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Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl
by Steven Bach
386pp, Little, Brown, £25
Lingering on very publicly to the beginning of her second century, Leni Riefenstahl, despite her strenuous attempts at self-exculpation, was the living embodiment of the damned Faustian artist who had sold her soul for the sake of her art. A romantic aura none the less clung to her, as well as a certain ambiguity which she did everything to encourage. Was "this mistress of the celluloid epic, the woman who had forged the visual image of nazism triumphant" actually as naive and tunnel-visioned as she claimed, ignorant of the horrors committed in the name of the regime she glamorised?
Steven Bach's compelling biography finally gives the lie to any such interpretation. Patiently, systematically, he dismantles each of her evasions, revealing a woman who was utterly ruthless in pursuit of her work and intensely devoted to Hitler and his cause. Bach takes care not to demonise her, but he doesn't need to: the record does that for him.
Her background was perfectly ordinary. She was born in 1902 in a working-class suburb of Berlin (a city which Bach evokes, as he does everything else in the book, with vivid economy) to a severe father and a stage-struck mother. She and her mum were a team, secretly visiting cinemas and gate-crashing fancy-dress balls. By sheer willpower and the generosity of a lover who longed to marry her, she became a successful solo dancer in the avant-garde style of Mary Wigman, but, said a critic, "She lacks the highest, most important quality: soul." Her life found its focus when she saw Arnold Fanck's location-shot film The Mountain of Destiny. "I have to meet that man," she told her still adoring, still matrimonially hopeful lover. It was, he said, the refrain of her life. She uttered it for the last time when Hitler appeared on her horizon, with momentous consequences for them both.
Struck by her vitality and beauty, Fanck wrote Holy Mountain for her, shooting it in Alpine locations over a gruelling two years. In what would become a familiar pattern, she took her co-star, Luis Trenker, into her bed, and then worked her way round the crew and cast, unleashing erotic mayhem in the isolated location. All her life, she changed men regularly, like the paintings on the wall. Many, if not most of them, were mountaineers, athletes and cameramen; quite a number were all three. Her essentially masculine sexual behaviour is almost exhilarating. When, for once, one left her - rather than her dismissing him - she slashed her arms, legs, hips.
She became a director by default. After failing to secure the Marlene Dietrich role in The Blue Angel, she determined to direct a vehicle for herself: The Blue Light. The experienced scenarist Béla Balázs wrote and co-directed with her; one of her former lovers shot it. Unschooled in film technique, she invented and experimented, eagerly accepting suggestions from her partners. This was her Citizen Kane: she empowered her colleagues, who rose to greater heights for her than they had ever previously managed. Her rough cut, none the less, was a catastrophe; Fanck rapidly re-edited it, saving the movie, which was highly successful, despite poor reviews in the largely leftwing Berlin press. For these Riefenstahl blamed the Jews, even though her two chief collaborators were Jewish.
Riefenstahl's first glimpse of Hitler produced an almost incoherent verbal outpouring: "a hemisphere that suddenly splits apart in the middle, spewing out an enormous jet of water". She wrote to him; they met. Without preamble he told her: "You will make our films." She rejected (she said) a physical advance from him, but thereafter behaved as if she were his mistress, which opened a remarkable number of doors. She assiduously insinuated herself into the inner circle of Hitler's court, receiving from Hermann Göring personally the joyful news that the thousand-year Reich had begun. She was stark naked at the time, having stepped out of the sauna in which she was sitting with two men, both of whom had been her lovers and one of whom still was.
Bach's account of the Nazi assumption of power is as swift and terrible as the events themselves: the sheer speed and comprehensiveness of it still shocks. As hundreds of thousands of proscribed books burnt on blazing pyres, Riefenstahl was Joseph Goebbels's guest at a gala performance of Madam Butterfly; he goosed her, she primly reported. Of everything that was happening in the world outside, she afterwards professed perfect ignorance; she was, she said, skiing at the time. In reality she was hobnobbing with Hitler and Goebbels and planning her first film for them, Victory of Faith, a record of the forthcoming triumphal rally in Nuremberg. Bach is not entirely convincing as to why they should have offered her, with her slender track record as a director, such a demanding and important project, but whatever the reason, she seized the opportunity by the scruff of the neck; it is impossible not to admire the bravado with which she went about the task, openly derided as she was by the sexist, exclusively male technicians.
After the Night of the Long Knives, Victory of Faith, full of scenes featuring the murdered SA boss Röhm making inspiring speeches and sharing jokes with Hitler, was quickly suppressed, to be replaced with a new one which would be known as The Triumph of the Will; its purpose was, Riefenstahl baldly stated in a contemporary interview, "the glorification of the Führer". Unprecedented technical challenges were met; cameras did things cameras were not built to do in places they were never meant to go. It was the triumph of her will quite as much as the Führer's: she brooked no resistance, and received very little. Her film created the image of nazism that would awe and alarm the outside world and sustain the semi-religious trance of the German people, effecting a kind of mass hypnosis, of which the consequences were, in Bach's sombre phrase, "the ashes and graves that may fairly be judged part of their legacy".
