Steven Bach (1938–2009)

A readable, if flawed, biography of the German film maker, Leni Riefenstahl. Riefenstahl rose from a perfectly ordinary working-class Berlin childhood to being one of the key propagandists of the Third Reich. Despite her later disavowals of any knowledge or complicity, Steven Bach's biography makes it clear that Riefenstahl was ruthless, narcissistic, utterly lacking in self-awareness, and quite attached to Hitler. It's true that she may not have been a fascist, ideologically speaking, but I show more think that's because she was attracted by power and the aesthetics of authoritarianism more than anything else. Riefenstahl would no doubt have risen to a similar height under another dictatorial regime.

Bach is good at sketching out the development of her career, from an early career as a dancer (having looked at a surviving clip of her on YouTube, she was terrible) to her direction of Triumph of the Will and the filming of the Berlin Olympics to her reinvention, late in life, as the creator of patronising, prurient photographs of Sudanese people. His opinion of Riefenstahl is plain but he refrains from either attacking or defending her, which is sadly a rare accomplishment for a biographer. He does however fail to deal consistently with his source material (he sometimes accepts, sometimes dismisses, Riefenstahl's account of her own past without always explaining why, though she was undoubtedly a skilled manipulator of her own biography), and doesn't contextualise her life in great detail.

The biggest failing of the book for me is Bach's failure to really consider how gender assumptions and sexism affected both Riefenstahl's career and her reception (at the height of her career and afterwards). For instance, Bach seems to regard Riefenstahl's interactions with Goebbels as yet further proof of her hypocrisy and her using her 'womanly wiles' to get ahead (having many sexual partners must mean that she was using sex to further her career, right? but it would of course be different if a male director did the same, just because), rather than realising that they rather show the workings of male privilege.

I cannot give a recommendation to the audiobook version of Leni, however. The narrator's pacing, intonation and inflection were all poor, but it was the way in which she mispronounced so many words so continuously that finally tipped things over into farcical. If you don't know how to pronounce abyss, libel, roster, tryst or nimbly, amongst others, you shouldn't be narrating an audiobook. show less

The core of this book is how Riefensthal went from stage-mad girl to one of the great film makers of the 20th century and the milestones of contingency along the way. Finding expression first in dance, Leni leveraged her athleticism and nerve into a place in the "Alpine" film genre of the Interwar Period. This provided her with the experience in out-door photography which gave her the key skills to make the great Nazi propaganda epics she's famous for, though perhaps she was not as talented show more a producer as she imagined herself (her management of time and finances were abysmal). From there Bach illustrates the downward spiral, as apart from being caught in the rip tide of Nazi collapse (though she was lucky not to be found more culpable) Riefensthal hit her ceiling of competence when attempting to produce dramatic films; she had grand visions but no sense of story apart from being the heroine of our own personal epic. One could go on but, of course, her epic was other people's nightmare; including betrayed lovers, aggrieved co-workers and the exploited extras in her works (mostly notably the Romany people taken from concentration camps to be in her egregious romantic epic "Tiefland"). While one might have wished for more historical context at points, Bach is a movie person and he probably does himself a favor by sticking to what he knows best and with a subject so given to living their life in a state of fantasy it's probably of limited value to speculate about their inner personality; Reifenstahl took most of her real self-insights with her to the grave. show less

Originally published on Upublica: http://www.upublica.com/article_c/article_detail/45/leni_riefenstahl_not_just_a_...

Leni Riefenstahl lived to the grand old age of 101 (1902 – 2003). This means that she spent 58 years (from 1945 to 2003) - over half her life – dogmatically asserting that her close association with the Nazi regime was down to youthful naïveté, that she did not know, could not have known, that her conscience was clear! Riefenstahl’s claims of innocence, however, are show more implausible to the extreme when we hold them up against her life both in the period before and after the Nazis came to power in 1933. Nothing else in her life could ever have been characterised as naive. She was a man-eater, regularly using men as a means to an end, which is noteworthy only for its excellent illustration that this was not a typical naive woman. She was an auteur decades before the term was forged, always ready to fight for her artistic vision as a film maker, and to work the corridors of power. This is not the portrait of a gullible girl.

