Leni Riefenstahl by Leni Riefenstahl
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Book Reviews of Leni Riefenstahl
Book Review: Sad but true
Summary: 4 Stars
Leni told Speer, about his Spandau Diaries, that he never explained how Hitler maintained his magnetic hold over him. Although Leni is now dead, I would ask her the same question of how she was drawn to Hitler and why she didn't explain this. I would also ask why she never realized Jews were being killed when she traveled widely and would likely bump into the 300 concentration camps. She claims to know about 2 of them, including Dachau but her story that she didn't know what went on there strains her credibility for, after all, she traveled widely throughout Germany, Poland, and Austria, had several Jewish friends, and heard Hitlers raving speeches against the Jews. I found her extensive writing on her films boring( about half the book is devoted to that) and uninteresting. I was facinated by what she claims she was told about the death of Geli Rabaul, Hitlers neice--about the letter Geli found in Hitlers coat from Eva Braun. William Shirer's book titled, "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich", says Geli's suicide was likely caused by the fact that Hitler forbid her to return to Vienna, supposedly to see an old boyfriend. The incident was investigated by the SS who regularly issued lies to cover-up things embarrising to Hitler. I find Leni's explanation, based on Frau Schuab's( wife of Hitler's Adjunt), story more plausible. I have read other descriptions of how destitute life in Germany was after the war and this book confirms it was doubly bad for the once rich and famous. I skipped most of the book about her trips to Africa because it was not historically interesting for me but the Hitler years are riveting.Book Review: A fascinating life.
Summary: 4 Stars
It's amazing how much Leni Riefenstahl has done in her long life. I just finished reading this autobiography written by her and was not disappointed. She has led such a full and varied existence. She tells the reader all about the different pursuits she has taken: everything from being a dancer to being an actress. Those are just a couple of examples. It's ashamed that she has had to put up with the prejudices of so many people almost all of her life though. It was very interesting reading about what she had to say about Hitler and that period of time that The Third Reich was in power too. Also her adventures in Africa photographing and filming the Nuba tribes was interesting. The book also contains numerous photos. Leni Riefenstahl is truly someone that has lived life to the fullest and has done what she has wanted. It's great to read about a person that has taken so many chances and done so many things. This autobiography is well worth a read. The documentary about her called The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl is also very good and quite extraordinary.Book Review: Excellent, especially the early years
Summary: 4 Stars
Leni Riefenstahl is a genius, but her life (tragically) was ruined by some poor choices and the fact she was erroneously labelled after the war as "Hitler's mistress." Here she sets the record straight and includes some marvelous never-before revealed vignettes on Hitler, Goebbels and other members of the Nazi hierarchy.Riefenstahl writes of how Hitler was walking with her on the sand on the Baltic sea and makes a sexual pass in 1932 as his entourage discreetly hovers in the background. Leni rejects the pass, as she rejects more vehemently Goebbels' more crude attempts to bed her later on.
There is much more, obviously, that this type of gossip, but it's riveting nonetheless. If you are an admirer of Leni's cinematic brilliance or curious about her real relationship with Hitler, this is a must read.
Book Review: Fascinating
Summary: 4 Stars
What an amazing woman - her life is truly a triumph of the will. Whether one believes her stand on Nazism wholly or only partially,one still has little option ultimately but to admire her.Book Review: Whitewash
Summary: 3 Stars
As the old saying goes, "only the good die young." This doesn'tnecessarily follow that the evil always die old, but it's noteworthy that the controversial photographer and movie director Leni Riefenstahl just turned 100 last year.
Reading this book was painful for me: As a Catholic in the 1990s, I worked for a Jewish civil rights organisation, and I am currently a fine-arts photographer, who has been deeply influenced by the broad sweep and tightly framed compositions of Riefenstahl. She is doubtless a pioneer in cinema and photography, and those who would lambast her art as without merit are putting their morality and politics ahead of their objective judgment.
In my review of "Olympia," there is nothing but unqualified praise; But this book is not *primarily* concerned with her art as it is justifying her collaboration with the Nazis. Given that context, and having opened that can of worms, she is found morally wanting.
I was stationed in Germany with the Army during the 1980s, and even then, it was the same old story, like a broken record, hearing the older Germans fall all over themselves in explaining away their dubious "noninvolvement" with the Third Reich: "Hitler was a horrible man.....I was never a member of the Nazi party.....We knew nothing of the Holocaust.....The German people really despised the Nazis, but there was nothing we could do," etc.
That's basically what Riefenstahl's account of her years as chief
glorifier of the Third Reich is: A painstakingly dry account of
semi-plausible denial. After all these years, she's yet to categorically apologise. In this book, she also glosses
over her use of gypsies from concentration camps in one of her movies. Also, Riefenstahl should be exonerated because, after all, she "was never a member of the Nazi Party." Please, this tome was published in 1995, but denying one's party membership was
already old hat when Mel Brooks put that line into the mouth of neo-Nazi playwright Franz Liebkind, author of "Springtime For Hitler" in "The Producers" in 1968.
So, we are left with this paradox: Was Leni Riefenstahl a genius or a monster?
I regard "Olympia," her film of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, as the
greatest documentary of the past century. It is a cinematic marvel, a rare work of grace and beauty that captures the true essence of the Olympian spirit.
But her 1934 masterpiece of technique, "Triumph of the Will" was equally brilliant and equally pioneering. It reveals a mind of unparalled insight and intelligence. And there's the rub: This makes her culpability even greater, because she was smart enough to know better. Riefenstahl was no babe in the woods, she was a sophisticated, worldly woman (read her accounts of her romances, her theories on cinema and her account of her life after World War II). Still, she expects us to believe she was some naif when it came to the Nazis. Sorry, I'm not buying; She was both a genius and a monster.
One reviewer tries to explain this away: "Artists and creators under censorship find ways to express themselves despite the hostile climate." Some, such as Jonathan Swift and Moliere, wrote satirical adventures to undermine the authoritarian regimes of their lands and times. World War II is rife with examples of artists who fled Europe to find freedom in America: Directors Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang and Ernst Lubitsch all saw the writing on the wall, and got out. Lubitsch even directed a gem of parody on the Nazis with "To Be Or Not to Be." Italian director Goffredo
Allesandrini made an epic movie out of Ayn Rand's anti-totalitarian novel, "We the Living" -- which the Fascists wanted as anti-Russian propaganda -- but made it as a thinly veiled allegory against Mussolini's regime, and it was soon pulled out of circulation. Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini left America to return to Italy and refused to play the Fascist anthem, and was jailed for standing up to the Fascisti. Dear readers, *that* is how artists with *guts* "express themselves, despite the hostile climate." They don't cozy up to the dictators and turn them into the second-coming of Jesus Christ, like Riefenstahl did. Riefenstahl's weak denials come off like conductor Herbert von Karajan's explanations that he "made due" under the Nazis. Truth be told, both Riefenstahl and Karajan were opportunists who *literally* climbed over corpses to the respective tops of their arts, because all their competition had either fled, been imprisoned, or executed.
Personally, I think Leni Riefenstahl should have been imprisoned at Spandau for fifty years. Certainly, I would have given her free artistic rein and run of the prison. She would have made some dark and charming images of the dank prison walls, the gruel for supper and rodents and cockroaches coinhabiting her cell, instead of being let loose in the world to rehabilitate her self-image by filming the Nubians in Africa. Monsters who are yet geniuses are still monsters, and it is society's obligation not to whitewash their sins, but to put them on display in order that civilisation not be mocked.