27/12/2021

Nina Gladitz, Her Lifelong Crusade against Nazi Filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl

 



In 20 November 1984, in the southern German city of Freiburg, two film-makers faced each other in court for the first day of a trial that was to last nearly two and a half years. The plaintiff, Leni Riefenstahl, had been Hitler’s favourite film-maker. Now 82, she showed up to court in a sheepskin coat over a beige suit, her blond hair set in a large neat perm framing a tanned face. The defendant was a striking, dark-haired 32-year-old documentary maker. Her name was Nina Gladitz, and the outcome of the trial would shape the rest of her life.

 During the Nazi era, Riefenstahl had been the regime’s most skilled propagandist, directing films that continue to be both reviled for their glorification of the Third Reich and considered landmarks of early cinema for their innovations and technical mastery. Once the second world war was over, Riefenstahl sought to distance herself from the regime she had served, portraying herself as an apolitical naif whose only motivation was making the most beautiful art possible. “I don’t know what I should apologise for,” she once said. “All my films won the top prize.”

 Riefenstahl was taking Gladitz to court over claims made in Gladitz’s television documentary Time of Darkness and Silence, which had aired in 1982. In the film, members of a family of Sinti – a Romani people living mainly in Germany and Austria – had accused Riefenstahl of taking them out of Maxglan, a Nazi concentration camp near Salzburg, in September 1940, and forcing them to work as extras in her feature film Tiefland (Lowlands). Riefenstahl would later claim that all of the Romani extras – 53 Roma and Sinti from Maxglan, and a further 78 from a camp in eastern Berlin – had survived the war. In fact, almost 100 of them are known or believed to have been gassed in Auschwitz, just a small fraction of the 220,000 to 500,000 Romani people murdered in the Holocaust. Some of the survivors insisted that Riefenstahl had promised to save them. One, Josef Reinhardt, was 13 when he was drafted as an extra. He was the trial’s key witness, and sat beside Gladitz in the courtroom every day.

 Riefenstahl denied that she had visited the camp to handpick the extras, denied failing to pay them and denied having promised and subsequently failed to save them from Auschwitz. She claimed that, while making the film, she had not known of the existence of the gas chambers, nor of the fate of the Roma and Sinti. When Gladitz’s documentary was played in court on the opening day of the trial, Riefenstahl repeatedly interrupted the screening with cries of “Lies! Lies!” and “Nothing but a lie!” As her shouts echoed round the darkened courtroom, the judge, Günther Oswald, told her: “Madam, I have no other choice than to watch the film.”

 While there is no doubt that Riefenstahl’s account of her own life is far from reliable, it has been hard to establish precisely what she knew about the horrors perpetrated during the Third Reich. She was the regime’s leading film propagandist for almost its entire duration, and her films included Triumph of the Will, about the Nuremberg rally, and Olympia, a record of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. But, though she was a close friend of Adolf Hitler and other high-ranking Nazis, such as the fanatical antisemite Julius Streicher, Riefenstahl fiercely denied any awareness of the slaughter that took place in concentration camps. Jürgen Trimborn, author of a highly critical biography published in 2002, declared that there was “no evidence that, due to her proximity to the regime, Riefenstahl knew more than others did about the mass annihilation of the Jews. But it is obvious that, like most Germans, she knew enough to be sure that it was better not to know even more.” (Gladitz would later judge this analysis as far too generous.)

 During the trial, Riefenstahl produced correspondence from one of the extras that appeared to support her account of her good relationship with them while filming Tiefland. It was accepted that they had habitually referred to her as “Tante Leni”, or Auntie Leni. “Even if you don’t want to believe it, the Gypsies – the adults as well as the children – were our darlings,” Riefenstahl said. But the court also heard that during the day the extras were watched by two policemen, and at night they were locked up in sheds and cellars. A contract discovered by Gladitz in archives in Salzburg showed an agreement between Riefenstahl and the SS camp guard that measures would be taken against any attempts at escape.

 When the trial finally reached its conclusion, in March 1987, Gladitz won on three out of four points. The judge ruled that Riefenstahl had indeed visited the Maxglan camp to choose the extras, and that they had not been paid for their work. He also overturned Riefenstahl’s description of Maxglan as a “relief and welfare camp”, stating that by definition it was a concentration camp.

 But Josef Reinhardt’s assertion that Riefenstahl had promised to save him and his family from deportation to Auschwitz, or that she knew what would happen to the Roma and Sinti once there, could not be proven, Judge Oswald said. And so he ordered the removal of the scene in Gladitz’s documentary in which Reinhardt recalled Riefenstahl’s promise.





 For Gladitz, this was a disaster. “There are certain edits I am not prepared to tolerate,” she told the court. Her refusal to remove the scene meant that WDR, the broadcaster of the documentary, consigned the film to the archives, where it has remained under lock and key ever since. In the years that followed, commissions for new films dried up, and Gladitz’s financial situation, already strained from being unable to work during the trial, worsened. “In the TV world I had become persona non grata, because I had dared to out Riefenstahl as a perpetrator,” Gladitz told me many years later.

 Though some journalists framed the verdict of the trial as an ending, for Gladitz it was only a beginning. She would spend the next four decades consumed by Riefenstahl, devoting most of her waking hours to pursuing the truth about her as no one else, in her view, had adequately done. Her career, her friendships, her finances and her health would all be sacrificed in the attempt to find evidence that would finally, conclusively, condemn Riefenstahl. The result would be the publication, last year, of her magnum opus, the product of a life’s obsession, Leni Riefenstahl: Karriere einer Täterin (“Career of a Perpetrator”). “Some people are certainly going to accuse her – and I don’t think it can really be denied – that this is something of a personal vendetta,” her publisher told me.

For Gladitz, though, this was irrelevant. “The most important thing is that Riefenstahl’s myth is dead,” she told me on the day the book was published. “In my mind’s eye, I see her grave glowing from within because she’s turning in it so fast.”

 I first met Nina Gladitz in 2002, when she contacted me ahead of Riefenstahl’s 100th birthday. Gladitz was supporting a Roma and Sinti rights group in a new legal challenge against Riefenstahl, and she wanted me to cover her efforts for a British newspaper. She was insistent – then and in the years to come – that if I wrote about her work, it must be in what she deemed to be the right way. “This is not about me. I will not let you focus on me and ignore my research,” she would tell me, although our conversations invariably led back to her own life. The more time I spent with Gladitz, the more apparent it became that her fixation was as much to do with her own biography, and with laying some of her own ghosts to rest, as it was about Riefenstahl.

 The shadow of the Nazi era had hung over Gladitz’s childhood. Born in 1946, she grew up in Schwäbisch Gmünd in the south-western state of Baden-Württemberg, about 30 miles east of the state capital, Stuttgart. Her beautiful, uncaring mother was, Gladitz believed, mourning the loss of Hitler. “She fed me. But affection and love or the feeling of emotional security was totally lacking,” Gladitz recalled. “Her standard insult to me was: ‘You’re not my daughter, you must have fallen out of a Gypsy’s pram.’”

 When she was about five, Gladitz overheard her mother and an aunt talking about how many people, including children, had been murdered in the gas chambers. “I suddenly became convinced my mother must have been involved,” Gladitz once told me. “Even though I later realised this could not have been the case, it was logical for a five-year-old, on the basis of my own experiences, to easily imagine my unloving mother had been one of the perpetrators.”

 In Gladitz’s telling, her childhood was sheltered and isolated. Playmates were not allowed to visit the family’s house, which stood on the side of a hill. Her imagination was her escape, fuelled in part by the magical films her father would show to Gladitz and her siblings. In her early 20s, Gladitz moved to Munich to study at the University of Television and Film. It was there that she first came across Riefenstahl’s work, but she was more interested in the growing movement against nuclear power, and other leftwing causes, than she was in looking back to the Nazi era. Soon after graduation, she made an agitprop documentary about attempts to block a nuclear power plant located not far from where she grew up, which was named the Chicago film festival’s documentary of the year in 1974.

 Gladitz’s interest in Riefenstahl began in 1977, when an acquaintance sent her a letter that he thought might interest her. It had been written by Josef Reinhardt more than 20 years earlier, and Gladitz’s acquaintance had found it in the archive of the Association of Persecutees of the Nazi regime. Reinhardt had asked the association for financial help, explaining that he and members of his family had been picked from a prison camp by Riefenstahl and forced to work as extras on Tiefland in 1940 and 1941. He had included two small black-and-white photographs of poorly clad, barefoot children.





 In Riefenstahl’s oeuvre, Tiefland remains a largely forgotten work. Based on an opera by Eugen d’Albert, the bucolic romantic drama was filmed between 1940 and 1944, and cost 6m Reichsmarks to make – a staggering sum for the time. The funding was secured thanks to an intervention by Hitler, with the project classed as vital to the war effort, though the film was not released until well after the war. When Tiefland finally reached cinemas in 1954, it received a lukewarm response from filmgoers and critics, who dismissed it as wooden and schmaltzy. Almost all the closeups of the Sinti and Roma extras had been edited out.

 When Gladitz visited the national film archives in Koblenz a few weeks after reading Reinhardt’s letter, she was amazed to find that it had no documentation on Tiefland whatsoever. “I had been sure that one drawer after another would open itself to me with documents on how Tiefland was made,” she recalled. “I knew immediately that I would have to start this lonely search on my own.” Her life’s work had begun.

 With remarkable speed, Gladitz managed to track down Reinhardt, who was living in the town of Offenburg in western Germany. A violin maker by profession, he was the nephew of the jazz great Django Reinhardt, and also of Schnuckenack Reinhardt, known as the violin virtuoso of Sinti music.

 At their first meeting, Reinhardt told his story over several hours. He and his family had fled Nazi Germany to Austria in the 30s. Following Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938, he had hidden with his relatives in the mountain forest south of Salzburg. They were captured by local authorities in October 1939 and held in horse boxes before being taken to a holding point near Salzburg, which prisoners had themselves been forced to transform into a “concentration-style” camp, later known as Maxglan, with barbed-wire fencing and a watchtower. He had first seen Riefenstahl there in September 1940, accompanied by several SS officers. Riefenstahl had, he said, inspected an array of pre-selected prisoners, including his teenage self, and several family members.

 The group Riefenstahl selected was soon transported to the film set, which was in Krün, near the Bavarian town of Mittenwald, about 125 miles to the west. As soon as Reinhardt and the other extras arrived, they were put to work. Their food and accommodation were, Reinhardt recalled, “worse than in the camp”. They slept on bare boards in sheds, barns, animal stalls and cellars, which were locked up at night. They were under constant watch. The women and children had been separated from the men, the majority of whom were left in the camp in Salzburg.

 Filming continued for about 13 months, until November 1941, after which the extras were ordered to march to the nearest railway station. Reinhardt told Gladitz they had not been allowed to take any of the costumes they had worn on set, instead having to wear the rags they had arrived in the previous year. The children no longer fitted their clothes. “We had to go barefoot because we had all grown out of the shoes we’d had. It was bitterly cold,” Reinhardt remembered. For the rest of his life he could only wear soft shoes as a result of the frostbite he suffered.




 Gladitz knew almost immediately that she would make a documentary about Reinhardt’s story. In time she also began to grasp, as she said, “why no one had known about Riefenstahl’s abuse of her defenceless prisoners”. In 1949, Riefenstahl had successfully sued Helmut Kindler, a magazine publisher who had been involved in wartime resistance, for revealing her exploitation of the Sinti and Roma extras. From then on, Riefenstahl had pursued dozens of further legal battles against those who had written or said anything about her that she disliked.

