Riefenstahl

Portrait of the Artist as a Nazi Handmaiden

Many people will be familiar with the debate about artists and their moral failings and/or their political choices. It’s a debate that tends to return to the same themes: Can even the greatest works of art be considered in isolation from the politics of their creators, even when their politics are actually despicable? To what extent do - or should - the political and moral failings of the artist influence our judgements of their artistic achievements?

Few artists lend themselves more easily to these discussions than Adolf Hitler’s favourite film director, the German dancer, actress, filmmaker and photographer Helene Bertha Amalie ‘Leni’ Riefenstahl. And few artists have personally intervened in these debates with the tenacity that Riefenstahl demonstrated, from her re-emergence into public life after World War II until her death in 2003 at the age of 101.

These were years in which the undisputed queen of Nazi propaganda re-invented herself as a photographer with the same ferocious creative energy that she had once displayed during the Nazi era. She took pictures of Sudanese tribes and sub-aquatic oceanic life that became bestselling coffee table books. She photographed Mick and Bianca Jagger’s wedding, and got a heads up from Michael Jackson. She was a guest of honour at the 1976 Montreal Olympics and also at Time magazine’s seventy-fifth anniversary in 1998, and received plaudits from Quentin Tarantino and Francis Ford Coppola

Throughout those years, Riefenstahl stubbornly proclaimed an aggrieved innocence regarding her Nazi past. She was a serial litigator, frequently taking people to court who raised troubling episodes about her Nazi past, while she set out to construct a more salubrious legacy for herself, as an apolitical artist drawn unwittingly into the Nazi orbit.

To make this case, she appeared repeatedly on talk shows, and in films and interviews. She wrote and re-wrote her memoirs, and forgot or re-remembered episodes that contradicted her claims to art-for-art’s sake innocence.

All these efforts are thoroughly dissected in the compelling documentary Riefenstahl, directed by Andres Veiel and produced by the German journalist Sandra Maischberger. In addition to publicly-available interviews, Veiel and his team had access to more than 700 boxes of previously-unseen materials from Riefenstahl’s personal archives, including recorded phonecalls, video footage, letters and other documents.

The result is an engrossing and complex portrait of a brilliant, extraordinary woman whose genuine artistic achievements were indelibly tarnished by her Nazi past. Although Riefenstahl acknowledges its subject’s multiple gifts, the film painstakingly strips away its subject’s layers of deceit and self-deception, to reveal an intellectually-dishonest and amoral narcissist who could not understand why the rest of the world did not admire her as much as she admired herself.

Watching it reminded me of the journalist Martha Gelhorn - a fearless journalist who did have empathy - who once wrote in 1964 of ‘the adults of Germany, who knew Nazism and in their millions cheered and adored Hitler until he started losing, [who]have performed a nation-wide act of amnesia; no one individually had a thing to do with the Hitlerian regime and its horrors.’

Riefenstahl was one of those amnesiac Germans, but her claims to innocence have even less credibility than those of her peers. Many Germans admired Hitler from afar, but not many had the kind of access to his inner circle granted to Riefenstahl. Veiel’s film meticulously unpicks the historical evasions that made her very specific amnesia possible. It shows how Riefenstahl constantly revised her retrospective explanations and justifications throughout her life, in an attempt to cover her tracks.

In one interview, she claims - ludicrously - that no one used the term ‘Nazism’ in the early 1930s, and then expresses surprise when her interlocutor points out that it was. Elsewhere she claims that her notorious film Triumph of the Will was merely a ‘commission’, and jokingly suggests that she would have done the same for Roosevelt or Stalin - not nearly the resounding apologia she seems to think it is.

In various interviews, she denies having any close relationship with Hitler and his circle, despite persistent photographic and documentary evidence to the contrary. At one point, she shouts at an interviewer from a previous film about her who had the temerity to raise these connections. In another clip, she mockingly asks an interviewer whether she should have become a resistance fighter, even though there were ‘very few.’

There may have been very few, but there were some. And there were also artists, most notably Marlene Dietrich, who the Nazis tried and failed to recruit, and who used her fame to fight them. No such efforts were required with Riefenstahl, who embraced the cause without any hesitations or reservations, and she did not like to be reminded of the fact. In one telling episode, she appears in a 1970s German talk show, bristling with anger and contempt towards another female guest of her own age, who did resist the Nazis, and rejects Riefenstahl’s claims that no one knew what was going on at the time.

Veiel also tracked down a 1934 interview with the Daily Express, in which Riefenstahl describes how she read Mein Kampf (‘the book of Hitler, the Bible of Hitler’) in 1931, and ‘after reading the first page, I became an enthusiastic National Socialist.’ These clips are interspersed with her own written recollections of the near orgasmic physical sensations that she experienced on first hearing Hitler speak, and her letters pleading with the Fuhrer to stage the premiere of her film Olympia and reminding him of the ‘great joy’ he brought to so many millions.

Indeed he did, even if many Germans subsequently chose to forget it. It was not for nothing that Hitler acceded to her request and arranged for Olympia to be premiered on his birthday. Because no one captured that joy more memorably than Riefenstahl herself; the relationship between Riefenstahl and Nazism was almost entirely dependent on her artistry and her role as an artist.

This convergence was most obvious in Triumph of the Will, the portrait of the 1934 6th Nazi Party Congress at Nuremberg. From its opening sequence of Hitler descending on the city like a Wagnerian warrior-god, to the joyous crowds, night rallies, precision-choreographed assemblies and artfully-framed images of Hitler, Hess, Himmer and other members of the Nazi ruling clique - this film is a rhapsodic hymn of praise to Nazi power.

