Leni Riefenstahl: Dead at Last

One shouldn't "speak ill of the dead," the saying goes. But Leni Riefenstahl was no good. She died this week at age 101, lending some credence to another saying: "Only the good die young."

Riefenstahl did many other things in her life than make propaganda movies for Hitler. But the main reason she is world-[in]famous, the main reason newspapers all over the world are running prominent obituaries for her, is that she made the film Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will), a documentary about the 1934 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, starring her friend, admirer and Leader Adolf Hitler.

The film is still commonly referred to as the greatest propaganda film ever made. A present-day audience may find that somewhat surprising. The booming, melodramatic rhetoric that was common in those days when politicians still had to depend heavily on projecting their voices in live appearances often comes off as histrionic today. And the long segment of marchers carrying banners and insignia to the sound of martial music is dull to almost anyone today.

But in those pre-television days, it was spectacularly successful. It would be a mistake, though, to think that Triumph des Willens was Rifenstahl's only service to the Hitler regime. Susan Sontag did a 1975 essay called "Fascinating Fascism" to counter Riefenstahl's effort to reinvent herself as some kind of pioneering feminist filmmaker.

Sontag debunked Riefenstahl's ridiculous claim that she made Triumph des Willens as pure art, a claim that Riefenstahl made until the end. Sontag describes how the 1934 rally was organized around Riefenstahl's filming, and how senior Party officials made great efforts to accomodate her directorial demands.

To use a more recent example, saying that Triumph des Willens was pure art would be like saying that George W. Bush's May 1 appearance on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln wearing a flight suit and featuring a giant "Mission Accomplished" banner was routine daily bureaucratic business. It was an event staged entirely for the cameras.

Moreover, Riefenstahl's second most famous movie, Olympiad, a record of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, was also a Nazi propaganda film. (Actually, it was two movies, Fest der Völker and Fest der Schönheit.) The event itself was meant to showcase the superiority of "Aryan" athletes, although the African-American runner Jesse Owens famously upset that goal. You don't have to go into philosophical discussion of what "Nazi aesthetics" were about to know that Riefenstahl intended the film to glorify the Nazi ideal and the Hitler government.

Hitler himself referred to Riefenstahl as the ideal German woman. Although, like some female Christian Right activists in America today, her own life as a professional woman hardly fit the traditional mold of "Kinder, Küche, Kirche" that the Nazis idealized for "Aryan" women. That means "children, kitchen, church," although the Nazis weren't as big on the "church" part as the other two.

She was never a member of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party, but Riefenstahl willingly promoted Hitler's regime. For instance, after the annexation of Austria in 1938, she went as Hitler's emissary to occupied Austria to help put a nice public-relations face on the new regime.

After the war Riefenstahl remained an unrepentant old Nazi. The 1994 film Die Macht der Bilder (The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl) allowed the elderly filmmaker to tell her story at great length, with minimal critical challenge. She portrayed herself as a kindly old grandmotherly type who just had no idea about all those horrible things Hitler was doing. Why, she was shocked, shocked, when she heard about it.

The master propagandist hadn't lost her touch. In that film, she carefully tailored her comments to minimize the evils of (verharmlosen) the Third Reich as much as she could without running afoul of the German anti-Nazi laws.

Even at age 100, she was still at it:

Speaking to The Associated Press just before her 100th birthday on Aug. 22,
2002, Riefenstahl dramatically said she has "apologized for ever being born" but
that she should not be criticized for her masterful films.

"I don't know
what I should apologize for," she said. "I cannot apologize, for example, for
having made the film 'Triumph of the Will' -- it won the top prize. All my films
won prizes."

The woman may never have been a Party member. But she was an incorrigible Nazi to the end. That's who she was, that's what she stood for. And that's how we should remember her.

- Bruce Miller

Hearing: Pete Seeger, "Last Train to Nuremberg"

Tags: leni riefenstahl, nazism, national socialism