 Gladitz was determined to speak to Riefenstahl for the documentary, and in 1981, she managed to track her down in Frankfurt. Their first encounter took place in a bookshop, where Gladitz posed as a film-maker called Anna Madou, hoping to make a film about great 20th-century artists. Using the same false identity, she wrote to Riefenstahl a few months later to remind her of their earlier meeting and to ask whether – given great interest in the project from, among others, the BBC and NBC – they could schedule an interview soon. She signed off: “Please forgive me once again for the tenacity with which I have already pursued you and be assured of my admiration and veneration for your great art!”

 For what she imagined would be the central scene in the documentary, Gladitz hoped to stage a meeting between Reinhardt and Riefenstahl. She envisaged Reinhardt greeting the film-maker warmly and starting a conversation, before eventually confronting her with the truth about her “extras”. “The idea came from Josef,” Gladitz told me. “He said he would go to her, as his favourite Gypsy, and say: ‘Tante Leni, it’s so great to see you again.’ I knew she would not have been able to resist him.” But the plan collapsed after Gladitz asked Riefenstahl, prior to the meeting with Reinhardt, what she calls a “throwaway question” – about how Riefenstahl had related to other women during the Third Reich, given her proximity to the overwhelmingly male inner circle of the Nazi regime.

  “It was as if I had put poison in her tea,” said Gladitz. “She turned away from me coldly, and I knew then that it was never going to work. It was such a stupid question. If I had known then that she had had several clandestine lesbian affairs, I would have known better than to ask that.” (“Frau Gladitz,” Riefenstahl would later write in her memoir, “clearly had the specific intention from the very start of producing a slanderous concoction about me.”)

 Today, the only way to see Time of Darkness and Silence is to get hold of a bootleg. Not long ago, via a French film director, I managed to obtain a grainy DVD copy of a VHS recording of the original broadcast. Despite the poor quality of the bootleg, the film retains its power. Watching it almost 40 years after it first aired, one is struck by the intimacy of the encounter with Reinhardt and his relatives, as they sit on their sofa, smoking and drinking coffee and relating their awful experiences. There is no musical accompaniment, no frills, no schnick-schnack, as the Germans say. Instead, what we get are the plain facts of the hunger they felt during the filming, the nights spent locked together in a stall with a single bucket for a toilet. At one point, Gladitz returns with Reinhardt to the place where Tiefland was filmed, and to the site of the former Maxglan camp. There is no trace of the horrors that unfolded there, just empty fields. It is only through Reinhardt’s testimony that we rediscover the significance of these sites, as he recalls where the watchtower once stood, the location of the kitchen, the entrance, the places where he was told to put up the barbed wire.

 Time of Darkness and Silence aired in Germany on 6 September 1982. Reviews were sparse, but those that did appear recognised the film’s significance. Few Germans had ever heard Sinti and Roma talk about their experiences in the Holocaust, and the fact that Gladitz had persuaded them to talk so openly on camera was remarkable, wrote a reviewer in Die Zeit. It wasn’t until the following year that Riefenstahl watched the documentary. In June 1983, she wrote an angry letter to her lawyer, claiming that she was “stunned” by the film’s “monstrous aspersions”. She immediately set about suing Gladitz for defamation.

 Going into the trial, Gladitz knew that not everyone would take her side. Riefenstahl’s work had experienced a renaissance in the previous decade, with several feminists celebrating her for succeeding in such a patriarchal environment, and some film critics arguing that the beauty and ambition of her films should be appreciated separately from the context of their production. (Others disagreed: Susan Sontag saw Riefenstahl’s aesthetics as entirely inseparable from Nazi ideology, calling The Triumph of the Will “the most purely propagandistic film ever made”.)

 Even Gladitz’s mother, who attended court every day, seemed to side with the plaintiff. “That poor Leni Riefenstahl,” she said to her daughter one day, “what you’re putting her through.” Over the years, Gladitz’s childhood suspicions of her mother’s Nazi sympathies had not diminished. During the trial, these confrontations took on a new intensity. “I was so incredibly angry,” Gladitz told me. “I took her by her blouse and pushed her against the wall and said: ‘I’ll let you go when you tell me what you knew about the Nazis.’” The most her mother admitted was thinking “nothing good” would come of the Nazis’ deportation of the last Jews from Schwäbisch Gmünd, which she had witnessed. (Gladitz believed that her mother sensed this “quarrel with Riefenstahl also had something to do with her”. Others sensed it, too. “You are aware who the Riefenstahl in your life is, aren’t you?” a doctor friend asked, and urged her to find a psychoanalyst.)




 With her documentary banished to the archives, Gladitz decided to continue gathering more stories of those whom Riefenstahl had betrayed and exploited. She met Rosa Winter, who had been 17 when Riefenstahl chose her as an extra for Tiefland. Winter’s mother had to stay behind in Maxglan concentration camp. When Winter began to fear that her mother would be killed there, she escaped from the set and began walking back to the camp on foot. She was caught and taken to a police cell in Salzburg. According to Winter, Riefenstahl visited her and ordered her to get down on her knees and beg for forgiveness. When she refused, Riefenstahl ordered the girl to be imprisoned, and Winter endured five years of incarceration in Ravensbrück concentration camp.

 Gladitz was also haunted by the story of Willy Zielke, a talented film-maker who had filmed and edited the famous prologue of Riefenstahl’s film Olympia. Zielke was absent from the film’s premiere in 1938, which had been part of the celebrations for Hitler’s 49th birthday, and Riefenstahl had Zielke’s name removed from the credits. Gladitz discovered that at the time of the premiere, Zielke was in a psychiatric institution, having had a nervous breakdown. As she pored over Zielke’s unpublished memoirs and his medical records, Gladitz grew convinced that Riefenstahl was responsible for Zielke’s admission to the clinic. In 1942, Riefenstahl removed him from the institution by appointing herself his legal guardian. She insisted that he help her with the filming of Tiefland, and later, during the edit, forced him to sleep in an unheated room guarded by one of her assistants so that he wouldn’t escape, and gave him such paltry portions of food that he was close to starvation.

 Bringing these stories to light became Gladitz’s mission. She gathered more and more interviews and documents, each piece of research opening a door to the next. Finally, she started compiling it all into a work that she hoped would finally prove the extent of Riefenstahl’s crimes. Time of Darkness and Silence may languish indefinitely in the archives, but Gladitz hoped that her book would vindicate the documentary’s creation.

 In late 2015, Gladitz contacted me again with some news: her book was finished. She had uncovered many new details about Riefenstahl’s life and crimes, she said, including previously untold stories of those whose lives she had destroyed. The manuscript was more than 1,000 pages long.

 A few days later, we met in a crowded cafe in Berlin. Dressed imposingly in a voluminous black velveteen dress coat, bulky necklace and black hat, Gladitz was what I would soon come to recognise as characteristically blunt. “I don’t see why I have to justify my motive,” she said, when I asked what had made her pursue the story of Riefenstahl for what was now more than three decades. “In retrospect it feels like the topic found me, rather than the other way round.” Gladitz explained her disgust at what she called “Riefenstahl’s renaissance in public life”, which she saw as tacit acceptance of the director’s lies and self-mythology. In 1998, for instance, Riefenstahl had been a guest of honour at Time magazine’s 75th anniversary banquet, where she had been given a standing ovation. In 2002, the year of her 100th birthday, in an interview with the leftwing Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper, Riefenstahl had declared that she had seen all of the Tiefland extras after the war and “none of them came to any harm”. The newspaper did not attempt to contradict her.

 Our meeting lasted several hours. Afterwards, I realised that in more than 25 years as a journalist, I had never met anyone so consumed by a single subject, or so indignant about the fact that hers was such a lonely pursuit. Since the trial with Riefenstahl, Gladitz had made other films, most of which championed underdog heroes. But in all the conversations I would go on to have with her, Gladitz barely mentioned these projects. She only wanted to talk about Riefenstahl, and how others had failed to pursue various lines of inquiry because of their ignorance and negligence.

 After that second meeting, Gladitz became a constant presence in my life. We usually met in the same Berlin cafe in Charlottenburg, and as she smoked roll-ups and nibbled on pastries, often the only food she would eat that day, she would keep me abreast of the latest developments and share with me her theories – details of Riefenstahl’s secret lesbian affairs, or her lie that a knee injury, rather than simple lack of talent, had ended her dancing career. Our phone calls usually lasted an hour or more, as she itemised the new letters, documents, court records and diaries she had uncovered, here in a French archive, there in a Polish one. I filled notebook after notebook during these meetings, struggling to keep up as she swept through her years of research, each new find reinforcing with greater intensity what she had known all along.

 Sometimes it felt as if Gladitz saw me as a journalist, a useful contact who could bring her research to a wider audience; sometimes, I was closer to a friend, or at least a confidante to a lonely woman who could not tolerate most people, and whom most people found intolerable. (I did too, at times.) The discussions sometimes spilled over into evening email exchanges. Once she sent me Riefenstahl’s description of her ecstatic feelings on first encountering Hitler: “It seemed as if the Earth’s surface were spreading out in front of me, like a hemisphere that suddenly splits apart in the middle, spewing out an enormous jet of water, so powerful that it touched the sky and shook the Earth.”

 

“It is – well what is it?” Gladitz asked me.

 “Either childbirth or an orgasm,” I emailed back.

 “Bingo,” she replied. “She is quite obviously describing an orgasm.” Every new fact further underlined the depths of Riefenstahl’s deviousness, her devotion to the führer.

 After Gladitz had a heart attack in 2016, I visited her in hospital in Charlottenburg, where I found Riefenstahl documents lining the windowsill. A few weeks later, I attended her 70th birthday party at a tavern in Berlin, where all the guests – historians, archivists, editors – seemed connected to her work on Riefenstahl. There she held court, tapping her ringed fingers on the table, entertaining the guests with Riefenstahl anecdotes until well after midnight.




  In the five years after she completed it, Gladitz’s book was rejected by about 30 publishers. To her, this was further proof that they were all “too afraid to release a critical book about the sacred Leni Riefenstahl”. Recent critical biographies of Riefenstahl, such as Trimborn’s, had not, in Gladitz’s opinion, gone far enough.

 When the literary agent Lianne Kolf received Gladitz’s manuscript in 2019, she recognised it as one of the best finds of her long career. “I thought: ‘Finally someone who is telling the truth about Riefenstahl, who she really was and what she really did,’” Kolf told me. She decided to represent Gladitz, but was also frank that the reason the book had struggled to find a publisher was “not so much because of the topic, but simply because the text was so unwieldy”. In the end, as Gladitz admitted to me, she had been forced to pay for an editor to pull the text into a manageable shape.

 Eventually, in early 2020, the Zurich-based publishing house Orell Füssli took on the manuscript. Stephan Meyer, its nonfiction publishing director, told me that communication with Gladitz had not always been easy. “Her attempts to steer the reception of the book are not likely to help its success,” he said, shortly before it came out. One of Gladitz’s demands was that she would only be interviewed by people who could prove they had read the entire book.

 When we spoke on the day of the book’s publication, 23 October 2020, Gladitz was elated. “I have finally managed to shatter the Riefenstahl monument, with all 675g of my book, a paper hammer,” she told me over the phone. No one, she insisted, will be able to write another word on Riefenstahl without referring to her book. “Even my mother would be forced to take me seriously.”

 By then, Gladitz had gone back to live in Schwäbisch Gmünd. Her movements were restricted by the pandemic and her own failing health. There was no publication party. “I don’t need a red carpet, and no one needs to tickle my tummy,” she said. Instead, she had celebrated with a latte macchiato, which an old friend, a former admirer from her teenage years, had delivered to her one-bedroom apartment. She was sleeping on a sofa bed, surrounded by mountains of Riefenstahl material packed into large plastic boxes.