Where the Confederacy and the Ku Klux Klan found their filmmaker in D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, Nazism found in Leni Riefenstahl an artist who knew exactly what was required of her, and understood the propaganda potential of the relatively new medium of cinema. Through pitch-perfect combination of images, music, lighting, and orchestrated crowd-spectacle, she glorified a regime that was then at the height of its power.

There is no hint in Riefenstahl’s film of the beginnings of the concentration camp system, the ongoing sterilisation of the mentally and physically ‘unfit’, the elimination of German democracy, the recent Night of the Long Knives, and the brute power of a terrorist police-state.

Triumph of the Will transformed the sordid and brutal history of fascist tyranny into an epic tale of Germany’s national resurrection and redemption. It made Nazi criminals like Hitler, Goering, Hess, and Streicher into noble statesmen.

Riefenstahl often said that she did nothing in her films to propagate hate. But if you make a film about a regime like that, without knowing anything of the history behind it, you are at best a credulous fool, whose art lacks even the most elementary grounding in morality or even in reality. And if Riefenstahl knew - or even suspected- what was happening in Germany at that time, then she was precisely the fascist fellow-traveller and accomplice that she subsequently claimed not to be.

Was Riefenstahl a naive aesthete infatuated with the images she created? Or was she an ideological fascist filmmaker, besotted with Nazism and its leader?

On one level the distinction is irrelevant. Because whatever Riefenstahl personally believed, she understood the kind of stories she was expected to tell, and saw in Nazism what Hitler and his cohorts wanted the world to see. Consider Olympia, ‘the greatest sports movie every made’ - her documentary on the 1936 Olympic Games which has left its mark on sports coverage and advertising ever since. Despite the funding and backing this film received from the Nazis, this film was less obviously political and propagandist than its predecessor. Though Hitler and Nazism feature in it, the film was ostensibly a celebration of the purity of the Olympian ideal and a paean to a certain notion of physical beauty and perfection.

Some of these images were seductive and astounding at the time, and still are. Riefenstahl even appeared to depart from Nazi standards of ‘Caucasian’ or ‘Nordic’ standards of beauty, by including scenes of Jesse Owens’s famous victory. But the fact that a black body could meet Riefenstahl’s aesthetic standards hardly makes her an anti-fascist or an artist-subversive. On the contrary, as Veiel pointed out in an interview about his film, even Riefenstahl’s supposedly apolitical art always had an underlying ideological purpose, in which ‘this celebration of the strongest is always the contempt of the weak.’

Within a few years of Riefenstahl’s Olympiad, this ‘contempt’ would find expression in the morbid antisemitic caricatures of Jud Suss, the Warsaw Ghetto and the Holocaust, and the Aktion T4 euthanasia programs. Riefenstahl did not celebrate or advocate such actions, and may not have been aware of their full extent. But nor was she as innocent as she later claimed to be.

Veiel’s team found a letter in which she asked her ex-husband - a major in a Nazi paramilitary unit - to remove a group of Jews from a marketplace in south-central Poland where she was filming in 1939. This request resulted in their execution. Veiel also revisits the filming of Riefenstahl’s film Lowlands in 1944, in which she handpicked a group of Roma and Sinti extras from a concentration camp. Though Riefenstahl later claimed that these extras all survived the war, 100 of them died in Auschwitz.

These revelations are not entirely new. In 1984 the late German journalist Nina Gladitz was once sued by Riefenstahl for a film making the same allegations, and her film has never been shown. If the retelling of these episodes confirms Riefenstahl’s duplicity, they are only elements in a broader indictment that goes beyond Riefenstahl herself. Veiel goes to some lengths to demonstrate the support that she received throughout her life, from Germans who never ceased to admire her.

At one point in the film Riefenstahl describes herself as an artist in search of ‘outer and inner beauty’, but her ideal of beauty was always associated with a certain notion of physical perfection and purity that could be realised on film. She even seemed to see herself as an image rather than a real person. Filmed preparing for an interview on her 100th birthday, she still acts like the director, checking the lighting and camera angles, and asking the director to conceal a wrinkle on her face.

Even at the age of 100, the fascist Norma Desmond could not stand to see an imperfection in herself. Vain and narcissistic to the last, she continued to portray herself as a victim, unfairly tarnished by her association with the regime that she served so well. At a time when the descendants of fascism and Nazism are more powerful and more brazen now than at any time since the war, Riefenstahl reminds us of the seductive power of the regime that seduced her and so many others - a seduction that Riefenstahl also facilitated through her films.

Today’s far-right movements operate in a social media-saturated world where the line between reality and fakery is even harder to determine than it was in Riefenstahl’s time, and propaganda has become an artesanal process, that can generated by anyone with a modicum of technical expertise through memes and deep fakes, Twitter/X videos and dodgy Facebook ads.

The movements that rely on these techniques may never find a chronicler to equal this brilliant but repellent egomaniacal artist, who fell in love with Nazism and then spent the rest of her life denying it. But Veiel’s troubling film suggests that we are not as far removed from the world that she belonged to as we might like to think.

In one of Riefenstahl’s recorded phone calls, a fan praises ‘the little lady who filmed the beautiful bodies, not the cripples’ and predicts that one day, the German people will recover ‘morality, decency and virtue’, to which Riefenstahl responds, ‘Yes, the German people are predestined for that.’

This powerful but disturbing film makes it clear that it was Riefenstahl who lacked morality, decency and virtue, and the praise and adulation heaped upon her by her compatriots throughout her life suggests that she was not the only one devoid of these qualities.