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.