 In the weeks after Gladitz’s book came out, it received considerable coverage. The French-German cultural TV channel Arte produced a documentary, which stated that Gladitz proves “the extent to which, unknown until now, the cultural ambassador of the Third Reich was entangled in the crimes of the Nazis”. The German magazine Der Spiegel ran a long article about the book’s gestation. The Frankfurter Allgemeine was more sceptical, saying that the book sometimes “borders on obsession” and will be “more a point of departure” for future Riefenstahl scholars than “representing a conclusive position”. (Among the points it queried was Gladitz’s claim that Riefenstahl had an affair with the Black American athlete Jesse Owens, hero of the 1936 Olympics. “But everyone knows that’s true!” Gladitz protested, when I asked her about it.)

 Gladitz was furious at much of the coverage, even those articles that were largely positive. Indeed, before the book was published, Gladitz had complained to me about a leading historian of the Nazi era, who had written a laudatory postscript for the book, which included the gentle concession that “historians may perhaps find some of her interpretations hard to follow, or not give them the importance the author does”. Gladitz judged this analysis a “declaration of intellectual bankruptcy” and the postscript was scrapped shortly before publication. It was replaced by an eloquent 12-page appreciation from Albrecht Götz von Olenhusen, professor of law at the University of Düsseldorf, who represented Gladitz in the 80s trial, and whom she had long regarded as her most constant and loyal supporter.

 One of the moments in the discarded postscript that had most infuriated Gladitz was the historian’s reference to a popular nickname for Riefenstahl during the Third Reich: Reichsgletscherspalte or “glacial crevasse of the Reich” – a nod to her mountaineering prowess and her sexual promiscuity. “That is just not on,” Gladitz told me. “It’s totally lacking in respect.”

 She sounded almost sympathetic towards Riefenstahl. It was an odd moment, her words perhaps indicating less respect than recognition. Over the years, Gladitz had spoken to me about the repeated abuse she had suffered from men, including from a violent ex-husband, and about being sexually harassed as a girl while walking home from school. Gladitz wanted Riefenstahl to be known for her crimes and condemned for her complicity, her lies and her cruelty. Sceptical though she was about those who viewed the director “through feminist eyes”, she bridled at seeing Riefenstahl belittled because of her sex, an experience she knew only too well.

 Sometimes Gladitz’s short temper, and frustration that her work was not getting the respect it deserved, were directed at me. She felt annoyed, betrayed even, when I asked, after publication, if I could still draw on two previous manuscripts I had read, both much longer than the published version. She replied that if there were elements of those manuscripts I found interesting, why had I not intervened to stop her editor cutting them?

 It had not, of course, been in my power to do so, but I felt guilty nonetheless. I often felt guilty around Gladitz – at not doing enough to help her, and at my inability to find her research as riveting as she did, even as I filled page after page with details of her work. By the time the book appeared, I had been in constant contact with her for five years. Occasionally, I felt my obsession with Gladitz had started to mirror her obsession with Riefenstahl, as the piece I had been planning to write grew and grew, year after year, and my office was taken over by mounds of related books, documents and newspaper articles.

 A few days after the publication of her book, I went to visit Gladitz in Schwäbisch Gmünd for the weekend. On the Saturday, we returned to her childhood home. Despite the house’s calm elegance, despite the brilliant sunshine and the peaceful woodland setting, Gladitz shuddered as we approached. When we reached the house, she would not get out of the car, sitting firmly in the passenger seat, enveloped in her trademark black gauzy dress and a knitted headband. In her deep husky voice, she dismissed my suggestion that we take a photograph of her in front of the house. A very silly idea, she said.

 Gladitz was notably more decrepit than when I had seen her last, and dependent on a walking frame. She was sick and exhausted, and her eyesight had deteriorated. In an email she had sent to friends and supporters when her book came out, she had invited them to “celebrate with me, the birth of my ‘baby’ after nearly 50 years of pregnancy”. Attached was a picture of the thirtysomething she had been at the time of the trial in 1984, captioned “BEFORE”, next to one of a large brown bear slumped on its stomach, captioned “AFTER”. Below she had written: “Book writing is not helpful for beauty contests.”

 For all her frailty, it was clear that Gladitz felt the years of struggle had been worth it. She was buoyed up by the recent sale of the film rights to her book, to a company that hoped to make a series for Netflix. Gladitz said she was planning to act as the project’s adviser and that she wanted Judi Dench to play the older Riefenstahl.

 On the last evening of my visit, we sat down on the sofa to watch Tiefland. Gladitz wanted to explain her reading of the film, which sees in it a deeply antisemitic message. “This is a real privilege that I’m letting you watch it with me,” she said, pulling tobacco from a battered tin and rolling the cigarettes that she would chain smoke as the film played.

 We had not been watching long before she flared up with impatience at my questions, at my inability to recognise as clearly as she did the film’s symbolism. She explained to me how the final scene, in which the main characters walk off together into paradise, is the perfect representation of the Germany Hitler had dreamed of. “The last words Hitler spoke to Riefenstahl when she visited him in March 1944 were ‘Germany will rise again far more beautiful than it was before’,” Gladitz told me.




 At one point, I asked her how she felt at being viewed as someone whose life has been taken hostage by Leni Riefenstahl. “I’ve never seen myself as a victim,” she said. She had numerous ongoing conflicts with historians and editors, and there were still legal battles she intended to fight, including with the broadcaster of Time of Darkness and Silence, to recover lost earnings and to have the film brought out of the archive. Now that her book was published, and given her struggles with her health, I asked whether it might be time to allow herself a more peaceful life. “Only weak people give in,” she told me.

 The next morning she refused to meet me for breakfast. “You think I’ve just been dawdling for the past 40 years? That is just the verdict of a trampeltier [a clumsy oaf],” she yelled at me down the phone. “Well I say thank God I had the guts to fight her.”

 On my seven-hour train journey back to Berlin, my head rang with her stories, recollections, jokes and insults. From then on our communication was scant – I knew she was still angry with me – and consisted mostly of businesslike emails via her agent. Gladitz’s health continued to worsen, and in early April 2021, she had heart surgery. From her hospital bed, she discussed the TV adaptation of her book with its producer, Ulrich Limmer. The series, which has the working title Leni, will be the first major biopic of Riefenstahl.

 On 22 April, I received the news I had been expecting for some time. When it arrived, in an email from her niece, it was still a shock. Gladitz had died a few days earlier. Her body had been discovered by a health visitor calling at her flat. She had apparently died peacefully in her sleep.

 Her ashes were buried under a tree on 12 May at a cemetery in Schwäbisch Gmünd. It was a cloudy day and the group of mourners was small, partly owing to Covid restrictions. Most were family members or old schoolfriends, many of whom Gladitz had not seen for 60 years or more. Gladitz’s niece said her aunt had “sought the closeness” of her relatives in her final days. “That gives us some solace, even if her loss pains us,” she wrote.

 In the weeks after her death, a smattering of articles about Gladitz appeared in the German press. In an obituary in Die Welt, the film critic Hanns-Georg Rodek praised her determination and the depth of her research. “She did not tolerate ignorance,” he wrote. “She demanded loyalty.” Rodek is one of a group of journalists urging the broadcaster WDR to rescue Time of Darkness and Silence from the vaults.

 When I met Rodek for coffee recently, it turned out that his relationship with Gladitz had not been dissimilar to mine. He had known her in the final few years of her life, after she contacted him with a request that he publish her work. We shared our experiences of Gladitz – how easily she had taken offence at a stray remark, or when she felt her work wasn’t being given the dignity it deserved. “I’m glad to hear it wasn’t just me,” he said with a faint smirk.

There was a strange kind of camaraderie that came from having known this singular woman. Her fury, often hard to bear, was her fuel. For most people, “pursuing the truth” or “confronting the past” are just platitudes or abstractions. For Gladitz, nothing was more important. Every lie or error that Riefenstahl had introduced into the public record, no matter how tiny, was an abomination to her. Attempts to rehabilitate Riefenstahl, by ignoring or failing to properly investigate her crimes, were the sign of a moral rot that needed to be cut out. “Take it to its logical conclusion and one day people might think Hitler was a second-rate landscape painter,” she once told me, her voice filled with anger. During the years she spent consumed by her book, fearing that it would never find a publisher, this is what kept her going. “I have achieved my life’s purpose,” she told me the last time I saw her. “I am my book.”

 Burying Leni Riefenstahl: one woman’s lifelong crusade against Hitler’s favourite film-maker. By Kate Connolly. The Guardian, December 9, 2021.

 



 onning white gloves, Ludger Derenthal removes a green floral cardboard box from a packing case, and carefully takes out the photographs inside.

 He lays an array of sepia portraits of the propagandist Leni Riefenstahl across the table of the workshop of the Museum of Photography in Berlin. “In these cases are items that no one outside of Riefenstahl’s intimate circle have ever seen before,” he says.

 Derenthal, the museum’s director, will soon be in possession of all 700 cases containing the estate of Hitler’s favourite film-maker and neo-Nazi icon. It includes photographs, films, letters, documents, even her diving suit and gowns, as well as boxes of film rolls dating back to the 1920s.

 Just a stone’s throw from the museum is the Ufa Palast cinema, where premieres of her Nazi movies Triumph of the Will and Olympia took place with great fanfare in the 1930s. Hitler and his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels marvelled at her talent for bringing their fascistic politics on to the screen for the masses to enjoy, under the guise of art.

 Riefenstahl died in 2003 at the age of 101. But her estate remained in her house on the banks of Lake Starnberg in Pöcking, Bavaria, until the death of her husband in 2016, leaving her secretary, Gisela Jahn, as the sole heir. Jahn said Riefenstahl had always wanted the estate to return to Berlin, where she was born and which was witness to many of the highlights of her

 A team of German-speaking archival specialists and Riefenstahl experts will spend the next few years in a collaboration between the photography museum, the film archive and the national library, to try to piece together the life of Riefenstahl, who attempted right up until her death to promote the image of herself as a political naif who had more or less been caught up by accident in the Nazi machine.

 Among the controversies involving Riefenstahl the estate may throw light on is her feature film Tiefland, for which 122 Sinti and Roma extras were personally selected by Riefenstahl from two holding camps. After filming they were transported to Auschwitz, where most were murdered.

 Nina Gladitz, who has just completed a book on Riefenstahl, said she was sceptical that anything of historical substance would emerge from the estate due to the amount of evidence Riefenstahl herself destroyed after 1945, including close-ups from the film where the murdered Sinti might have been identifiable, so that she could not be held culpable for their deaths.

 “This episode has been completely ignored by academics and film historians,” said Gladitz. “I have no expectation of anything coming out of this research that would throw light on her crimes because Riefenstahl did her utmost in her lifetime to keep her myth intact.”

 Among the advisers to the project is Rainer Rother, the artistic director of the German film archive and a Riefenstahl biographer. He said there was little more to be learnt about Riefenstahl’s role in the Nazi era. “I’m not expecting any unsettling findings to be made – the situation of Riefenstahl between 33 and 45 has been brilliantly researched already – but I am expecting that the picture we have of Leni Riefenstahl and how she created her films and photos to become much clearer,” he said.

 Concerns have been voiced that the estate will prompt a new wave in Riefenstahl fanatics, many of whom continue to celebrate the last surviving prominent member of the Third Reich as an artist of great stature, often ignoring the political context.

 Others have expressed unease that Riefenstahl’s photographs will be stored in the same museum where Helmut Newton’s work has been on display since 2004. The Jewish photographer was forced to flee Nazi Germany as a boy in 1938, and is buried in Berlin.

