A documentary by Andres Veiel at the Venice Film Festival asks with new vehemence about the Nazi director Leni Riefenstahl. He once again dismantles her myth of the apolitical and brings the problem of her aesthetics into the present
You can also commit a crime with a typewriter. The Federal Court of Justice in Leipzig recently confirmed the verdict in the case of a former secretary in the Stutthof concentration camp. Irmgard F. was an accessory to murder in more than ten thousand cases, according to the verdict of the Itzehoe Regional Court in December 2022. The now 99-year-old appealed, but without success. The verdict is final: two years’ youth sentence on probation, because she was between 18 and 19 years old at the time of the crime.
The case of Leni R. is completely different. Firstly, one would have to speak of an “editing table perpetrator”. Secondly, the photographer and filmmaker knew nothing about concentration camps and mass murder – or so she claimed until almost the very end. Thirdly, she is already dead.
Leni Riefenstahl died in September 2003 at the age of 101 in her house in Pöcking on Lake Starnberg. Apart from a few “mistakes” in the past, she did not want to be accused of anything. She was the only female director in the “Third Reich”, an artist who was at Hitler’s mercy and, to a certain extent, at Goebbels’s. Despite this, she was finally denazified in 1952 after four denazification trials, and was considered by many to be the embodiment of innocence. Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol, George Lucas, Quentin Tarantino, Jodie Foster and Madonna expressed their admiration. In a 1999 “Emma” article, Alice Schwarzer was also enthusiastic about her. Is there such a thing as “fascist feminists”?
Riefenstahl double strategy
How can all this be? Or to put it another way: How did Riefenstahl manage it? After all, the seemingly naive woman knew very well what she wanted and what she was doing. Her self-denazification program always included gathering powerful admirers around her and eliminating critics. She silenced the latter with cease-and-desist orders whenever possible. The fact that Riefenstahl’s double strategy existed is probably nothing new. But no one ever really thought about it. For a while it was under the radar, then hip again. Now a documentary film has premiered at the Lido that asks about Leni Riefenstahl with new vehemence. And that also poses questions to those alive today: who we are, how we see the world, how we want to be.
Andres Veiel and his team worked on “Riefenstahl” for six years. What you cannot see in the film – and this is meant as praise – is that it is a work of art that is free of artistic effort. At the beginning of the project was the unpleasant realization of the TV presenter and journalist Sandra Maischberger, that she too had allowed herself to be tricked and lied to by the lovely old womanas the “Riefenstahl” producer explained on the sidelines of a first press screening in Berlin. Since “many questions remained unanswered”, Maischberger tried to obtain the estate in the 700 boxes that had been transferred to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in 2017. She offered the foundation a complex inventory of the estate, carried out by experts, in return for producing a documentary film. Andres Veiel, who had already impressed audiences in 2017 with the film “Beuys” about art and economics, joined the project.
One gets the impression that even the young Riefenstahl was driven by superhuman ambition. From expressive dance to acting (in Arnold Fanck’s mountain films) and directing feature films to documentary films, she tried everything that promised success. She was not blessed with great talent in all disciplines. But when Veiel shows her in two photo sequences as a master of film editing, handling film strips, it becomes clear that her strengths probably lay in the organization of material.
“She was a genius, but a political idiot”
She also had a good eye for the talent of the others, especially the cameramen. Veiel then shows the longest excerpts from the “documentary” field: from “Triumph of the Will” – from the Nuremberg Party Congress in 1935 – and from the two-part “Olympia” project, which was shot during the 1936 Games in Berlin. But: these technically and aesthetically most successful Riefenstahl films are of course also highly problematic because they were part of the Nazi propaganda machine.
Leni is unattainable without her enthusiasm for Hitler. She never distanced herself from the “Führer” and so remained loyal to National Socialism in the post-war period. But she did so in a devious manner that was in keeping with the times, which weighed every public word and liked to portray herself as a victim of slander in talk shows and interviews. Riefenstahl’s numerous recordings of telephone conversations uncovered from her estate – in which she receives a lot of moral support and applause from diehards – provide a sometimes dismaying insight into her mindset and the response that Riefenstahl was able to build on.