Riefenstahl’s iron will and highly developed leadership skills shine through The Triumph of the Will (1934), which is simultaneously her greatest work, her claim to fame and the one shameful act that would forever tarnish her image, the main evidence of her Nazi complicity. She was just 32 years old when she deftly turned the 1934 Nuremberg Rally into a propaganda masterpiece that has, arguably more than any other picture, influenced how we envision Nazi iconography today, with its endless columns of marching troops, torch parades, Nazi banners, close-ups of dedicated Hitlerjugend, and revolving swastikas formations of soldiers. It is all there, and it is highly embellished. The emphasis on her relatively young age at the time should not imply that she should somehow be excused, or that her talents were perhaps taken advantage of. In fact the very opposite is true: it was her tremendous drive, maturity and ability to operate in higher circles that earned her the job. Nor did she merely show up with camera in hand and point it at the action: much of the filming was staged outside of the actual rally and Riefenstahl herself personally instructed entire columns of marching soldiers. If some official or high-ranking Nazi stood in her way during filming, she went to plead her case directly to her protector, Adolf Hitler, who along with Goebbels was of course personally involved in the planning process.

An integral part of Nazi high society and a celebrity in her own right, Riefenstahl would schmooze with the Nazi elite, pulling strings here and beguiling men there. At no point in her career did she shy away from associating with the Nazi elite. For all her claims of naïveté she should have known better, if for no other reason than that many of her Jewish colleagues had fled the country, having been barred from the film industry (which had been nationalised by Goebbels). Jewish athletes were also barred from the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, an event that Riefenstahl was able to manipulate to craft remarkable pro-Nazi footage, her famous shots of US black athlete Jesse Owens notwithstanding.

Steven Bach doesn’t need to build up a grand case against Riefenstahl’s claim to youthful naïveté. He merely – and this is why the book is so good – has to provide a detailed account of Riefenstahl’s life. The events speak for themselves, most chillingly when she used Gypsy children as extras for her film Tiefland in 1940, children she personally handpicked from the camp Salzburg-Maxglan and who were later to die in Auschwitz. Riefenstahl could not have known of the gruesome death that awaited the Gypsy children, but the horrid living conditions in the camp ought to have elicited some kind of protest at the very least. But they didn’t. Once again her dedication to her work, her tunnel vision, clouded her moral judgement.

In a sense, Riefenstahl’s life is representative of many in the upper echelons of German society, who weren’t exactly active Nazis or part of the Nazi governing structures, but who nevertheless thrived during the Nazi regime and whose silent acquiescence effectively helped further the Nazi cause. We do not feel sorry for Riefenstahl for losing the rights to her work after the war. Nor do we pity her many legal attempts to clear her name in courtrooms.

Had it not been for Riefenstahl’s association with the Nazi elite we would have placed her in the pantheon of great film makers. There is no doubt that she was a remarkable and fascinating woman. Regrettably, she sold her soul. show less

"‘O opportunity! thy guilt is great, ‘Tis thou that execut’st the traitor’s treason;Thou set’st the wolf where he the lamb may get."
That's from Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece.

And speaking of opportunism run rampant, I've been working my way through Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl by Stephen Bach. It's slow going; two checkouts from the public library weren't enough. I had to place an interlibrary loan request through the library at Job #1. I'm not much of a show more biography fan, but I heard an interview with the author on NPR and had to check this one out.

If this biography is accurate, or even close to accurate, wow. Just, wow. Riefenstahl was such an opportunist that she was definitely self-deluding, like many people at that time, but also a true narcissist. It is unbelieveable how cold and self-serving she was, pulling Gypsies from transport to use them as extras in her movie, for example, spoiling the children, giving them hopes for the future, then glibly sending them back on their way to the death camps. She hand-picked her Gypsies from camps, but then she swore she never knew the camps existed. Crazy.

Bach builds a portrait of a self-described artistic genius who was really a genius of opportunism. She maintained her own illusions and lies for years, building a facade around herself and never admitting its damage bymere facts or her own mistakes...it's incredible.

I do recommend this book, if you can take it. It's amazingly thorough and the photographs alone are very telling. My only quibble is that Bach has pages and pages of notes in the back, but no numbers, etc to reference them to in the text. I would like to read some of the supporting information. The whole story is terrible and fascinating. show less