 Brian Winston, professor of film at Lincoln University, said he was appalled at the decision to bring Riefenstahl’s works together with Newton’s. “It’s an absurd and disgusting obscenity that the estate of Hitler’s favourite film-maker is to be given a home in the foundation of a man who was forced to flee Nazi Germany because he was a Jew.

 “Those who see anything to admire in Riefenstahl’s work, which was mired in fascistic content and sensibility, have been duped again just as she, and those who supported her, wanted.”

 Derenthal said the museum was reassured by Jahn’s assertions that the two were friends, Newton having visited Riefenstahl in Pöcking, and points to the correspondence that passed between them.
 
As a climax of the preview, Derenthal produces a folder of letters, labelled “Special Correspondence H-Z”. As those present squeeze together to get a closer look he says: “I’m afraid to disappoint you, but there is no letter from Adolf Hitler here.”
 
Instead there are notes to Riefenstahl from Siegfried and Roy, the legendary entertainment duo, the actor Sharon Stone and Newton, who wrote: “Dear Leni, you look bewitchingly glamorous and those legs ... poor Marlene (Dietrich – the German film star) would be green with envy.”
 
Some have cited the letter as proof of a close relationship between Newton and Riefenstahl, others as the photographer’s successful attempt to flatter her into sitting for him for Vanity Fair at the age of 100.
 
The result, showing a hollow-eyed Riefenstahl, powdering her face, was deemed to be deeply unflattering and a critique of her Third Reich role. “So much for them being friends. This was Newton’s final revenge on the Nazi grand dame,” says Gladitz.
 
Leni Riefenstahl archive to throw new light on Hitler's film-maker. By Kate Connolly. The Guardian,  April 24, 2018.





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.

 

Where there is a Will: The rise of Leni Riefenstahl. By Judith Thurman. The New Yorker, March 12, 2007.















24/12/2021

The Victorians Speaking With the Dead : William Michael Rossetti / The Fox Sisters

 




 
Death and disease are no strangers to the streets of Britain. By the late 19th century, tens of thousands of people had contracted fatal infections, such as cholera, smallpox and scarlatina, beginning with the first cholera epidemic of 1832, when detailed records first started being kept.
 
Wave after wave of typhoid also swept over the population where cause, diagnosis and cure were all equally uncertain – and social class provided no protection. In his novel Bleak House, Charles Dickens recorded “fever” deaths in the slums of London. But the most prominent flesh-and-bone victim was Queen Victoria’s own husband, Prince Albert. He was diagnosed with typhoid and died in December 1861.
 
Meanwhile, a bizarre form of comfort was at hand. In 1848 in Rochester, New York, two sisters claimed to have received messages from the spirit of a long-dead inhabitant of their house, and their conversation with him fired the imagination of America. Soon “table-rapping” swept the American continent, modern spiritualism was born and in the early 1850s it crossed the Atlantic. Séances began to take place in the parlours and dining rooms of France, Germany, Italy and Britain. All communication with the spirits was done through letters of the alphabet, similar to ouija boards.
 
The fashion for spiritualist séances was fuelled by those who longed for communication with lost loved ones or friends. The pre-Raphaelite poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, for example, started holding spiritualist séances after the death of his wife, Elizabeth Siddal, in 1862. Many of these took place in his home in Chelsea, attended by friends and acquaintances. The most regular participant was his brother, William Michael Rossetti.
 
Pursuing William Rossetti’s stray memories led me and my colleagues Rosalind White and Lenore Beaky to the Special Collection of the Library of the University of British Columbia where a small notebook by William Rossetti (labelled “Séance Diary”) is kept. We have co-edited this meticulous record of 20 séances that William attended between 1865 and 1868, published for the first time this year as a volume titled Pre-Raphaelites in the Spirit World – The Séance Diary of William Michael Rossetti.
 
Many of the séances feature conversations he and his brother had with Elizabeth Siddal, whose presence punctuates the three recorded years. Many others feature dead friends and relatives. According to William, on one occasion their uncle, Gaetano Polidori, once Lord Byron’s doctor, correctly confessed that he had died by suicide. On another, their Italian father, Gabriele Rossetti, was reportedly summoned and addressed the brothers in his native Italian.
 
Many of the spirits that Rossetti said rose from the dark were artists, often responding accurately to being asked about when, where and how their deaths had occurred. Some of the most remarkable manifestations involve figures of whom there is no evidence yet whose accounts have been confirmed recently through the archival research of the editors of this volume. And so, like many people curious about spiritualism we remain mystified by the bizarre accuracy of some of the messages coming from the spirit world through these diaries.
 
 
William Rossetti was a diligent civil servant with a strong sense of probity and an eye for detail, and what he gave us in this little notebook was an unparalleled insight into the Victorian spirit world.
 
Victorian séances
 
 
The Rossettis were by no means the only Victorians committed to a belief in the occult. The poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the social reformer Robert Owen, the evolutionary biologist Alfred Russel Wallace and the novelist Arthur Conan Doyle were just a few more passionate believers in the power of séances. William Ewart Gladstone, Alfred Tennyson, John Ruskin and the painter G.F. Watts were all members of the Society for Psychical Research, a badge of belief in spirit activity, and it was even rumoured that Queen Victoria received messages from Prince Albert via a psychic teenage boy named Robert James Lees.
 
Mediums became celebrities. The most famous, D.D. Home, came to Britain from America in 1855. In 1853 the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray met him in America and, convinced of his authenticity, used the pages of his journal, The Cornhill Magazine, to promote Home’s career. In Britain, one of the most famous mediums was Mary Marshall, who had risen to prominence in the late 1850s and who presided over a number of séances recorded by William Rossetti.
 
But dealing with the dead created as many sceptics as it did fans. The novelist George Eliot and her partner G.H. Lewis turned to the press to denounce spiritualism as a sham. Meanwhile the journal Once A Week described the aforementioned Mary Marshall as “poor”, “vulgar”, but hugely eminent as the “washerwoman medium”, describing “the abominable profanity and wickedness” of her séances.




 
The satirical journal Punch was quick to seize on the comic potential of the new vogue. Weekly cartoons depicting humorous dialogues with the dead appeared. Like this piece of doggerel in which Mr Punch:
 
“Wanted to know what on earth are the merits
That make Mrs. Marshall affected by ‘sperrits!
Wanted to know why respectable dead
Come back to life at five shillings a head.”
 
The most consistent war on spiritualism, however, was waged by the powerful voice of Dickens. He was outraged by D.D. Home. In 1860, he denounced Home’s autobiography as “odious”, written by a “ruffian” and a “scoundrel” and agreed with George Eliot that Home was “an object of moral disgust”. As for Mary Marshall and her daughter, he said they possessed the “duplicity and legerdemain of … two illiterate conjurors” playing on “the holiest and deepest feelings of their audience”.
 
While the debate about authenticity raged, séances – both in public and in private – took place throughout the country. Some were spectacular displays of showmanship involving large audiences; some were intimate, devout gatherings, while others took the form of after-dinner entertainment.
 
The social, anthropological and religious role of spiritualism in Victorian culture has been much debated, but one important factor drove people to the darkened room of the medium: the need to contact a dead loved one. It was this motive that lay behind Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s desire to communicate with her brothers, both of whom died in 1840 – in February Samuel died of a fever in Jamaica, and shortly afterwards her favourite brother Edward was drowned in a sailing accident in Torquay in July.
 
Indeed, the biologist Alfred Russel Wallace, started a career of his own in spiritualism after the death his brother in 1845. And the death of Conan Doyle’s son, Kingsley, strengthened the crime-writer’s lifelong belief in the occult. Death also lay behind the séances in William Rossetti’s diary, since many of them were driven by his brother’s desire to reach out to the spirit of his dead wife.
 
Though there are many records of spiritualist experiences in the 19th century, what makes William Rossetti’s diary so valuable is its detail. Every moment in the 20 séances is meticulously recorded, every participant and his or her reaction to the events is noted down, and the presence of so many prominent artists from the Pre-Raphaelite movement casts each of their personal beliefs and prejudices in a new light.
 
The spirit world
 
The lights are dimmed. The candles flicker. William Michael Rossetti asks some questions of the spirit of Elizabeth Siddal, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s wife. His questions involve a picture that he has just sent to a wealthy patron in Birkenhead called George Rae. The questions are strange, the responses reported by the diary monosyllabic but accurate.
 
William: Did you consider that picture which Gabriel sent away the other day one of his very best?
Elizabeth: Yes.
William: Do you know to whom it has gone?
Elizabeth: Yes.
William: Give initial of surname?
Elizabeth: R [correct for Rae]
William: Do you know in what room of Rae’s house that picture is now placed?
Elizabeth: Yes.
William: Dining room?
Elizabeth: No.
William: Drawing room?
Elizabeth: Yes.
William: How many in the whole house?
 
At this point, a pause of some 15 minutes ensues, within which no answers are reported.
 
William: During that pause were you absent looking into Rae’s house?
Elizabeth: Yes.
William: Can you give me any idea of the process by which you pass from one place to another?
Elizabeth: No.
 
Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s fascination with the occult went back to his early experiences of the poetry of Dante Alighieri in the scholarly work of his father Gabriele. In the course of his work, Gabriele frequently invoked the authority of the Swedish mystic, Emmanuel Swedenborg who, around 1744, began to have visionary experiences of the afterlife. He had become a “seer”, he said, by God’s command to explain the correspondences between life on earth and life in heaven.



 
He claimed not only communication with angels and demons, but spoke of how he had been admitted into the spirit world and how he had returned to the terrestrial sphere to tell the story. Consequently, Rossetti’s poems and pictures are filled with spiritual experiences; with stories of hauntings and uncanny events. In the late 1850s he began to participate in séances, but it was the death of his wife, Elizabeth Siddal, that lent his participation a new urgency.
 
Prior her death, Siddal had been suffering from post-natal depression caused by a still birth. Driven to despair by Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s long-term infidelity and neglect of her, she took an overdose of laudanum. Dante Gabriel Rossetti was consumed by guilt and filled with remorse and, as some kind of compensation, he buried the whole manuscript of his unpublished poems in her coffin. But no sooner had she been placed in the earth than he began to have nightly visions of her in his bedroom. At that point he decided to try and look for her in the afterlife.
 
In October 1862, abandoning the house which they had shared, he took up residence beside the River Thames, where he began holding séances with his new friend, the American painter James McNeill Whistler. Many years later, Whistler spoke of the “strange things that happened when he went to séances at Rossetti’s” since, according to William Michael’s daughter, Dante Gabriel Rossetti was “anxious to get some message” from Elizabeth.
 
William Rossetti’s séance diary
 
By the time William Rossetti began his séance diary in 1865, he was already a firm believer in spiritualist communications. Some of the séances he recorded came under the auspices of amateur mediums.
 
The richest and most dynamic ones took place under the mediumship of two professionals, Mary Marshall and Elizabeth Guppy, and the very first one he recorded took place in Marshall’s house. William Rossetti was accompanied by his artist friend, William Bell Scott. The two men, who were certain that the Marshalls had no personal knowledge of them, wanted to make contact with the recently deceased brother of Scott’s mistress, Spencer Boyd.
 
The information that emerged from this séance was striking. The spirit of Spencer Boyd was reportedly summoned, and stated, correctly, that he had died in Scott’s home, providing the address together with the date on which he had passed away. He is also reported as correctly telling the group that he had heard of, but never met, William Scott in person.
 