Riefenstahl's follow-up was to film the 1936 Olympic Games. The film took two years to complete: the massive opening night in Berlin, in 1938, was followed by acclaim across Europe, but no British or American distributor would take it. Riefenstahl embarked on a promotional tour to the United States, which started rather well ("She is," remarked Walter Winchell, "as pretty as a swastika") but then turned sour as news of Kristallnacht reached the film community; she went home empty-handed, with no American distribution and, worse, without the acting offers that she had fondly imagined would come her way.
The moment war broke out, she enlisted as a war correspondent but, shocked by the massacre she witnessed at Kronskie in Poland, she returned to Berlin, later following Hitler to Danzig and Warsaw where her team shot his victory parade. She was not in Paris when it fell, but she sent Hitler an effusive telegram, reporting her indescribable joy, deep emotion and burning gratitude at a deed "without parallel in the history of mankind".
Her war was spent shooting the slushy romantic epic Tiefland, combing the Gypsy internment camp outside Salzburg for unpaid extras who were on their way to their deaths in Auschwitz; many were used as Josef Mengele's guinea pigs. Shrewdly, she liaised with Hitler's secretary Martin Bormann ("hated and feared by all other senior Nazis") in her struggles to complete the film, which took four years, mostly because of her psychosomatic breakdowns; during one such, Hitler himself emerged from "warlord isolation" to bring her flowers. She led a charmed life, winning her crew exemptions from conscription while 10-year-olds were being sent to the front. After the war, she was officially pronounced a fellow-traveller, a designation which carried with it no penalty. She never ceased to deny her knowledge of the darker activities of the Nazi party, insisting that she was an artist, knowing nothing of ordinary life. The world was not so easily persuaded.
Attempts to make a film in Africa (partly designed to rebut charges of racism) failed; finally even she had to believe what she was told by an old colleague: "You can never practise your profession again." While she herself was virtually untouchable, her reputation as an artist grew and grew: the venerable documentary-maker John Grierson described her as "one of the greatest film-makers in the world". Her last stab was to make a musical version of her first feature, The Blue Light. Her choice of screenwriter was perhaps a little misjudged: L Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology. Blue Light: The Musical was not to be. Instead, at the age of 60, having seen a photograph of Nuba tribesmen, she set off for Africa with a stills camera in pursuit of images "of what is beautiful, strong and healthy". The book she produced, The Last of the Nuba, became an instant bestseller; in these photographs and the extraordinary athletic footage in Olympia, she embodies the phrase body fascism.
As she entered her eighth decade, her determination to conquer new worlds had by no means abated: having photographed the Munich Olympics and Mick Jagger, she became the oldest underwater diver and photographer in the world. When she was 85, her comprehensively unconvincing Memoirs appeared; at 90 she resumed her ugly struggle to disinherit her niece and nephew; she celebrated her 100th birthday by showing the film she had made from her underwater footage (The Triumph of the Gill, the wits called it). On her birthday itself she was taken to court - with carefully calculated timing - by a Gypsy organisation which accused her of Holocaust denial in the matter of the extras from Tiefland; she issued a terse statement acknowledging the reality of their fate. Shortly afterwards she died, "as she had lived", in Bach's properly savage phrase: "unrepentant, self-enamored, armor-clad".
But there is something that stops one from simply writing her off as a Nazi iconographer and manipulative careerist. She is an odder figure than that, someone almost uncannily lacking in self-awareness. Ray Müller, director of the extraordinary documentary The Wonderful, Terrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, reports that when they went back to Africa to see the Nuba 20 years later (she was in her early 90s), she burst into torrential tears, then, realising that the cameras had not been turning, she angrily upbraided Müller, demanding that he switch them on immediately. She then burst into tears all over again, exactly as she had just done, sob for sob. Later, on the same shoot, when she broke two ribs in a helicopter crash, she lamented the fact that the accident hadn't been caught on film. Could they not, she asked Müller, reproduce it in a studio using blue screen techniques? The New Yorker's response to Müller's documentary gets her about right: "If you believe her, she's one kind of a monster; if you don't, she's another." Beyond any ideology, she was fanatically obsessed, to the exclusion of all other feelings, with creating striking images at any cost, human, financial, spiritual. "Of what am I guilty?" she used plaintively to ask journalists who challenged her. The answer must be: abdication from the human race.
· Simon Callow's Orson Welles: Hello Americans is published by Vintage
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