2024-08-29 16:43:29
German director Leni Riefenstahl was devoted to the ideas of Nazism during the reign of Adolf Hitler and after World War II. That’s according to the makers of a new documentary called simply Riefenstahl, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival this Thursday. The authors were the first to gain access to the artist’s archive.
Leni Riefenstahl, who lived from 1902 to 2003, was a protégé director for Nazism and commissioned regime propaganda in Germany. After the war, however, she claimed that she did not know about the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis. She argued that she never became a member of the NSDAP, claimed that she did not know Adolf Hitler personally, despite the fact that they are depicted in several photographs, and in 1951 she was indeed issued a certificate of no wrongdoing under Nazism.
However, the filmmaker used the advantages of the Nazi elite throughout the war, and she did not get rid of the label of Hitler’s servant even in the following decades. Nevertheless, film critics have always appreciated her innovative work with the camera, the use of light or the resignation of spoken commentary. For her work, she received a gold medal at the Venice Biennale or the Grand Prix at the World Exhibition in Paris.
The creators of the new film gained access to her personal archive, containing many documents and recordings. A large part of the materials comes from the post-war period. The authors found, among other things, letters and recordings in which Leni Riefenstahl expresses her disappointment at the fall of the Third Reich and her belief that Nazi ideals will rise again in Germany, writes the British newspaper The Guardian.
The director of the documentary, Andres Veiel, no longer doubts whether Leni Riefenstahl really believed in Nazism or just opportunistically took advantage of it. “She was not an opportunistic artist, she believed very deeply in the Nazi ideology, including its aesthetics, the celebration of strength and heroism, and, on the contrary, the contempt for the weak, the sick or the so-called foreigners. In addition, she was a real anti-Semite,” said the documentarian of The Hollywood Reporter website.
According to the British Guardian, the picture suggests that Leni Riefenstahl may have even been personally present at one of the massacres of Jews when she accompanied the Nazi troops during the invasion of Poland in September 1939 as a war correspondent.
Adolf Hitler congratulates Leni Riefenstahl on the success of her film Parade of Nations. | Photo: Profimedia.cz
A later letter found in her estate suggests that the filmmaker may have witnessed the massacre in the town of Końskie, or rather that she even partially caused it by ordering that the Jews be “removed” from the location where she intends to film. When she barked the command “take out the Jews”, several of them took off running. “And that sparked the shooting,” the Guardian paraphrases.
Even director Veiel is not 100% sure if the events happened like this. If so, it would mean that Leni Riefenstahl was directly involved in the atrocities of the Third Reich, the documentarian points out.
Leni Riefenstahl made several propaganda films about the Nuremberg congresses of Hitler’s national party, for example Triumph of the Will from 1935, Parade of Nations depicting the Summer Olympics in Berlin 1936 or Our Wehrmacht discussing the power of the Nazi army.
After the war, she repeated the claim that she did not know about the crimes of Nazism, for example, in a televised debate in 1976, for which she received many understanding reactions from the audience. The film shows that all the approximately 500 letters of encouragement from the German public that arrived by post were carefully preserved and sorted by Leni Riefenstahl.
The documentary also gives insight into her phone calls with Nazi architect and Minister of Arms Industry Albert Speer, who was sentenced to 20 years for war crimes at the Nuremberg Trials after the war. Calls were recorded.
A new film about Leni Riefenstahl was shot by Andres Veiel and premiered at the Venice Film Festival. | Video: Filmladen Filmverleih
According to Deadline.com, the creation of the film was initiated by German journalist and TV presenter Sandra Maischberger, who interviewed Leni Riefenstahl in 2002. After him, she “was left with more questions than answers”.
She therefore teamed up with Veiel, and after the death of Horst Kettner, the director’s husband, 40 years her junior, in 2016, they managed to gain access to the archives. “In 2020, I received the first scans of her diary from 1948 and then the records of phone calls with Albert Speer,” the director describes how he gradually went through 700 boxes of documents.
Sandra Maischberger is convinced that the public should reconsider its opinion of Leni Riefenstahl. “It is no longer possible to portray her only as an extremely ambitious and primarily opportunistic artist, willing to lend her talents to any power that would provide her with enough resources and opportunities. I think she was primarily an activist who was fundamentally convinced of the idea of National Socialism and that she didn’t give up her old ideals until the last moments,” believes Sandra Maischberger.
Director Veiel is convinced that what they found in the archives can still serve society today, almost a century later. “It seems awfully relevant to what’s going on around us right now. How she was captivated by heroic nationalism, how she celebrated beauty, superiority and winners, how much she despised the weak or the sick, all of this provides a deeper insight into a kind of prototype fascism . And it allows one to understand the reasons for the rise of various far-right movements, such as we see today not only in Germany, but also in Europe and the USA,” concludes Andres Veiel.
Leni Riefenstahl studied painting, started her artistic career as a dancer. After a series of performances on stages in Berlin and Prague and a knee injury, she became an actress, and from 1932 she started filming. She experienced her greatest fame under Nazism. After World War II, she was unable to direct for several years. Later she began to admire African nature. In the early 1970s, for example, she learned to dive in retirement, and since then she has been photographing the underwater world, about which she also filmed the documentary Podvodní dojmy. She also published a series of picture books about the Nubian tribes of southern Sudan and life under the sea.
Shortly before her death in 2003, she married for the second time, to her longtime assistant who was 40 years her junior. “Nazism cast such a shadow over my life that the only way out would be death,” she once said.