“She was a genius, but a political idiot,” said Irish film expert Liam O’Leary. Nina Gladitz, who died in 2022 and gave Riefenstahl a devastating testimonial in her book “Career of a Perpetrator,” turned the quote around: “Not an exceptional artist, but a political genius.” But: As a supposedly long-term tactician, shouldn’t she have erased the many testimonies to her fascist worldview from her estate?
Leni, the perpetrator
She glossed over her past, told lies, and exploited people terribly. The fate of the filmmaker and photographer Willy Zielke, which Nina Gladitz almost turns into a conspiracy story – according to Gladitz, Riefenstahl first destroyed her competitor’s career in order to take advantage of his considerable skills during the Nazi era; she made sure that the mentally unstable man ended up in the clutches of psychiatry, but at the same time ensured that he remained available for Riefenstahl’s purposes. Here, the evidence is patchy in places.
But there are no doubts about the Sinti and Roma chosen by Riefenstahl for the “Tiefland” shoot from the “gypsy” camp Maxglan near Salzburg and used as extras. The director later claimed that she had seen them all again after the war – in reality, more than half of her “protégés” were murdered. Gladitz made the documentary film “A Time of Silence and Darkness” with the participation of the victims, which disappeared into the WDR’s poison cabinet after being broadcast in 1982. The deeply moving film can now be viewed on YouTube.
Leni, the perpetrator. Veiel of course does not fail to mention “Tiefland” and the fate of the families affected. Above all, “Riefenstahl” examines the events in Konskie in Poland, where, as head of a “special film crew”, she was (not only) an eyewitness to one of the first Wehrmacht crimes in 1939. She denied this, but photos showing Riefenstahl with wide-eyed horror prove that she was there when Jews were shot in the market square. Veiel goes even further, citing another witness who claims to have heard Riefenstahl shouting during filming in the market square that the Jews – people she did not want in the filming – had to “go”. It is conceivable that the filmmaker helped trigger the massacre in this way.
In master race attitude
“Riefenstahl” is a film that by no means observes its main character from the safety distance of a Guido Knopp documentary. Rather, it brings her into the present. The material selected often acts as a mirror of current events. When Rudolf Hess says in “Triumph of the Will,” for example, “the Führer is our guarantor of peace,” Putin’s war of aggression and the often distorted discourses of more recent times are also meant. “Riefenstahl” also discusses the field of post-colonialism. From 1962 onwards, Riefenstahl traveled several times to Sudan to visit the Nuba people, in order to get the strong warriors and young, beautiful women in front of the lens. In rare documentary scenes, Veiel shows the director in a master race attitude, for example when she beats her models with a stick to get certain pictures of them.
At the core of “Riefenstahl” is a perverted concept of beauty that ignores the other side of the beautiful, superior and victorious – the supposedly worthless, sick, weak and also the foreign. According to this principle, the Nazi era can also be benevolently overlooked in order to marginalize it as “bird shit in over 1000 years of successful German history” (Alexander Gauland). But “Riefenstahl” has an even wider impact, although the present, its trends and crises, at first glance do not seem to play a role in Andres Veiel’s masterful documentary.
In view of an outtake from “Speer und Er. Nachspiel – die Täuschung” by Heinrich Breloer, in which the aged figure of the century thinks aloud about lighting to reduce wrinkles, one could certainly draw parallels between her work, which celebrates the cult of perfect bodies, not least in her “Olympia” film, and Instagram filters, beauty mania and body shaming. Leni Riefenstahl is perhaps not innocent of the fact that beauty has broken out of the triad of true, beautiful and good.
The mental connection between the cult of beauty, fantasies of exclusion and delusions of superiority should cause us great concern because it is spreading ever further. It is precisely the supposedly “apolitical” nature of Riefenstahl’s aesthetic that makes it so dangerous. In reality, it is highly political. Without establishing a direct, visible context in the film – it is always better to let the audience draw their own conclusions – Andres Veiel connects “Riefenstahl” with Putin, Trump and Höcke. The Irmgard F. case is closed with the verdict in Leipzig. The trial of Leni R. continues.
