[Leica] Riefenstahl ...apolitical alternate view

[jbcollier at shaw.ca (John Collier)]

Oh darn and I said I would only make one comment :-)

You forgot:

6.      So wildly, selfishly ambitious that any concerns but her own 
"destined by the the gods"      advancement would never even occur to her 
let alone seem significant.

This is ably illustrated by the film Olympia where she worshiped the 
body perfect regardless of  skin colour or Nazi preferences. In her 
mind the Nazi regime is just irrelevant to the preordained rise of her 
talent. They served her purpose by enabling her dramatic form of 
expression just as the rugged mountains did in her earlier films. She 
was no more pro-Nazi than she was pro-mountain. The only thing Leni was 
pro was herself. Like Norma Desmond she is vicious and unfeeling and, 
most importantly, complete unaware of anything but her own raw 
ambition.

When she said she didn't know, I believe her. What was going on around 
her would have seemed just as insignificant to her then as the 
questions about it did right to her dying day.

John Collier


On Aug 23, 2004, at 10:50 PM, Peter Klein wrote:

> You make an interesting point, John.  And if the French had only 
> listened to Woodrow Wilson instead of sticking it to the Germans at 
> Versailles, maybe the whole mess would have been less horrific later.  
> Ditto if they'd paid heed to a young Ho Chi Minh. . .
>
> But seriously, I think it is perfectly appropriate to judge Leni 
> Riefenstahl, because she became the visual spokesperson for Nazi 
> Germany.  "Triumph of Will" was not just German nationalism, it was a 
> glorification of Nazism itself, and of the sublimation of self to the 
> collective "Volk" under the supreme will of the Fuhrer.  Meanwhile, 
> the persecutions had already begun.  Leni's Jewish friends in the 
> German cinema were already fleeing.  The central place of racism and 
> Jew-hatred in Nazi ideology had been apparent from the Party's 
> earliest days.  And the whiff of conquest and Auchwitz are in the 
> lines of "Mein Kampf."
>
> What irks me most about Leni is not just that she made those 
> propaganda films.  It's that to her dying day, she maintained that she 
> did nothing wrong, she knew nothing of the Nazi barbarities, and 
> what's all the fuss about, anyway?  This tells me that she was (pick 
> one or more):
>
> 1.  The kind of artist who was a genius in her field, but not 
> particularly bright to totally clueless about all else.
> 2.  A "compartmentalizer" who blinded herself to all that was going on 
> around her save what directly affected her.
> 3.  Someone who, like Richard Strauss, thought she could make a deal 
> with the devil and come out intact.  Unlike Strauss, she lived another 
> half-century, and had to create an internal fiction so she could live 
> with herself.
> 4.  Someone who got caught up in the Wagnerian pageantry of early Nazi 
> Germany, and by the time she realized what the inevitable result was, 
> it was too late.
> 5.  A committed Nazi who knew exactly what she was doing, and has lied 
> through her teeth about it forever after.
>
> Personally, I think the answer is some combination of 1-4.  I could 
> forgive Riefenstahl if she had acknowledged her complicity in evil.  
> But she did not.  It's telling to compare her with another German who 
> turned to work in Africa--Albert Schweitzer.  While Schweitzer healed 
> the sick in Africa in part to atone for his feeling of collective 
> guilt over German militarism, Leni found perfect black African bodies 
> to glorify in the same way she had glorified perfect Aryan bodies in 
> the 30s.  A master stroke, as she could say "See, I'm not a racist" 
> while using the same predilections that had served Hitler so well.
>
> --Peter Klein
> Seattle, WA
>
>
> At 09:06 PM 8/23/04 -0700, John Collier wrote:
>> The only comment I going to make is that Germany suffered under
>> egregious terms and conditions following the end of WW1*. The economic
>> miracle following the dreadful inflation of the late twenties must 
>> have
>> made for very giddy times. It is trite for us pinheads to judge her 
>> for
>> what we know now. This does not exonerate her or anyone else but it
>> should make you wonder what you might have done if you had been in her
>> shoes.