Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2004/08/24
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At 09:50 PM 8/23/04 -0700, Peter Klein wrote: >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): Riefenstahl worked for the Nazis from 1934 to 1936 and was then dumped by them at the insistence of G?bbels, who ran the German film industry at the time. Riefenstahl spent a decade in the wilderness and then spent twenty more in the wilderness for her having produced two brilliant films, TRIUMPHS DER WILLENS and OLYMPIAD. She was not a Nazi Party member. She was never an insider. She did her technical bit in two movies and then was cast aside. Nor did she deny the horrors of the Nazi Regime. Read her autobiography. You folks are inventing a politically-correct myth from whole cloth. Riefenstahl was not a Nazi nor an apologist for the regime, and I have no idea where you have come up with such a bizarre interpretation of the historical path. (Even the De-Nazification trials of the later 1940's could find no evidence that she did anything beyond produce two movies and act in a couple of others.) Hard evidence to the contrary would, of course, be appreciated. I am not interested in some interpretation of her work by a third party: I would like examples of her actively supporting the Nazis at any point and, especially, after 1936, LONG before the Nazis had become the aggressive power they were to later prove themselves to be. Marc msmall@infionline.net FAX: +540/343-7315 Cha robh b?s fir gun ghr?s fir!