Hitler’s natural accomplice
Frederic Raphael
LENI: THE LIFE AND WORK OF LENI RIEFENSTAHL by Steven Bach Little, Brown, £25, pp. 386, ISBN 9780316861113 ✆ £20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Steven Bach justifies his new biography of Leni Riefenstahl by virtue (if virtue comes into it) of a cache of new material which he charmed out of Peggy — ‘we quickly became first-name friends’ — Wallace, whose 1975 doctoral dissertation at USC led her to record hours of interviews with Hitler’s pet film director. The result is a detailed tombstone to the greater glory and infamy of the legendary maker of The Triumph of the Will and Olympia, in which fabrications and re-shoots are edited with apparent seamlessness into what ‘really happened’, as have been their director’s accounts of her actions and motives as the Nazis’ pet flick-chick.
Bach adopts a plodding, year-by-year approach to the literal century of Leni’s life. We are treated to a list of the legion of lovers of the woman who, in her protracted youth, had a favourite phrase ‘I must meet that man!’ and who, in old age, repudiated (well-authenticated) charges of repeated jambes en air by (skittish?) reference to ‘my well-known almost virginal sexual history’. This began with a belated (by 1920s Berlin standards) deflowering, just before her 21st birthday, by the tennis champion Otto Froitzheim, Hollywood-bound Pola Negri’s lover, whom Leni had not met before. After a quick first service, he threw her a $20 note in case she got pregnant.
Leni later claimed that Froitzheim had forced her, but continued the affair for two years. The businesslike separation of sexuality from love, and of responsibility from ‘art’, gives her a certain sisterhood with the unmentioned Lee Miller. Genuinely raped, as a very young girl, by a family friend, Lee used beauty more striking than Leni’s to make (and get) her way in the male-dominated world of photography. She threw herself into Man Ray’s arms, to get him to take her on as his pupil, but her heart belonged only briefly to dada. Unlike Leni, Miller developed a conscience: photographing in Dachau soon after its liberation changed her view of life for ever. Leni, by contrast, used doomed gypsies (such adorable kids!) as extras and, after the war, claimed that she had saved all their lives. In fact, once finished on her interminable picture, they were shipped to Birkenau or Auschwitz, where almost all her little darlings were murdered. Their faces remain, impersonating Spanish peasants, in an epic piece of kitsch entitled Tiefland, on which Leni worked from 1940-1945, an alibi endlessly funded by Goebbels, on the Führer’s instructions.
Leni’s return to feature-filming was a not wholly despicable response to her having witnessed the murder of Jews in the small town of Konskie in September 1939. Steven Bach spends too much time trying to make her complicit with events which clearly appalled her, though the massacre was, of course, entirely consistent with the the orders of her darling Führer. At least she did not consent to make overtly antiSemitic movies such as Veit Harlan’s Jew Süss, which was not as badly directed as one might wish. Film is perhaps naturally amoral, a whorish art which, given the money, lets you do anything you like.
By claiming that her first and last allegiance was to art, Leni managed to mount a sustained post-war campaign of selfacquittal. Her one abiding loyalty was to her own myth. Splicing effrontery with self-pity, duplicity with imposture, she edited herself into eternal innocence. Bach implies that she may have been halfJewish: if so, having faked documents proving her racial purity, she had no difficulty in becoming wholeheartedly Nazi, especially after Jewish critics — unlike the imminent Führer — failed to applaud the overblown romanticism of her 1932 film The Blue Light, in which she also starred. There was nothing she couldn’t do, it seems, apart from tell the truth.
Groped by Goebbels, entertained by Streicher, bankrolled by Bormann and abetted by Speer, she danced prettily through the criminal overworld. Like many Germans, she did not, as Rebecca West put it, ‘know enough to come in out of the rain, even when it turned to blood’. She did, however, open a wide umbrella afterwards, when she claimed that she had been too ‘busy’ to perceive what villains her producers were (an excuse not unknown, in diluted doses, in the film world at large). Leni’s admirers concentrate on the supposedly non-ideological Olympia as her unquestionable masterwork. The 1936 Olympic games are said to have been transformed into a visual hymn to beauty and youth, our own prevailing gods. The notion that it is purely documentary is absurd: much of the material was pre-shot during pre-Games practice. Bach informs us that the Olympic torch is shown being carried from ‘Mount Olympus’ to Berlin, presumably in emulation of Prometheus. After the triumph of the movie, it is said, the Greek ambassador handed Leni an olive branch from ‘the sacred grove on Mount Olympus’. Do neither Bach nor his myriad of advisers, agents, publishers and close-reading friends know that Olympia, and its sacred grove, is in the western Peloponnese?
Genius, bully, documentarist, fabulist, whiner, egomaniac, embezzler, Riefenstahl was the archetypal film-maker. Never before the 20th century had the means of recording events so commandingly shaped the events themselves. The Triumph of the Will advertised the 1934 Nuremburg rally, with rigged footage and preconceived camera-placing, but then the rally itself was factitious, a staged show with beerbellied extras disguised as Teutonic knights and Hitler as Thomas Mann’s Mario the Magician topping the bill. (By the way, Bach seems to think that Mann left Germany because he was Jewish).
In one of his letters, in the 1880s, Flaubert forecast that the waxwork show would be the popular art form of the future. He was wrong, but not absurd: the Nazi rally used living waxworks, who marched, drilled and applauded like cued automata. Film was Hitler’s natural accomplice; it glorifies fraudulence and, whatever its qualities and seductions, it cannot think. Hitler’s close-ups were his apotheosis. His director was almost as important to his vanity as he was to hers; their chaste romance (hand-holding only) was narcissism à deux.
The Triumph of the Will may stand as a superb warning against megalolatry, but although Hitler came and went, the triumph of the media has grown and grown. Modern political success is mainly a matter of looking and sounding right to the camera and the microphone. If there will never be another European demagogue like Leni’s Hitler, it is because realistic hesitation (Blair is a master) and walkabout shows of sincere concern for ‘ordinary people’ work better on today’s cameras and sound-equipment than premeditated rodomontade.
Whether or not Leni was ‘really’ a genius is hardly worth debating; she was indefatigable (film-making too is a marathon) and, by the insolence of her ambition, she turned photo-opportunism into the art form of our time, the triumph of emotion over thought and of shadows over substance.
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