More startlingly, however, was a communication with people of whom there is no evidence that anyone present had any knowledge of – yet whose accounts have been subsequently confirmed by our own archival research. In February 1866, for example, a New Zealand Maori chief calling himself “Hemi” is reported to have appeared out of the dark. Sources show that he claimed to have met William Rossetti three years previously in Newcastle, when the chief was touring Britain exhibiting Maori dances.
 
Information gathered from historians in New Zealand, and our own research in the archives of local newspaper, the Newcastle Chronicle, confirmed that in the week beginning September 14, 1863, a group of “Maori chiefs” had indeed performed to audiences in Newcastle. On that same day, Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote a letter to a friend saying, in passing, that his brother was about to leave on a visit to Newcastle.
 
On other occasions, what were called “aports” were allegedly materialised. Eau-de-cologne and water were described showering out of nowhere, books thrown from the bookcases and, in one incident, the medium asked the participants if they would like to receive flowers. In response, roses, ferns and jonquils were requested and, to their amazement, appear to have dropped out of the darkness onto the table in front of them or onto their laps. Dante Gabriel Rossetti invited Jane Morris, the wife of William Morris, to two of these séances, where she claimed to have seen unexpected lights and cold draughts of air passed over her hands.
 
The most moving and dramatic séances, however, are those that featured the spirit of Elizabeth Siddal. In the second séance recorded by William Rossetti, his brother spoke to her with clear reference to the past. “You used to give me clear [and] significant answers,” he said, “but of late the reverse: can you tell me why?” He writes that she had no answer. In a later séance, the spirit reportedly confessed that she knew William Bell Scott, and thought that William Rossetti had been a very affectionate brother to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Later, at the home of Thomas Keightley, historian and folklorist, the diary describes her as telling the participants that she knew William Morris, and correctly told them his London address.
 
The most intensive cross-questioning of Elizabeth’s spirit took place in the very last séance at 2am on Friday August 14 1868. In this, the spirit was asked about the Rossetti’s father Gabriele in the afterlife, about the nature of Christ, and about the nature of the manifestations that they had recently witnessed at another séance. The most touching exchange is described as occurring between Dante Gabriel and Elizabeth.
 
Gabriel: Are you my wife?
Elizabeth: Yes
Gabriel: Are you now happy?
Elizabeth: Yes
Gabriel: Happier than on earth?
Elizabeth: Yes
Gabriel: If I were now to join you, should I be happy?
Elizabeth: Yes
Gabriel: Should I see you at once?
Elizabeth: No
Gabriel: Quite soon?
Elizabeth: No
 
 




 “Bogie pictures”
 
Though they are not usually linked, during this period, both Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Whistler created pictures with an occult significance. Dante Gabriel’s drawing How They Met Themselves (1860-64) is a ghostly double in a dense wood. It was completed in its first version during his honeymoon in 1860, and reworked as a coloured version in 1864. Dante Gabriel Rossetti called it his “bogie picture”.



 
William Rossetti said of it: “To meet one’s wraith is ominous of death, and to figure Elizabeth as meeting her wraith might well have struck her bridegroom as uncanny in a high degree. In less than two years the weird was woefully fulfilled”. Then, in 1863, both Whistler and Rossetti embarked on paintings with links to other spiritualist experiences.
 
Whistler’s Symphony in White No. 2: The Little White Girl (1864) has a contemporary setting and, like Dante’s drawing How They Met Themselves, it is also a doppelganger work: in it, Jo Hiffernan, Whistler’s mistress and her reflected image gaze down towards a lacquered Japanese box which Whistler employed in séances. Attached to the frame were Swinburne’s lines:
 
“Art thou the ghost, my sister,
White sister there,
Am I the ghost, who knows?”
 
Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix (1864-79), was begun at about the same time. Its original title was “Beatrice in a Death Trance”, a Dantean image which linked the death of Beatrice Portinari, the woman believed to be the muse for Dante’s Vita Nuova, beside the Arno with Elizabeth Siddal’s death beside the Thames. The painting was based on an unfinished portrait of Elizabeth and depicts the moment of her passage from life into death. The picture came to the notice of the prominent spiritualists William and Georgina Cowper-Temple.
 
William Cowper-Temple was president of the Board of Trade, and he and Georgina presided over séances in their family home with the most famous mediums of the day. In September 1865 they began to take an interest in Dante Rossetti’s work. They frequently visited his studio where he was working on the painting and offered to buy it as a genuine spiritualist work. It was beneath this picture and in the same studio that Rossetti was trying to conjure up the spirit of Elizabeth Siddal.
 
The Rossetti brothers have long been known for their contribution to writing and painting in the 19th century, but the record of their séances connects them to the widespread Victorian preoccupation with the occult.
 
The huge mortality rate in Victorian Britain encouraged large numbers to seek the support of mediums. Similarly, around 1918 the carnage of the first world war and the waves of Spanish flu created a new interest in spiritualism. Perhaps in this context, it’s unsurprising that the COVID-19 pandemic is reportedly driving a revival of the ouija board.
 
Though spiritualism is still surrounded with an air of suspicion and mystery, William Rossetti’s diary shows that believing one has made contact with the next world is usually a source of consolation and reassurance. For some, spiritualism was as precious as fiction: a place to go to when needing to step away from too harsh a reality.
 
Before the Ouija board: William Rossetti’s diary gives an insight into Victorian séances. By Barrie Bullen. The Conversation, December 23, 2021.



It’s a good time to be dead—at least, if you want to keep in touch with the living. Almost a third of Americans say they have communicated with someone who has died, and they collectively spend more than two billion dollars a year for psychic services on platforms old and new. Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, television: whatever the medium, there’s a medium. Like clairvoyants in centuries past, those of today also fill auditoriums, lecture halls, and retreats. Historic camps such as Lily Dale, in New York, and Cassadaga, in Florida, are booming, with tens of thousands of people visiting every year to attend séances, worship, healing services, and readings. And many people turn up not every year but every week: there are more than a hundred Spiritualist churches in the United States, more than three hundred in the United Kingdom, and hundreds of others in more than thirty countries around the world. Such institutions hardly represent the full extent of Spiritualism’s popularity, since the movement does not emphasize doctrines, dogmas, or creeds, and plenty of people hold spiritualist beliefs within other faith traditions or stand entirely outside organized religion.

 The surging numbers are reminiscent of the late nineteenth century, when somewhere between four million and eleven million people identified as Spiritualists in the United States alone. Some of the leaders back then were hucksters, and some of the believers were easy marks, but the movement cannot be dismissed merely as a collision of the cunning and the credulous. Early Spiritualism attracted some of the great scientists of the day, including the physicists Marie and Pierre Curie, the evolutionary biologist Alfred Russel Wallace, and the psychologist William James, all of whom believed that modern scientific methods, far from standing in opposition to the spiritual realm, could finally prove its existence.

 So culturally prevalent was Spiritualism at the time that even skeptics and dabblers felt compelled to explore it. Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, and Queen Victoria all attended séances, and although plenty of people declined to attend so much as a single table-turning, the movement was hard to avoid; in the span of four decades, according to one estimate, a new book about Spiritualism was published roughly once a week. These included scientific-seeming tomes purporting to offer evidence of the afterlife, as well as wildly popular memoirs such as “Evenings at Home in Spiritual Séance” and “Shadow Land; or, Light from the Other Side.” Meanwhile, more than a hundred American Spiritualist periodicals were in regular circulation, advertising public lectures and private séances in nearly eight hundred cities and towns across the country.

 A recent spate of histories of the Spiritualist craze and biographies of some of its central characters have attempted to locate the movement’s origins in various cultural, political, and technological aspects of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These accounts vary in both plausibility and persuasiveness, yet all of them are interesting—partly because of what they tell us about the Victorian era, but also because of what they suggest about the resurgence of Spiritualism today.

 Because Spiritualism so strongly rejected hierarchy and orthodoxy, it is difficult to say exactly when or how it started. Plenty of scholars regard it as part of the larger religious efflorescence that began in the early nineteenth century in the area of New York State that became known as the Burned-Over District, which gave rise to the Second Great Awakening. Others, including Robert S. Cox, in his magisterial “Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of American Spiritualism,” have looked far beyond that century and that countryside. This long view was also taken by one of Spiritualism’s first major historians, the novelist Arthur Conan Doyle, who became so zealous a believer that he set aside Sherlock Holmes in order to focus on his research, ultimately writing more than a dozen books on the subject. His two-volume “History of Spiritualism” starts by situating the movement as “the most important in the history of the world since the Christ episode,” then proposes the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, born in the sixteen-eighties, and the Scottish reformer Edward Irving, born in 1792, as forerunners of the Victorians.

 But most accounts of Spiritualism don’t begin with great men or distant precedents. They start with little women on an exact date: March 31, 1848. On that night, as Emily Midorikawa details in her new book, “Out of the Shadows: Six Visionary Victorian Women in Search of a Public Voice” (Counterpoint), two sisters, fourteen-year-old Margaretta Fox and eleven-year-old Catherine, finally convinced some of their neighbors that an unsettling series of knockings and tappings in their home, near the south shore of Lake Ontario, was coming from the spirit world. Soon the whole town of Hydesville, New York, was gripped by the mysterious noises that haunted the Fox family.





 Maggie and Kate, as the Fox sisters were known, claimed that they were able to communicate with the maker of those noises, which they said was a spirit called Mr. Splitfoot. From beyond the grave, the spirit answered their questions, first rapping back to respond with a simple yes or no, then using a more complicated series of raps to indicate letters of the alphabet. In this manner, the spirit allegedly revealed that he had been murdered for money some five years previously and been buried in the cellar of the Fox house. That revelation only further excited the residents of Wayne County—no strangers to new religious claims, since they had already welcomed the Shakers at Sodus Bay, witnessed the founding of Mormonism at Palmyra, and lately outlived the doomsday prophecies of the nearby Millerites.

 The Foxes fled their haunted home, but the rapping followed the girls into other houses during the next few months, and their sensational story continued to spread. In the fall of 1849, four hundred people gathered at Corinthian Hall, in nearby Rochester, where the Foxes demonstrated what they had advertised as “WONDERFUL PHENOMENA” for a paying audience—the first of many during the next forty years. William Lloyd Garrison and James Fenimore Cooper came for séances with the girls, and Horace Greeley and his wife, Mary, not only visited with the sisters but boosted their celebrity in Greeley’s newspapers, including the New-York Daily Tribune, which would go on to cover the Spiritualist craze as dozens and then hundreds of others claimed that they, too, were capable of hearing “spirit rapping.”

 According to Midorikawa, the Greeleys were representative of some of the earliest and most enthusiastic adherents of Spiritualism: affluent and progressive mothers and fathers who were desperate to communicate with sons and daughters who had died too young. In the mid-nineteenth century, an estimated twenty to forty per cent of children died before the age of five, and scholars often point to this fact to help account for the appeal of Spiritualism. But it was worse in the preceding centuries; for some time, the child mortality rate had been falling. What mattered more was that the average family size was shrinking, too, at the same time that modern ideas of childhood were taking hold—trends that combined to make the loss of any child seem that much more anguishing.

 But it wasn’t only the death of children that brought people to Spiritualism, or kept them in the fold. Mary Todd Lincoln, who lost three of her four children, visited with mediums in Georgetown before hosting her own séances in the Red Room of the White House. She also hired the country’s most famous “spirit photographer” to take a picture of her with her husband after he was assassinated. Peter Manseau’s “The Apparitionists: A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln’s Ghost” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) offers a fascinating account of that photographer, William H. Mumler, who worked as a jewelry engraver in Boston before taking a self-portrait that, when developed, revealed what became known as an “extra”: in his case, a young girl sitting in a chair to his right, whom he recognized as a cousin who had died a dozen years before. Mourning portraits—paintings of the recently dead—had long been popular, but spirit photographs offered something more: not just the memorialization of lost loved ones but confirmation of life after death.

