficiality of their treatment of film scholarship on Riefenstahl, despite their evident reliance on it. It is most often in this literature that the question of continuity between Riefenstahl's guilt and post-1945 culture has been raised. Their discussions of Susan Sontag's crucial article, "Fascinating Fascism," emphasize Riefenstahl's indignation about it as a personal attack, but they go no further. They do not explore the continuity of post-1945 culture with Riefenstahl's work and with Sontag's summary of fascist art: [It] "glorifies surrender, it exalts mindlessness, it glamorizes death." Even more superficial is their discussion of the feminist critics who found a gender bias in the vehemence of the accusations against Riefenstahl, while men in comparable positions (such as Albert Speer) were offered more understanding. The role of gender in shaping Riefenstahl's celebrity, and how its pertinence to the current cultural climate influences the way her guilt (as an associate of Hitler and Goebbels) is perceived, deserves more discussion.

Riefenstahl's images are most troubling because they do not themselves encourage the viewer to ask any such questions; instead, they discourage it. But we ourselves are only one step away from Riefenstahl's self-stylization as a passive witness to Nazism if we remain passive as viewers of her work. So I shudder at the assertion, quoted by Bach, that Riefenstahl is a model for filmmakers in her single-mindedness and dedication to her craft. In proposing Riefenstahl's exemplary obsession with "getting the shot," Bach recounts two of Ray Müller's anecdotes. One is the helicopter accident in Africa in which she received serious injuries at the age of ninety-seven. She lashed into Müller for not having the camera running at the time.

But more disturbing as an example of her obsession with the image is Müller's account of a scene in the Nuba village to which Riefenstahl returned many years after her initial famous photographic sojourn. Suddenly Riefenstahl runs toward Müller in an outcry of fury. Bach writes, "She had just inquired after two of her oldest Nuba friends. Told they were dead, she had begun to weep when she suddenly realized Múller's cameras were idle. He had missed the dramatic moment, her emotion, and the proper angle to capture tears running down her face." Here the tragedy of Riefenstahl and the failure of her concept of art is clear: it is not just that, for her, art was more important than life. It is also that she believed that grief could be captured in an image.

We may soon see the day when Adolf Hitler and Leni Riefenstahl are mainly known as movie characters. A major step in this direction was Bruno Ganz's portrayal of the tormented and humanized Hitler in Downfall(2004). This film role may now join that of King Lear as a culminating challenge to crown an actor's career. The biographies of Riefenstahl considered here both note the fact that Jodie Foster once considered making a film of Riefenstahl's life with herself in the starring role. Steven Bach's knowing jibe at Riefenstahl's rejection of the idea is far more telling than at first glance: "She told the press that, in any case, Foster was not beautiful enough to play her on-screen. She saw Sharon Stone in the role." Marlene Dietrich's rival to the end, she claimed to be an artist above politics, but she also wanted to be a star.

To buy Leni Riefenstahl DVDs click here

To buy Leni Riefenstahl biographies click here

Barton Byg teaches film studies at UMass Amherst where he is founding director of the DEFA film library and graduate program director in German and Scandinavian Studes. 

Cineaste,Vol.XXXIII No.1 2007

Comments

(There are no comments yet)

Leave a comment:

Name (Required)
E-Mail (Required)
Website

Enter the above in the field below