 In the years following the Civil War, when around three-quarters of a million dead soldiers haunted the country, spirit photographs were in high demand. After Spiritualism migrated to Europe, its prominence there tracked loosely to war, too, with a spike following the First World War. Mumler alone took dozens of spirit photographs, in which deceased friends or relatives appeared behind or beside their living loved ones. Other photographers focussed on capturing active séances, table-turnings, acts of levitation, and even ectoplasm—spiritual substances that mediums “exteriorized” from their own bodies, often their mouths, noses, or ears, but sometimes their stomachs or vaginas. Such substances could be clear or dark, pasty or gauzy, shapeless or in the form of appendages or faces.

 Technological explanations for the rise of Spiritualism often cite the development of photography, which at the time was an inherently spooky medium, in that it could show things that were not actually there. Although it can be hard to remember in the age of deep fakes, photography was initially thought of not as a manipulable art but as a mirrorlike representation of reality, which made its role in Spiritualism seem probative. Other technologies similarly seemed to bridge such unfathomable gaps that the one between this world and the next appeared certain to collapse as well. The telegraph, for instance, offered access to voices from the beyond; how far beyond was anyone’s guess. The very word for those who could talk with spirits reflected all the new “mediums” through which information could be transmitted; spirit photographs were marketed alongside spirit telegraphs, spirit fingerprints, and spirit typewriters. Inventors such as Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison even tinkered with uncanny radios and spirit telephones, inspired by some of the disembodied voices of their own experiments and curious about the supernatural implications of electromagnetism and other universal energies.

 Still, like the appeal to mortality rates, this account of the rise of Spiritualism goes only so far. For one thing, no notable uptick in spiritualist beliefs accompanied earlier technological upheavals, including the entire Industrial Revolution, even though it altered our sense of time and set all kinds of things spinning and moving in previously unimaginable ways. For another, some of the most popular Spiritualist technologies were some of the oldest: the Ouija board was simply a branded, pencil-less version of the planchette, and forms of planchette writing had been around for centuries.

 The use of technology to document spiritual phenomena was of interest not only to believers but also to skeptics, who pored over images looking for cheesecloth passing as ectoplasm, overexposures masquerading as ghostly apparitions, and wires or pulleys that could account for rappings and table-turnings. In one of the most publicized attempts to test the claims of Spiritualists, Scientific American offered five thousand dollars in prize money to anyone who could produce psychic phenomena sufficient to convince a committee that consisted of academics from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, psychic experts, and also Harry Houdini, who knew something about illusions and developed a sideline in exposing those which hucksters were trying to pass off as real. Armed with electroscopes and galvanometers, the committee tested all mediums who presented themselves for scrutiny, sometimes attending multiple séances before rendering a verdict.

 Houdini’s debunking of one famous medium, Mina Crandon, is thoroughly recounted in David Jaher’s “The Witch of Lime Street: Séance, Seduction, and Houdini in the Spirit World” (Crown). Crandon was married to a prominent surgeon and attracted Boston’s élite to her performances, channelling her dead brother’s voice and even revealing his fingerprints from beyond the grave, while also levitating tables and producing ectoplasm from her mouth and from between her legs, often while naked. (The backlash against Spiritualism, which came partly from the clergy, stemmed not only from its challenge to orthodox ideas about Heaven and Hell but also from its scandalous exhibitionism.) Crandon’s case divided the Scientific American committee, with some members accusing others of having been sexually coerced into validating her fraud and even conspiring with her. Houdini had already exposed the deceptions of other mediums in his book “A Magician Among the Spirits,” and he never relented in his effort to discredit Crandon, publishing an entire pamphlet detailing her tricks, and going so far as to incorporate some of them into his own stage act in order to demonstrate their fraudulence.

 Houdini prevented Crandon from winning the Scientific American prize, but her fame only grew, and her case later splintered another group of researchers. The American Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1885, a few years after its British equivalent, was devoted to the investigation of spiritual phenomena, which the society considered as worthy of careful study as fossils or electricity. In “Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death” (Penguin), Deborah Blum records the society’s investigations into everything from haunted houses to hypnotism. For the most part, those investigations only ever succeeded in disproving the phenomena they studied, but it was James, a founding member, who best articulated why they nonetheless continued their work. “If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black,” he said, “you mustn’t seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.”




 “My own white crow,” James announced in that same address to the Society for Psychical Research, “is Mrs. Piper.” He was referring to Leonora Piper, a Boston housewife turned trance medium who withstood years of testing and observation, her fees rising twenty-fold in the meantime and her fame extending all the way to England, where she went on tour. On one occasion, Piper impressed the James family by making contact with an aunt of theirs. Asked about the elderly woman’s health, the medium informed them that the woman had died earlier that day. “Why Aunt Kate’s here,” Piper said. “All around me I hear voices saying, ‘Aunt Kate has come.’ ” The Jameses received a telegram a few hours later confirming Aunt Kate’s death the night before.

 Unlike Crandon, Piper was not fully discredited, though many people doubted her abilities, noting her failed readings and prophecies and offering convincing psychological explanations of those predictions and telepathic readings which seemed accurate. Her feats as a medium were not particular to the James family; in the course of her career, she claimed to channel, among others, Martin Luther and George Washington. As such efforts suggest, the allure of Spiritualism was not limited to consolation for the bereft: plenty of mediums worked as much in the tradition of the carnival barker as in that of the cleric, and Spiritualism was popular in part because it was entertaining. Its practitioners, some of them true connoisseurs of spectacle, promised not only reassurances about the well-being of the dearly departed but also new lines from Shakespeare and fresh wisdom from Plato.

 Even more strikingly, from the perspective of the present day, early mediums offered encounters with the culturally dispossessed as well as with the culturally heralded. Piper, for instance, claimed to channel not only Washington and Luther but also a young Native American girl named Chlorine. And she was not alone in allegedly relaying the posthumous testimony of marginalized people. Enslaved African-Americans and displaced Native Americans were routinely channelled by mediums in New England and around the country. Whether race persisted in the afterlife was a matter of some dispute, but racially stereotyped and ethnically caricatured “spirit guides” were common, conjured with exaggerated dialects for audiences at séances and captured in sensational costumes by spirit photography. Flora Wellman, the mother of the novelist Jack London, claimed to channel a Native American chief called Plume; the Boston medium Mrs. J. H.Conant became associated with a young Piegan Blackfoot girl she called Vashti. Mediums with abolitionist sympathies passed on the stories of tortured slaves, while pro-slavery Spiritualists delivered messages of forgiveness from the same population and relayed visions of an afterlife where racial hierarchies were preserved.

 For white mediums, communicating with spirits of other races could be a form of expiation, a way to confront violent histories and make cultural amends—or merely crude appropriation, garish performance art that was good for business. But Spiritualism was not only a white phenomenon. There were plenty of Black Spiritualists—including Sojourner Truth, who lived for a decade in the Spiritualist utopia of Harmonia before settling in Battle Creek, Michigan—and many Black mediums, including Paschal Beverly Randolph and Rebecca Cox Jackson, both of whom wrote books that included their work with spirits. Harriet E. Wilson, one of the first Black authors to publish a novel in the United States, later became a Spiritualist healer who was known, like some of her white counterparts, for summoning indigenous spirits, and who was described, in one of Boston’s Spiritualist newspapers, as “the eloquent and earnest colored trance medium.”

 The lines between syncretism and appropriation were often fuzzy. If the initial Victorian wave of Spiritualism had a distinctly American character, later iterations took on global influences, as when the theosophists incorporated elements of Eastern religions, including belief in reincarnation and past lives. Immigration and translation brought sacred literatures into renewed contact with one another—the Bardo Thodol handed to readers of the Zohar, the Vedas and the Upanishads circulating alongside Julian of Norwich and Meister Eckhart. Occult practices melded with culturally blurry techniques of meditating and altering consciousness, and the roots of the esotericism that would eventually be known as New Age took hold.

 As a belief system, Spiritualism was largely free of the legal and moral strictures of orthodox religion. It made few demands on its practitioners, while offering them many rewards, from an uplifting and personalized vision of the afterlife to otherwise unavailable opportunities in this one. In its Victorian incarnation, Spiritualism had provided ways for female mediums to lead and to profit. The medium Annie Denton Cridge became a newspaper publisher and wrote one of the earliest feminist utopian novels, wherein the narrator dreams first of a matriarchal government on Mars that oppresses men, and then that America has a female President; Victoria Woodhull, a clairvoyant turned suffragist, became, with her sister, one of the first women to start a brokerage firm on Wall Street and, later, the first to actually run for President of the United States; Emma Hardinge Britten, an opera-singing skeptic who set out to discredit the Spiritualists but ended up joining them, became one of the country’s most popular public speakers and helped Abraham Lincoln win reëlection. But they and other Spiritualists faced a cultural backlash almost immediately. The religion scholar Ann Braude’s groundbreaking “Radical Spirits” (Beacon) situates spiritual work as social and political activism, since it gave women the opportunity to speak in public, and as a foundation of the women’s-rights movement, since it demonstrated the equality of the sexes. Such a framing helps explain why Spiritualism became so ridiculed, and why its opponents sought to discredit its female leaders most vigorously.

 Not that those opponents needed a great deal of assistance. Much of the disillusionment came from the inside—including via the Fox sisters, the Hydesville girls credited with starting the Spiritualist craze. For years afterward, they entertained private gatherings and large public audiences in America and England. All the while, they endured examinations by physicians and gadflies, who strip-searched them, looking for bodily explanations or external assistance, and were attacked by mobs of Christians and secular skeptics alike, who threatened them with grenades and guns. Many people had tried to discredit them, but, in the end, they discredited themselves: in 1888, Maggie Fox, fulfilling the wishes of the late famous Arctic explorer Elisha Kane, whom she had allegedly married in secret, declared that the whole thing had been a hoax.

 As Midorikawa recounts in “Out of the Shadows,” a newspaper advertisement ran in New York City in October of that year announcing the “DEATH OF SPIRITUALISM” and promising “A THOROUGH AND COMPLETE EXPOSE.” With her sister Kate watching from the audience, Maggie, now in her fifties, appeared onstage at the Academy of Music, on Fourteenth Street, put on a pair of glasses, and read from a prepared statement confessing “the greatest sorrow of my life”: namely, that she and her sister had collaborated in “perpetrating the fraud of Spiritualism upon a too confiding public.” After her reading ended, three doctors came to the stage and waited for her to begin cracking her big toe; each doctor then confirmed that the rappings were coming from the clicking of her joints, which grew louder and louder until finally she shouted, “Spiritualism is a fraud from beginning to end!”

 The scandal crossed the Atlantic faster than any steamship, and Spiritualists around the world reeled. A written confession followed the performance, describing how Kate “was the first to observe that by swishing her fingers she could produce certain noises with her knuckles and joints and that the same effect could be made with the toes,” and that after a great deal of practice the girls mastered making these noises in the dark. “Like most perplexing things when made clear, it is astonishing how easily it is done,” Maggie Fox said. But, the very next year, Fox recanted her recanting, leaving both sides to claim and reject the testimony of the sisters as they saw fit, a contest that was still unresolved when, a few years later, both sisters died poor.

 Helped along by such scandals and the passage of time, Spiritualism eventually moved to the fringes. It became a kind of curiosity, a Victorian fad encountered chiefly in the biographies of artists such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who dabbled in mesmerism; in the footnotes to the modernist poetry of T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats, with their invocations of astrology, sorcery, and Madame Blavatsky; in museum exhibits of the mystical paintings of Hilma af Klint; in horror films like “Ouija” and “Things Heard & Seen.” Spiritualism is most often invoked only to be discredited, and cynical accounts routinely sneer at the sincerity or impugn the sanity of individual believers, unwilling or unable to imagine the appeal of a movement that dominated several decades of religious life both here and abroad.

 Still, purely cynical accounts like those are dead ends—intellectual cul-de-sacs, bent on describing Spiritualism as a passing phenomenon when, in reality, the movement never really came or went. Necromancy had only just faded from cultural memory when Queen Victoria was born, and long after her death people with spiritualist beliefs continued to gather, as they still do, meeting regularly at the Golden Gate Spiritualist Church in San Francisco, the Swedenborg Chapel in Cambridge, the Summerland Church of Light on Long Island, and the Wimbledon Spiritualist Church in London, to say nothing of the nearly four million active spiritists in Brazil.




 The flaw in most efforts to account for historical iterations of Spiritualism is that they look exclusively to transient features at the expense of more fundamental ones. It is true that today’s Spiritualists have something in common with their Victorian predecessors, situated as they are in another era of rapid technological change and increasing secularization; the Internet and virtual reality are the present moment’s photography and telegraphy, technologies so advanced that they approach the uncanny; then as now, a vast penumbra of proto-spiritualists surround the true believers. No longer persuaded by orthodox religious accounts but also not satisfied with pure materialism, they experiment with psychics, crystals, tarot, and astrological charts, or simply swap stories of the eerie and the unexplained.

 But, if today’s Spiritualists have much in common with the Victorians, they also have something in common with the ancient Romans, who celebrated the festival of Lemuria by making food offerings to their restless dead, and with the Israelite King Saul, who consulted a medium in the Canaanite city of Endor. Arthur Conan Doyle’s long view may well be the right one, for, as he wrote, there is “no time in the recorded history of the world when we do not find traces of preternatural interference and a tardy recognition of them from humanity.” The dread of mortality has always inspired the dream of immortality, and the hopes that animated Victorian Spiritualism are eternal: to bridge the divide between ourselves and those we have lost, to know that they are safe and content, and to believe that they are thinking of us just as much as we are thinking of them.

 

 Why Did So Many Victorians Try to Speak with the Dead? By Casey Cep. The New Yorker, May 24, 2021.












On October 21, 1888, a startling newspaper advertisement appeared in New York City. Block capitals declared that at the Academy of Music, that evening, the audience would witness the “DEATH OF SPIRITUALISM.” The performance would amount to “A THOROUGH AND COMPLETE EXPOSE,” an onstage battle of “SCIENCE vs. SPIRITUALISM.” What’s more, the legendary Fox sister Margaretta Fox Kane would be the star attraction.

 That night, hordes filled the famed theater where Victoria Woodhull had delivered an address to a boisterous crowd during her 1872 run for the presidency. In the words of the next day’s New York Herald, the place hummed with “the wildest excitement.” Among those present were hundreds of agitated Spiritualists, still not quite able to believe that one of those who’d initiated their movement forty years ago should now emerge from her relative obscurity of recent times to try to strike its death blow. Also in attendance, seated in a prominent theatrical box, sat Maggie’s sister, Catherine Fox Jencken. Although Kate wouldn’t be sharing the platform with her sibling, her conspicuous presence gave the impression that she supported Maggie’s actions. It would not have escaped the attention of the crowd that the eldest sister, Ann Leah Underhill, was not in attendance.

 After some opening discourse from the night’s compère, Dr. Cassius M. Richmond, Maggie entered the stage, eliciting cheers and hisses all around the auditorium. Now in her mid-fifties and clad all in black, she cut a very different figure than that of the lively adolescent who’d first appeared in public in 1849 at Rochester’s Corinthian Hall. The unhappiness of her later life, especially the struggles with alcoholism that had plagued both her and her younger sister, showed on Maggie’s gaunt face. She drew out a pair of heavy-rimmed glasses strung on black cord, placed them upon her nose, dropped a curtsy to the audience, and, standing, began to read from a prepared confession.

 That she had played such a large part in “perpetrating the fraud of Spiritualism upon a too confiding public” had, she said, been “the greatest sorrow of my life.” Lifting her hands heavenward, she continued, “It is a late day now, but I am prepared to tell the truth; the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God!”

 Further clapping and hissing followed. Once it had died away, Maggie went on with her speech, laying the blame for her part in the decades-long “deception” on her young age at the time of its beginnings. Perhaps wisely, she didn’t state how old she had been— about fourteen—since her words probably gave the impression that she was rather younger than this. Instead, Maggie preferred simply to insist that she had been “too young to know right from wrong.”

 At this point Dr. Richmond brought on three somber-looking male doctors, who knelt on the floor by the now seated Maggie, who removed her shoe. The audience waited.

 Then it began, softly at first, the mysterious knocking. Each doctor took his turn to place his hands on Maggie’s shoeless foot before announcing to the audience that he could hear the infamous rapping sounds emanating, not from any hidden spirit presence, but from her clicking big toe.

 In the stunned silence that followed, Maggie climbed up onto a small wooden table, so that the packed theater could get a good view. Having placed her foot against a wooden board designed to amplify sound, she stood, seemingly unmoving in her stocking feet, while more raps rang out. The knocks came louder now, louder in fact than one might have thought it possible for a toe to make, even with the aid of a sounding board. Indeed, contrary to what the crowd had just been told, the noises appeared to come not just from her foot but also from behind the backdrop of the stage, the rigging above, and the galleries packed with seated onlookers.

 Still, apparently now relieved of a long-held secret burden, Maggie became animated: clapping, dancing, and calling out, “Spiritualism is a fraud from beginning to end!”

 Climbing down from the stage, into the audience, she daringly placed her toes, clad in nothing but a layer of stocking, against the shoe-clad foot of one man. In an act that harked back to the twin aspects of theater and inquisition of her early Corinthian Hall performances—but that this time seemed to place her in a position of greater control—Maggie asked the man to tell the house what he felt. He was able to confirm that, like the doctors, he could feel vibrations.

 At the conclusion of the evening’s program, applauded by Kate up in her box, both sisters found themselves surrounded by enthusiastic new supporters. Spiritualists in attendance, the Herald said, “almost frothed at the mouth” before departing the theater muttering “furious threats” against the two women now recast as the would-be destroyers of their movement. The newspaper’s own opinion of the evening’s entertainment was, perhaps not unreasonably, that “one moment it was ludicrous, the next it was weird.” Modern Spiritualism could “never recover from this crushing blow,” the Herald said. On the other hand, another of the city’s papers, The World, felt that, even in the aftermath of Maggie’s pronouncements, “spiritualistic imposters” would continue to “find as many fools as ever and continue to make their cheats profitable.”

 _________________________________

 Excerpt from Out of the Shadows: Six Visionary Victorian Women in Search of a Public Voice by Emily Midorikawa. Counterpoint Press, 2021

  

From Victorian Mediums to Anti-Spiritualism Activists : The Legendary Fox Sisters.By Emily Midorikawa. LitHub, May 26, 2021.







Out of the Shadows : Six Visionary Victorian Women in Search of a Public Voice. By Emily Midorikawa

 Small groups gathered for séances, some in ornately furnished parlors, others in humbler settings. They held hands or placed their palms on a table, then fell silent or uttered a prayer or sang a hymn. They tried to include equal numbers of men and women, among them, ideally, someone scarcely out of girlhood. Young women, they believed, were most receptive to messages from another realm, and some might even discover that they were mediums who could decipher knocking noises or speak in the voices of the dead or write as those spirits directed.

 For many Victorians in both the United States and Britain, those parlor gatherings were a passing diversion, but for others, efforts to commune with the dead proved more sustained and far more serious. Spiritualism — the belief that the living could communicate with the dead — gave comfort to the bereaved, assurance of an afterlife to the anxious and support for faltering Christian faith. But some among a select group of mediums discovered in Spiritualism the chance to perform, to profit and to emerge, in the words of Emily Midorikawa’s title, “Out of the Shadows” and have a public voice.
 
Modern Spiritualism started in the Finger Lakes region of New York, for years a crucible of evangelical revivalism, new religions and reform movements. Early in 1848, members of the Fox family began to hear mysterious rapping sounds in their Hydesville home, a sign, they suspected, that a ghost was reaching out to them. When the adolescent Fox daughters, Maggie and Kate, revealed that they could commune with this spirit, their elder sister, Leah Fox Fish, monetized the girls’ claims, staging public performances and scheduling private readings.
 
Although they inspired many imitators, the Fox sisters did not number among those mediums who subsequently developed Spiritualism as an organized movement in both the United States and Britain. Their ranks included Emma Hardinge Britten, who wrote its history and traveled the public lecture circuit as a trance medium in the late 1850s, delivering opinions about the issues of the day as dictated by the spirits. By contrast, Victoria Woodhull had cut her ties to Spiritualist groups when her claim to clairvoyant powers persuaded the tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt to back her in founding the first female brokerage firm on Wall Street. But shortly thereafter she managed to recruit both Spiritualist and women’s rights organizations to support her bid for the presidency in 1872. Meanwhile in Britain, Georgina Weldon — not a medium herself but a stage-struck Spiritualist — fought the efforts of her husband and his squad of doctors to commit her to an asylum. She challenged Britain’s lunacy laws with more than a decade of agitation, which included parading sandwich-board men as pickets, scattering leaflets from a hot-air balloon, giving theatrical performances and offering antic testimony in court.

 Midorikawa’s chosen Spiritualists are a colorful bunch, and her lively writing makes their careers fun to follow. But why bring them together in a book? The author ventures that these six women acquired a “voice within a patriarchal society” and, as such, belong in our accounts of “the journey toward female empowerment.” True, every one of those visionaries knew how to draw a crowd. It’s true, too, that Spiritualists as a group played a major role in spreading the message about women’s rights throughout the 19th century and that merely by standing up and speaking in public they were defying Victorian gender norms. Yet the goal of advancing feminism played little role in prompting the careers of the women described by Midorikawa.

 Leah Fox Fish, a single mother deserted by her husband, needed the means to support herself and her daughter, and once a third marriage guaranteed her economic security, she retired. Neither she nor her sisters lent their support to any women’s rights organization. Emma Hardinge Britten — who from youth supported her widowed mother — turned to mediumship when her star as an actress faded on Broadway. Women’s rights numbered among her many lecture subjects, but Britten’s most consistent aim was to seize on any topic that would grab the attention of a paying audience. It’s hard to say what causes, if any, Victoria Woodhull took to heart because ghostwriters — especially her very corporeal second husband, Col. James Harvey Blood — wrote her speeches and articles. She latched onto the Spiritualist movement to gather support for her presidential campaign when business reversals and personal scandals threatened to derail her ambitions and remove her from the public eye. Many Spiritualist and feminist leaders condemned her opportunism and ultimately both movements ended their connection with her. As for Georgina Weldon, although she excelled at confounding her male adversaries, her main goal was basking in the limelight, and she vied for it ferociously — even with other women.

 Other Spiritualists would have made a much better fit as feminists, but Midorikawa’s ensemble do belong together in a different book — one that explores the making of popular entertainments in the 19th century and the origins of celebrity. Kate and Maggie, Leah and Emma, Victoria and Georgina: Victorian Kardashians all. They were pioneers in show business strategies, media manipulation and advertising techniques, and their spirits still lurk among the many people intent on making a spectacle of themselves.

 

The Victorian Women Who Pierced Glass Ceilings by Speaking to the Dead.  By Christine Leigh Heyrman. The New York Times,  May 11, 2021

 






One of the greatest religious movements of the 19th century began in the bedroom of two young girls living in a farmhouse in Hydesville, New York. On a late March day in 1848, Margaretta “Maggie” Fox, 14, and Kate, her 11-year-old sister, waylaid a neighbor, eager to share an odd and frightening phenomenon. Every night around bedtime, they said, they heard a series of raps on the walls and furniture—raps that seemed to manifest with a peculiar, otherworldly intelligence. The neighbor, skeptical, came to see for herself, joining the girls in the small chamber they shared with their parents. While Maggie and Kate huddled together on their bed, their mother, Margaret, began the demonstration.

 “Now count five,” she ordered, and the room shook with the sound of five heavy thuds.

 “Count fifteen,” she commanded, and the mysterious presence obeyed. Next, she asked it to tell the neighbor’s age; thirty-three distinct raps followed.

 “If you are an injured spirit,” she continued, “manifest it by three raps.”

 And it did.


 Margaret Fox did not seem to consider the date, March 31—April Fool’s Eve—and the possibility that her daughters were frightened not by an unseen presence but by the expected success of their prank.

 The Fox family deserted the house and sent Maggie and Kate to live with their older sister, Leah Fox Fish, in Rochester. The story might have died there were it not for the fact that Rochester was a hotbed for reform and religious activity; the same vicinity, the Finger Lakes region of New York State, gave birth to both Mormonism and Millerism, the precursor to Seventh Day Adventism. Community leaders Isaac and Amy Post were intrigued by the Fox sisters’ story, and by the subsequent rumor that the spirit likely belonged to a peddler who had been murdered in the farmhouse five years beforehand. A group of Rochester residents examined the cellar of the Fox’s home, uncovering strands of hair and what appeared to be bone fragments.

 The Posts invited the girls to a gathering at their home, anxious to see if they could communicate with spirits in another locale. “I suppose I went with as much unbelief as Thomas felt when he was introduced to Jesus after he had ascended,” Isaac Post wrote, but he was swayed by “very distinct thumps under the floor… and several apparent answers.” He was further convinced when Leah Fox also proved to be a medium, communicating with the Posts’ recently deceased daughter. The Posts rented the largest hall in Rochester, and four hundred people came to hear the mysterious noises. Afterward Amy Post accompanied the sisters to a private chamber, where they disrobed and were examined by a committee of skeptics, who found no evidence of a hoax.

 The idea that one could communicate with spirits was hardly new—the Bible contains hundreds of references to angels administering to man—but the movement known as Modern Spiritualism sprang from several distinct revolutionary philosophies and characters. The ideas and practices of Franz Anton Mesmer, an 18th-century Australian healer, had spread to the United States and by the 1840s held the country in thrall. Mesmer proposed that everything in the universe, including the human body, was governed by a “magnetic fluid” that could become imbalanced, causing illness. By waving his hands over a patient’s body, he induced a “mesmerized” hypnotic state that allowed him to manipulate the magnetic force and restore health. Amateur mesmerists became a popular attraction at parties and in parlors, a few proving skillful enough to attract paying customers. Some who awakened from a mesmeric trance claimed to have experienced visions of spirits from another dimension.

 At the same time the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg, an 18th-century Swedish philosopher and mystic, also surged in popularity. Swedenborg described an afterlife consisting of three heavens, three hells and an interim destination—the world of the spirits—where everyone went immediately upon dying, and which was more or less similar to what they were accustomed to on earth. Self love drove one toward the varying degrees of hell; love for others elevated one to the heavens. “The Lord casts no one into hell,” he wrote, “but those who are there have deliberately cast themselves into it, and keep themselves there.” He claimed to have seen and talked with spirits on all of the planes.

 Seventy-five years later, the 19th-century American seer Andrew Jackson Davis, who would become known as the “John the Baptist of Modern Spiritualism,” combined these two ideologies, claiming that Swedenborg’s spirit spoke to him during a series of mesmeric trances. Davis recorded the content of these messages and in 1847 published them in a voluminous tome titled The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind. “It is a truth,” he asserted, predicting the rise of Spiritualism, “that spirits commune with one another while one is in the body and the other in the higher spheres…all the world will hail with delight the ushering in of that era when the interiors of men will be opened, and the spiritual communication will be established.” Davis believed his prediction materialized a year later, on the very day the Fox sisters first channeled spirits in their bedroom. “About daylight this morning,” he confided to his diary, “a warm breathing passed over my face and I heard a voice, tender and strong, saying ‘Brother, the good work has begun—behold, a living demonstration is born.’”




 Upon hearing of the Rochester incident, Davis invited the Fox sisters to his home in New York City to witness their medium capabilities for himself. Joining his cause with the sisters’ ghostly manifestations elevated his stature from obscure prophet to recognized leader of a mass movement, one that appealed to increasing numbers of Americans inclined to reject the gloomy Calvinistic doctrine of predestination and embrace the reform-minded optimism of the mid-19th century. Unlike their Christian contemporaries, Americans who adopted Spiritualism believed they had a hand in their own salvation, and direct communication with those who had passed offered insight into the ultimate fate of their own souls.

 Maggie, Kate, and Leah Fox embarked on a professional tour to spread word of the spirits, booking a suite, fittingly, at Barnum’s Hotel on the corner of Broadway and Maiden Lane, an establishment owned by a cousin of the famed showman. An editorial in the Scientific American scoffed at their arrival, calling the girls the “Spiritual Knockers from Rochester.” They conducted their sessions in the hotel’s parlor, inviting as many as thirty attendees to gather around a large table at the hours of 10 a.m., 5 p.m. and 8 p.m., taking an occasional private meeting in between. Admission was one dollar, and visitors included preeminent members of New York Society: Horace Greeley, the iconoclastic and influential editor of the New York Tribune; James Fenimore Cooper; editor and poet William Cullen Bryant, and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who witnessed a session in which the spirits rapped in time to a popular song and spelled out a message: “Spiritualism will work miracles in the cause of reform.”

 Leah stayed in New York, entertaining callers in a séance room, while Kate and Maggie took the show to other cities, among them Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, St. Louis, Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia, where one visitor, explorer Elisha Kent Kane, succumbed to Maggie’s charms even as he deemed her a fraud—although he couldn’t prove how the sounds were made. “After a whole month’s trial I could make nothing of them,” he confessed. “Therefore they are a great mystery.” He courted Maggie, thirteen years his junior, and encouraged her to give up her “life of dreary sameness and suspected deceit.” She acquiesced, retiring to attend school at Kane’s behest and expense, and married him shortly before his untimely death in 1857. To honor his memory she converted to Catholicism, as Kane—a Presbyterian—had always encouraged. (He seemed to think the faith’s ornate iconography and sense of mystery would appeal to her.) In mourning, she began drinking heavily and vowed to keep her promise to Kane to “wholly and forever abandon Spiritualism.”

 Kate, meanwhile, married a devout Spiritualist and continued to develop her medium powers, translating spirit messages in astonishing and unprecedented ways: communicating two messages simultaneously, writing one while speaking the other; transcribing messages in reverse script; utilizing blank cards upon which words seemed to spontaneously appear. During sessions with a wealthy banker, Charles Livermore, she summoned both the man’s deceased wife and the ghost of Benjamin Franklin, who announced his identity by writing his name on a card. Her business boomed during and after the Civil War, as increasing numbers of the bereaved found solace in Spiritualism. Prominent Spiritualist Emma Hardinge wrote that the war added two million new believers to the movement, and by the 1880s there were an estimated eight million Spiritualists in the United States and Europe. These new practitioners, seduced by the flamboyance of the Gilded Age, expected miracles—like Kate’s summoning of full-fledged apparitions—at every séance. It was wearying, both to the movement and to Kate herself, and she, too, began to drink.

 On October 21, 1888, the New York World published an interview with Maggie Fox in anticipation of her appearance that evening at the New York Academy of Music, where she would publicly denounce Spiritualism. She was paid $1,500 for the exclusive. Her main motivation, however, was rage at her sister Leah and other leading Spiritualists, who had publicly chastised Kate for her drinking and accused her of being unable to care for her two young children. Kate planned to be in the audience when Maggie gave her speech, lending her tacit support.

 “My sister Katie and myself were very young children when this horrible deception began,” Maggie said. “At night when we went to bed, we used to tie an apple on a string and move the string up and down, causing the apple to bump on the floor, or we would drop the apple on the floor, making a strange noise every time it would rebound.” The sisters graduated from apple dropping to manipulating their knuckles, joints and toes to make rapping sounds. “A great many people when they hear the rapping imagine at once that the spirits are touching them,” she explained. “It is a very common delusion. Some very wealthy people came to see me some years ago when I lived in Forty-second Street and I did some rappings for them. I made the spirit rap on the chair and one of the ladies cried out: ‘I feel the spirit tapping me on the shoulder.’ Of course that was pure imagination.”

 She offered a demonstration, removing her shoe and placing her right foot upon a wooden stool. The room fell silent and still, and was rewarded with a number of short little raps. “There stood a black-robed, sharp-faced widow,” the New York Herald reported, “working her big toe and solemnly declaring that it was in this way she created the excitement that has driven so many persons to suicide or insanity. One moment it was ludicrous, the next it was weird.” Maggie insisted that her sister Leah knew that the rappings were fake all along and greedily exploited her younger sisters. Before exiting the stage she thanked God that she was able to expose Spiritualism.

 The mainstream press called the incident “a death blow” to the movement, and Spiritualists quickly took sides. Shortly after Maggie’s confession the spirit of Samuel B. Brittan, former publisher of the Spiritual Telegraph, appeared during a séance to offer a sympathetic opinion. Although Maggie was an authentic medium, he acknowledged, “the band of spirits attending during the early part of her career” had been usurped by “other unseen intelligences, who are not scrupulous in their dealings with humanity.” Other (living) Spiritualists charged that Maggie’s change of heart was wholly mercenary; since she had failed to make a living as a medium, she sought to profit by becoming one of Spiritualism’s fiercest critics.

 Whatever her motive, Maggie recanted her confession one year later, insisting that her spirit guides had beseeched her to do so. Her reversal prompted more disgust from devoted Spiritualists, many of whom failed to recognize her at a subsequent debate at the Manhattan Liberal Club. There, under the pseudonym Mrs. Spencer, Maggie revealed several tricks of the profession, including the way mediums wrote messages on blank slates by using their teeth or feet. She never reconciled with sister Leah, who died in 1890. Kate died two years later while on a drinking spree. Maggie passed away eight months later, in March 1893. That year Spiritualists formed the National Spiritualist Association, which today is known as the National Spiritualist Association of Churches.

 In 1904, schoolchildren playing in the sisters’ childhood home in Hydesville—known locally as “the spook house”—discovered the majority of a skeleton between the earth and crumbling cedar walls. A doctor was consulted, who estimated that the bones were about fifty years old, giving credence to the sisters’ tale of spiritual messages from a murdered peddler. But not everyone was convinced. The New York Times reported that the bones had created “a stir amusingly disproportioned to any necessary significance of the discovery,” and suggested that the sisters had merely been clever enough to exploit a local mystery. Even if the bones were that of the murdered peddler, the Times concluded, “there will still remain that dreadful confession about the clicking joints, which reduces the whole case to a farce.”

 Five years later, another doctor examined the skeleton and determined that it was made up of “only a few ribs with odds and ends of bones and among them a superabundance of some and a deficiency of others. Among them also were some chicken bones.” He also reported a rumor that a man living near the spook house had planted the bones as a practical joke, but was much too ashamed to come clean.

 

The Fox Sisters and the Rap on Spiritualism. By Karen  Abbott. Smithsonian Magazine, October 30, 2012.